Page 28 of Heartless Prince

I screamed and tried to fight her off, and she sighed and put the needle down. “These are just routine medical tests. If you keep fighting me, I’ll be forced to give you an orange juice. Is that what you want?”

I stopped shrieking and simply gaped at her. Was she crazy? I’d love an OJ right now.

“I’d actually like a drink, so go ahead,” I said, narrowing my eyes.

She gave me a thin-lipped smile. “You won’t like the orange juice here. It’s what they give the more spirited girls at night to make them sleep instead of screaming the place down all night and bothering the guards. The active ingredient in it is similar to what they injected you with last night. It wipes you out and when you wake up, you have no memories for a while and feel like you got hit by a freight train. Is that what you want?”

I bit my bottom lip and shook my head. “No,” I whispered miserably.

“Good girl. Now stay still.”

She wrapped a tourniquet around my upper arm, then stuck me with the needle. My blood filled the syringe a moment later, and she pulled the needle out and removed the sample, quickly capping it with one hand while applying pressure to the puncture mark on my arm with the other. Then she put a cotton ball and medical tape over it.

I sat back and watched, numb and exhausted. The nurse carefully labeled my blood sample, and then she held out one of the specimen cups. “I need you to urinate in this,” she said sharply.

A raw red flush of humiliation crept up my neck as I trudged over to the toilet and squatted over it, aiming for the specimen jar as much as possible. I filled it, then wiped and flushed. There was nowhere for me to wash my hands.

I swallowed hard and gave the sample to the nurse. “Can you please tell me what’s going to happen to me?” I asked softly. Hopefully I could appeal to her, woman to woman, and she’d give up some information.

No such luck.

“Please,” I said, my voice reaching a higher pitch again. “I have friends and family. They’ll wonder where I am. I can’t just stay here.”

“That’s all been taken care of,” she said. She held up another needle. “I’ll need you to stay still again.”

“Wait, what? What do you mean it’s been taken care of?”

“I said stay still.”

“No!” I backed away from her. “What the hell is in that needle?”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s not poison, if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s just a basic Depo contraceptive shot. Now come here, or I’ll get someone to give you some juice. I think we already established you don’t want that.”

My blood felt like ice in my veins. A contraceptive shot? That was very illuminating. I knew exactly what was going to happen to me now.

Tears burst forth like water from a dam, spilling down my face in warm salty rivulets. The muscles in my chin trembled and I looked toward the horrible nurse, as if blatantly showing my terror and distress might actually soften her attitude.

She simply stared at me, her gray eyes cold and dead inside, like a shark. She didn’t move. I had a feeling she had been through this exact process many times, and she was waiting for me to cry it out and give up.

My eyes kept dripping with tears, drenching my shirt, and soon I was on the ground sobbing as the walls that once held me up and made me strong began to collapse. I was innocent. I didn’t deserve this. All I did was sneak into an event and see some weird stuff. Nothing criminal happened there, just some entertainment, some drinking, and probably some wild sex, so why did it even matter if I witnessed it? I couldn’t get any of them in trouble for it. Surely they would realize that soon and let me go. It was all a mistake.

Despite that belief, I couldn’t stop sobbing, no matter how hard I tried. Try as I might to convince myself otherwise, I knew I was anything but innocent. The guilt that had nestled deep within me for the last year and a half, coiled like a snake, was bubbling up in my throat, and a little voice in the back of my head was whispering, ‘maybe you deserve this.’ I pressed my hand against my mouth, trembling and shaking as the raw emotion spilled forth.

The pain started to come in waves, subsiding for long enough to let me take short recovering breaths before hurling me back into grief again. Finally, there were no more tears, no more gasps, no more begging. I was too tired.

“Are we done with the tantrum?” the nurse said in an acid tone.

I nodded and stayed curled up on the floor, barely lifting my head for the gesture. She crouched down and jabbed the needle in my upper left arm. “There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“Please….” I said in a last-ditch attempt to get help, my voice nothing more than a ragged whisper.

“I’ll get these to the lab for testing. You need to try to get some more rest,” she replied calmly. She didn’t acknowledge my plea for help.

She wheeled the cart to the door and slid some sort of keycard into a slot. A light flashed green as something beeped, and the door swung open. I knew I could try to rush the door and slip out with her and the cart, but I was too exhausted, and besides, I could see a man in black clothes and boots out in the hall. She’d mentioned guards earlier, so he must be one of them.

I wouldn’t make it two steps out that door.

With a defeated sigh, I got back on the bed and closed my eyes, praying that this was all some sort of horrible nightmare. Perhaps I would wake up in my bed tomorrow, and I would go down for breakfast with my friends and laugh about the crazy dream I had. It would be nothing more than a dark memory from the depths of my imagination.

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