Page 31 of Feed Your Fiends

“Congratulations,” I sneer.

She’s still holding out that damn key and once she realises I’ll never take it, she slips it into my coat pocket. Then, she hurries into the Watering Hole for her preferred choices while leaving her daughter at the curb like rubbish.

What else is new?

She could’ve sat and waited with me even if I was being a bitch. Waited to see that I’d gone and that I’d gone safely. She could’ve mentally embraced me even if I wouldn’t let her physically. I didn’t want her to stay, but the fact that she didn’t, regardless of my words, just proves my point.

A chill curls around me despite my warm coat, and not for the first time since waking up in the hospital do I think about how much I miss those warm, seemingly safe embraces. The ones I never got many of before. Before I fell into Gant’s arms. Into his trap. His warm trap.

And it’s cold here.

So fucking cold and lonely.

And miserable.

Gant

Insanity.

It’s rippling through my veins as I step into the penthouse after another immersion therapy lesson with buffalo chicken wings, hotrod live streams, and piss coloured beer.

The maniac wave I’ve been trying to contain in my chest leeches into the surrounding tissues the moment I lock the door. It seeps through my brain, drowning it.

Bae’s contact hasn’t been successful in gathering any new information about my mother’s killer. I still don’t know where the fuck this heir was born, much less who he is. And Elle is still missing.

I’m at a complete standstill.

Answers.I need answers. And I need Elle.

I look from her worthless father cowering timidly in the corner of the theatre to my mother’s death portrait. Neither can give me answers, yet I have to deal with both of them. Time in the penthouse feels an eternity, a void, but how could I leave the live beast entirely alone when it’s not time to drug him yet? Outside the horsemen, who I trust with my life, I can’t let anyone see him, help him, not even Heldina.

“Eyes like springs,” I hiss to myself as I turn to face her. The sound of icy, rushing water in the tank matches the pacing of the blood rushing in my ears as I turn on the jets. I want tea.

“A name fit for a prince. In a country where the government controls a child’s name,” I whisper to both of us. “Japan? Japan has lots of springs. A long royal lineage. One of the oldest countries. Able to reject inappropriate names at the birth registry.”

She just stares through me. I look over my shoulder at Jarett, whose useless pools of spring are glued to the rushing tank.

“Well? Did she tell you where she ran off to have this baby?” I ask him for the fifth time, my footsteps echoing in the dark room as I approach him. “Did she even tell you that she was pregnant at all? Or was she too embarrassed to be carrying your offspring?”

But how could she be embarrassed when her letters alluded to a whirlwind love? Then I think of Elle. I couldn’t deem his seed utterly worthless. Not when he’d given Jaime my Elle.El. L. Ll…

But this bastard brother of mine isn’t Elle, and what are the chances that Jarett produced two good things in one lifetime?None.

“Elle and I could have a shared sibling. You could have another child. A child that could try to take what’s mine. My empire that she,” I hiss, jabbing a finger at the death portrait, “builtwithme. That she left for me in her will. Her firstborn son. ”

Jarett whimpers.

“She worded it just like that. A little loophole to cut me out. It can’t be legal, can it?”

But it can be in this county, or so my lawyers had informed me.

“My father has more money than I can spend in twenty lifetimes. My mother’s? I can blow it in a half-decade. It’s not about the money, not to me. Bart is concerned about the sub-companies he gifted you,” I say to the portrait, then to Jarett. “He didn’t bat an eye until he realised she’d already birthed another calf. That’s what this bastard brother of mine is to Bart, a calf to be slaughtered,yourcalf to be sacrificed.”

Jarett whimpers again, but he’s not looking at me. He’s not hearing me. He’s too occupied with the mangled corpse and the rushing water.

“He, this crowned prince, has slaughtered my perception of who I thought I was,” I say quietly. “And when he’s slaughtered, it’ll be restored because like I said, I don’t care about the money, the prestige. I care about the time. The time spent hiding from my father while my mother trained me to be the best dancer despite his wishes. The time sneaking around with lawyers and realtors and cash so my father couldn’t trace her organisation until it was too late because he never wanted her to have anything of her own. The time spent during those late nights pouring over paint and flooring samples, things my ten-year-old self cared about because she cared about it, sowecared about it together. Ballet wasus.” I turn back to the portrait. “And you want to give it all to his offspring? Him who left you to rot on your back and push out aprincehe doesn’t give a singular fuck about?”

A surge of adrenaline rushes through me as I grab the cricket bat I’d used every day last summer, hitting Kookaburra balls around with Hale to distract myself from the fact that I was dying.

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