Page 7 of Merciless Prince
A lot of guys lost their minds over girls who looked like that. I was fast becoming one of them, but not because I wanted to fawn all over her, date her, or fuck her like every other guy who spotted her. She was simply driving me crazy with her mere existence, all because she was a threat tomyexistence. That meant I had to think about her all the time. Keep tabs on her. Follow her. Even if Derrick didn’t need a ride today, I would’ve showed up at the station anyway, just to watch her step off the train and into my world at Bellingham.
As she climbed into the back of the white car with her friend, I narrowed my eyes and clenched my jaw, wishing I never met her. Wishing I could wipe her out of existence with the snap of a finger.
When I first encountered her at the party on my family’s estate, I thought she’d simply be another conquest. Another beautiful girl to warm my bed until I grew tired of her. Instead, she’d wormed her way into my life and mind, becoming a twisted obsession for me. Not in the darkly sexy kind of way that would lead to me showing up at her door to hate-fuck her, though. No, as nice as she was to look at, she was nothing more than a thorn in my side. A malignant tumor that needed to be sliced out.
Derrick was right about her ass, though. It was perky and perfect, just like the rest of her body.
“Hey, Kill.” Derrick snapped his fingers in front of my face. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
I jerked my head around to face him, realizing I’d completely zoned out and stopped walking for several seconds. “Sorry. Forgot where I parked.”
“Isn’t that your car over there?” he said, dipping his chin toward the left.
I nodded and briskly strode down the asphalt, keys dangling from my right hand. When I reached the car, I pressed the button on the fob and pulled the driver’s door open. “Get in.”
Derrick dumped his duffel bag in the back before climbing into the passenger seat. Next to him, a silver Tiffany bracelet with an engraved tag and a broken clasp lay on top of the center console. Furrowing his brows, he picked it up and stared at it. “You still have this?”
“Haven’t got around to tossing it yet,” I said. “It’s not like she’ll ever know I have it, anyway.”
“True.” He leaned forward and looked through the windshield. “Shit, look at that. It’s gonna bucket down in a second.”
He was right. Even though it was sunny just moments ago, thick gray clouds were rolling in fast, and the air was filled with the earthy scent of petrichor. Typical Bellingham weather. Temperamental as fuck, especially in the fall.
I started the car and side-eyed Derrick as he played around with the bracelet. The sterling silver tag was facing me now, so I could see the engraving.
SLS.
It belonged to Shay. She’d accidentally dropped it from her little hidey-hole when she spied on me and my society friends a month ago, setting off a chain reaction of events that led to me morphing into a fucking stalker like Joe Goldberg. It was a good thing she dropped it, though, because if she hadn’t, my friends and I might never have known that an intruder managed to get in that night.
Up until the second we saw the silver piece land on the ground right in front of us, we had no idea that anyone was observing us. None of us had ever thought to have any security cameras or alarms installed in the tunnel or the cave it terminated in, because we always assumed our spot was safe and totally hidden from outsiders.
Clearly, we were wrong. Shay was living proof of that.
How long she’d remain living, however, depended entirely on the words and actions she chose over the next few months.
As I pulled out of the busy parking lot, the storm clouds opened and rain started to pour, loudly battering the windshield. I switched the wipers on and turned onto the main road, carefully navigating the route back to Bellingham. What was usually a seven minute drive was going to be a white-knuckled fifteen, thanks to all the idiots in front of me who barely knew how to drive on these sharply-winding country roads in the rain without skidding and veering all over the place.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Derrick still playing with Shay’s broken bracelet. “Any updates on the girl?” he asked, finally dropping it back on the center console.
“No.” I briefly shook my head as I steered the car around a sharp bend in the road. “She hasn’t told anyone about that night. Not yet, anyway.”
“You sure?”
“As sure as I can be,” I said. “I can read all of her messages and emails, and I can listen to her calls, too. She hasn’t said a word about it in any of those. Also, I got my guys to send that virus to her phone. Remember?”
“Uh… I think I was wasted when you told me about the virus. What does it do?”
I gritted my teeth, wishing Derrick would take things a little more seriously. For someone who claimed to be so worried about the messy situation we’d found ourselves in, he seemingly had no issue leaving all the fixer work to everyone else. It pissed me the fuck off.
“It’s turned her phone into a listening device, and everything gets recorded as well,” I said. “So even if it’s just sitting in her purse, I can still hear everything she says to her friends or whoever else she talks to, as long as she’s within ten feet.”
“Right. Wouldn’t listening to that take up all your time, though?”
I shook my head. “I don’t have to listen to her entire life. The audio files are stored in a program that shows a spike when any sound has been recorded, so I can just select those parts to listen to. I can speed them up, too, so an hour-long conversation with one of her friends can be turned into a fifteen minute audio file.”
“Nice.” Derrick nodded slowly. Then he looked at me again, brows rising high on his forehead. “You’re absolutely sure she hasn’t said anything about that night?”
“Not a word. But that doesn’t mean she won’t in the future.”
