One
Not all prisons are made of steel and concrete.
Some are made of the finest marble and expensive mahogany.
I sat in front of the mirror at my vanity, in a bedroom that felt cold and empty. The space seemed far too large and far too small at the same time, and my skin itched from the feeling of confinement.
The door wasn’t locked.
There were no chains around my ankles.
Yet I was a prisoner as surely as if there had been.
I bit my lip, and the girl with delicate features and pale blonde hair in the mirror bit her lip too. She looked wan and exhausted, with circles under her eyes from too little sleep and too much stress.
She looked… hopeless.
It was easier for me to inspect the face of the pitiful girl in the mirror if I pretended she wasn’t me. If I pretended this wasn’t my life. And in a way, it wasn’t. This wasn’t a life I had agreed to or asked for. It was the life being thrust upon me by my parents—by my father.
I had spent weeks, months, trying to find a way to prove his innocence and get him out of prison. I had made bargains with people I wasn’t quite sure I should trust in my pursuit of that single objective. And I’d been certain that if my father was given a second chance, a new lease on life, he would make different decisions. Better ones. That he would run his business empire with more care and honor, and that he would consider how his actions affected others. That he would strive to use his vast fortune and resources for good.
But I was wrong.
That may have been the worst error I’ve ever made in my seventeen years, and I honestly don’t know what hurts worse—the fact that I’ve finally learned the true depths of human greed, or the fact that my father was the one to teach me that lesson.
My stomach churned, and I pressed a hand over it, dropping my gaze from the mirror. I couldn’t look at myself anymore. Every time I did, I remembered another version of myself. One with eyes that sparkled and a smile that came readily to her lips. One who was wild and full of life.
One who loved three beautiful, dangerous boys.
She was still inside me, that version of myself. But I felt like every day, she became suffocated a little bit more. As if my parents were doing everything they could to snuff her out.
The trappings of this wealthy, luxurious life had once felt comfortable and right. It was all I’d ever known.
But now I knew something else. I knew what it was like to dance in a cold, empty warehouse to music played on an old boom box, with only the blood rushing through my veins and the press of three hot, solid bodies around me to keep warm.
I knew what it was like to fight. To laugh.
To love.
Only one of those things happened in this house, and even the fighting felt stifled and suffocated. My parents could barely be in the same room with each other anymore, and I was almost positive Dad knew about Mom’s affair with Mark Jemison. But they wouldn’t even fight about it properly. They just picked at each other, throwing little poison darts with their words, and pretended that life could go on as normal, even though nothing was how it had been before Dad’s arrest.
He was trying to get it back though. To put everything back together and rebuild the shattered pieces of his life.
And the way he hoped to accomplish that was by selling me off.
Of course, no actual bill of sale would be written up. No money would change hands as I said my wedding vows.
But that didn’t change the basic fact that I was being sold.