Chapter 2 2:

Before I could process what that meant, I felt myself being lifted not by the arm this time, but thrown over a shoulder like a sack, face down, the guard's back beneath my stomach, my fists hitting against it over and over in a fury that was completely useless and that I could not stop.

"Put me down. Put me down...."

"We're sorry, Miss Kayla." His voice was genuinely apologetic. "These are our orders. We have no choice but to obey them."

I kept hitting his back the entire way to the car. It accomplished nothing. He walked with the steady, unhurried pace of a man who knew exactly where he was going and had already decided to feel bad about it later.

The car door opened. I was finally placed inside and he closed the door. The locks engaged with a sound.

And then we drove back to the Harrison estate while I sat in the back seat with my ruined dress and my bleeding feet.

The car finally came to a stop, we had finally arrived at the mansion I wanted to leave but get caught and brought back.

The guards brought me in through the main entrance of the house. Through the doorway, I could see them, all three of them. My father was standing near the fireplace. My mother was sitting upright on the sofa, her spine perfectly straight. And Mirah, perched beside her in her blush bridesmaid gown, her hands folded in her lap.

None of them had the look of people who had been worried about me.

My father glanced at the guards. "You can leave he said to them."

They bowed before leaving. The room contracted around the four of us.

I stood in the middle of them in my destroyed wedding dress, the torn skirt, the muddy hem, the bare bleeding feet, and the thin cut on my cheek from a branch I'd caught on the way through the trees. I looked at my father the way I had been looking at him my entire life.

Staring at him, after twenty-three years, hopelessly searching his face for the particular expression a parent is supposed to have when their child is standing in front of them like this.

But I see nothing.

The silence stretched between us, taut and purposeful.

Then I felt it.... the sharp, stunning crack of my mother's palm across my cheek.

The blow snapped my head sideways. The pain bloomed immediately, the kind that rings in your ears for several seconds afterwards. I turned back slowly, pressing my own hand to my face, and I looked at my mother.

Linda Chen was on her feet, she was furious in a way I had always seen her.

"How dare you." Her voice was low and sharp as a blade. "How dare you think of running away today of all days? Do you have any idea what you almost did to this family?" She raised her hand again.....

"Linda." My father's voice cut across the room. Not because she shouldn't hit me. But because he had things to say first.

My mother lowered her hand.

Not one person in the room asked if I was alright. Not one person looked at the mark blooming on my cheek and felt the need to say something about it.

This was simply how things were in the Chen mansion.

My father looked at me in that cold, considering the way he had frightened me since childhood.

"Do you have any idea," he said quietly, "what today means for this family?"

A broken sound rose in my chest that was almost a laugh. "I know exactly what today means."

"Then you understand why you cannot do this." He took one measured step toward me, his voice dropping into the reasonable register he used when a decision had already been made and he was simply walking you toward it.

"Kayla. The company is finished if this marriage doesn't happen. Everything I have built, this family's future, everything it all depends on you today."

"Then it shouldn't have depended on me." The words came out steadier than I expected. "You should have built it differently."

Something shifted in his face. In twenty-three years I had never said the true thing directly to either of them, never held the mirror up and made them look, and I watched them absorb it, my father, my mother and I watched it change absolutely nothing, and that was the part that broke something in me far deeper than the slap had.

"You have embarrassed this family enough for one day."

I had heard that sentence in a hundred different forms my entire life. You've embarrassed us. You've disappointed us. Why can't you simply......

"Embarrassed," I said. The word tasted strange in my mouth, like something that didn't belong there. "You want to talk to me about embarrassment. You are selling your own daughter to settle a business and you want to talk to me about embarrassment."

I looked at him directly, and I felt something in my chest that I had never quite felt before, not courage exactly, but the specific recklessness of someone who has already lost and therefore has nothing left to carefully protect. "I am standing up for myself for the first time in my life. That is not an embarrassment. That is the only reasonable thing I have ever done."

My father turned to my mother. Slowly. "Where," he said, in a tone of genuine bewilderment, "did she get this nerve today?"