CAMILA
I took the job because nobody else would hire me.
Cash on a Friday. A big ugly house on the hill. A family that eats together every Sunday like it's a law, because in that house it is.
Nobody told me whose kitchen I was standing in. By the time I worked it out I had already informed Dante Di Angelo that his knives were organised like a crime scene.
He didn't fire me. That should have been my first clue.
He doesn't laugh. He doesn't touch me. He just puts himself between me and every door in that house like it costs him nothing.
He's promised to someone else. Everybody knows but me.
And his grandmother keeps setting me a place at the table like I belong there.
I have never belonged anywhere in my life. I could get used to this.
That's the part that will kill me.
DANTE
She has her back to the room.
Nobody in my house has their back to the room. Nobody hands me things. Nobody puts food in front of me without wanting to know something, and in eleven years nobody in that kitchen has ever once made me sit down.
She's been here four days and she has already done all three.
I was fifteen when my grandmother told me what she had traded for my life. I said okay. I have been paying it every day since and I have never once been late.
Then a woman burns her arm on an oven door on a Thursday night and I am across that kitchen before I decide to move.
I am promised to a girl I have met eleven times.
And I have started counting the hours until eleven o'clock.
This is the first book in The Thorns We Wear Series. Reading order:
A Throne of Thorns.
A Crown of Thorns.
An Empire of Thorns.
