Thorne Princess(9)

“This is my last field assignment,” I hissed.

“Pinky promise.” Tom offered me his pinky. I snatched and bent it, to the point of almost breaking it as I pulled him close to me. His chest bumped mine.

“Last. Fucking. Time.” I watched him squirm in pain.

“Aw.”

I let go of his finger. Brushing my shoulder against his, I stalked out of my office.

“Where are you going?” he yelled after me.

“To stab myself in the neck.”





I did not stab myself in the neck.

A travesty, I realized twenty-four hours after my conversation with Tom, as I made my way through an overcrowded, filthy LAX.

The last time I’d been here, some years ago as a counterintelligence agent, a lot of blood had been shed. I’m talking Squid Game level shit. It was one of the reasons I left. It became clear to me I was at risk of losing the very little humanity I had left in me if I didn’t quit.

I didn’t give much of a damn about being humane. The main incentive was not to snap into a machete-yielding killer who’d end up going on a rampage.

Prison life seemed uninspiring, and I heard the food there left a lot to be desired.

It also helped that as a CI agent, the money wasn’t half that of going private. A no-brainer.

Speaking of no brains, I had to get to that Hallie person’s house before she decided to document her trip to the gynecologist on TikTok. Since I’d been advised by McAfee that the brat had no less than four cars in her Hollywood Hills’ mansion’s six-car garage, and a driver, I cabbed it.

Glaring out the window with my duffel bag perched in my lap, I again marveled at how stunningly ugly Los Angeles was. Rundown buildings, grungy bodegas, littered streets, graffiti-filled bridges, and more shopping carts on the street than inside Costco.

To top all of this, the air was so polluted, that living in this shithole was akin to smoking two packs a day. You had to be seriously stupid to move here voluntarily.

Coincidentally, I had very few expectations for Hallie Thorne.

Though I’d never had a proper home, I did consider Chicago to be my sort of base. Chicago was where I worked, where I played, where I fucked, and where I lived in a maximum-security building, in a three-million-dollar penthouse.

Me, a boy who’d once had to eat scraps from the garbage can behind grocery stores.

“That’s you.” The cab driver killed the engine in front of a hideous mansion that looked like origami put together by a child with ten thumbs. An architectural phallic gesture if I ever saw one. A black square on top of a white square, which were the stories of the house, with numerous floor-to-ceiling windows revealing the “promising” inside:

Vintage wallpaper, tasteless art, and a huge, tacky chandelier.

I tipped the driver and slammed the passenger door behind me.

Since McAfee had warned me that the Thorne child was difficult and unruly, I didn’t bother milling around after hitting the doorbell twice. I took out my trip wire, tampered with the keyhole, and saw myself inside.

She had a state-of-the-art security system, but just as I suspected, she didn’t bother using it.

The house, like its renter, was a mess. An array of masquerade masks were strewn across the living room furniture, along with fabrics—gowns. Piles of unopened goodie bags and gift boxes, labels still intact. The TV was on. A Korean drama full of sulky, young people in school uniforms. A canvas print of the Thorne princess took up an entire wall in the living room. Sprawled over a windowsill in black and white, overlooking Manhattan’s skyline, wearing nothing but knee-high black socks, and a black birdcage veil over her eyes.

I looked away (she was seventeen, maybe eighteen), ambling toward the bookshelves in the living room, in no hurry to meet my new client. You could tell a lot about a person from the books in their library.

The shelves were aggressively up-to-date with all the Oprah and Reese book club staples. I plucked one out and sifted through it. The pages were crisp, with the same ink and woody scent lingering from the bookstore. They still clung to one another, the stiffness of the spines revealing more than titles:

These were props. The little princess didn’t read a lick of the books she possessed.

After a quick inspection of the place, I leisurely ascended the stairway. No sign of the Thorne girl on the second floor either. The only hint of her was a trail of clothes leading from the hallway to the master bedroom.

The last item—a pink, lacy bra—was tossed by the double doors to the balcony. Where the girl I’d seen on the cover of that magazine lay on a lounger, naked as the day she was born, a towel flung over her face.

Is she allergic to clothes?

Not stopping to check out the goods, I made my way toward her. She was twenty-one, I’d learned on my flight here. As I suspected—a child, especially to my twenty-nine-year-old self. Not to mention, stealing a look was in bad taste. I was a professional—and didn’t need to creep on sleeping women. One kink was enough.

I stood directly above her, blocking the sun. Her skin prickled, turning into goosebumps as I provided her some shade and cool. Motionless, I waited to be acknowledged without touching her. As a general rule, I did not touch my clients.

I did not touch anybody, if I could help it.

Unless, of course, it was part of a well-plotted fantasy controlled for all variables.

She tossed the towel from her face, stretching her limbs.