Page 89 of Ruthless Prince
I shook my head disbelievingly. “Whatproof?”
He went back to his bag and retrieved the tablet. “When the cops looked for the hit and run driver on nearby surveillance footage, they didn’t find anything, even though there were two CCTV cameras overlooking the street. One on a warehouse security system, another on a closed pawn shop. The pawn shop one had been broken for a while, so that was a no-go, and the warehouse camera mysteriously malfunctioned that evening. All the footage from it was wiped. Convenient for whoever ran over my sister,huh?”
“Yeah, Iguess.”
“When I started looking into all of it, I asked my friend’s uncle to help. He’s in the security business and actually owns the company that fitted the warehouse with its system, so he helped me access the video files from that particular camera. Like the cops said, they were wiped from that night due to the alleged malfunction, but their tech guys were total idiots. They didn’t realize there was a backup cache in the system. Rookie mistake, according to my friend’s uncle. Anyway, he helped me access that cache, and I ended up with this. It’s the only copy of the footage from thatnight.”
He handed me the tablet. “Pressplay.”
With a trembling index finger, I pressed the white button in the middle of the screen. A black and white surveillance video started playing. The timestamp showed it was the night after my school dance in2013.
The asphalt road in the shot was empty, aside from a few crumpled soda cans rolling around in the wind. Puddles shimmered under the streetlights, and the brick buildings lining the street were dark from the drizzlingrain.
“Nothing’s happening,” I said after twominutes.
“Just wait. It’scoming.”
A narrow beam of light appeared on the far left end of the screen. A familiar Vespa came into the shot a few seconds later, zooming along recklessly fast considering how slick the ground was from all therain.
On the right side of the screen, a young blonde woman stepped out of an alleyway on the other side of the street. She held her hand up, like she was waving the rider down. Her face was scrunched up, and her trembling legs made her seem dizzy andconfused.
Instead of stopping to help her, the Vespa driver veered wildly toward her and slammed right into her before skidding off to the left and tipping over a few yards away. The blonde girl flew sideways, body twisting terribly as she fell. The back of her head smashed on the middle of the road, and she twitched a few times before goinglimp.
A chill shot down my spine. The injured girl was unmistakably Chloe. I couldn’t make out the Vespa rider, as he or she had fallen off on the other side of the tipped-over scooter, but I could see the license plateclearly.
It wasmine.
“That wasn’t me,” I said, shaking my head. “Someone must’vestolen—”
Logan cut me off. “Keepwatching.”
Nothing happened for five minutes. Chloe lay motionless, and the Vespa driver didn’t stireither.
Another minute or so later, the driver finally sat up. I could tell it was a woman from the long hair spilling out from the helmet and the feminine curves of her body. She unknowingly turned her face toward the camera as she pulled the helmet off and rubbed her temples, wincing withpain.
“Oh my god,” I whispered. It was me. No doubt aboutit.
I seemed disoriented from the crash, and I kept rubbing my head and squinting as I panted for breath. Then I caught sight of Chloe. Panic widened my eyes as I crawled over toher.
I crouched over her unmoving figure, tentatively reaching one hand out to touch her. She awoke a moment later and weakly reached up to grab my shoulder. Her lips were moving slightly. Then her hand dropped and her eyesclosed.
I stood up on shaky legs, staring down at Chloe. Then I started hurrying away from her, back toward my scooter. Instead of picking it up and starting it, I leaned down and grabbed my phone from a zipped pocket on the side of theseat.
I dialed a number and spoke to someone for about a minute, and then I started hurrying down the street again. Before I made it out of the shot, I swayed and collapsed onto the wetground.
The footage fast-forwarded to fifteen minutes later. A black van appeared on the road. An unidentifiable man in dark clothes and a knit cap gently picked me up and put me in the van, and two other men picked up the scooter and shoved it in the back. The first man ran over to Chloe and briefly checked her pulse before waving briskly at the others and shaking hishead.
The headlights on the van went back on as it started up, and when the first man ran back over and climbed in, it toreaway.
The screen wentfuzzy.
My hand flew to my chest as shock reverberated through my system. “I… I don’t…” I shook my head, clueless as to what I should saynext.
“You don’t what? Don’t recall your attempt to kill another human being?” Logan said in a mocking tone. “Don’t recall phoning your dad to cover everything up foryou?”
“I didn’t do it. The video can’t bereal.”
“I had five unbiased experts analyze it to see if they thought it could be fake or edited in any way. They all said no. It’s definitelyreal.”
