Total pages in book: 21
Estimated words: 19922 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 100(@200wpm)___ 80(@250wpm)___ 66(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 19922 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 100(@200wpm)___ 80(@250wpm)___ 66(@300wpm)
Orion was with her, as always, standing outside the lecture hall like a monument to personal security. Maika had been subdued these past few days. Orion had been pretending not to notice, which was his own form of kindness.
She came out of the building with her bag over one shoulder, squinting at her phone. Her professor had asked about her paper, and she'd smiled, said "it's coming along great," and then spent the entire lecture staring at her notebook not writing a single word because she was thinking about Mykos.
She was always thinking about Mykos now. Or rather, she was always doing her best not to think about him and failing at it every single time, too.
The course of true love never did run smooth.
The line from A Midsummer Night's Dream had been floating through her head all day, and she wanted to laugh at the irony, because Shakespeare had written it as comedy—two pairs of young lovers getting tangled up in fairy magic—but there was nothing funny about Maika's version. In her version, there were no fairies. No magic. Just a husband who had looked at her like she was boring and walked away.
The ways she used to cope no longer worked, and she could no longer compartmentalize her life the way she used to. She had always been able to open a book and disappear into someone else's words. But now, when she tried to read, every love story reminded her of what she didn't have, and every tragedy reminded her of what she was afraid she did have.
Life had always been hard, but she had never let it affect her studies. There were things that always made her cry, but she had never lost hope.
Now, though...
Maika had gotten a B-minus on her last essay. A B-minus. And for a paper on Shakespeare at that! That, to her, was the sign that her life had hit rock bottom, and it was because her mind was drowning in despair that she didn't notice it while Orion, who had always been so vigilant...
He, too, wasn't able to escape what was ordained.
And so at the very second that Orion had accidentally dropped his phone and he had bent down to pick it up...
It was the very same second that Maika was blind to her surroundings, her thoughts clouded by despair...
And in a blink, she was gone.
By the time Orion straightened, it was done.
An unmarked van. Side door already open. A group of men who knew what to do—they had clearly been watching, waiting for the one moment when her guard's attention would break. One of them grabbed her from behind, a hand clamping over her mouth before she could scream. Another wrenched her bag off her shoulder. A third pressed a cloth to her face, and the smell was chemical and sweet, and the world started to blur.
She tried to fight. She kicked, tried to bite the hand over her mouth, but her limbs were already going heavy and wrong, and the last thing she saw before the van door slid shut was the sky—blue, ordinary, the same sky that had been there that morning when she'd walked to class thinking about nothing more important than her B-minus.
All it took was one second...for the unwanted wife of Mykos Ravensworth to be abducted.
THE ROOM WAS COLD.
Dark, concrete, a chair, zip ties on her wrists. Her mouth hurt where someone had hit her. Her wrist was bruised from the grab. One side of her face throbbed.
She was shaking so hard her teeth chattered, and yet...it was in the midst of terror and darkness that Maika learned to hope again.
This time, she didn't stop herself from thinking of Mykos.
This time, she didn't just allow herself to think of her husband.
This time, she embraced her memories of him.
Not the Mykos who found her boring and walked out on her...
But the Mykos she married, the Mykos who made love to her and wrote notes to her...
The Mykos who had spent an entire week building Maika's Corner before she even knew his name.
The Mykos whose fingers traced words on her shoulder while she fell asleep.
The Mykos who had pulled her into his lap in his study at midnight and held on like she was the only thing keeping him afloat.
And it made her laugh and cry at the same time even though she knew that made her a lunatic.
She just couldn't help it.
She laughed and cried because she knew this was God answering her prayer.
God allowing her to be abducted because somehow...this was exactly what had to happen, for her to wake up and remember that the heart was deceitful above all else, and it wasn't just her heart that could be fooled...but Mykos's, too.
And that was why...
People sometimes ended up believing what wasn't true—
(Her heart was breaking, and it bored him!)