Page 70 of A Wise Prince

“Ash?” I whisper yell.

I hear another groan, but this one sounds panicked. “Ash, it’s OK. I’m right here.”

I scoot across the floor and try to get near her. I hear her move on the bed. When I reach the side of it, she’s leaning over, looking down at me in complete and absolute terror.

I sigh. I don’t want to tell her, but she needs to know.

“Will…isn’t who he says he is, Ash. He’s Bill, Jared’s cousin,” I say. Her eyes widen.

“I think this has something to do with Dad and Auggie’s family, and…I don’t know,” I whisper, my bottom lip trembling.

My hands are bound with a zip tie, there’s no getting out of it. “How tight is your zip tie?” I ask her.

She pauses and then shakes her head. “Too tight?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “Can you get out of it?”

She grunts, and I see her arms moving. A minute later, I hear duct tape ripping. Her hands come around the front. I frown because one wrist is bleeding. It’s then I realize that she’s used her diamond watch to cut through the tape, smart girl, but the friction has also scraped her wrist. She pulls the tape from her mouth with a whimper.

“What do we do?” she asks, her voice wobbling as she attempts to take the tape off her legs.

I look around. “Help me up.”

She gets off the bed and helps me to my feet. I shuffle across the floor with Ash behind me. I push the blackout curtains aside. It’s dark still. I have no idea what time it is. I peer out into the darkness. Forest, fields, and nothing else.

I have no idea how long we were out or how many hours have passed since we were in the square. I look around the room. The building appears to be older. I don’t see a way to get out, the windows don’t open far enough for us to get through them. I look around the room.

“Well?” Ashlyn says, her face looks extra pale in the moonlight.

“I don’t know. Let me think,” I mutter. I hear people talking below us. He’s still here.

I limp to the door and turn the knob, but it doesn’t budge. Then a thought comes to me. At the palace, there were a ton of old passageways and secret doors. Could this house have any?

“Feel along the wall, look for a door,” I say to Ashlyn, as I hobble along, pushing against panels.

“The wall? Are you OK?” Ash asks, looking at me like I’m completely insane.

I groan. “Damn it, Ash, just do as I say.”

“Fine,” she huffs like the petulant teenager that she still is. Ash might be almost twenty, but damn if she isn’t still an immature pain in my ass.

“I can’t believe we are arguing at a time like this,” I mutter. The walls have wooden panels on them about two-thirds of the way up the wall. The rest is painted a dark color that I can’t make out clearly, but it looks like blue in the dim light.

There’s a large armoire on one side of the room. My brain tells me to look behind it.

“Help me move this,” I whisper.

“Are you serious? That has to weigh about a ton.”

I glare at my sister. We’ve been kidnapped by my psycho ex-boyfriend and his cousin and she’s worried about the weight of a piece of furniture. She rolls her eyes and pushes as I pull. It makes a little noise, and we freeze.

“Here, push it out a little,” I say.

She does. “Can you feel behind it?”

She nods. I hear a click and her head pops back out from behind it. “There’s a door back here,” she says.

“Yes!” I say a little thank you to the universe, looking up at the ceiling. I shuffle over to her. My ankles are killing me.

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