Asia winced, taking a second to smack me in the head with the palm of her hand. “Stop laughing. It’s not funny,” she said to me and then patted her husband’s arm. “I’m sorry, RJ. I should’ve mentioned it sooner, but . . .”
“You didn’t want me to know,” he said with a groan.
She nodded.
“What am I going to do with you?” He leered, his eyes shining with lust and a wee promise of revenge. Asia shivered prettily, which made me want to gag. What was wrong with these people? RJ tugged Asia close, wrapping his arm around her waist. He leaned down to kiss her.
“Enough!” I shoved between them. “Any more of this kissy-kissy crap and I won’t be responsible for my actions.”
“Fine. It’s almost midnight anyway.” She gave RJ a quick kiss on the lips. “I’m going up to bed. To change. See you upstairs.”
I puckered my own lips.
“Night, Jean-Michel.” She patted me on the head like a kitten missing a mitten. “Try not to goad my husband into murdering you.” With that parting shot, Asia disappeared into the crowd of gamblers, leaving RJ and me alone at the bar.
I studied my former friend’s lovesick face, a slow grin filling my own. “Second.”
“Second what?”
“Cousins, my friend.” I waggled my sculpted, dark eyebrows. “Asia and I are only second cousins. By marriage. No blood ties to speak of.”
Bam!
RJ’s fist connected with my head. For a second time that night, I dropped to the floor, a smile on my bloody lips.
The rest of the evening, or what I can remember of it, went a lot like the first part. I’d wind up on the floor, usually wiping away a copious amount of blood; yet with each punch, our strained friendship healed a bit.
Or so I thought.
“Ow!” I yelped as RJ smashed his fist into my face yet again. Not that I felt it. I’d passed the point of feeling anything an hour ago. Rubbing my jaw, I asked, “Are we even yet?”
RJ chuckled.
Not a good sign.
“Waitress,” I called to a bare-chested fairy carrying a tray of pink umbrella drinks. “Another round.”
She gave me the finger.
Our drinks arrived a half hour later. I glanced at RJ, ready to duck or cover depending on his mood. He took a sip from his mug of beer and set it down on the table, so I ventured a question. “What brings you to Cin City?”
His snort was loud enough for the stripper on stage, dressed in a Little Miss Muffet costume, to pause mid-grind, her face, along with other parts of her anatomy, pinched. “Some stupid wedding,” RJ said. “One of Asia’s cousins is getting married in a couple of days.”
“Ten days.”
RJ tilted his head, his eyes boring into mine. “What?”
I exhaled loudly. “The wedding is in ten days.” I squinted at my watch. The numbers floated around, finally settling on 2:34 a.m. “Oops. Nine days.”
RJ let out a bark of laughter. “You!” He pointed at me with two equally fuzzy fingers. “You’re getting married. What poor princess sank so low as to marry the likes of you?”
“You don’t know her,” I said quickly. Much too quickly.
“Spill or I’ll punch you.” He grinned. “Again.”
I tried to roll my eyes, but they had taken on a will of their own. “Fine. Her name’s Beauty.”
His smile widened. “As in Sleeping Beauty? The chick who fell asleep at Baby Bear’s Coming Out Ball? The one they had to wake up with a hose? That Beauty?”
My face flushed with embarrassment and alcohol. Beauty wasn’t that bad, or so I told myself for the twentieth time today. So she had a bit of an attitude and slept a lot. Big deal. I wasn’t Prince Fucking Charming either. Besides, I needed her to break my curse. I drunkenly slurred the whole sordid tale to RJ, from the day Elly foretold of the curse to my not-so-happy meeting with my future wife and my impending nuptials. Like an annoying cricket, my conscience, the unpickled part, screamed “shut up,” but I was too far gone to heed the desperate warning.
But rather than laugh in my face as I expected, a warm glint entered RJ’s eyes, which in hindsight was a bad sign. “Happily ever after, you say?”
I nodded, resigned to living out the rest of my days with my bitch of a bride. “Till death do us part.”
“How about another drink?” RJ flagged down our waitress and ordered another round.
