The inbox loaded to reveal what David had feared: nothing.
Frustrated, he slammed the laptop shut, and the device gave a sharp, metallic clacking sound.
David squeezed his eyes closed, immediately regretting his impulsiveness. He’d probably broken his damn laptop now, when money had already been getting tight for the past few months. He opened his eyes and gingerly eased the laptop back open.
He breathed out in relief. No screen damage or cracks. And the keyboard looked fine, too.
What was that noise, then?
David picked the laptop up and tilted it, feeling a little rattle in response. Then something small fell out of a USB port and clattered onto the desk. He narrowed his eyes and picked it up.
It looked like a tiny USB device, so tiny that it hadn’t even been sticking out of the laptop like it was supposed to. For a moment, David wondered if it was a piece of the USB port itself, and peered into the hole to determine the damage. But the port was intact. He looked back at the device.
So it was some sort of USB insert. But for what? And David certainly hadn’t placed it there. So who did?
As he looked it over in his hands, random puzzle-shaped pieces in his mind began to rearrange themselves into something a bit more coherent. What if all of this wasn’t just bad luck?
What if some, maybe all, of the things that had gone wrong recently had been carefully orchestrated? By whom? Someone with a grudge against him?
Suddenly the tiny device in his hand made sense. It was small because it was meant to be hidden. It could be some sort of espionage equipment, probably to give a person remote access to his computer. It could’ve been a keylogger, too. Maybe someone had been seeing everything he typed and watching everything he did.
Which meant . . .
The paper. The plagiarism. His breaths coming fast, David opened his files and found the internship application paper he had submitted to Bell. At random, he selected a sentence and plugged it into an internet search engine. It immediately returned the matching result of the blog that had caused the whole scandal.
He hadn’t thought to examine it too closely before, since so many more important things had drawn his mind away from the internship debacle. But now that he could really look at it, he was starting to have some doubts.
If you took the time to read it properly, the blog post seemed to take lines from David’s paper somewhat haphazardly, placing them into the narrative like puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit. It looked to David like it had almost been designed to raise a flag in any plagiarism check or software. And just the day before he had turned in his own original work! Someone had taken snippets of it and conspired against him. That was the only explanation that made any sense.
David’s pulse was flaring in his veins. Doubts and inconsistencies began to float up in his mind. Yvette’s sudden reappearance in his life. Was that just bad luck, or had she been in on it somehow? What about the photographer? If David’s devices were being tracked or accessed, wasn’t it safe to assume the same of Katy’s things? That would account for how the photographer had found them—someone with access to Katy’s phone’s GPS coordinates could easily have sent them to an outside source, leading him to show up at just the right time.
And the beeping . . .
David turned around and looked at his room, his eyes jumping rapidly over every item, assessing it with new fervor. He had to find what was making the noise.
He stood, raked his hand through his hair. What position in the room had the best vantage point from which to spy on him? It would need to get his desk and bed in the frame. David went to his closet, hesitated, then tossed T-shirts and shoes off the top shelf to pile in the middle of the floor. He felt along the shelf with his hand, all the way back to the place against the wall that he couldn’t see.
Nothing. Surely he was just being paranoid. Surely.
But then he ran his hand along the underside of the shelf, and his fingers collided with something small and cold, like metal.
David pulled mightily, and the device came unstuck from the wood and fell into his hands.
It was a camera. David could clearly see the lens, and a flickering red light on the top of the device showed that it needed battery. It looked like it was more of a nanny cam than, well, real spy equipment. Hence the obvious beeping as the batteries began to die, which had led to David’s discovery of the device. All right, so whoever has been doing this might not be a professional, career spy.
No matter how cheap the device looked, it was all the evidence he needed. This was real. It wasn’t all just in his head. To whoever this was, David was just a problem that needed to be dealt with.
He shook his head in disbelief, unable to comprehend that he was being watched. He’d never been so sure of anything in his life. His own room, where he’d had heart-to-hearts with Zeke, where he’d held Katy in his arms, suddenly felt alien, unsafe.
Why? Or, maybe more importantly, who stood to gain something from David’s downfall? The answer was obvious.
For power and prestige, Katy was probably the most sought-after bride in the world. And hadn’t Cassie told him herself just how important a Lorrellian royal marriage was? She’d said back in Lorria that the princess’s marriage formed alliances and consolidated power. And Katy had been so close to just throwing that away for some orphaned nobody.
Despite her parents’ objections.
The most likely people to be conspiring against David were the king and queen of Lorria.
David paced back and forth in his room, stepping on the clothes on the floor without thought, holding the camera in his hand. He couldn’t understand why the Lorrellian royals would be willing to tarnish their daughter’s reputation so extremely in the process of getting to him, but they were simply the most likely suspects. No one else had anything to gain, and the king and queen . . . they had everything to lose.
And they were lying to Katy, even hurting her, to get what they wanted.
A protective rage flared up in David. Not on my watch.
