Exquisite Guilt by Claudia Vincetti

Shard Mikhail Feodorovna Konstantin Vanin.
The year is 1850.
I am a lieutenant colonel in the Russian Imperial Army Hussars, and I’m no friend to the female sex. I spell only darkness delivered with the imprint of my body.
The sins of my youth have haunted me my whole life. Comb for the truth under the polished veneer, and I’m an aberrant, a destroyer and a herald of depravity. My father was a manipulative and evil controller of women, and the more femininely delicate they were, all the better it was to him. I have his blood in my veins, and if I could bleed myself dry of it, I would.
On my father, the Grand Duke’s death, my great wealth gave me the freedom to be different, and I chose submissive vassalage. Turning my back on the obscenities happening in the palace of my birth, I became a fighting man. Although my lineage linked me to the Tsars of Russia and a lifetime of inestimable privilege, I embraced the life of a soldier; yet, nothing I could do in the arena of conflict ever erased the person I am inside. I’m damaged, not by war, but at the hand of my family.
I once thought nothing could ever scare a soul more than the eve of battle. That was before I met a fascinatingly vibrant debutante who summed up the entire world’s beauty. London society told her she needed a compliant spouse with a pleasing disposition, a man she could shape like clay, but in me, that is not who she got. Faced with my raging need to sink myself deep into her virgin body, I found myself asking the question, “When the past had stripped down everything human about me to the most basic core, what were my options?” In my opinion, I had only one:
“Serve up the truth.”