Chapter 5
The next afternoon, I awoke in the bathtub of my hotel suite, a bathtub brimming with ice, having no recollection of how I’d gotten there. Chills racked my naked body. My teeth chattered. My stomach rolled. And my head felt like Mary’s Little Lamb after being sheared.
I was too old for this party-like-a-prince lifestyle. I shifted in the tub. Water and ice sloshed over the side and onto the marble floor. A pain exploded in my lower back. A pain so intense I screamed like a witch during a sponge bath. With shaking hands, I staggered from the tub and flopped on the floor. Vomit crawled up my throat.
Closing my eyes, I prayed for death. The pain in my back increased. I moaned. Groaned. And cried just a little.
All in a manly sort of way.
What the hell had happened last night? My mind flashed to the old fairy legend about a man who woke up in a very similar situation in a very similar city with one less kidney. This is bad, I thought. The last thing I remembered from the night before was RJ’s face floating over me, an evil smile on his lips. Was it possible? Had RJ taken his revenge in the form of my kidney?
When the waves of nausea passed, I opened my eyes and glanced around the water-soaked bathroom. A Post-it note hung on the elongated mirror. I squinted at the block letters.
It read: Now we’re even.
Two hours later, after a brief nap, a pot of coffee, and a bowl of pease porridge, lukewarm, mixed with a hearty dose of ketchup, I felt much more like myself. Of course, I looked more like something the farmer had left in the dell. Bags circled my eyes, matching the dark rings left by RJ’s fists. My skin drooped, appearing greener than I liked. All of which diminished my stunning good looks. But only a little.
Luckily, I still had two kidneys.
Unfortunately, I also had a brand-new tattoo on my lower back, and not a cool “hey, I’m a badass” tattoo either. In fact, one might say it resembled the outline of a pocket full of purple posies.
I considered the tattoo in the reflection of the gold-trimmed bathroom mirror. Was this what RJ meant by “we’re even”? I’d slept with his former wife, so he’d marred me for life? Seemed fitting, but I doubted RJ was finished torturing me just yet. Letting me off this easy wasn’t in my former friend’s villainous nature.
Something tickled at the back of my brain.
Something very bad.
A vague memory my brain couldn’t quite capture.
I squeezed my eyes shut trying to conjure up anything about last night. Grape lollipops came to mind. They floated in and out of my consciousness like the dancing snack food at a movie theater. Then another vision surfaced—a rose with sharp barbed wire crisscrossing around the flower.
My stomach clenched. Picking up the house phone, I dialed the operator. A woman answered, her tone bored. “Aladdin’s Palace. How can I help you?”
“This is Prince La Grenouille.”
“Who?”
“Just connect me to Stiltskin’s room.”
Through the phone line the click of manicured nails on a keyboard sounded. French manicure, I’d bet, long and pointy, sharpened like talons as they flew across the worn letters. There was a brief pause and my bored maiden was back on the line. “I’m sorry, sir. But we have no one registered under that name.”
Shit. “Try Maldetto,” I said, using Asia’s maiden name.
“I’m sorry. No listing,” said the woman. But she didn’t sound the least bit sorry. “Can I try another name for you? Prince Charming, perhaps? Or how about Snow White? I hear her sugar dwarfs are in town for a mining convention.”
I scr
atched my chin, thinking, and again a sense of doom pooled in my intestines. Something bad had happened last night. Something my subconscious didn’t want me to remember. I hoped it didn’t involve a foursome with Eeny, Meeny, Miny, and their uglier sister Moe. “Did anyone leave a message for me?”
The receptionist sighed, as if my request was almost too much to bear. “No messages, sir.”
“Oh.” Damn.
“But someone did leave . . . something for you,” she said. “Shall I have a bellhop bring it up?”
“Something?”
“I believe it was a red rose, sir.”
“Was?”
She paused. “Now it more resembles rose-scented mulch. A potpourri, if you will. A very nice scent,” she added with glee.
“A mulched rose?” I repeated, unsure I’d heard her correctly.
“Yes, sir. And a note.” When I didn’t reply, she said, “I suppose you’d like me to read it.”
