Page 63 of Broken Princess
He smiled again. “You don’t need to know that. All you need to know is that there’s no escape. You’re mine now.”
“So you convinced the prince to sell me to you?”
“No, I took you from him.”
“You took me? Just like that?”
“Yes. It took some quick and dirty planning, but it all worked out, didn’t it?”
I narrowed my eyes and shook my head. “You’re never going to get away with this.”
“I will.”
“No way. The prince will come after you, and so will Liz and the rest of her minions when she realizes you betrayed her and screwed over one of her highest-paying clients. Whoever finds you first will kill you.”
“No one is coming after us, Willow. No one even knows you’re here with me.”
“They might not know exactly where you’ve brought me, but they still know I’m out here somewhere,” I said through gritted teeth.
“That’s where you’re wrong.” He pulled a phone out of his pocket, clicked a few buttons, and held it out to me. “See this?”
I squinted at the article on the screen, taking it all in, and then I stared up at Jamie with furrowed brows. “The prince’s plane blew up?”
“Yes. Liz and the others involved in the auction think you were on the flight with him, so as far as they know, you’re strewn over the Atlantic in a million pieces. Everyone else—like your family and Logan—will be told about your so-called yachting accident quite soon, so you’ll be dead to them too. Only one person in the whole world will ever have a clue that you’re actually still alive, and that’s me.”
My heart began to thud painfully in my chest. “No…”
“Yes, Willow,” he said, reaching over to stroke one side of my face. “You’re dead to the whole world, and no one is coming to save you. I’m all you have now.”
Nausea rolled through me at the feel of his skin on mine. “Why wasn’t I on the Keshari plane?” I asked, voice barely above a murmur.
“Because I didn’t want you to be on it, of course,” he replied, slowly shaking his head. “The second that auctioneer announced your sale, I realized I couldn’t let it happen. I couldn’t let you go home with that slimy piece of shit Darius. I wanted you for myself. Always have, if I’m being honest.”
“So what did you do?”
He smiled thinly. “Luckily for me, it’s my job to handle the slaves after the auctions are over, and it’s my responsibility to prep them for their journeys to their new homes,” he said. “I told the prince and his entourage that you would need to be sedated, gagged, and blindfolded for various reasons before getting on his plane, and then I did that to you and another girl— a girl who looked similar enough to you with two thirds of her face covered. I hid you on my plane before putting her on his plane, and then I used some connections of mine to shoot it down not long after takeoff so he could never let Liz or anyone else know the truth. The attack will be pinned on an extreme left-wing anti-fascist group who protest whenever any of the Keshari royals visit the States.”
My stomach plummeted, and I pressed a palm against my mouth. “Oh my god,” I muttered through it. “You sent an innocent girl to die.”
“Well, I needed to put someone on that plane in your place, didn’t I?” he said. “Do you think the prince would’ve taken off without the girl he paid a fortune for?”
“You’re fucking sick,” I hissed, unable to believe what I was hearing. That poor girl…
He waved a hand. “She was nothing. Just another disposable slave. Not like you. You’re special, Willow.”
“She was just as special as me, whoever she was,” I said in a hollow voice, avoiding his lecherous gaze.
“Not true.”
I looked down at my lap, trying to swallow the acrid taste of disgust lingering in the back of my mouth. “You might have convinced yourself that you’re some sort of diabolical genius, but you won’t get away with this,” I finally said, glancing back up at Jamie. “Liz is smart. She’ll realize a girl who looks like me vanished from the mansion on the same night as the auction and plane shootdown, and she’ll make the connection eventually.”
Jamie smiled patiently. “No, she won’t. One of the guards at the mansion owed me a favor, so I told him to write a note admitting that he raped and accidentally killed that girl before burying her somewhere on the grounds in a panic. I promised to get him to a safe place when the story came out, so Liz couldn’t kill him in retribution, and I offered to throw in several million dollars as a sweetener. He went along with it, of course. Money always talks.”
“It doesn’t matter how much you paid him. Liz will track him down, and when she does, she’ll get the truth out of him,” I said.
Jamie laughed. “I didn’t actually give him the money, Willow. I only said I would. As soon as he wrote the note, I shot him. Made it look like a suicide. All Liz will ever know is that one of the guards allegedly raped and killed that girl before killing himself out of guilt. Sad but believable.”
My stomach churned. “You’re so fucked up.”
