RUIN ME: ENEMY DADDY

CHAPTER ONE

CAGED

SOFIA’S POV

The bedroom door locks at exactly 10PM, every night. It was the same sound and unfortunately the same cage.

I pressed my ear against the wood and counted Luca's footsteps down the hallway, fourteen steps to his door, if I'm not mistaken. The door closes and finally, the whole mansion can breathe. Twenty three years I have been so calculative, learning the different tones of his door from the time he's entering the room to when he's leaving the room to meet me.

Ever since that night, I stopped believing he was just my brother. Not after the stunt he pulled a few years back. Hell no.

I stood at the window and looked out at the garden below, the manicured hedges and the stone fountain with two guards who changed their positions by 11pm. I thought about the black dress folded inside my winter coat at the back of my closet. I thought about the guard who owed Gonna a favour.

“Hmm, maybe he could be useful tonight.” I thought to myself as I remembered how he told her about the tunnel behind the wine cellar in exchange for her silence about the bottle of whiskey he lifted from the cellar last month.

She'd always tell me to let her know whenever I was ready, but I've been so scared but now, I don't give a fuck. “Not tonight, at least.”

I stripped off the white silk nightgown Luca bought for me, it was exactly the way he liked it. As long as it's reaching my knees, we wouldn't have any issues. I wasn't feeling the dress either way so I might as well take the black one staring at me.

I strip off the white silk nightgown Luca bought for me, the one that falls exactly to my knees the way he likes, and I put on the black dress and feel the difference immediately. It was tight across the hips, low at the back, the kind that would immediately go nuts for me the moment he lays his eyes on me. I found the red lipstick at the bottom of the makeup drawer, the one I bought online and hid behind my perfume bottles, and I put it on and looked in the mirror and tried to remember what it felt like to win instead of a possession.

The tunnel looks like what the guard described earlier on. I crawled through it on my hands and knees with my heart beating so fast against my ribs and emerged three blocks from the mansion into the cool night air alongside the distant traffic…

I got up with dirt on my knees and red lipstick on my mouth. Then I hail a cab and go find it.

~ ~ ~ ~

Sinners and Saints is darker than I expected and louder, everyone wears masks and the anonymity is the most intoxicating thing I have ever felt in my life. “Basically I'm no one here,