by Thorne, Gigi
There's a pause on the other end of the call. Helena's holding back? She never holds back. Not from me. Though I shouldn't consider it a hard and fast rule considering she didn't let me in on her well-guarded secret love affair with a guard.
"I want you to be the first to know. Can I come over?"
"This sounds serious. Yes, come on by. I'm still in bed, wearing my party digs, and the renovation uproar is awfully annoying with my hangover, but yes. I'll be here. "
"Be there in five," she answers.
As promised Helena breezes in through my door just minutes after we hang up.
"Are you sitting down?" she asks in a hushed tone. She pushes the door closed behind her and tests it to make sure it's locked.
"I am now," I answer, sure she can read the puzzled look on my face as I push off the mattress and sit up. "Will you please tell me what's going on?"
"Fine. I think someone saw us together last night."
"Why, did anything pop up in the media?"
"Not yet. But I got a call."
"From who? What did they say?"
"I don't know who these people are. No one's supposed to have our numbers... they told me about my relationship with Daniel." She climbs into bed beside me and locks her arm under mine at our elbows. "They're threatening to expose us ... everything. Pictures, dates, places, us in compromising situations… And oh my God, they said they have pictures of Daniel and me in bed together… making love."
"Goodness. I can’t believe this,” I say, rubbing my temples to control the rising stress headache that layers on top of my hangover. They might be targeting my sister, but they might as well be aiming at me. Helena is my best friend too, not just my sister. She’s an extension of myself, and anyone who wants to harm her is my enemy too. “What do they want?"
"Nothing, except to destroy me... his exact words were, ‘we will show everyone in the entire country that the future rulers of this land are not deserving of a place at the helm. You will pay for your part in the decay of the rulership. You will die by rendition at the hands of the four.’ Then he called back. I shouldn’t say he, per se. It could’ve been anyone. The voice was masked. It kind of sounded like one of those electronic things that serial killers and terrorists in the movies wear over their faces to anonymize their voices. But getting back to the point, another private call came in, and I didn’t answer it. He left the identical message in my voicemail."
"God, that’s truly horrible,” I say, wide awake now. Her news is sobering me right up.
“Do you want to hear it?” she asks and pulls her phone out, but I push it away.
“No, I’m a scaredy cat. I’d get nightmares from his creepy electronic voice alone, let alone his threat. I’m so sorry, sister. You must be so terrified right now. I know I am… Except… Don't you think that's strange?”
“Strange? Yes, it’s strange and horrifying that they’d reach out—”
“No,” I stop her mid-sentence. "Think about it. If they don't want money, a position, or something we can offer, something at all, why haven't they just given all the information over to the media?"
She sighs out a despondent moan. "I don't know. But I have to tell mother and father... about everything... oh my God, they're going to kill me when they learn about Daniel."
"They won't love the news, but surely they won't not support you. Think about their own story. Sure, they were both of royal families, but Mother was not of the same station. And they know firsthand how hard they fought our grandparents to be together. Telling them now is the only way, sister," I say, squeezing her hand to help reassure her. "They can bring in the right advisors, possibly have the crown security or IT departments trace the call, or arrange to be ready if the person calls again... we're at the point where we have options. That means there's hope."
Her phone starts to ring, and as soon as she looks at the screen, all the color leaves her face. "Let's hope you're right. Father will see me now."
"I can come with you," I offer. "For emotional support."
"I would normally jump at the chance to have you with me as a buffer, but I think I need to face the music alone. Well, not alone. I’m taking Daniel with me.”
Setting down my phone, I lean back on the headboard and pull the covers up again, wincing from the nagging throb of pain that lances along my temples. "You know where to find me if you change your mind."
"I'll be okay, I think. Plus... don't take this the wrong way, but you look awful, darling. Shall I have Tasha summoned to help you get dressed?"
"Maybe in a few hours," I groan.
"Get some rest," she adds with a smile. But I know she's more nervous than she's letting on. “You might need it… if they make me abdicate the throne to you.”
“That cannot happen,” I insist. There’s no way I’ll stand by and let my parents force Helena to relinquish her monarchical authority. Helena was born to lead. It’s in her blood, in her soul, in her very being. “Cannot. And will not! If they dare force you to give up the crown and step away from being the next queen, everyone will object. The citizens adore you. They won’t accept it.”
“Maybe they will, if Father and Mother work with their advisors to select someone else to rule. Cousin Archie or Thomas, perhaps. They have coveted the throne for the last decade, anyway. Maybe they should have it.”
“Then we’re done for. With those pompous cousins of ours at the throne, Gideanor will go up in flames.”
“But sister, you’re next in line after me at the moment, as I have no children…yet. Well, wish me luck!"
I raise a weak thumbs-up out from under the covers.
"Luck," I mutter, then the last part of what she said sinks in. No children yet. “Hold on, Helena?” I shout. I sit up again, but the sound of her retreating footsteps clicks against the hallway floor and diminish to nothing. “Helena, you’d better not be holding out on me, dammit,” I groan, and sink back into the sheets.
