Chapter 2
Leena
Today is my wedding day. And I’m a mess.
On the outside, I look put together. Polished.
Poised. Nothing less than the graceful woman I’m supposed to be, the daughter of Viking, a man who doesn’t like to be disappointed.
On the inside, I’m a mess of twisted up insides, my stomach roiling, my heart beating out an unsteady rhythm.
I force my breaths to come regular, to stay calm, but my soaking wet palms and the clammy skin underneath the simple off-white, lace dress are dead giveaways that I’m barely holding it together.
My chest hurts the most. All my life I’ve battled against invisibility, simply fading away in a world where I’ve always been little more than unwanted.
The grain of terror that’s taken root in my heart keeps growing with every passing second.
I’m afraid it will burst its confines and split me wide open to flower, terrible and enraged, in the room where my sisters and I wait.
I dart quick glances at Ami and Stephanie. I wish I could blame them for this, for all of it, but I know that whether or not they’d acted on their right to express their own freedoms, the man we call Father would have orchestrated some other way to wash us from his hands.
“He always wanted sons,” Ami whispers, like she can hear my thoughts clear across the small room we were shoved into by my oldest brother, Ivan, AKA our guard for the day, to hurriedly dress and make ourselves passably presentable.
That was two hours ago. No one has come for us yet, but I know it won’t be long.
“We’re just pawns in his game,” Stephanie adds.
There isn’t any bitterness in her voice, because it’s a fact that we’ve all long since accepted.
At twenty-five, she’s my oldest sister. Old enough to know how the world works, though I guess I’ve known these things since I was old enough to process thought.
“Whatever.” Ami shifts out of the chair she’s been perched in for the past hour. She’s beautiful. At twenty-two, she’s had more experiences than I could hope to have in an entire lifetime. My father didn’t ever know what to do with her.
With any of us.
Marrying us off, like it’s eighteen fucking hundred, is his grand solution. Get a woman a husband. Get her settled down with a man and a job and children. That’ll tame her.
Please.
I shouldn’t have expected anything less.
We’ve always been little better than horses or cattle to him.
Just another thing to have to feed and shelter and bother with until it can be sold to the highest bidder.
I always thought I’d end up with a stodgy, rich husband.
A man who wants a young wife, a toy and plaything to manhandle and treat as he will.
A sick old fuck who paid my father a good price in the exchange.
I was wrong. Instead, my sisters and I aren’t being sold at all.
We’re being traded. The highest bid was an alliance with a powerfully understated club that my father has wanted to partner with for almost two years.
He’s bided his time. Growing in strength and power, until one night, he acted.
He shot their bar up as a message, a warning, that my father was a man to contend with.
After that, he stole their Prez’s old lady, his daughter, and some other woman, an old lady to a member of their club.
He never meant to harm them. He wanted to negotiate.
Their three women back in exchange for marriages to his three daughters.
And an alliance. A new chapter, more power, better territory, warehouses.
It doesn’t matter what he got in the exchange. All that my father wants is to keep moving up in the world. He got dissatisfied with his own small-time operations, running clubs and strip joints and having to deal with his own children.
Which he has produced nine of over the course of his lifetime, all with different women.
His sons are a source of pride. Men he can shape and use. Men he can set as heads of his strip joints. Men he can turn into guards or throw into his business.
If only I had been born a man.
Then I might have had a choice.
“It’s your fault. You couldn’t keep your legs closed for longer than two minutes and you’ve wrecked this for all of us,” Stephanie hisses at Ami.
I choke back my shock. Stephanie is definitely the sweeter of my two sisters.
I’ve never heard her say a bad thing about anyone in my whole life.
Even though her words aren’t entirely venomous, they still drip with enough poison to bring down a grown-ass man.
Obviously, the forced nuptials have her more than a little on edge.
Ami’s eyes widen and her hands ball into fists at her sides. She looks like she’s going to launch herself at Stephanie. She’s just wild enough, tough enough, to go for the jugular.
As much as I would like to see my father’s good money spent on these stupid dresses in this stupid sham, go to waste, soiled by blood, I don’t want it to be my sisters’.
“Stop it,” I say quietly, gently. I might be soft spoken for the most part, but no one has ever mistaken my meekness for weakness.
My sisters’ heads swivel in unison. Stephanie is tall and willowy.
She wanted to be a model, which of course, my father hated.
She’s incredibly beautiful, with a heart shaped face, porcelain skin, long wheat blonde hair, and the lightest blue eyes.
I’m sure her new husband will be enchanted by her, as I haven’t seen a man yet who hasn’t been captivated by her unearthly beauty.
Ami is the exact opposite. She barely tops five feet.
She’s athletically built, curvy. She has a wild mane of dark curls, dark eyes, red lips, and flawless skin.
I’ve heard my father call her a siren behind her back, that no man can resist her.
I’m not sure why, because she’s not classically beautiful like Stephanie, but she has something that men want.
She’s been the bane of my father’s world since she was a teenager, running wild.
I don’t look like either of my sisters. I’m somewhere in the middle, five-seven with understated curves, not willowy like Stephanie, but not shaped like Ami either.
