Page 42 of Merciless Prince
“Ooh, I’m intrigued,” she said, brows lifting. “Ask away.”
I took a sip of the milkshake as I tried to figure out the best way to broach the subject. “It’s about a party,” I finally said. “Raymond Knight’s eightieth birthday. It was a couple of months ago.”
“Okay. What about it?”
“I was invited to go by his executive assistant,” I said. “I had to pretend to be a real guest so Raymond wouldn’t notice that half the people who were actually invited didn’t show up.”
Francesca snickered. “I heard about that,” she said. “Anyway, what happened?”
I hesitated again, wondering if I should tell her that my friends were involved with this story too.
I quickly decided not to bring them into it. If the things that happened in the grotto were real like I suspected, there was a chance that Francesca was involved in it as more than just a hired actress. She could go right from this meeting to Killian and his friends and tell them everything.
“I went outside during the party to explore the statue gardens on the estate, and I found something,” I said. “It was a hidden tunnel entrance.”
Francesca nodded and leaned forward, lips closing over her pink and white striped straw.
“I decided to go down and explore it,” I went on. “It was pretty long, and it went all the way over to Beaumont Island.”
Francesca swallowed her mouthful of milkshake and lifted a palm. “Wait, you went and explored a creepy old tunnel all alone?”
“Yes.”
“Wow. You’re a lot braver than me,” she said, tipping her head to the side. “Anyway, sorry. Go on.”
“I saw a whole bunch of people in the tunnel, so I followed them. Some of them were dressed in red cloaks. Others were wearing gold underwear and antlers, and there was also one guy in regular clothes.” I paused and nervously picked at a nail. “The tunnel ended in a cave above a grotto.”
“Uh-huh.” Francesca nodded for me to keep going.
“The people went down to the grotto and…” I trailed off for a second. “They did some weird ritualistic kind of stuff, and they filmed all of it.”
There was a flash of something I couldn’t quite pinpoint in Francesca’s eyes—fear, perhaps? Or mere surprise? Then she laughed. “Let me guess. You saw me down there with all those people, and you saw some of them killing a guy on an altar,” she said. She put the word ‘killing’ in air quotes.
I swallowed hard. “Yeah, that’s what it looked like.”
“So now you’re curious about it.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I thought it might’ve been a job you were hired for. Like, uh… a student film, or some rich weirdo’s fantasy project.”
As I waited for Francesca to reply, I carefully watched her face to gauge her reaction.
“Well, you’re right. Iwasthere for a job, and I did have to wear that stupid gold stuff,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “It wasfreezing.But anyway, if you were at Raymond’s party, I’m guessing you probably met Killian Knight? His grandson.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, heart skipping a beat at the mention of Killian’s name.
“One of his friends goes to Bellingham with him. Third-year film student, I think. He had an idea for a movie and wrote a script for it, and he asked Killian to help him film a scene. He figured Killian could get him the right equipment and props because his family owns a few studios and networks.” Francesca paused to take another sip of her milkshake. “Anyway, they hired me and a bunch of other actors to help them out with it. I played a cult slave, and the people in red were the cultists. The other guy was meant to be someone who broke into the cult’s inner sanctum, or something like that. I can’t remember the exact details.”
I felt like all the air had rushed out of my lungs, deflating my entire chest. “So it was just a movie shoot?”
“Yes. A very amateur one, mind you,” she said with a sardonic smile. “They said they were going to present the scene to some execs at one of the Knight studios in the hope that it would generate enough interest to get the project picked up as a proper movie. Or maybe a TV show. But I haven’t heard anything about it yet, so who knows?”
I leaned back in my chair, reeling with shock. For weeks now, I’d been building up a dark, dramatic narrative in my head about stalkers and murderers, and it all turned out to be… nothing, really. Just a silly movie, like my friends suspected all along.
“What did they use for the blood?” I asked in a low voice, still scarcely able to believe that it was all fake.
Francesca shrugged and licked a thin film of milkshake foam off her upper lip. “Not sure. But some of it sprayed on my face, and it tasted kind of sweet, so I’m guessing it was corn syrup. It looked totally real, right?”
I pressed my lips together and nodded slowly. “Yeah, it did.”
