Page 90 of Broken Princess
“I know. This just feels weird.”
“Why? I’ve blindfolded you enough times in the bedroom,” he murmured against my ear.
I giggled. “That’s different. Where are we?”
“Patience, princess. You’ll see in a minute.”
“The guys must think we’re crazy,” I said, referring to our escorts in dark sunglasses.
Seeing as my mother was still the president until the next election, my brother and I had to have Secret Service agents with us wherever we went. Just like the old days.
The Service had been purged of any Hale-affiliated agents—like Mal and Adam, who were rotting away in prison right now—so I knew I was always in safe hands. I couldn’t see or hear today’s assigned agents, but I knew they were somewhere behind us, watching carefully while maintaining a respectful distance.
Logan chuckled. “Who knows what they’re thinking? Their faces are always blank,” he said. I felt his hand on my hair, and then the blindfold came off.
I found myself staring up at a beautiful red brick mansion with an impressive white portico and dark green ivy creeping up the walls. I knew I’d never seen the place before, but something about it was weirdly familiar anyway.
My brows knitted as I glanced around at the nearby magnolia trees and the marble fountain rising out of a round pond covered with lily pads.
“This is Thorne House,” I said, looking back at Logan with wide eyes.
He shook his head. “It’s the same property, but not the same house,” he replied. “After Teddy set the place on fire, there was too much structural damage for it to be fixed up. The whole thing had to be demolished.”
“So you rebuilt it?”
He squeezed my hand. “Yes.”
“It looks completely different.”
“I know. The old place had too many bad memories. I didn’t want it to look the same, so I came up with a new design.”
“You and the builders did well. It’s gorgeous,” I said. “Are you going to keep Thorne House as the name, or will you give it a new one?”
“Why don’t we just call it ‘our place’?” he said, pulling me around to face him.
My eyes widened. “You mean….”
He nodded. “I built it for you, Willow.”
“But it’s—”
He held up a palm to cut me off. “Before you say anything else, I understand if you don’t want to be anywhere near this place after everything I did to you here,” he said gruffly. “I just figured that you deserve the best, and this land is the best of the best in this city. I know you always loved the gardens here, too. But if you want to look somewhere else, we can—”
It was my turn to cut him off. I smiled and held an index finger to his lips. “I was just going to say that it’s ridiculously big for the two of us. That’s all.”
While there used to be four of us living together—me, Logan, Chloe, and Chuck—that number had dwindled over the last year. Chuck was in prison with the rest of the old Order high council for their unwitting part in Elizabeth’s evil schemes, and he wouldn’t be released for several years despite his full cooperation with the case investigators.
As for Chloe, a real-life miracle had occurred.
Without her mother paying a doctor to inject her with drugs that would prevent her from regaining major brain functions, her condition had started to improve. Her new doctors told us not to get our hopes up too high, given the length of time she’d been in a mostly-vegetative state, but after three months, she’d regained the ability to speak and move whenever she wanted. It was incredible.
We were told it was because of something called neurogenesis—a process in which new nervous system cells were produced from stem cells. While most of this occurred in the embryonic stages, it could also happen in certain regions of the brain throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Chloe’s case, parts of her brain had tried to repair themselves after she experienced the traumatic head injury six years ago, but they’d been prevented from doing so properly due to the drugs given to her. Once she was free of that, those parts of her brain were finally able to produce new neurons, and this in turn allowed her to regain major functions that were previously thought to be lost forever.
While she would never be the exact same girl she was before the accident (a lot of her memories were gone, and she would always have a limp in her right leg due to certain parts of her brain being permanently damaged) she was doing very well. She’d even decided to move out to a new apartment a month ago so she could experience life on her own.
Well, not entirely on her own.
