PROLOGUE

GIANNA (GIA)

Age 4

My heart was beating ten to the dozen as Julian, my stepbrother, threw me into the cupboard.

“This is where you belong. I hope you suffocate,” he smiled at me gleefully.

Ignoring my whimpers, he shut the door and locked it, leaving me in the dark. I knocked on the door for a long time, but nobody heard me. This was a little used room in the house. It was hours before one of the servants found me and got me out. This wasn’t the first time he’d done something like this, and it wasn’t the last.

It was around this time that I stopped trusting my mother. When I told her what he’d done, she just laughed and said he’d been playing. As young as I was, I knew he hadn’t been playing. Especially with him smirking at me across the table at her words.

He was fifteen, nearly sixteen to my four. I tried to stay away from him as much as I could. But that didn’t stop him from ripping the heads off my dolls and lying about just about everything he could get away with so that I could get punished.

Getting punished was actually preferable for me as I didn’t mind being sent to my room; it was my safe space, and I didn’t mind my own company.

That’s how it was for years. Then, when my brother was born a few months after my mother married my stepfather, I got to spend time with him and his nanny. Because I was quiet and didn’t cause trouble, she didn’t mind me spending time with them and would often hide me when Julian came looking. His grandmother was another safe person for me. She was the only one who believed me and had stepped in several times with her son and my mother to defend me against his lies.

I thought that I’d escaped when I left home at eighteen, and I did for a quite few years until my mother and stepfather died.