Player's Princess (A Royal Sports Romance)(154)

I nod.

We enter the hotel through a private entrance. It jars me to see good ol’ fashioned American cops, NYPD no less, holding back crowds of people at the far end of the alley. I lift my skirts like I’ve been wearing a poofy dress every day of my life, to keep the hem out of the muck water behind the hotel.

Once inside we’re escorted to an upper floor. We have it all to ourselves, and the security detail that arrived ahead of time. I see Americans mingling with Kosztylans. It’s easy to pick out the Americans. They’re all in suits with those things in their ears. The Kosztylans wear uniforms, sharp black ones that give them a morbid but authoritative air. The blonde-haired guard I saw before is among them.

I have my own room. I feel a pang of guilt when I realize it. I head inside and sit in the sitting room. It’s a huge suite, but I’m too exhausted and depressed to pay much attention to the details. I’m sure it’s nice. There’s trim and stuff and a big bed and I have a nice bathroom with a fancy shower.

“I want to go home,” I tell no one in particular.

The knock comes at the door an hour later. I’ve been sitting near the door the entire time.

It’s that blonde guard woman.

“My lady, your party has arrived. His grace has secured a private room on the third floor. If you would follow me, please.”

Sighing, I follow her to the elevator and stand straight as it carries me down. I feel like I’m sinking into the earth’s crust. The sense of dread grows as I fall.

I furrow my brows when we pass the third floor.

“Hey, wait,” I say, “What’s…”

I feel something hard jab into my back. It feels like a gun.

“Shut up.”

I freeze.

Oh, oh God, no, please no.

The door opens and she nudges me forward, into the basement of the hotel. Oh God, I’m being kidnapped. I move slowly and deliberately, flexing my hands at my side. The gun in my back feels like it wants to go off, like the bullet is urgent to smash into my back, crack bone, and tear flesh.

I tremble and stop moving when she tugs on my arm.

“This is her, take her.”

Two men yank my arms painfully behind my back. When I cry out from the twist of my shoulders, they backhand me across the face and my split lip wells with blood. I spit some on the floor and go quiet as they pull zip ties and stiff cords that feel like wires around my wrists and then my elbows.

Then a thick, rough sack pulls down over my face and steals the world away. I can barely breathe, and in few heartbeats it becomes stifling hot inside the sack. Pushed forward with a gun in my back, I stumble to an unknown destination in the dark, my feet scuffing over rough concrete ground.

“Who are you?” I say quietly.

“Shut up,” she says, though I can hear the smirk in her voice.

“Are you the Resistance?”

“Shut up, you stupid American whore.”

“Please, you have to let me go.”

The gun jabs hard into my back. I stifle a cry of pain.

“Why should I do that?”

“I don’t want him to hurt you.”

“You don’t want him to hurt us?”

She laughs, but she doesn’t know how serious I am. I mean it. When he finds out about this he’ll kill them all.

Oh God.

I know why they did it now, why they waited. Oh sure, snatching me from the castle would have been difficult, but this same woman has been in and out a dozen times, I’ve seen her everywhere. They could have grabbed me anytime they wanted.

They waited until right now because he doesn’t know if I’m coming back. I stifle a sob and tears well in my eyes. Not like this, please. He’ll think I left him. He’ll think I abandoned him.

As they sit me down on a thin seat—I think they’re putting me in a van—I do something I have not truly done for a long time. Not with intent. Out of panic or fatigue, without sincerity or thought. Very deliberately, silently, I pray.

Please, God. Don’t let him think I abandoned him. Gentle the rage in his heart. If you do not find it within your divine plan to guide him to me as you did before, then I beg of you at least, do not let this be the end of the man he could become. I beg of you, if this is the end you mean for me, give him a better one. Help him. Help him. Help him.

I must have said the last part aloud.

“What are you saying, whore?”

“Nothing.”

It’s the woman who hits me. Not a slap, a punch. It knocks me off the seat onto the floor and my mouth wells up with blood, throbbing. The world spins, poked through with bright pinpricks of light. She drags me up by the arms and punches me in the stomach, and I double over in agony, spitting blood on the inside of the black sack they’ve put over my head.

“I take it back,” I growl, “I can’t wait for him to find you.”

I’m a teacher. Not a saint.

“You say that as if he’d harm me,” she says, her trilling accented voice like honey. “He had his chance.”

My head pops up. Bloody cloth clings to my lips. “Good God, you’re her, aren’t you? You’re Cassandra.”

“No. I am,” a third voice intones. She must have been waiting in the van.

“I first thought to take you when we drew him away from the castle a few days ago, but there are too many loyalists, we never would have made it past the inner courtyard. Even in the hell he’s built there are still some fiercely loyal to him.”