It was like a scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It soundedlikethe Malachi I had always known, but was also eerily dissimilar and foreboding. Deeper, velvety, but void of the soft warmth I’d always loved.
“Papá,” I couldn’t help piping up, “May I speak to the Duke in private?”
Papá merely chuckled again as he stood. “Of course,mijita. You are to be married next year. I hope you will speak to him in privateoften. You have lost time to make up for.”
I stared at my hands, clasping them at my waist as I stood and crossed the room toward the glass doors that opened to the lush, French-style courtyard behind the great room. I didn’t wait for Malachi to follow me, and I sure as hell didn’t put on the ring.
I stood next to the large, ornate fountain at the center of the courtyard and watched Malachi step through the door and close it behind him. He approached me, stopping at arm’s length in front of me, and slipped his hands into his pockets as he looked at me with a haughty expression.
“Malachi,” I began, boring holes into his eyes as he bored holes into mine, “are you at least going to offer me some kind of explanation for why you disappeared off the face of the fucking earth?”
“No,” he snapped, albeit maintaining a neutral posture for the sake of our parents who were assuredly watching through the glass. “I will not offer you a fucking explanation because you did not extend that courtesy tome.”
“What in the hell do I owe anexplanationfor?” I gritted out through clenched teeth. “You are the one who—”
“I am the one who offered you the world and my heart on silver platter, andyouthrew all of it back in my face,” he growled, closing the distance between us with a looming prowl.
He towered over me, and I inclined my face up toward his, all the while racking my brain to remember that horrifying, heartbreaking time when it was clearsomething happenedthat caused his sudden radio silence, but I didn’t know what. My memory is a threadbare, patchwork quilt, butsurelyif I didsomethingto him, I would remember it.
Nothing can make you feel as helpless and crazy as not being able to trust your own memory and perception of your life.
Somethingorsomeonewas gaslighting me, and at that moment, I was convinced it was Malachi.
“However,” he clipped, still all up in my face, “explanationsofbeforeare irrelevant. I signed that contract with your father. You will be my duchess. You will be my wife. And you will becompliantwith the duties of your position just as I will be.”
My duchess.
My wife.
Just like the promises from before, only these were a sick, twisted, alternative version of them.
“Malachi,” I couldn’t help retorting, my words barely backed by breath, “do you hear yourself right now? What happened to you?”
He snapped his hand out of his pocket to grab my arm and jerk me close to him. “You made a vow to me.” He lowered his face to growl like a blood-thirsty predator in my ear. “And I have come to collect.”
He lingered next to my face for a moment, his fist gripping my arm so hard I had traces of bruising the next day, and pressed his lips in a kiss to the leaping pulse point just below my ear.
Just like his voice, it was an eerie, sinister clone of everything it had been before, and my blood ran cold while my body flushed with an aching heat of longing.
And then he let go, pivoted on the balls of his feet, and marched back inside.
Andthatwas how this was going to be.
There was no escaping this arrangement. No avoiding this marriage.
Malachi was going to make me suffer. So, I made a vow to myself right there in the courtyard.
‘Til death do us part, I will make him rue the day he met me.
TWO
ISLA
Present – One Year Later
MY SIBLINGS THINK MY royal wedding is one big, fat joke. More specifically, they think it’s funny that Malachi and I are getting married after breaking up years ago, but they don’t know how bad everything got. Then again,Idon’t knowexactlyhow bad everything got because I don’t remember the worst parts.
Actually, the worst part was the break-up itself, and I do remember that—what there is to remember, that is: the fact that there was no actual break-up and only sudden radio silence from Malachi when I needed him most in the aftermath of theotherworst thing that ever happened to me. King Andrew, Queen Deirdre, and Prince Philipp all looking at me with disdain and basically telling me to fuck off. Really horrible things had happened just prior to that, but even those paled in comparison to the person I’d loved more than anyone or anything in my entire life disappearing like a wisp of smoke in the air.
