Page 133 of Savage Prince
How long can I stay hidden?
Where can I even go where I’ll be safe?
I don’t know if anything is safe. I can’t imagine Boston will ever be safe for me. But I don’t know how far they’ll chase me.
I have to figure something out. Something that’s not Connor.
He said he would marry me.
I can’t even comprehend it. He’s an O’Reilly. He helped kill my husband. Kill Dmitri. He stormed the house when I was tied up in the basement after they took down some of Dmitri’s men.
He was the one that helped cut the rope that bound me.
I barely remember much about that day. I remember Dmitri drugging me. It wasn’t pretty. He liked to make things bad when he could, liked to make me wish I had never been born. He was more than just a bastard, just a bad husband. He was a monster. He liked making people suffer. He liked makingmesuffer.
So I’ve tried to block out a lot of that day. Part of me doesn’t want to relive those moments with Dmitri, his abuse, his horror.
But I can remember the O’Reilly brothers. I remember Aiden, and the way he held Rose close to him. God, I hope she’s happy. She seemed happy at her wedding. She probablywashappy before Dmitri made me wreck everything for her.
The other brothers were there the day Dmitri died. They all sort of blended together to me—or at least, most of them did.
Not Connor.
For some reason, I remember his eyes. They’re brown, soft. I feel like there’s so much in them. When he helped me out of the basement, there was anger in their depths, but there was also sadness. Like he was sorry I was there in the first place.
It makes no sense. He doesn’t even know me.
I’ve seen him sometimes at gatherings where Assembly members were. I thought he was handsome, charming. The kind of man I hoped Dmitri would be, before I married him. Before I realized he was a psychopath.
Dmitri made my skin crawl.
Connor was always different. I have fragmented memories of him, especially at the gala where I first met Rose. I saw him talking to Violet, that girl who’s friends with the O’Reilly family. He was smiling. He seemed to stay on the edges of the group, though, like he didn’t really belong.
I felt like we were a little alike when I saw him. But that wasn’t true.
It isn’t.
He’s free, and I’m not. He’s always had a family. I’ve only had the right to be sold off, and then isolated. But I saw Connor at that gala and I imagined I was Violet. I imagined I was a happy woman, enjoying myself and talking to a handsome man.
That will never happen.
I take another side street, avoiding another dirty puddle. God, it’s so sad it’s almost funny. How far have I fallen to get to this point?
I had happiness, once. I had dreams. I was going to do things.
Then my father gave me to Dmitri, and my life ended. Dmitri was vicious and brutal, and he never even tried to hide it. He was bad from the beginning, although I pretended for a while that maybe I could change him.
But the more I tried to be a good wife, the more I tried to appease him, the worse it was.
Dmitri didn’t give a shit about me. He wanted me for my virginity, and once he’d used me, all I was good for was a fuck, if he even used me for that. Mostly, he just liked to use me as a punching bag or an ashtray.
Would Connor do that?
My heart tells me no, but how can I trust it? I don’t know a thing about Connor anyway, besides his brothers and the way I saw him from afar. For all I know, he’s not as charming as he seems. Maybe he’s a monster too.
But he would be a prettier monster than Dmitri.
I don’t know if that’s all I can ask for from life at this point, but I don’t want to give in. I don’t want to settle for the lesser of two evils. I’d rather run and try to live first. I have to try, at least. I have to hope for more.
Maybe Connor is handsome, but it doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter how he looks, or that he and his brothers freed me from my nightmare of a marriage, because I’m not truly free. Not now.
I was already trapped in a marriage once. It nearly destroyed me.
I won’t let myself be trapped again.
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