𝚂𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚍 ✔

Chapter Twenty-Two

The walk back to my room felt like it took an age and a half to complete.

I was silent, mind hardly working, as my hollow body navigated its way down the hall. What she had just told me and the shock of finally finding out why I had been sent in my sister's stead, was hard for me to swallow, let alone even begin to accept.

Part of me had already jumped to conclusions, and the little voices of fear a doubt begged me to leave that place at once, to go home. That maybe the man my father had promised to arrange for me to marry would have been kind. That with him I would have had zero chances of being beaten and neglected again.

Once I got to the door of my apartment, I mindlessly unlocked it and went inside. I looked around the receiving room expecting to find Cordelia, but to my surprise she wasn't in. This, thankfully, meant I had time to be alone with my unstable thoughts and work through them before she returned. I turned back to the door and locked it before I made my way through the silent space and opened the doors to my bedroom. To where I just walked over to my bed and sat on the end of it.

I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself, only for it to come out as a shaky, broken mess while tears began to build in my eyes. An overwhelming sense of disappointment, fear and sorrow took hold of me, and I finally broke down into an awful sob.

"How had it come to this?" I questioned everything that had happened up until then, tears violently streaming down my face, accompanied by unwanted snot from my now running nose. "Am I only meant to suffer? Or is there some other reason for this endless torment?"

I felt robbed of my only chance at freedom. That after how hard I had worked to get where I was in the courting, all in hopes to rid myself of my parents, everything I had done up until then had seemed to have been for nothing. The way out had been barred and the freedom that I had been fighting for had been nothing more than a fool's hope, an unattainable, nonexistent dream.

In my head, I had convinced myself that Thomas was going to be my savior, that he would have rescued me from my parents and made it so that I would have never had to suffer any more mistreatment from them, or anyone, ever again.

But perhaps my hopes were too high, my fantasy too elaborate, and the disappointment I felt towards Thomas wasn't all that fair. I had never met the man prior to my arrival, yet I had concocted this idea of him from the moment I had found out that he was the one I needed to woo if I had hoped to escape. Though, looking back on it now, there was no way anyone could have lived up to expectations that had been formed for an imaginary version of themself.

It was not possible, and I had no right to think as such. I admit, despite my emotional state and tattered dreams, I had hoped for far too much. And tried to force someone to be something they weren't, instead of getting to know and accepting them for who they actually were.

Though, I also knew that I had a right to be upset with the fact that he could have been just as bad, if not worse, than my parents. I had come all that way to escape them, so of course such awful news would've upset me. Because, in all fairness, why would I have wanted to marry a man who would have continued the abuse that my parents had started? I wouldn't have, and I knew that.

Yet somehow, I was torn. I, still, did not want to believe it. Because, for all I knew it could have just been a nasty rumor. A twisted tale spread, by one of the mothers of my many competitors, in hopes to scare away some of the harder competition early on. But part of me wondered if it had actually carried some truth to it, no matter how small that truth might have been.

In all the time I had spent with him and watching him from afar, I had seen some things, some reactions and behaviors that had unnerved me. But they were so minuscule, so easily mistaken for things that they weren't really, that I was not sure if they had really mattered in the context of him possibly being a terrible person.