Broken Princess: Ruthless Rulers Book 3

by Hart, Stella

  “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.”

  “At least I’m smart enough to get away with it,” he said with a nonchalant shrug, as if the body count he’d racked up was nothing more than a casual joke.

  I narrowed my eyes again. “You won’t. Someone will figure out the truth eventually.”

  “Like who?” Jamie asked, raising his brows. Before I could reply, he grinned and raised his palms, fingers spread out wide. “Wait, let me guess… some deluded little part of you still thinks Logan might find you and help you. Am I right?”

  “If anyone can, it’s him,” I murmured.

  “No. A few days from now, he’ll start grieving your death without knowing any better. Eventually he’ll move on and marry someone else, and you’ll just be a sad footnote in his history. It’s pointless and stupid to think otherwise.” He rose to his feet and looked down at me. “Anyway, let’s stop talking about that. I need to discuss a few things with you.”

  “Like what?”

  He waved a hand around the room. “Our arrangement here. Obviously I have a life back in the city, so I can’t be with you as often as I’d like, but I want you to know that you’ll be fine here on your own. There’s enough food and water to keep you healthy whenever I’m gone, and there are enough books and movies to keep you from losing your mind out of boredom.”

  “What’s stopping me from going out the window and running away?”

  “Nothing. There are no locks anywhere here. But you won’t do it.”

  I crossed my arms. “Are you kidding?”

  “You can try, of course, but you won’t get far,” he said with a smug curl to his upper lip. “That’s not just a regular beach out there.”

  My heart sank. “Are you saying we’re on an island?” I asked in a small voice.

  “Yes,” he replied. “I suppose you could always try to swim away, but the nearest piece of land is a neighboring island thirty miles away, and the seas around here are rough and freezing. You’d be dead within minutes.”

  “What if I’d rather die than be here?” I said stubbornly.

  Jamie hooked a fingertip under my chin and slowly stroked it. “You’ve never seemed like the suicidal type, Willow. But if that’s something you might actually consider, then I’ll have to stop you from going outside after all. I’m sure I can barricade you in here for long enough to get some bolts installed, along with a nice little shock collar that will prevent you from straying too close to the water’s edge in case you manage to break a lock while I’m gone.”

  I gulped and looked down.

  “Are we clear?” Jamie asked, forcing my chin up again. “Are you going to keep yourself alive, or do I need to take extra measures?”

  “I won’t kill myself,” I muttered.

  “Good girl,” he said, lips curling upward again. “And speaking of good girls… when I’m here, I expect you to serve me like the good little girl I know you can be.”

  “Not gonna happen,” I blurted out before I could stop myself.

  He lunged forward and wrapped his hand around my throat, almost lifting me right off the bed. My eyes watered as I tried to pry his fingers off me to no avail. I kicked my legs out at him, hoping that would unbalance him enough to loosen his grip, but it didn’t work.

  Finally, he let go. I slumped down and rubbed my throat, dragging painful gasps of air into my lungs as he stared down at me. “What happened to you, Willow?” he asked, eyes narrowed slightly. “You were being so good for me the other day, and now you’ve developed this attitude all over again. It’s a real shame.”

  “You didn’t break me in that mansion,” I said, fixing him with a fevered stare. “I only thought you did because you were torturing me, but I won’t let it happen again. You can do whatever you want to me. Choke me. Hit me. I’ll still never do anything for you willingly.”

  “You will.”

  “No. You’ll always
have to force me.”

  He sighed. “All women break in the end. It just takes the right push from the right man.”

  “You aren’t the right man for me, Jamie,” I said in a ragged whisper.

  “You say that now, but you unintentionally gave me a weapon that night at the White House,” he replied. “Do you remember our conversation in the bathroom?”

  “I think so.”

  “So you remember opening up to me about how awful Logan used to be. How he used to make you do things by threatening your little brother’s life.”

  My pulse began to race. “Yes.”