7
Wes
I heard everything.
Now, my blood is boiling.
I’m wrong for sticking around, for keeping the door slightly ajar and not minding my own business, but I don’t regret one fucking second of eavesdropping on my princess and her sister, Crown Princess Helena, the future Queen of Gideanor. I’m a hell of a rulebreaker, and I might be low on the totem pole of Gideanor’s citizens, but my loyalty is without question. No one fucks with my country and its rulers.
No one fucks with my princess.
While Princess Charlotte listened to her sister relate the threatening phone call, my mind is reeling. I know the crown faces its fair share of risks and threats from crazies, foreign and domestic, but to bypass the current King and Queen and target a defenseless young heiress to the throne, it’s revolting. I want to find this person and pound them into the ground for being the skeeviest douchebag around. I want to face them in their own backyard and use every inch of my six-foot-four height to intimidate the fuck out of them. I want to force them to back down, then shake them from their scrawny, coward as fuck pencil neck until they apologize for the shit they pulled.
I want to choke the chickenshit to an inch of his life, then, when he begs for mercy, I finish him off.
Murder.
If that’s what it takes to stop him, I’ll sign the fuck up.
No one has ever lost their life by my hands, but I came close a few times. That was a lifetime ago, back when I was an angry, bad-tempered young adult who only settled conflict with my clenched fists. And they were trivial, unimportant fights, to be honest. I calmed my shit down over time, with the help of an old man who dragged my then perpetually-drunk, beat-up ass out of the gutter one day and gave me a chance to make something of my life. Saul. To this day, I owe him everything. He’s the one who showed me I could create good things with my hands instead of breaking shit. He put a hammer and a drill in front of me, pointed at a table in his workshop that was covered in odds and ends and planks of wood, and told me to make something. That was
where I turned my shit around. I stopped picking fights just for the fuck of it, and slowly put my attention and energy into learning the trade of woodworking. I owe Saul everything for that.
He took a man destined for a future in jail or dead before the age of thirty, and he made me into a productive member of society. Saul has been dead for a few years now, but to this day, I still visit his and his wife’s graves every first Sunday of the month, just as he used to do for his late wife while he was still alive.
From then to now, I never believed I could fight and brawl the way I used to. Never thought I’d ever physically do severe damage to another person during a fight.
Not until now.
Now, I want to do much worse to this sick fuck who threatened the future Queen.
I pace around the marble bathroom floors like a caged animal long after Crown Princess Helena leaves the room, long after Princess Charlotte dozes off. My mind is working overtime, playing and replaying the sisters’ conversation. Everything about this person terrorizing them is off. Bits and pieces of the threatening words that Crown Princess Helena relayed back to her sister keep flooding my thoughts. The adrenaline pumping through my blood is off the charts, causing the veins in my neck to pulse and jump. There’s something not right about it. Something strangely familiar. It takes me a while, but I do my best to return to the detailing work that remains in the bathroom. Even with the unsettled cloud hanging over my head, I manage to get most of my day’s work done, and with as little noise as possible. Some of the crew aren’t done by our clock out time, so they stay back to finish. We’re on strict orders to work around the clock to be finished within a week, less if possible. I leave the sleeping princess’s chambers with a handful of the men in my crew, promising myself that I’ll figure something out, that I’ll find some way to help fix everything.
The terrorist’s threats are still on my mind as I make it to the large concrete apartment building where I live just as the sun begins to lower on the distant horizon. Then, as I climb the five floors to my tiny bachelor apartment on the sixth floor and walk down the hallway to my front door, it hits me like a ton of bricks. It hits me so hard that I stop short in the middle of the hall, my hand lifting to my pounding skull.
No wonder my brain wouldn’t let it go.
I know something.
Crucial information.
I have to do something.
And I will.
Right fucking now.
But I have to do something first.
I know I’ve only touched her once, and barely, but I don’t care. She’s mine.
I have to see my princess one more time.
Then, I’ll have no regret putting my life on the line to confront the most influential person I know, the person who can wipe me off the face of the earth before I’m close enough to do any damage to him.
8
Charlotte
After Helena left, I dozed off for some time. But I wake up again to a darkened room, the setting sun casting its final light on the orange sky, leaving a hint of a glow on my ceiling. Then the deafening sounds of all-out construction taking place on the other side of my bedroom door picks up again. And it stretches on. Dammit, it won’t stop. Helena’s news from this morning is dastardly enough. I need silence. I'm quickly pushed past my limits. If this is Wes's way of breaking me down, he's got another thing coming.
That arrogant, ridiculously rude, profoundly presumptuous, giant, sexy fool.
Shoving back the covers, I kick my legs over the side of my bed, toes searching for my favorite bedroom slippers but finding nothing.
"I swear to God that if this incessant pounding doesn't stop, someone will have to answer to the king!"
But just as I pad barefoot on the cold granite floors and make it to a few paces from my door, I feel a presence. Someone's behind me. Before I can react, a broad, bulky arm of thick, corded muscle grips me around my waist, and my feet leave the ground as a big, beefy, now familiar hand covers my mouth and half my face.
