Scandalous

Intro

These are the things that I no longer wish to remember: My family's lies to me as they knew what was going on behind my back and did not tell me. The avoidance of answers to the slowly increasing disappearances of people that I often considered more than family as compared to my blood relatives. The ones who raised me as their own in my parent's absence. The ones that protected me as much as they could in the positions that they were in, but couldn't protect me from everything.
I wish to forget all the lies that I've had to keep up with in order to sustain my family's name, morral, and reputation. We are royalty, after all.

Maybe I should run away. But if I did, I'd be leaving everything that I know. If I left, they'd find me, and bring me back to this Hell-hole, and lock me up as a common criminal. No, I'd much rather just grin and bear it for now, and hide from my family in the secret passages I used to play in as a child. You would think that living in a castle, I would have a room to myself that I could have all to me. Well, I have my suite, but no one respects personal space there since I'm considered a commodity and not an individual. My mother gave it to me for my 16th birthday in hopes it would become my marriage suite. But after I asked she stop referring to it as that, and asked she give me books instead, she gave me a library on the condition that I allow her to send in suitors once a week at tea time. The library is stacked with piles upon piles of books, of all genres, and that is usually how I get the suitors to leave. I put my nose in a book and ignore that they are even there. She never said I had to interact with them after she sent them in.

I huff in my corset, trying to rearrange it so it no longer cuts off the circulation to my breasts. But, of course, pain is beauty, lessons are lessons, and when it's all said and done, things burned into your brain as a child tend to stick with you forever. Hello, future mental insanity problems.

The bell for supper has been rung throughout the castle. Maybe I could feign sickness again, and get out of having to sit next to him. Duke Devan Declain, from the Irish province. Don't take it lightly when I say he is my soon-to-be-husband, and I could not hate him more than I do now. He has done just about every possible thing to piss me off. He is a pig, a cheater, and an alcoholic. I am only 17, and yet every other female member of the royal family was already married at this age, which my mother constantly brings up. This man is 23 years old and decided to choose me, and I can think of a couple of reasons why. It definitely was not my good looks. My father has chosen to find the most boring, piggish, and stupid person on the planet to be the one I am to stay with for the rest of my life, most likely to spite me.

I begin the long walk to the dining hall and walk swiftly, trying to make it on time. "A prompt princess shows perfection, precision, propriety, and prudence," my mother always says. I walk up to the large double doors to the dining hall. The doors are almost as thick as my palm is wide, and are about as tall as three of me, and I am about 5'7". The width of just one of the doors could withstand four people through at once, with room to spare. The two men guarding the door look at me, one smiling, the other scowling. The one scowling yanks open the door and announces my presence, and everyone already sitting stands, addresses my presence by looking my way and bowing, and I curtsey back tartly. I start the long, awkward walk up to the table to take my place and finish is within mere seconds, but the walk feels like an eternity with all eyes upon me. As I place myself behind the seat that has been my "assigned" seat my whole life, the waiter comes up and pulls it out for me, the whole table still at attention, waiting for me to sit. The waiter tonight happens to be one of my most valued friends, Herbert. He is old and very nearly outdated for our staff, but he is fast, precise, and has eyes that see everything. He holds the secrets to about four generations' worth of my family, and so, when Devan tried to have him fired, I could think of nothing else to say but that he holds my family's secrets to my father, and father agreed in my favor for the first and only time in my existence. So I was blessed with being able to keep my best friend. It's understandable that the ones I have tried to forget are my loved ones being taken off staffing without my knowledge or approval, and after hearing Devan tried to have Herbert removed, I put the math together and realized he was trying to isolate me for more power over me.