Page 2 of A Vow to Set the Virgin Free

Even Athena, for all that she had never left the compound before, understood that.

She was now being delivered to him, to be married. Mattias made his home in the Northern Highlands of Scotland, which is where they were driving now, after a long flight from Russia. The scenery couldn’t have been more different here.

She was in the back of a shiny black SUV. A convoy of them.

For safety.

Her father had said.

No one could know which of them was in which vehicle.

The spread would be advantageous to her.

She would’ve loved to have been excited by the view.

The mountains were craggy and awe-inspiring, the sky gray, the clouds heavy with rain. It was so very different than the stern view of the Black Sea she was accustomed to.

She had spent her life in a beautifully gilded cage. The compound was styled as a luxury villa. It was the heavy security, the isolation from the outside world that gave it its name. Her rooms were soft and safe.

She was under surveillance at all times.

Never alone, yet somehow lonely. It had been part of her life from the time she could remember, and it had only been as she grew older that it had become notable.

It had begun to feel oppressive just a few years ago. It was like something in her had clicked.

Naya, her predecessor, had gone off to have a life. Athena had no life at all. She’d asked her mother once, when she could be free to go live her life.

“Naya died living outside these walls. I will not lose you, Athena.”

It was not a proclamation of tenderness, but of desperation, and Athena could see she had no choice.

The compound was too secure. Too isolated.

Perhaps that was when she had become aware that she was a prisoner.

Such a prisoner that for a moment, marriage to a stranger had seemed an adventure.

She was wide awake now, and she could never go back to before she’d realized how astonishingly wrong that was. She knew now. She was not their daughter, she was a prisoner. She was being used as a bargaining chip.

She would not go quietly.

She had no choice now. She had to do this. Or she would spend the rest of her life as this. This creature who had been fashioned to be pliable and dependent. To exist for others only, and never herself.

A doll, the man who had called himself her father, had said.

He was not wrong. A thing to be dressed up, looked at, played with.

She was nervous. But she was resolved. Her decision was made, she would not waiver from it now.

She had pretended to be excited for the wedding. She had peppered the man she’d come to think of as her father with questions, and because he underestimated her, he had answered them all. He’d told her how they would travel, when, where. She’d told him she was just so excited to travel. She’d pretended to be starry-eyed about the marriage.

She had not known she was duplicitous, but it had turned out she was when need be.

He had given her every detail she needed. Then she’d used the limited access to maps and the internet that she had to study the area.

There was a forest they would drive by in two miles, she could see it in her mind’s eye. It would be her chance. Her one and only chance. And she would take it. She would get caught, very likely. She could not imagine a scenario wherein she was not captured and restored immediately by one of her father’s men. She was fast, but they would overtake her. They had guns.

She had to.

---