A Gilded Cage

You deserve better than this, Tabby…

This thought kept echoing around in circles through Tabitha’s brain. She wasn’t sure how she was going to face her new reality, sentenced to a life of miserable luxury. She was only 21, and hadn’t experienced even a tenth of the things she had planned on.

She had dreams of exploration and beauty; now Amy, her best friend since kindergarten, was going to be taking their long-awaited backpacking tour of the U.S. without her. They had always planned on being together forever, best friends to the end.

That was before her father’s “arrangement” with the man he owed all that money to.

Her new husband was extremely wealthy, and he wasn’t horrid to look at. At first she was flattered--and then even a little excited--by the mystery that being a wife would be. She had moved to a beautiful new apartment, and was able to wear beautiful clothes … and she now hated every moment she spent there.

It was a velvet prison, and the man next to her was her warden now. This little trip to Switzerland, for example, was for him; she wouldn’t even be allowed to go shopping without an escort.

Lost in these dark thoughts, Tabby stared out the window at the clouds that covered the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of feet below. There was no way for her to know that her new husband, and this ‘wonderful’ new life, had only 480 seconds left, or that she would be spending the next seven weeks in a battle just to survive. No way to know, that was, until the sound from the planes engine stopped, and the nose took a sudden lurch downward…

(c) 2017 - dustygrein