Page 76 of Heartless Prince

19

Tatum

All I could do now was wait.

Tick tock. Tick tock.

I tried to count the minutes in my mind, but it wasn’t easy. I figured it had to be at least five hours since the guards finished cleaning the blood off the floor and locked me in again, but it might be even more. No one had told me what was going on or what would happen to me, but now that the adrenaline had worn off and the stark fear had set in, I had a pretty decent idea of what might happen.

The thought filled me with sheer dread.

When Elias got back here, he would probably murder me with his bare hands for what I did. Or maybe he’d get one of the guards to do it while he stood there laughing at me. He already thought I killed his second cousin, after all. Now I’d literally tried to kill his father. So it made perfect sense that the next person being killed might very well be me.

My fault. I did this to myself.

I was still curled up in a ball on one side of my cell, staring at the opposite wall. Streaks of blood marred the white paint, and I kept playing the events of this morning over and over in my mind in a macabre loop.

The sheer rage that possessed me earlier was like wildfire in my veins. A feeling like that had never come over me before, not once in my life, and shame tore through me as I pictured myself jamming that uncoiled bedspring into Tobias’s neck. The shock in his eyes, the way thick torrents of blood sprayed out of him like a geyser, the way he twitched and convulsed after falling to the ground… in those moments, I thought I wouldn’t feel bad, but I did.

It didn’t make sense that I would feel so terrible, given what an evil bastard Tobias King was, but just knowing that I was capable of committing such a heinous act against another human being made me realize there was a whole part of me in existence that I never knew about. Some dark passenger in my mind that could wake up at any moment and do awful, sickening things completely beyond my control.

Maybe Elias was right about me. Maybe I was an evil, murderous little liar….

“Don’t,” I forced myself to say out loud. “Don’t let them drag you down again. You’re not like them. They made you into this.”

I had to keep reminding myself of that. Otherwise, the guilt would set too far in, blurring the lines of reality, and I might start to feel as if I deserved to be here again.

My stomach growled. I hadn’t finished my breakfast earlier and it wound up soaked in blood anyway, so I could hardly eat it now, and I doubted anyone would bring me more food anytime soon. I probably wouldn’t be allowed out of my cell to shower, either.

One of the guards had been kind enough to give me a wet towel when he was mopping the floor earlier, just so I could wipe the caked blood from my face, neck, chest and arms, but I was still in the same clothes and my hair was streaked with red. The coppery smell made me feel sick, like I was in the middle of an abattoir.

My cell door suddenly swung open. I skittered back and squeezed my eyes shut, terrified it was Elias. Please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me….

“It’s just me,” said a vaguely familiar voice. “They told me to bring you this.”

I looked up to see one of the guards who’d come in to clean my floor earlier. It was the one who gave me the towel.

There was a fresh set of clothing in his arms, and he tossed it over to me. Sweatshirt, jeans, panties, bra.

“Thank you,” I muttered. I hurriedly changed out of my old bloodstained clothes.

“They’ve airlifted Mr. King to the nearest hospital. He’s probably gonna be okay,” the guard said, staring at me with coolly assessing eyes as I got dressed.

“Right. I guess that’s… good,” I said softly. I would probably be much worse off if Tobias actually died.

The guard’s eyes traveled to my blood-soaked hair. “They probably won’t let you shower just yet, but you might be allowed out tomorrow morn—” Something bleeped in his back pocket, and he stopped midsentence and pulled out a black walkie-talkie. I could hear a frantic, static-filled voice coming over it.

“Anyone who’s available, get the hell up to the second floor! One of the members is here and he’s high on coke or something. Complained about the girl he’s training, then started throwing shit around and trying to destroy the room. He just tore down a painting in the hall, and then he threw a sculpture at us and managed to get away. We need to catch this fucker before he destroys the whole floor.”

The guard in my cell muttered. “Fucking rich cokeheads.” He sighed. “Gotta go. Someone else will bring you dinner in a few hours.”

He strode over to the door and slid a keycard into it, then stepped out and slammed it behind him. I heard his hurried footsteps pounding up the hall a second later.

My eyes fell to the floor where he’d just been standing. In his haste to pull the walkie-talkie out of his back pocket, a few other things had spilled out of it, and he hadn’t noticed.

I stepped closer and crouched to look at the stuff. A few blue and white gum wrappers, a loyalty card for some sort of burger place, and something that looked like a bank card.

My heart skipped a beat as I looked closer. It wasn’t a bank card at all. It was black with a gold Crown and Dagger logo at the top and the word ‘Reserve’ printed on it in the middle.

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