“That would be nice.”
“Fine,” she said with a drawn-out sigh. “There’s just one word . . . scrawled in blood.”
I swallowed the rush of bile crawling up my throat. “Blood?”
“Oh, sorry.” She paused. “Not blood. Red ink.”
I rolled my eyes. “What’s the word?”
“Beauty.”
I hung up, my mind racing. What the hell had happened last night? And what did it have to do with Beauty? The mulched rose was clearly some sort of threat, but for who? Was Beauty in danger, or was the message more personal? Maybe the less I knew about last night, the better. Yet try as I might, I couldn’t quite convince myself to ignore the warning. Something was very wrong.
A few minutes later, a light knock sounded at the ornate French doors of my hotel room. I wrapped a robe around my body and went to open it. Karl stood on the other side, his jester hat replaced with an umbrella hat. The pink of his scalp shined through like a diamond and nearly blinded me with its intensity.
Shielding my eyes, I nodded to my manservant. “You do know we’re in a desert, right? That it hasn’t rained in Cin City for three years.”
“Of course, sir.”
“So what’s with the hat?”
“Just in case.”
“I see,” I lied, too tired and hungover to apply logic to the ridiculous answer. “I’m glad you’re here. I need your help.”
Karl nearly jumped for joy. “Of course. Your wish is my command. But, sir, what happened to your face?”
I fingered my bruised cheek. “I ran into RJ last night.”
“A lot of times, apparently.”
“A few cuts are the least of my worries.”
“Oh?”
“I blacked out,” I admitted sheepishly. “Don’t remember a damn thing after three A.M.”
“Have you checked your pockets?”
I patted my robe. “No pockets.”
“I meant the pockets of the trousers you wore last evening.” He tapped his umbrella hat. “Dark blue slacks, with a crease in the left thigh region. Two front pockets. Two back pockets.”
A bit creeped out by Karl’s intimate knowledge of my wardrobe, I ran to the bedroom in search of my wayward pants. They lay on the floor tied into a bow. How they’d gotten there or that way was a mystery best left unsolved. I quickly dove into the front pockets, finding fifty cents and a matchbook from a strip club called Old Mother Hubbard’s All Bare Cupboard. The back pockets bore little more—a scrap of paper, my credit card, and a red rose petal.
I laid my trinkets on the coffee table in front of Karl. We stared at each, my mind searching for any faded memory. My eyes kept returning to the rose petal. What did it mean? Was it from the same rose left at the hotel desk? I glanced at Karl, unsure what he was thinking or even if he was thinking. He could’ve fallen asleep, if his expression was an indication. His mouth hung open and his eyes were closed. A string of drool slid south of his chin.
Come on, I thought, remember. What did these things mean? A credit card, a matchbook, fifty cents, a rose petal, and let’s not forget, a pocket full of posies tramp-stamped across my back. Whatever had happened last night, it was bound to be one hell of a tale. If only I would survive to tell it because, deep inside, I knew my memories were a matter of life or death.
An image of a rose flashed inside my brain again. This time the barbed-wire rose thorns dripped with purple blood spelling Beauty’s name.
Chapter 6
I dressed quickly, tossing on a pair of dark khakis and a lightweight button-down shirt while Karl poured hair gel onto my black locks. When all was said and coiffured, I looked like my normal princely self, which was to say I looked damn good. Neither Jack nor his beanstalk had anything on the Frog Prince.
Before I changed out of my robe, Karl had called my credit card company for a list of charges from last night’s debauchery. There were seventy-one separate charges from four different places totaling over a hundred thousand dollars. A portion of the money went toward drinks and cash advances, likely to pay for numerous lap dances. I supposed that explained the finger-shaped bruises on my thighs.
I really hoped that explained the finger-shaped bruises on my thighs.
Now it was a matter of returning to the scene of whatever crime I might’ve committed last night. Karl suggested we start with the first charge and work our way down the list. As far as suggestions went, it wasn’t bad. And I didn’t have a better clue to last evening’s events, barring the mulched rose at the concierge desk, which I decided to keep to myself for the time being, so I nodded to my servant. He beamed in response.
