prologue
Life didn’t treat everyone the same way, she would know. Life has never been kind to her, unlike others. Her brother had had the opportunity to live his perfect life; he was a great student, got a job almost immediately after finishing school and got married to the woman he loved from the very start. He got to have a perfect family with her and he lived till he grew old, he died at the age of eighty-five.
She hadn’t been that lucky.
Oh no. She really hadn’t been.
If someone needed an example for the word unlucky, he would most definitely use her. Everyone in their small town knew how unfortunate her life had been. How unfair in some people’s eyes – mostly her own though.
School hadn’t been something she liked but after finishing it so many times, she had learnt everything by heart. Finding a job hadn’t been necessary for her back then, after all, women were supposed to stay home all day and night to take care of the house and the kids and now, it seemed like the only job she would be able to have would be being an eternal high school student, forever stuck at the age of eighteen.
And family? That’s where things got even worse.
She had the most amazing brother ever, he always made sure to keep an eye out for her, to look out for her but when she turned seventeen, her parents shipped her off to the first wealthy male they met to make sure that they would have a good life when they would grow even older and they wouldn’t be able to take care of themselves. They never cared for her, they never asked her if she wanted to marry him, they never asked if she loved another.
And so, Cassandra watched from afar as the one she truly loved married to another while she married a stranger. Her husband wasn’t the best one out there, he would get drunk easily, he loved hunting and get bringing every animal he killed inside the house – and then made her clean it all up – and always bossed her around.
She hated him and he didn’t pay her any attention.
Until one day where he returned home drunk out of his mind with his shotgun in hand and the head of a deer on the other. It had been a night when he did show up to his home, the animal had a really bad smell since it had been a while since he had killed it and he was still screaming the songs he and his palls had been singing in the local pub. He scared her to death – quite literally.
She had woken up from her slumber by his loud singing. She had entered the living room to check was all the fuss was about and screamed when she saw him carrying that deer head like it was his grand prize. She had been scared, sleep still coating her eyes and her mind. She didn’t know what to think and her first instinct of hers was to scream and run. That’s all she wanted to do and that’s exactly what she did.
Her screams seemed to scare him too because he had turned towards her in an instant and then, the unexpected happened.
A trigger was pressed, a bullet flew, blood coated every clean surface and even though it was a little macabre to think like that, this was the moment when Cassandra Cullen’s story truly began.
