“Do you, Alex Snow, take Jennifer Walker, to be your lawfully wedded wife? From this day forward, to have and to hold, for better, for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do you part?” the priest asked.
My soon to be; in a couple of seconds, husband looks at me with the eyes of a beast, ready to rip me apart at any second as he says tightly “I do”
Although he just vowed to take me as his wife, to hold, love and cherish, his ‘I do’ vowed something else entirely.
It was an oath to make me suffer horribly at his hands.
“Do you, Jennifer Walker, take Alex Snow, to be your lawfully wedded husband? From this day forward, to have and to hold, for better, for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do you part?”
I look at him defiantly with my head held high, piercing him with my hatred and loath, telling him that I don’t fear him, as I answer without an ounce of hesitation “I do”
As soon as the words left my mouth I was certain, I just sealed my own fate by marrying Alex Snow.
Fate had a merciless, screwed up sense of humor when it set me up with this monster, and made me marry him in a last minute forced marriage, or more like imprisonment.
And my fate was crystal clear, death is coming for me…sooner rather than later.
Chapter 1
Jenny’s POV
ONE WEEK EARLIER
I wake up to the sound of my father screaming in rage, followed by something smashing on the floor.
It was such a typical way to wake up, like waking up to an alarm every morning. It became a daily routine in this house a long time ago.
I close my eyes and curse inwardly. Another day god didn’t answer my prayer to take that man’s life in his sleep.
There is always tomorrow, I thought with a sigh.
I used to hate myself for praying for my father’s death every night. It made me feel like a bad person. But as the days passed, as I became certain he will never change into a better person, that feeling went away.
I get up from the bed and head towards my bathroom.
I stare at myself in the mirror for a long time, trying to recognize the person staring back at me. It wasn’t me. Or it wasn’t who I wanted to be. Why? Well, there are so many reasons that I don’t even know from which one to begin.
First and foremost , I lived in this god forsaken deadbeat of a town.
God, how I hate this town. How I curse my damn luck for having the unfortunate fate of being born and raised here. Where is here you ask? I will tell you.
I live in an extremely small town called ‘Snow’. It is a town with a population of around 500 people, located in Alaska; more specifically, located within a collection of mountains that spread all the way across the border between America and Canada.
Yukon, Canada was about a half hour drive from here, through the mountain road.
This specific feature made it the perfect place for smuggling anything from and across the border.
What kinds of things? Anything.
Electronics, medications, goods, gold, alcohol, cigarettes, fabrics, the list can go on forever.
Guns and ammunitions are the number one products that are smuggled through this town. The most profitable one.
Illegal drugs such as heroine, are worth all those things I listed multiplied by ten. But, they were forbidden from entering or leaving through this town.
Who gets to decide all this?
The Snows.
They are the people who started this whole thing.
They are the ones I blame for being stuck here.
If it weren’t for their great great grand father, this place would have been just a pile of rocks and a massive stretch of empty land.
It was never meant to become an inhabited town.
But given its unique advantage, its unlimited source of incoming money, the original Snow family started the whole smuggling business.
They started building up the town with the money they received from smuggling, they moved in, brought and attracted other people from nearby towns; that’s where my family comes into the picture, and established this town. Its people called it ‘Snow’ honoring the original family for creating life into the town.
And because of their continuous contribution to the prosperity of ‘Snow’, their name was plastered everywhere in this place.
They owned pretty much the whole town. Snow school, Snow hospital, Snow supermarket, Snow anything you can think about.
Snow police department, now that sentence is a fucking joke on its own, you can imagine what kind of protecting and serving they were doing.
They are the alarm system for when the real police come for a random bust desperately trying; and failing, to stop the smuggling business. The SPD protected the Snows, just like everyone in this town.
While the whole town was in the smuggling business at the beginning; my family included, the more the town got built and established, people gradually started earning their money through the legal businesses established by the laundered money from smuggling, leaving the Snows solely in charge of the illegal activities of this town.
The Snows are about half our population now, they are a tight, loyal clan.
A criminal clan with a moral code, how fucking ironic.
They don’t allow addictive drugs or human trafficking to be smuggled through this town.
That is their number one rule.
Most of them are wanted outside the town for suspicion of unsolved crimes and illegal criminal activities.
They are safe inside the town, but not so much outside it.