Player's Princess (A Royal Sports Romance)(117)

“Yeah. It’s pretty bad, I admit.”

“Pretty bad,” he snorts. “You have a talent for understatement. Half the populace is unemployed, and two thirds are on a dole the government cannot sustain. The local currency is scrip, useless except for buying rotten potatoes and old cheese at moldy government stores. Walk into Solkovia with a week’s pay for an American and you can buy drugs, women, enforcers.”

He turns sharply to me. “They don’t sell women in my country.”

I meet his gaze evenly. At least, I think I do. I want to sink into the seat and disappear, but I swallow hard and say, “You talk about hurting women a lot. Does it bother you when people hurt women?”

“Yes,” he barks, his accent making the word almost unintelligible. “Yes. It bothers me. It disgusts me. It is the most perverse thing a man can do. No man in Kosztyla dares raise a hand to his wife.”

“Why, you’ll cut it off?”

“No. He can keep the hand. It’s other parts I remove for that.”

I hunch my shoulders and glance down at my hands.

“In my country you could walk down the street naked at midnight and no one would harm you.”

“Yeah, except you, right? Don’t tell me your laws would permit that.”

“No, of course not. You’d be arrested, but you wouldn’t be attacked. Try that in New York and tell me what would happen.”

“I’ve never actually been to New York.” I turn up my nose. “You foreigners, you’re always, New York, New York, New York, like there’s only two cities in America. You’ve been lecturing me all day about my presumptions about your country, what about your presumptions about mine?”

He sits back and folds his arms. “I’m listening.”

“You talk about America like if you walk down the street you’ll get dragged into an alley and raped. News flash, your majesty.”

“The proper style is your grace.”

“Whatever. That doesn’t happen. Yes, people get hurt. A lot of people, but it’s a country of three hundred and fifty million.”

“That’s your excuse? One assault is too many. One woman hurt is too many.”

“I’m not going to lie. I went to college in a city. I’ve been followed, I’ve been catcalled, I even had to duck into a bar and call my fiancé once because I was scared of a guy following me on the bus.”

“Fiancé?” he says, quickly and sharply. “You are to be married? You’re promised to a man?”

“What? No. Not anymore. I don’t want to talk about it.”

He eyes me and bites his lip. He has a snaggletooth, on the right side. It looks like a fang.

“You’re not selling me on America. All I hear is that you have to be afraid to walk the street at night.”

“Not afraid, cautious. I have to be careful, just like I have to be careful I don’t get run over, or something like that.”

“You can’t walk the streets without fear someone will attack you.”

I clench my fists. “Like what you offer is any better. You act like it’s better, but it’s not better at all. Sure, people in your country don’t have to be afraid of a criminal in a dark alley, do they?”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“They don’t need some random attacker. They’ve got you.”

He blinks. “What?”

“That’s the choice you’re offering here.” I hold out my arm, gesturing at the empty streets around us. “You’ve replaced one fear with another. I’ve read about this place. You only let them read what you allow, watch what you allow, say what you allow. Your schools teach children to report on their parents. You tell them what to eat and where to go and when to go to bed.”

He says nothing.

“Okay, so it’s clean, and you say it’s safe. Is it? Is it safe not to like the menu options at lunch? If one of your subjects just stands up and throws his lunch down because he can’t stand choosing from Door One or Door Two anymore, what do you do with him? Drag him off for reeducation?”

I fold my arms over my chest and sink into the seat.

“If anybody else talked to you the way I am now, would you just let them?”

“No,” he says, turning away to look out the window.

“Why not?”

“They’re not you.”

“But they are. I’m not anybody special.”

His gaze almost disarms me a little. Almost. “That’s not true.”

I sigh. “Of course you’d say that. It’s great for you, isn’t? You eat what you want, go where you want, do and say what you want, read what you want. Why? Because you were born into it. Because of who your dad was.”

“You say that as if there are not people of privilege in your country—”

“Of course there are. Look, I’m not saying everybody is equal and that it’s a perfect land of sunshine and opportunity and we all go out and dance in amber waves of grain like a goddamn cartoon. Yes, we have a lot of problems, but I’d rather have some problems than live in a cold gray world with no human spirit. God, look at this place! Everything is gray!”

“It’s efficient.”

“It’s a prison. The whole place is one big prison. You know what really speaks against the way you run this place? If you won’t let people leave.”