Married to the Tyrant in a Wheelchair

“My boyfriend and stepsister murdered me for my inheritance, their celebratory kiss a final insult above my broken body on the rain-slicked concrete of the port. As my soul floated inches from my own face, a tyrant the world knew only as a disfigured cripple, Charles Moses, arrived with a team of soldiers. He ignored my killers, who were now begging for their lives. Instead, he fell to his knees in the mud and blood. He cradled my lifeless head in his hands, and a gut-wrenching sob of pure agony tore from his throat before he carried my body into the black ocean. As the water closed over us, I didn't understand. Why did this monster, a man I had never met, weep for me as if I was his entire world? My eyes snapped open. I was five years in the past, coughing up water in a hospital bed. It was the night my family screamed at me for ruining my stepsister's dress after she'd tried to drown me. When they offered to marry me off to the "crippled monster" Charles Moses to save my perfect stepsister from that fate, I didn't fight them. I smiled and said yes. This time, I would walk straight into the lion's den myself.”