Page 32 of The Stolen Princess
“Why?” she asked with tears in her eyes, but he still didn’t answer.
Drake, who was friends with Rommel, was a bad guy. Did that mean that Rommel and Joett were bad too?Were they in on the kidnapping?
She was stunned to silence for a moment as she tried to work through what was happening, but something inside of her snapped—some sort of lifesaving mechanism. She began screaming and kicking, writhing against the ropes tied to her.
“Help!” she yelled. “Help me!” There was no one around to hear her cries. Tolsten House was still a mile away, but she continued to scream into the vast afternoon sky—it was the only thing shecoulddo.
Drake and the other man worked between her wild limbs until they had her restrained again. Tears dripped down her face, and she looked at Arco. What kind of guard was he? How could he let these men take her?
“You’re nothing like Quaker Oats!” she screamed at Arco.
She didn’t know anything about Quaker Oats, but if she did, she was sure Arco wasn’t as good of a man as he had been.
Arco glanced away, not answering her.
“I’ll never forgive you!” she yelled through her tears. “Wait until my father finds out what you’ve done. He’ll kill you!” She twisted her body one last time, then sank into herself, losing all strength. Drake tried to get her to stand on her feet, but her legs were too weak, and she collapsed onto the dirt. Tears blinded her vision, and her fingers dug into the cool soil, grasping for some sort of solid ground.
Drake stood above her, and she blinked the moisture out of her eyes, trying to see what he was doing. He knotted the other end of the rope around his belt.
There would be no way to escape now.
A loud sob racked through her.
What if she never saw her father again?
What if he died before someone ever found her?
It would all be Drake’s fault. Her father’s death would be on his hands.
The old man pulled an envelope out of his pocket and handed it to Arco. “These are our terms for the kidnapping.” The old man gestured to a man beside him who had so many muscles, he almost looked fat. “Kase Kendrick will be waiting back at the Denton Inn for the king’s response. There are instructions inside of our letter about how the king is to communicate with our man.”
Arco nodded. “I’ll see that your letter gets put with the other Tolsten House mail that comes in tomorrow. The king won’t see it until then.”
Myka looked at the men, trying to focus on their conversation.
The terms for the kidnapping?
“I’ll take her horse back to Tolsten House, so nobody knows the princess went out,” Arco said.
The bald man with the dark goatee spoke up. “What about the stable hands? Won’t they know you left?”
“No,” Arco said, shaking his head. “We saddled the horses ourselves.”
The world seemed to slow down as Arco prodded the horses forward. Myka reached her tied hands out as if he would somehow reconsider leaving her with these men, but he didn’t. A swell of emotion filled her chest, suffocating her. She watched helplessly as Arco rode off, leaving her with the men and their knives.
Arco was another person in her life who had betrayed her. And so were Rommel and Joett. For years, she had mistakenly thought they were trusted friends and that the fondness was mutual, but they had just been pretending. They were with Drake today. They had to be a part of this somehow, consorting with him, aiding and abetting a kidnapper. Why else would he have been at their house, visiting them? The realization pulled her sorrow down to the deepest place. Oddly, the pain reminded her of the day her mother had left. Her father was the only person she could trust, the only person who hadn’t betrayed her. She had to find her way back to him somehow.
“Wait for the king’s response,” the old man said to the muscle man. “We’ll meet you back at camp in a few days.”
Muscle man nodded.
Myka hoped her father was even alive in the morning. If he wasn’t, who would come for her then?
10
Drake
There had been so many clues—the gun, the colored scarf, the mention of a pre-Desolation magazine, the fact that Drake only ever saw Mya on the sixteenth of the month, the weird name thing with Rommel’s wife. How had he missed every clue? It was Rommel who had thrown him off. Why would the old man work against the king and be such good friends with Adler’s daughter? Was this some kind of trap? Drake didn’t think so. He’d been investigating Rommel for the past few months. He’d done his homework, but he’d missed one very big detail. Mya was Princess Mykaleen, and each month she snuck out to see Rommel and Joett.