"Hush, princess," Wes growls out in a threatening yet undeniably beautiful warning. This is the voice of the man who is quickly becoming the exception to every rule I've ever known. And as hard as I try to fight it, to fight him, I know I was utterly lost the first moment our paths crossed.
I hate it.
I love it.
I hate that I love it.
He tightens his hold around my waist, molding me to him as he turns and carries me back to the bed.
"You're going to have to be perfectly quiet if you want me to stay," he groans against a spot behind my ear. "Are you going to do that?"
I shake my head as far to each side as his steady hand will allow, relaying my refusal to cooperate.
"You're not planning to scream, are you?" he asks as a follow-up.
I nod. Repeatedly. On the surface, I have every intention of screaming, but when his hand lifts off my face, I'm perfectly quiet.
Somehow, Wes has a way of seeing right through my empty warnings. Either that. or more tragically, I am unable to disobey a single instruction that he gives.
If it's the latter, I am hopelessly lost.
"There's my good little girl."
He lowers me into the bed then straightens up to his full height. I roll onto my back, and just as I do, I notice the beams of sunlight flooding in through the vast, towering windows on both sides of my bed. They cast a golden glow across Wes's immense frame, making him seem not of this world. Like a perfectly sculpted statue of a Greek overalls-clad God come to life.
My breath catches in my throat, and I struggle to hold back, but a low moan escapes anyway.
"I take it that you like what you see, and the feeling is mutual. Let's not waste another second fighting...this...whatever this is. Now go."
"Where?" I hear myself asking.
He points to the door of my attached bathroom. "I drew you a bath. Go. Bathe. When you’re finished, come back to the room, dry yourself off and put on the high heels and tiara that I set out near the towels. There’s a bright red lipstick on the vanity too. Put it on for me like a good girl. Then, when you come back, stand at the foot of the bed, completely naked and in just those high heels and tiara, and wait for me to tell you what's going to happen next."
And like a moth to a flame, I begin to do as he demands.
But moths like me get consumed and sometimes turned to ash when they finally reach the object of their captivation.
I’m sure of one thing.
If I survive this at all, it’s going to burn.
9
Wes
It’s the end for me.
One way or another, I’m going to hang, or worse.
It’ll either be for what I’m about to do to my princess, or what I’ll do for her and her sister after I claim her.
Either way, I’m fucking dead.
But I intend to make the most of this one night.
While Charlotte indulges in the bath I drew for her, I take my opportunity to make sure we’re alone. Before too long, my entire next paycheck is spoken for when I beg, bribe and pay off everyone on the skeleton crew and convince them to call it a night. When I’m the last man standing, I go to work, locking and deadbolting all access doors, and preparing the princess’s bed and all around it the way it needs to be for what’s going to happen next.
I hear the bathroom door creak open slowly as I set down the last item in its place. I turn to look at her, and a primitive, possessive urge hits me. I almost make the four or five ground-eating steps needed to go to her side.
Almost.
But I don’t.
As hungry and greedy as I am, I of all people know that timing is everything. From waiting and withholding, to nibbling, to engorging, they all serve their purpose. I will have my feast, just not all at once.
I scan her body from head to toe and see that she did exactly as I asked. Wearing only a pair of sky-high spiked heels, the bright red lipstick on her mouth, her official royal tiara and nothing e
lse, Princess Charlotte shakily walks toward the bed. Her arms and hands are put to use, timidly covering her breasts with one and cupping her mound with the other.
How sweet. She’s shy.
Too bad she won’t be shy for long.
I’ll make sure of that.
Moving over to the cream leather button back armchair I placed about ten feet from her bed, I remove every piece of clothes except for my boxers, and I take a seat.
“Before we start, there are just a few ground rules for you. First, you are to say nothing unless spoken too. Or you’ll be punished. Understood?”
“Yes,” she answers in a voice as soft as a light breath.
“Good girl. Second, you will not hide any part of your body from me.” I wait for her to obey, but she does not. “Right now,” I warn, and slowly, she drops her arms to her side. Fuck. Her pussy is completely bare. It’s sexy as fuck.
“Third, your name is Shana while it’s just you and me. Shana. That is the name I’ve chosen for you, and you are to answer to it when I call, or you’ll be punished. What is your name right now?”
“Shana,” she trembles out.
“Fourth, I am giving you the word ‘shrew’ to use as your safe word. Use it only if you believe I’ve pushed beyond any of your limits in an extreme way. Be warned though. You are only to use it in extreme situations. Or you’ll be punished. What is your safe word?”
Her tiara shimmers under the dimmed overhead light as she shakes her head from side to side. But she doesn’t answer.
“I gave you an instruction,” I say firmly.
She shakes her head again.
“You’re being a bad girl, Shana. Do you want to be punished?”
Again, with the head shake.
“Tell me why you won’t repeat the safe word.”
“Because you said that I’m only to use it in an extreme situation,” she explains. I want to laugh at her staunch interpretation of my instruction, but I don’t.