PROLOGUE - FIONA

I never saw it coming. I never heard him sneaking up on me until it was too late. One minute I was just walking down the street, heading home, the next I was being dragged into the darkness of an empty park, fighting for my life.

I shouldn’t have walked home. I should have called a cab. Easy to say with hindsight but I had no money for taxis, I’d spent it all on the ridiculously expensive ballgown and shoes I had stupidly been talked into getting, I didn’t have a contingency plan for getting home once my bank balance was below zero. But then I hadn’t planned on walking home in the middle of the night either.

Had he been following me the whole way? Was this just bad luck? Was he lurking in the shadows, waiting for someone vulnerable to walk past, someone who wasn’t paying attention to her surroundings? Step forwards, Fiona, the perfect victim.

It wasn’t even that late, not really. It was a little after ten, the sun had not long set, it was still warm, summer was about to slip into autumn but it wasn’t quite there yet. It had been a hot day, and after the heat of the house, I was glad to get some air, at first.

I was in a foul mood, I was still thinking about the party, about all the mistakes I’d made there, about what I was going to say when I got home, how I could explain the red marks on my ass, the things that had been done to me.

I had headed out of the gate from the enormous house, down the hill towards the city centre, passing by the other gated homes, all the assembled wealth that was a world away from my life. I lived near the cathedral, a typical city centre house, cramped, tissue thin walls, permanently wet windows. From his to mine was about an hour’s walk but I was glad of the time it took, it gave me a chance to think.

I had a lot to think about, not least about him.

I reached the entrance to the park and looked in. Walking through would shorten my journey by about twenty minutes compared to circling around the outside but I didn’t want to risk it, having grown up hearing the horror stories of girls on their own walking through the park at night. It had been drilled into me by my mother to never, ever go in there in the dark.

So I skirted around it instead but it happened anyway, the thing my mother feared the most, I was snatched off the street.

The last car had gone by a couple of minutes earlier. This street cut between two main roads and was lined with enough speed bumps that most cars avoided it. On my left were the hedges of the park, on the right a restaurant that had closed last year, the A of Bannon’s Grill swinging upside down on a single nail. There was a page from a newspaper in the gutter beside me, flickering slightly in the breeze. The last bubbles of champagne were popping when I breathed out, the drunken warmth of the night fading slowly. I remember that moment as a single perfect snapshot, the last instant before my world changed forever.

The first I knew of him was when a hand fast as lightning reached out from the hedge next to me. There was just the slightest rustle of leaves and then a solid grip descended on my shoulder, yanking me sideways off my feet, dragging me from the pavement through the twigs and branches that scratched at my arms.

I opened my mouth to scream but I was too shocked for anything to come out. All that escaped was a hoarse gasp in the first seconds. By the time I realised and tried to cry out, it was too late.

I had been knocked off balance by the movement of his arm and as I tried to right myself, he got his other arm around my neck, wrapping his fingers over my mouth, pressing down hard. I felt his breath in my ear as he pressed his face towards mine, his body hard against my back. “Don’t make a sound,” he said, keeping his hand in place, crushing my lips in his vice-like grip until it hurt. I wanted to scream, I did my best to scream but the sound was too muffled for anyone but him to hear me.

He was already dragging me further into the park as he spoke, ignoring my scrabbling feet which sought to dig into the earth underneath me. One of my shoes came off, left behind. I had a bizarre thought of that being my Cinderella moment but then I was back to trying to scrabble free from him. He was insanely strong. Even with adrenaline coursing through me, I could do nothing to stop myself being pulled closer to a copse of young trees, the sounds of the city dying away in the distance.

He stopped inside the treeline. He was still standing behind me, his free hand moving down my chest to roughly squeeze my breast. I felt his breath change, becoming heavier as he found my right nipple and tugged hard at it. It hardened at once. I tried to cry out but his other hand was still clamped over my mouth. With a loud ripping sound, he suddenly tore at the front of my dress. He kept tugging the fabric apart like an animal, stripping away my modesty, my decency, who I was vanishing from sight, I was becoming nothing but an object of his lust and he needed to see what he had stolen. I had worn nothing under the gown, essential for the perfect party outfit with no VPL. It meant I was virtually naked by the time the remnants of dress fell open. All that was left was a few strips of fabric, my necklace and my one remaining shoe.

I tried to protect myself with my hands, not wanting him to see my body without the protective layer of clothing. It was useless. There was too much to hide and too little to hide it with. He laughed at my efforts, spinning me round to face him, shoving my shoulders down, forcing me down onto my knees. The grass was cold and damp on my knees. I thought about running but I was frozen in place. I couldn’t move. I knew I couldn’t out run him, not with one huge heel. Could I kick it off first, then run?

I looked up at his face, seeing him properly for the first time since he’d grabbed me. “You?” I said in disbelief as he reached for his trousers. “It’s you!”

He began pulling his cock out, pointing it towards me. I stared at it in awe, knowing what he wanted me to do, what was about to happen, what this all meant. Suddenly, it all made sense.

“Open your mouth,” he said as I wondered how the hell it had come to this.