  “Look at this.” He grabbed his phone again and showed me a video. My stomach lurched as I realized what it was. It was him, stalking around Jared’s room at my aunt’s place in Alexandria.

  Jared was fast asleep in the middle of the bed, letting out little snores as his chest rose and fell. The camera moved closer and closer until it was zoomed all the way up to his perfect little face. He remained blissfully oblivious to the sinister presence.

  “I made this video when I went to steal some of his things to put on the boat after I convinced you to leave Logan,” Jamie explained, observing my horrified reaction with a proud gleam in his eyes. “I thought I might need it to scare you at some point, and I was right. You are scared, aren’t you?”

  “You wouldn’t hurt a little boy,” I whispered as the hairs rose on the back of my neck.

  “That’s where you’re wrong. I’m not like Logan. I don’t make threats and later renege on them out of guilt,” he said, nostrils flaring. “If you don’t do every single thing I tell you while we’re here together, I will hurt Jared. And I won’t stop there. I’ll go after everyone else you care about too. Is that what you want?”

  I swallowed thickly as terror zipped down my spine. “No.”

  “So then I am the right man for you,” he said. “I’m the one who knows exactly how to break you, and I’m the one who’ll actually follow through with it if you don’t behave. You understand that now, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” He smiled again and moved one hand to his belt. “Now get off the bed and get on your knees.”

  15

  Logan

  “I don’t understand why you can’t track that motherfucker. You’ve managed to do everything else with all of your computer whiz shit.”

  I scrubbed a hand across my jaw as I spoke, shoulders slumping against the back of the spare chair in Rowan’s office.

  He looked at me and frowned. “Even I have my limitations. You know that.”

  I sighed. “I know. Sorry, man. I just really want to find Willow,” I muttered.

  “I know,” he replied. “Believe me, I’m trying everything I can think of to find Jamie so we can get to her.”

  “Like what?”

  He turned back to his computer screen. “I have VIGIL hooked up to his burner phone. If he uses it to talk to any of his most trusted contacts, we might be able to glean some useful info about Willow’s location from that.”

  “See, that’s what I don’t get,” I said, leaning forward. “Why can’t you just track the phone like you’ve done with everyone else before?”

  “I would, but he’s made it impossible,” Rowan said, bringing up a map on the screen. “See this? It’s his burner phone’s GPS activity from the last sixteen hours. I’ve been tracking it ever since I started suspecting that he might’ve taken Willow.”

  “So what’s the issue?” I asked, brows furrowing.

  “You know how we use cell phone tower pings to triangulate a person’s location via their phone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The phone doesn’t have to be in use at the time. It just has to be on and close enough to cell phone towers to communicate with them.”

  I waved an impatient hand. “Yes, I know about all of this stuff.”

  “Right. Well, this is Jamie’s activity over the last day.” Rowan pointed to a spot on the map. “He was at Lilith Hall, and then he flew to his family’s summer house all the way up here on the coast of New Hampshire. You see the problem?”

  I squinted at the activity log. There was no data for the last several hours at all. “There’s nothing happening,” I said.

  “Exactly. But he’s not actually at the summer house anymore. I know because I hacked into their home security system and checked the cameras.”

  “So he turned the phone off after he left the summer place, and that’s why we can’t track him anymore?” I asked.

  “That’s what I thought at first,” Rowan replied with a slow nod. “But the thing is, we can actually track phones that are turned off, as long as we’ve infected them with a Trojan virus. It forces the phone to continue emitting a signal even if it’s off.”

  “Huh. I didn’t know that,” I said. “Is that what you did?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I sent a virus to his phone, but it didn’t work.”

  “Shit.”

  Rowan turned back to me. “There’s only two ways to get around being tracked like that. The first way is to take the battery out of the phone. That way it doesn’t have the power source to emit any signals,” he went on. “But that would require the person to know that they’re possibly being tracked by the NSA in the first place, and Jamie has absolutely no idea that we’re onto him. So it can’t be that.”