He carefully set the camera and the keylogging device down on his bed, though what he wanted to do was hurl them on the floor and stomp on them. He had to show all of this evidence to Katy. He could catch a flight out to Lorria today. He would reach her, even if he had to stand outside of her summer home and yell for her until she came out. And with this evidence, maybe Cassie would be convinced of his innocence, and she could help him get to Katy if the princess wasn’t being allowed outside the palace.
He just needed to buy his plane ticket and pack.
He was ready within twenty minutes. But as he was gathering his things, there was a knock at the door. David felt a knot of fear grow in his stomach.
What now?
He cracked open the door to see Charles, one of his quieter housemates. And behind him . . .
“David, they asked for you,” his housemate said ominously. Then he stepped back to let in two Cambridge police officers.
David felt his heart skip a beat. There was no reason for police to be in his room right now. Unless, when he had been figuring out the depths of the espionage, someone had been watching from the other side.
“Mr. Rosen, I presume?” the older officer asked. He walked in and began to look around the room.
David nodded, realizing that nothing good could come from this situation.
“Mr. Rosen, we received an anonymous tip. Can you confirm for me whether or not you just returned from South America?”
“Officers, I need to explain something.” David could already tell how insane he was about to sound. “Whatever the tip is, it’s wrong. Someone is working against me. I’m being framed. And I have the evidence to prove it. If you’ll just let me . . .”
The younger officer put his hand on the butt of his gun as David reached for his backpack on the bed. David slowly pulled back. This was even more serious than he thought.
“We’ll do the looking, son,” the older officer said. Then he stood nex
t to David while the younger man approached David’s backpack.
David stood by to let them, his face carefully neutral. He could afford to cooperate. They wouldn’t find anything—he’d just packed the damn thing! All they’d find was the evidence of the conspiracy against him, which he’d sealed into its own plastic bag in an inner pocket.
But as David tried to peer around the larger officer to see what he was doing, a new thought made his blood run cold. If the tip-off had come from the people spying on him, just how far-reaching was their influence? What if the officers were on the king and queen’s payroll?
“Bingo,” the younger officer said. And then he turned around, holding a small, clear plastic bag in his gloved hands.
A bag that David knew hadn’t been in his backpack before. A bag that certainly would’ve been discovered in the airport if he had been carrying it. A bag of white powder, ostensibly a calling card from South America. David’s heart plummeted into his stomach.
“Hidden between the seams,” the older officer said, and pulled out his handcuffs. “Cocaine.”
35
Katy
“I can’t reach him. Something’s wrong.”
Katy stared anxiously at her phone. She had been trying to reach David for hours now. Where was he? She stood from where she had been sitting in the sand of the ocean shore and started to pace, getting ready to call David again.
“Hon, maybe you should put it away for a while,” Cassie said gently.
Katy shook her head and checked her email on the smartphone instead. “Maybe he emailed me back,” she said, mostly to herself, over the sound of the waves breaking on the beach. He hadn’t responded to any of her calls or texts, but Katy was still holding out hope that perhaps David was just having technical issues with his phone. They were a long way from each other, after all, and the connection to Lorria could be weird from time to time.
But instead of hearing the click as David picked up, all Katy heard was Cassie, vocalizing a deep-seated fear inside of her.
“Maybe you should consider the possibility that David might not want to be contacted.”
Katy rolled her eyes and breathed out in obvious exasperation before turning back to face her cousin. “For heaven’s sake, Cass, I just talked to him! We spoke before his flight home. I know you’re suddenly very anti-David, but—”
“I’m not anti-David. I’m pro-Katy,” Cassie interrupted with a frown. “Are you even listening to yourself? You sound crazy! Why would your whole family turn against David if that meant turning against you? We’re doing this because we love you and want to save you from more pain, in the long run.” She paused, her voice growing gentler, a distant pain glimmering in her eyes. “I know it hurts, believe me. I’ve been in your shoes before. The truth is the bitterest pill to swallow, but it’s the only thing that can save you, in the end.”
“What truth?” Katy cried out. She did feel crazy, but not for the reasons Cassie thought. She felt insane for knowing the truth about who David was and being talked to like she didn’t know him at all.
Cassie moved in front of Katy and held her shoulders, looking into her eyes with earnest. “The truth about all of this, Katy. The truth about David not being who you thought. It’s only been a few months… At least it’s not three years, like with Alexei.”
Katy gazed wordlessly at her cousin, then took several steps back. Cassie didn’t know David. Neither did the king or queen. And the cabal of lawyers and PR agents definitely didn’t know him.
So how could she expect any of them to believe her? No, she’d have to bring the evidence to them herself. And she needed David to do that. But he was unreachable at the moment.
Cassie walked toward her, her eyes soft and sympathetic, while Katy stood still on the rocky edge of the beach, just out of the softer sand. When Cassie reached her, her cousin again placed a supportive hand on her shoulder.