“What’s our first stop?” I asked Karl, a feeling of dread weighing my natural enthusiasm down, not to mention a liver the size of Humpty Dumpty before his supposed suicide.
“Knowing you, sir, it’s to the free clinic for a shot of penicillin,” Karl called as he charged out of the room.
I scowled, snatching up the rose petal from the table before pulling on my baseball cap and sunglasses. “What’d you say?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Mademoiselle, do you remember me?” I asked a stripper at Old Mother Hubbard’s All Bare Cupboard, our third and hopefully final stop on my quest for answers. I was tired, still hungover, and cranky to boot, but I couldn’t stop searching for clues now. Last night had changed my life.
And not in a good way.
The tattoo above my butt proved as much.
Damn RJ. When I got my hands on him . . .
The stripper halted briefly in her gyration to stare down at me. I lifted off my baseball cap and sunglasses. Her eyes narrowed. I beamed my most charming smile. She shrugged her thin shoulder, making her pink tassels spin in a circle. “Not really.”
“I think I was here last night. With another guy. Not nearly as good-looking.” I flashed a twenty-dollar bill her way.
“After a while you all kinda look alike.”
“Excuse me?”
“Princes, I mean.” She scissor-kicked her leg, nearly slaughtering a wolf with her spiked stiletto heel. The wolf ducked, his granny glasses falling to the stage.
I straightened to my full six-foot height. “Madam, I assure you. I am one of a kind.” What was wrong with her? I was more than just a prince. I was the Frog Prince. Women fell at my feet. Other princes wished they could be me, just for a day or two. Damn it, I was special!
“Excuse me, sir.” Karl patted my shoulder. “If you would allow me to handle this?”
I nodded, sweeping my hand toward the half-naked chick grinding onstage. “Be my guest. But be leery, my good man.” I boosted my voice over the throbbing beat of the canned music being pumped into the club. “She’s obviously demented.”
“Obviously.” Karl stepped around me and faced the poor deluded stripper. “My lady,” he began. “It is with the utmost urgency that my employer requests your help.”
Pulling a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket, Karl held it out to the stripper, his eyes never wavering from her face. “If you could pause in
your,” he cleared his throat, “daily grind and assist us, I would be eternally grateful.”
The stripper glanced down at the money and then up to Karl’s earnest face. She stopped mid-gyration. “You got it, hon.”
The lady stepped off stage. A gaggle of businessmen on their lunch break groaned in dismay. She shot them a lascivious wink and then motioned Karl and me toward the back room, a place where, for the right price, a prince might encounter a wealth of STDs. Not that I’d ever personally partaken in the seedier sections of a strip club—or so I told Karl.
I was a soon-to-be-married prince, after all, I assured my faithful servant as we arrived at the steel door. The stripper gestured to the plaque on the door. It read “Paid for by a generous donation from the La Grenouille Foundation.”
Karl frowned.
What could I say? I was a humanitarian at heart, altruistic in every endeavor. We entered the shady room, our feet sticking to the cement floor. I shook my head at Karl and mouthed “Don’t ask.” Thankfully he didn’t.
The stripper led us to a small alcove in front of a stage complete with the requisite gleaming silver pole. The room smelled of desperation, perspiration, and a hint of black sheep wool. Two bags full, if I wasn’t mistaken.
The stripper pointed to a throne-like chair with a high back and golden trimmings. A pale and sweaty Karl eyed the tassels and then me, as if begging for a stay of execution.
“Buck up, chap.” I gave him my brightest smile. “It’s all in a day’s work.”
He swallowed hard and wiggled in his chair.
When Karl finally settled, the stripper draped her long leg over his upper thigh and plopped down on his lap. Karl’s face went a few shades whiter and a bead of sweat dribbled down his bald head.
“That’s a good lad.” I patted the air above his shoulder. “Now think of baseball or that sport with the gloves.”
“Boxing, sir?”
“They use gloves in that? Seems sort of barbaric.” I scratched my chin. “Very well then, think of any damn thing you like, but find out if she remembers me from last night.” I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at my faithful servant.
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