His Princess (A Royal Romance)(110)

“Jared.”

I hold up the driver’s license.

“Is this you, Jared?”

“Y-yeah.”

“You want to go home tonight, Jared?”

He swallows, hard.

“Man, I’ve seen your face…”

I snort a laugh.

“Ha. Right. You have. Good for you. Look, I don’t want to drag this out. This is how it’s going to work.”

I wheel over a cart and roll open a padded leather case full of tools, and slip them out of their slots one at a time.

“Man, if I start screaming—”

“They’ll think it’s my TV. Welcome to suburbia, Jared. The land of nobody gives a f*ck.”

I slam the potato peeler down on the tray. It makes the other tools rattle.

“What are you going to do with that?”

I look up at him. “Okay, this is how it works. You will answer my questions to my satisfaction, and you will get to keep the skin on your balls. You don’t, welp.”

He swallows. “I can’t…”

I lift the potato peeler. “I can.”

“Jesus Christ,” he whimpers, and I smell a distinctive bitter scent, and a wet stain spreads on his khakis. He’s wearing f*cking khakis.

“First question, who are you?”

“Jared—”

“Not your name, chucklef*ck.”

“I’m a private detective.”

“Who hired you and why?”

“I can get sued—”

“You can get castrated.”

He whimpers. “I’m supposed to be looking for anything that lady’s ex-husband can use in court to get the kids taken away.”

“How long have you been watching them?”

“A couple of weeks.”

“Have you reported anything so far?”

“Y-yeah,” he says. “She leaves them unattended after school and while she’s in class.”

“So f*cking what? Lots of parents do that.”

“The judge won’t see it that way. The oldest is fourteen. They can’t be alone all night by themselves.”

I grit my teeth. “You provided this information to the ex-husband already.”

“Y-yeah,” he says.

“Fuck. I don’t like the answer to my questions. Say goodbye to your scrotum.”

I snatch the potato peeler from the tray and take a step toward him and he screams like a little girl.

I grab his collar and touch the tip of the potato peeler to his nose.

“You can change my mind.”

“H-how?”

I smile a hungry smile.

“Tell me everything you know about this Russel.”

“O-okay. It’s not much, just—”

“It’s a start.”

I take a pad and paper and sit down on my folding metal chair.

“Talk.”

The details he gives me are not especially significant—only the things an employee would know. Full name, address. He rattles off descriptions of his car, tells me how they met. Dutifully I write it all down then slap the tablet on the tray of torture tools and stand up.

No more potato peeler. I pick up a linoleum knife, a hooked implement used to make drawing cuts, and stalk toward him. He shakes and somehow manages to piss himself again.

There’s piss on my floor. That makes me mad.

“You might have hurt that woman and her children really bad,” I tell him. “If she gets her kids taken away, I’m going to be very put out.”

“I swear I won’t tell anything else, I swear to God I’ll quit.”

“No, you won’t quit. You’ll wait for me to give you instructions. You’ll feed your client the information I want him to have. Is that clear?”

He swallows and clears his throat.

“Let me make sure you understand. If you don’t do this, somebody, not me, somebody you’ve never seen before, will be paying you a visit, Jared. Somebody who knows everything about you. Somebody who taught me everything I know.”

“I’ll do whatever you say. I swear to God.”

“Don’t swear to God. Swear to me.”

He nods.

I love that swear to me line, it always works.

I heft the knife, making a show of it. It’s light in my fingers, alive. The knife is sharp as hell. I could open his belly or his throat with no more effort than swatting away a bug.

He screams as I swing, but I aim high, miss him, and hit the rope. He drops to the floor in a bubbling, sobbing heap and I cut the bonds around his wrists. He falls back and rubs at the raw marks on his arms.

I toss him a pack of wet wipes. “Clean the piss off my floor. Jared.”

When I’m satisfied, I give him a kick in the ribs. Not hard enough to break anything, but it knocks him on his side.

“Get the f*ck out of here, and don’t let anybody see you.”

I open the garage door and he shuffles out, whimpering. I still have his driver’s license.

Once he’s gone I pace the room while the connection tediously loads, then eagerly sit down and use the info Jared gave me about Russel to gather every piece of information about Rose’s ex-husband that I can.

It takes me about four hours to pull everything together.