I have a mix of my father’s dark eyes and my mother’s green.
The rest of me is fairly plain. Light brown hair that I’ve managed to grow out nearly to my waist, olive hued skin, ordinary features that I wish were more pronounced like Stephanie’s.
At nineteen, I’ve never really done anything with my life.
While they got to live with their mothers and then find their own places, I’ve been a prisoner at my father’s house since I was twelve and my mother dropped me there so she could go off and live her own life.
I’ve always been under scrutiny, had a curfew, been expected to adhere to my father’s rigid rules and respect his wishes.
Ami and Stephanie both snap their mouths shut. Stephanie’s eyes well up with tears while Ami studies the floor.
“I don’t want to get married,” Stephanie wails. Two huge tears slip down her cheeks, making tracks in the makeup she so carefully applied. She likes to look flawless, even if the situation isn’t one she wants to be in.
“Yeah. What if he’s like Dad’s men? What if he fucking drinks and beats me?” Ami says bitterly. I know that her life hasn’t been an easy one. Her mother is what my father calls unpredictable, which is basically his way of calling her a whore.
Even though my hands are damp and shaking, I stalk across the room and grip Ami’s icy cold palm in my own. “He promised he wouldn’t marry us to men like that. If they treat us badly, the alliance is void and he’ll put them in the ground.” I chew my bottom lip mercilessly.
Stephanie sighs. “He says a lot of shit that he doesn’t mean. He could let them do it, just as long as he doesn’t choose to believe it. This is important to him. He’s not just going to throw it away.”
“He’s happier than a pig in shit, rolling in all his power,” Ami sneers.
“He doesn’t give a fuck about us. Never has.
He would have left us with our mothers if he could have, pretended like we didn’t exist. He’s always wanted to wash his hands of us.
We’re not any good to him. We can’t work for him or guard his shit or run women at his stupid clubs. ”
“He’s tried to look after us the best way he knows how,” Stephanie protests half-heartedly.
Ami shakes her head vehemently and tugs her hand out of mine. She looks at me though, real fear etched into her beautiful features. “What did they look like? You went to the shower. Did you see any of them?”
I laugh softly. “The shower was at the Prez’s house.
His old lady put it on. Most of the old ladies were there.
None of the men were there until their Prez walked in at the end.
Steel. He’s huge. Good looking but intimidating.
His old lady is this tiny little blonde thing.
She looks happy though and we’ve heard good things about their club.
I don’t think they would marry us off to a bunch of thugs.
I’ve heard that they don’t let their men treat their women that way. ”
Ami rolls her eyes in disbelief. “Those kind of men always treat women the same.”
“I don’t know,” I swallow convulsively. “Maybe it’ll be different. We won’t know until we try.”
“It couldn’t be any worse for you,” Ami says acerbically. “You’re locked in that bastard’s house all the time. He never lets you do anything. Stephanie is giving up her modelling and I’m being forced into this too. We’re losing our freedom. You’re getting sprung out of jail.”
I steady my breathing and bite down on my bottom lip a little harder to prevent myself from saying anything I know I’ll regret. My sisters and I have a strained relationship, and I don’t want to do anything to damage the fragile strands holding us together.
“Ami,” Stephanie scolds softly. “We don’t know that we have to give up anything. I’m not planning on giving up modelling.”
“No? Our father told us that we were expected to produce children. You going to do that with a baby inside of you?”
Stephanie’s lips thin out. “I think that will be between my husband and myself. I’m on birth control. Far as I know, he can’t stop me from taking it.”
Ami’s eyes widen a little. Stephanie is generally very sweet, and her words are spoken with such forceful confidence that we’re both a little shocked.
Stephanie joins us, taking our hands in both of her own. We stand like that, a little triangle. No matter what was going on in our lives, in our worlds, we’ve always held together in whatever ways we can.
“We don’t know what those men look like or what our lives will be like with them, but we’ll be together here in this little shit town and we have each other,” Stephanie assures us, her normal calm back in place.
Her pale throat bobs and I can tell what an effort she’s making to be brave.
I love her even more for it. “If one of us isn’t getting treated right, we’ll make a pact right now that if our father won’t help us, we’ll help each other.
If anyone touches either of you, I’ll fucking castrate them. I promise you that.”
Ami snorts, but it turns into a quiet laugh. “I’d like to see that. My sister the ball butcher.”
Stephanie giggles too, and it releases some of the tension. “Swear it too. Swear that we’ll have each other’s backs. We might only be half-sisters, and our father might be a real bastard, but we’re family. Our blood is thicker than anything they can do to us.”
“I swear it.” I force my voice not to waver.
“I swear it too,” Ami says vehemently.
“Well, maybe after a while we can get a divorce. Maybe in a few months when everything’s calmed down,” Stephanie says hopefully, but her face looks anything but hopeful.
Ami winks. “And if that fails, we’ll start sharpening our knives.”
I know my father is going to come into the room at any minute to drag us out to be united to men who we don’t even know, but right now, with my hands joined to my sister’s sticky palms, a strange sense of calm descends over me.
It might just be the eye of the storm, but holding onto hope, and each other, is all we can do.