Above All Else: A Bad Boy Military Romance (Easy Team Book 2) by Gemma Hart Page A

days?”
                  That hadn’t been just a random number she had tossed out. She had been specific. Not a week old. Not two weeks old. Ten days. She had gotten it down to the day.
                  I had always attributed that kind of knowledge to only soldiers. Being out on the field and getting battered constantly, you become very familiar with bruises and cuts and just how long it takes to heal. But even then, that kind of knowledge only came after years of experience. You knew a true hardened soldier when he could calculate how long he had been out in the field or maybe held captive as a POW based on the growth of his beard or the darkness of his bruises.
                  How could a princess possibly possess this knowledge as well?
                  Sofia shrugged and gave a kind of quick half smile. “Experience,” she said broadly. She walked over to the fence, leaning against one of the fresh posts I had just replaced.
                  I studied her. “Where’d you get experience in timestamping bruises?” I asked, unable to keep the incredulity from my voice.
                  Sofia looked up at me before her eyes warmed with an almost pitying look. “Just because you are born a princess, doesn’t mean you are a princess. You must be trained to become one,” she explained as if teaching a child something obvious. “And for most, the rules and regulations of royal life does not come naturally. So you must be taught…and disciplined.”
                  “Like being starved,” I finished, my throat tightening in anger, remembering her stories about her childhood. Who disciplines a child through starvation?
                  Sofia nodded. “That’s one method,” she said calmly and without rancor. “Beatings were common. Pain. Humiliation. Essentially, anything that could break a person’s will.”
                  I almost didn’t want to know the answer but I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “And how often were you beat?”
                  Sofia pressed her lips in thought, as if considering the weather. “I would say from age 9 onward, there wasn’t a day I didn’t have a bruise on me, fresh or old. It wasn’t until I got sent to boarding school that I finally got to see my body without any purple or blue splotches.”
                  She spoke of her torture as casually as someone could speak about their dinner or a TV show.
                  I stared at her, unsure which feeling was stronger—anger or pity. It was a combination of the two. An overwhelming tornado of both emotions whirling in me as I fisted my hands, itching to break a fence post.
                  “How in the hell did you manage to get out of the palace then?” I asked. “I would think Minister Pryto and that bitch governess wouldn’t want you out of their sights, let alone in a boarding school across the globe.”
                  Sofia gave a soft, humorless chuckle. “In any other case, you’d be right. But Minister Pryto is very smart. You have to be if you’re going to take over sole control of the only crown heir after the King and Queen have died suddenly. He had plans. When he had told me I was going to school in Switzerland, I had thought he had been teasing, torturing me with the ideas of hope.”
                  I could just imagine that sick bastard doing something like that to a girl he had just spent the last decade tormenting and torturing.
                  “But he meant it,” Sofia said. “I didn’t believe it till I was on the plane but he really sent me. I cried on the plane from sheer relief. But it wasn’t until later I realized what he had done. The older I got, the harder it would be to control me, especially once I got close enough to my coronation age. And he knew that. So what’s the solution? Send me