“I know this is hard for you. But at least we’re home now,” Cassie said gently. “You have your family around to support you. And your people here to encourage you. You don’t need David or Harvard or the Bissenhofs and Clarkes of the world. All you need is right here.”
Katy furrowed her brow. “So that’s it? I should just run away from anything that gets too hard? What if Harvard is worth fighting for? What if David is?”
“Katy,” Cassie replied. She was looking intensely at Katy, as if she was delivering tough love. “I went with you to Harvard because I love you and because I know you needed it. I supported your relationship with David because I trusted your judgment. But you have to start seeing facts, Katy. Those things weren’t good for you. Lorria is good for you. Your family. Your people. Maybe you should put them first for once.”
Katy grimaced at Cassie’s words. She had been feeling guilty about that all along. But it didn’t seem fair that she had to choose between her duties and her happiness.
And if she could get David to help her prove his innocence, then she wouldn’t need to.
“I just love him, Cass,” Katy replied, trying to keep her voice strong. “And I don’t see a reason why we can’t be together.”
“Of course, hon. But you loved Al, too. And you weren’t able to see the truth until it was literally right in front of you. How much more pain does David have to cause for you to see that he’s just the same?”
Katy gave her cousin one last, lingering look before turning and walking back toward her estate. They were talking different languages here.
Cassie might be saying these things out of concern, but that didn’t make them any less false. And if she couldn’t get Cassie on her side, then she had finally made up her mind about what she needed to do.
* * *
“Katerina?”
The queen turned to look at her with a raised eyebrow. She was sitting in her powder room chair, smoothing thick night cream into her décolletage.
It was only three in the afternoon.
“I came to say goodbye,” Katy replied.
The queen stared at Katy, then let out a weary sigh. “I told your father you’d try something like this again. He was so certain that you’d finally start to see sense, but”—the queen shook her head—“I knew that it’d take more than just a worldwide scandal to rid your heart of that boy’s claws.”
Katy held her mother’s gaze. “I can’t argue with that,” she replied coolly.
The queen rose from her chair. “Katerina, back in Northern Lorria, when you told us that you were leaving to be with that boy, there was another reason why we walked back our threats to stop supporting you. Do you know what that was—why we encouraged you to make your own choices?”
Katy could feel the puzzled look spread over her face. She hadn’t been expecting the question. The queen went on.
“Because we knew that, as an adult, you’d have to make your own way in life. And even though we offered you the world, it’d never be enough until you could go out and compare it to real life experience. And now you have that experience, Katerina. But at what cost?”
Katy was quiet as she considered her mother’s words. She had felt the burning desire to explore the world for herself. And it had cost her, and her family, quite a bit.
But it didn’t change the way she felt.
“I know I’ve been impulsive. And I’m sorry for the pain I’ve caused,” Katy answered. “I already know that I’m never letting myself get into a situation where the press can take advantage of me like that again. But I love David. I think I want to be with him for the rest of my life. And I think that if he feels the same way, it’ll take the sting out of this whole ordeal. This can be a love story, Mama, not some moral parable. But I need to go see him. I need to talk to him.”
“Why can’t you talk to him from Lorria?” she asked.
Katy hesitated. She didn’t have a great answer to that question. “It’s why I need to go, Mama,” she replied. “The connection has been sporadic today. Either that, or something is wrong. David would never just disappear li
ke this—”
“Margery, Katerina.”
Katy and the queen both turned to see the king in the doorway. The queen tightened her robe.
“Dear, a lady’s powder room is hallowed ground. Perhaps you could’ve sent the maid to fetch us?”
“I’m sorry, Margery. But this was urgent. Could you two step out and meet me in the study?”
Katy looked to her mother to gauge her reaction. The queen looked taken aback and concerned. “Give me a moment to dress, Frederick.”
Katy went out with her father, closing the door to her mother’s private quarters as she stepped out into the hall.
“Is everything all right?” she asked hesitantly as they made the walk together to the king’s study.
“That remains to be seen,” he replied darkly.
They waited together for tense, silent minutes until the queen made her arrival.
“All right, dear. This isn’t about the draperies I ordered, is it? If they aren’t done this week then I’ll . . .”
“This isn’t about your drapes, dear,” the king replied shortly. Only the queen would’ve thought that a delay on a curtain order would warrant a family meeting.
“Unfortunately,” the king went on, “there’s more bad news stateside.”
Katy’s breath caught and her pulse quickened. “David?” Was this why she’d been unable to reach him? Had something happened?
The king sighed. “I’ll be glad when we’ve completely moved beyond this whole ordeal, Katerina. It’s taken years off my life, to be frank. First the dismissal of your suitors, then this photo scandal, and now I’ve got the president of Harvard calling to warn about the next crisis involving our name to hit the papers.”
Katy shook her head, not understanding what could have happened. The queen cut through the king’s vagueness.
“What is it? Come out with it, dear. It sounds like we’ll need to involve the PR team again!”
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