Pretty Pink Poison

Prologue

BIANCA

“Father, please don’t. Not again.”

My voice cracked as he yanked me by my wavy hair, dragging me down the marble hall.

I’d always had my mother’s smaller frame, and it allowed him to throw us around like rag dolls.

The polished floors reflected the chandelier’s glow and my humiliation.

Every step echoed like a countdown, each one reminding me that even in a mansion built on comfort and luxury, punishment could still be brutal.

It had been years since I’d defied him. Years since I’d tested the boundaries of his control. But tonight, he’d found my application to the university’s English Lit program—proof that I dared to carve out a life of my own, a future not written by his hands.

“You think you can choose a life for yourself?” he snarled, disbelief bleeding into rage.

He threw me into the narrow steel-lined closet, the door slamming shut behind me with a thud that vibrated through my bones. The locks clicked—once, twice, three times—and my breath hitched with each one.

“Please, Father. I’ll drop from the program. I swear it,” I begged, my voice trembling as my palms hit the cold door. The steel bit into my skin, my fingernails scraping uselessly against it.

His answer came in the form of a fist. A single, brutal punch that rattled the frame.

“After they found out?” His voice was venom, thick with disgust. “You’ll complete it, you ungrateful little brat. And you’ll do it well. I didn’t raise you to show weakness. You’re lucky I promised to marry you off, or I’d kill you and let you rot in there.”

I froze.

He’d kill me. His own daughter. His own flesh and blood.

And I knew he meant it.

The sound of his footsteps retreating down the hall were steady, measured, confident, as if he’d done something righteous, as if punishing me was an act of devotion rather than cruelty. My lungs seized as I listened to him fade away, the silence after him louder than his fury had been.

I gasped for air, over and over, desperate for oxygen, comfort, salvation. But the darkness pressed closer. The air grew heavier by the hour.

It was in there that I learned the sound of my own heartbeat. I learned the scent of fear—sharp, metallic, and endless. I learned that the body adapts when the soul wants to give up.

Seconds blurred into minutes. Minutes into hours.

Time didn’t pass; it stretched and distorted.

My knees ached until they gave out, my throat burned with thirst, and the world outside stopped existing.

I cried again when I realized I would have to sit there in my own filth, my own fear, and my own silence…

But I learned to live in it because I had to.

Then came the sound of a tray sliding across the floor. My mother’s silhouette appeared, soft and ghostly in the sliver of light beneath the door. She set down water and bread like she was feeding a prisoner, not her daughter.

Her hands shook. I could see it in the flicker of her shadow. “Stop screaming,” she whispered, her voice frayed and tired. “It’ll only make it worse. Let the punishment run its course.”

Her words broke me more than the confinement ever could.

Because I loved her. I loved her even as I hated the weakness in her voice, the way she’d folded herself into survival.

I knew she’d been beaten into silence long before I was born—but that didn’t make it easier to forgive.

I wanted her to fight for me, to fight with me.

Instead, she’d learned to live in the cracks of his power, and she expected me to do the same.

But I wasn’t her.

I sat there for days with no sense of morning or night, no air, no dignity. Just silence. And in that silence, something inside me changed. I stopped begging. I stopped waiting for rescue. I stopped believing that obedience earned love.

Maybe that’s why I became twisted enough to want what I wanted later—to crave the forbidden and the violence and the pain later. Or maybe that’s who I’d been all along.

Because I wasn’t a girl who listened to a man’s rules. Not even her father’s.

Every man thought he ruled the world, that he could shape another’s life to fit his vision of perfection. But I wanted the imperfections and the wreckage. I chose the broken path because destruction was the only road that felt like mine.