  “Right. What’s the second option?”

  “Dead zones.”

  I raised a brow. “Dead zones?”

  “Spots where phones can’t connect to any towers, because there aren’t any within range.”

  “Right, of course. Do you think he’s keeping Willow in a place like that?”

  He nodded and brought up another map on his computer. “Yes. I’ve plotted out every zone within a two or three hour flight-time to D.C. I figured he’d probably want to keep her relatively close because he has work and other commitments here in the city, and he doesn’t want to make anyone suspicious by disappearing for days at a time.”

  “There’s thousands of possible spots,” I said, skating my eyes over the map. “Three hours on a plane can get you almost anywhere in the country.”

  “Hence our dilemma,” he said, letting out a small sigh. “We’d need to search every one of these places, and we wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  “Most of them are in mountainous areas or forests. We could look up property records to see if Jamie or any of his family members own houses around any of those spots.”

  “On it,” he replied, typing speedily again. “Problem is, though… they could’ve bought a bunch of investment properties through shell companies—or in other people’s names—for tax reasons. So there could be a bunch of houses we don’t even know about.”

  “Fuck, that’s true.” I leaned back, put my chin in my hands, and let out a deep sigh.

  The computer suddenly let out a pinging sound, and Rowan’s brows shot up. “Jamie’s burner phone just came into range again.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Looks like he’s back at the summer house in New Hampshire,” he said, zooming in on the map.

  “Whichever dead zone he’s keeping Willow in has to be somewhere near that house, right?” I said. “Otherwise he wouldn’t keep going back there.”

  Rowan nodded slowly. “That’s true,” he said. “Thing is, though… there aren’t really any viable dead zones anywhere near there. See?”

  I glanced at the map. Then I traced a finger over it, out into the ocean. “You’ve only marked out continental dead zones,” I said. “But what about the ocean? There’s got to be a ton of islands without phone towers, right? He could be keeping Willow on one of them and taking a boat back and forth from the mainland. That would explain why we lose him after the summer place.”

  Rowan’s shoulders drooped. “Shit, you’re right,” he muttered. “I didn’t even think of that. I’m totally off my game.”

  I smiled faintly. “I guess I can be useful sometimes.”
<
br />   He kept his eyes on the screen as he typed rapidly for a few minutes. “Okay, here we go,” he finally said. “I’ve marked every island within a hundred square miles of the Torrance summer place in red.”

  “There’s so many,” I said, forehead creasing as I stared at the little red dots. “Wait… look at this.”

  “What?”

  “One of the islands near the Torrance summer place is Fire Island,” I said, tapping my finger on the map.

  “Fire Island?”

  “It’s an Order property. There’s a mansion there, and there’s also plenty of plane and boat landing spots. Do you think Jamie could be keeping Willow there?”

  “It would be nice if that were the case, but I doubt it,” Rowan said gently. “There’s no way he’d be dumb enough to keep her in a place your mother could visit anytime.”

  I groaned. “Shit. You’re right,” I said. “We’re gonna have to search every fucking one of these islands, aren’t we?”

  “I guess we could narrow it down by making it less than a hundred square miles, but then we might miss Willow.”

  “Yeah, because he could be keeping her really far out,” I said, shaking my head. “Fuck…”

  Rowan’s computer made a strange buzzing sound, and his eyes widened. “That’s VIGIL,” he said. “Jamie’s about to take a call on his burner phone.”

  “From who?”

  He glanced at a number on his other screen. “It’s your mother,” he said, turning back to me with his brows lifted.

  “This should be interesting.”

  We leaned forward to listen in on the conversation.

  “Jamie,” my mother snapped on her end of the line. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Sorry. Had some family issues up north,” Jamie replied. “I’m headed back to the city now. I’m needed at the White House, for obvious reasons.”

  “Well, you’re needed here too. Do you have any idea what I’ve been dealing with since last night?”

  “I’m guessing this is about the Keshari plane disaster?”