Page 33 of Heartless Prince

Sometimes I felt lucid, in control. Other times I felt like I were in a dream state, and none of this was real. I would drift off in my mind and start to think that at any minute, my friends would jump out with party hats and streamers, and I would find out it was all a huge, elaborate prank.

I suddenly sat bolt upright on my bed.

Shit.My friends!

I couldn’t believe this hadn’t occurred to me before now. In all the days or weeks I’d been kept here, I hadn’t thought about anyone’s welfare other than my own. It was horribly selfish. Considering the reach and influence Crown and Dagger had, my friends could all be in serious danger.

The society had watched me and followed me for a long time, as Tobias had informed me, and that meant they knew who my friends were. Not only that, they knew about the paper I wanted to write, and Greer, Willa and Mellie had all helped me with ideas for it.

Greer and Willa had helped me figure out how to sneak into the Tap Week party, and Mellie had helped me sneak into the second-level ceremony. Greer and Willa were probably fine—I hoped—seeing as Crown and Dagger apparently let people sneak in to the lower-level parties all the time. But Mellie… she could be in serious trouble.

When she’d managed to get into her father’s office and found his laptop mysteriously unlocked, she’d seen it as an incredible stroke of luck. At the time, we couldn’t believe it, but now I realized that we should’ve been far more suspicious of that so-called luck. No one got that lucky. Mellie’s dad had probably been told by the rest of the society to leave his computer unlocked when his daughter was around, knowing full well about our plan to sneak me onto the actress spreadsheet.

We’d both been played like fiddles.

“Shit, shit, shit,” I murmured, praying Mellie was unscathed. Perhaps they would be more lenient with her, given her father’s place in the society.

Or maybe she was right here in a cell too, being tortured horribly…

Guilty tears sprang to my eyes, and a grim chant started in my mind. My fault, my fault, my fault.

A face appeared in the thick pane of the door a moment later. It was Elias. He simply stood there watching me fight back the tears, a hungry look in his striking green-blue eyes. He didn’t come here often, but when he did, he would look at me for a while as if I were an animal in a zoo and then stride away without a word.

I jumped up, anger temporarily replacing my fear and sadness. “Stop staring at me, you sick fuck!” I screamed through the door.

I wasn’t sure if he could actually hear me, given how thick the door and glass pane were, but it made me feel better to yell at him anyway. I might be craving human company, but not his. He and his father were the sickest bastards known to mankind, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t want anything to do with them.

The other day, I’d shocked the hell out of Elias when he came to look at me. I’d just been given a tray of mashed potatoes and salad to eat, and instead of eating the mash, I’d picked some up between my fingers and smeared it all over the glass pane so that it was too clouded for him to see me properly. I hadn’t been able to stop laughing after that, giggling away for the first time in far too long, and I’d subsequently learned what the orange juice in this place was like.

The nurse from my first day here was right. When the guards came in and gave it to me for my insolent behavior, it knocked me out almost immediately, and when I woke the next day, I was dizzy and disoriented, my memories all gone until it finally wore off. It was the strangest feeling, remembering all these things I’d already forgotten and remembered once before.

My door was clean when I woke, of course, and Elias came back to stare at me like the fucking smug creep he was.

I flipped a middle finger at him and went back to lie on my bed, inching over to the very edge of it and facing away, just so I could be as far away from his lecherous gaze as possible. As I snuggled into a curled up position, my hand fell into an indented spot on the mattress.

Strange.

I sat up to look at it, keeping it covered with the thin blanket so Elias wouldn’t know what I was doing. There was a reason the spot sank inward slightly. One of the coiled mattress springs beneath it had come loose. I could see part of it sticking out of a tiny hole in the fabric on the side of the bed.

My heart skipped a beat. All the promises I’d made myself about attaining freedom came flooding back to me in a giddy rush. This spring could be useful for when I finally found a way to escape. If I managed to pull it out and uncoil the wire, it could make a decent improvised weapon.

I rolled back over and stared at the door until Elias left. Then I quickly set to work on the mattress. I ripped the hole in the fabric so that it was a little bigger—but not so big it would attract a lot of attention if a guard or nurse ever came in here—and then I deftly worked the spring out. It took a while and was a lot harder than I thought, but finally, I wrenched it free. A triumphant grin quirked up my lips as I uncoiled it.

Now I just had to find somewhere to hide it.

I went over to the door and looked through the glass pane, just to make sure no one was coming down the hall in either direction. Then I stood up on the bed and reached into the air vent on the wall, carefully placing the wire around one of the slats so that it wasn’t easy to see but would be easy to pull out if I wanted it in an emergency.

I couldn’t sit down after that. Thoughts of escape and freedom were heavy on my mind again, and for the first time in what felt like forever, I was excited. Inspired. What else had I missed in all my days of gloom-and-doom moping? What other things could this room be hiding from me?

I began to search everywhere, painstakingly tapping on the walls and every part of the floor for anything that sounded different to the rest. Under the bed, behind the toilet… everywhere.

One of the stones in the gray wall on my left sounded strangely hollow when I tapped it. I tapped it again, harder, and to my shock and amazement, it swung outward to reveal an old lever.

“Holy shit,” I whispered, hoping to god I wasn’t hallucinating.

I tentatively reached forward and pulled the lever down. There was a heavy grinding sound for several seconds, and then a third of the stone ‘wall’ swung open to reveal a hidden doorway.

Oh my god. It was a secret passage.

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