Page 4 of Merciless Prince
Her lips tightened, and she nodded. “Creepsville,” she muttered before closing her eyes again.
My thoughts exactly.I followed Cori’s lead and closed my eyes, letting my mind drift back in time.
About a month ago, my friends and I were invited to attend Raymond Knight’s eightieth birthday celebration at Clyde Park House. Raymond was the founder of a conglomerate named Lodestar Knight Co., which consisted of media, entertainment, hotel, and cruise businesses. These enterprises had made him and his family stupendously rich over the years, so it was no wonder that they owned so many sprawling properties in the state along with an entire island in the Hudson River.
My friends—Cori, Ashleigh, Rumer, and Dionne—and I had never met Raymond before the party. Technically, we weren’t even real guests. We were just hired for the evening by Raymond’s executive assistant to make the party seem bigger than it actually was.
That wasn’t standard practice for high society parties, but Raymond had recently experienced some controversy which caused quite a few of the real guests to revoke their RSVPs. His family and staff wanted to hide that from him so he could enjoy his birthday celebration without realizing how deeply unpopular he’d become, so they tracked down some agents in the city and used them to find a bunch of relatively-unknown actors to fill up the ballroom on the evening in question.
My friends and I were among those chosen from the talent pool. Our only task was to have fun and pretend that we were anythingbutactors if any of the real guests questioned our presence. In return, we each received a thousand dollars in cash.
At first, the party was everything I expected it to be—glitzy, glamorous, Gatsby-esque. But partway through the evening, things took a strange turn.
At some point, my friends and I decided to go outside and check out the famed statue gardens on the estate. We ran around in the moonlight, giggling and giddy from all the champagne and cocktails, until one of us tripped on something and fell. After that, it didn’t take us long to realize that we’d stumbled upon a partially-hidden handle on the mossy ground—a handle that opened a secret hatch.
We decided to open the hatch and discovered that it was actually a tunnel entrance. The tunnel stretched all the way over to Beaumont Island via a secret passage that had been built into the bridge, and it terminated in a dark cave. The cave overlooked a massive grotto containing an underground stream, red and gold swan-shaped boats, flaming torches, and frescoes depicting the Greek mythological Underworld. In the middle of the fantastical space lay a large stone altar.
As my friends and I crouched in the cave above, drunkenly wondering what the hell we’d stumbled upon, we witnessed a strange and grisly scene.
Several people in red hooded cloaks stood in the grotto below us, surrounded by others in skimpy gold underwear and antler headdresses. A man in regular clothing was chained to the altar, and some of the red-cloaked people took turns stabbing him with ceremonial daggers while the others looked on and filmed the whole thing.
I was deeply disturbed by the sight, for obvious reasons, but my friends thought it was all part of an amateur film production. I eventually realized that they had to be right. It made perfect sense. Both the tunnel and the grotto lay on Knight properties, and the Knights were heavily involved in the TV and movie industries. It seemed far more likely that one of the younger family members was helping some friends with a student film rather than engaging in some sort of cult sacrifice.
Still, the thought of the strange ritual on the altar made me shiver whenever I thought about it. It was so eerie. So realistic. And the screams…
I shook my head, banishing all thoughts of the Knight family and their creepy grotto. The sudden movement made Cori stir next to me, and she yawned and sat up straight.
“Are you okay?” she asked, peering over at me. Her blue eyes were wide and filled with concern. “You’re covered in goosebumps. I didn’t freak you out with all that Triangle stuff, did I?”
I forced a smile and shook my head. “I’m fine. Just excited that we’re finally going to Bellingham.”
“Same,” she said, face lighting up. “I still can’t believe we both got in.”
“Me neither.”
As aspiring actresses, Cori and I had been applying for Bellingham’s intensive three-year performing arts diploma since we were eighteen. Because of the heavy competition, we’d been knocked back every time… until this year. Four weeks ago, we both received notices of acceptance from the university for the upcoming fall semester.
The performing arts course was the best of the best in the US. Every aspiring actor who made it into the program found great success, so our acceptance was a dream come true.
Cori glanced at her watch as the train slowed. “Just one more stop and we’ll be there,” she said. “I seriously can’t wait.”
“Same.” I looked out the window as the train pulled into Beaumont Bridge Station. Beaumont Castle was no longer a distant vision. It was barely half a mile away, over the nearby bridge that gave the station its name.
I watched several tourists step off the train and head toward an idling coach that would transport them over to the island. Then I felt it again—that same sense of dread from before, along with the swell of nausea in the pit of my stomach.
I pressed my lips into a tight line and quickly turned my attention to the seat in front of me.
“Hey, are you sure you’re feeling okay?” Cori asked, gently prodding my arm. “You look really pale.”
I hesitated, not quite knowing what to say to her.
She knew I’d been worried and anxious a few weeks ago about what we saw in the grotto beneath Beaumont Castle, and she was the one who’d done the most work to convince me that it was just a movie shoot. Nothing to worry about. She also reminded me that we’d actually recognized one of the gold-clad people down in the grotto—an actress we auditioned with occasionally—which was a fact I’d completely forgotten about in the paranoid, sleepless state I found myself in a few hours after the Knight party.
She was right. I knew it. The whole thing was just an amateur film project.
So how could I look her in the eye and explain the bad vibes I got from the mere sight of the castle? I couldn’t even explain it to myself.
“Shay?” Cori’s brows knitted with concern as she awaited my response.
