Page 1 of Defiant Devotion

1

SONYA

The last time I tried to break out of this house was during the coldest weeks of winter. Almost a year ago, at the end of January, the snow gave me away. My footprints were too traceable in my route from this damn farmhouse I’d been held captive in for the last eleven years. Blizzard-like conditions were supposed to have been my cover, both to mask my path and to prohibit any of these thugs from chasing me down.

They always did. Every time. Without fail, these Ilyin assholes would find me and drag me back into the room I was supposed to wait and live in until they deemed I was “ready”.

The snow foiled my last grand plans to get the fuck out of here. It hadn’t mattered how quickly I ran and darted behind structures coated with thick snow. They’d found me.

That time, I almost reached the second fence to scale it to flee.

This time…

I paused at the fence and glanced back over my shoulder, glad that in this last week of February no snow was blanketing thelandscape on this night. No white fluff to indicate where I’d placed my feet. No winds to send my long brown hair flowing out of my hood and giving away my location.

No guards or patrolmen noticing my attempt to bolt.

Only the navy-blue darkness of the starless sky hung overhead. Shadows concealed me in this pitch blackness.

Go. Stop stalling and justgo!

I wouldn’t have another chance. Driven not only by the need to survive and escape this captivity, but I was also motivated with the urgency to thwart those bastards’ plans.

For eleven damn years, I’d been held here upstate and cut off from the rest of the world. For over a decade, I had to accept that the Ilyins wanted to stoop so low as to kidnap a Mafia princess like me just to marry me off when they deemed the timing to be right.

And that time was now. Yesterday, I eavesdropped and listened in to the guards talking about finally being done with keeping me up here. That I would be sent off to my “fiancé” within the week. That I’d be shipped away and expected to serve as a pawn in a dangerous political game.

“Fuck that,” I muttered under my breath. The mere notion of being used as a virginal transaction lit a fire within me. Despite the bite of the chill in the wintry air, I felt as though I was burning up from the inside out.

With rage. Fury. Anger born of the darkest wrath. I harbored all three.

I hated my captors for taking me. I loathed those same Mafia men for raping my mother and killing her before my eyes. I scorned them for distancing me from my family.

And I dared them to steal anything else from me.

As I ran again, careful to slip under the eyeline of the patrolmen who’d hawk around the perimeter fence of the property, I let that fiery thought be my mantra.

I’ll be damned if you use me.

I’ll be goddamned if you try to rob my virginity as a power play.

Pumping my arms, I dug my feet in faster and harder after climbing the second fence. I wasn’t escaping under any illusion that I’d succeed, not with my freedom. I would never be free. In each of my five attempts to get away from these men who’d kidnapped me so many years ago, I learned and relearned the cruel lesson that there were simply too many loyalists and fearful men in this small town for me to ever actually leave. All my previous attempts to flee ended the same. I had been dragged back, beaten, and expected to stay put. Again.

This time would be different.

This time, I would not be returned in defeat.

Iwouldbe married to whoever they wanted to force me to be with. I knew that. They outnumbered me and were in control here.

But I would not be a virginal bride when they found me again.

I wouldn’t let them steal that one thing they had no business even concerning themselves with.

Instead of running my breath ragged as I sprinted toward the main street of the small town with an intention to disappear, I focused on accomplishing the ultimate twist. I concentrated on how I could mess up their grand plan to offer me as a virginal bride to someone I didn’t know, much less want.

“Whoa!” a man said as he exited the small bar at the end of the main street.

I hadn’t been granted many chances to see this town, but over the last eleven years, I’d pieced together small snippets of this rural area to have a halfway decent mental map in my head. The bar, just like the guards often said, was right at the end of the street, near the property I had been held at. And exactly like the guards said, it was often dark, full of smoke, and narrow.

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