Page 63 of His Accidental Princess

My head rocked to one side with the force of the slap she landed on my face. I backed into the wall as much as I could, but there was no escaping her as she knelt close to me and pinched my cheek.

“Don’t you scoff at me, you pampered royal cunt,” she said calmly.

Then she moved away and rubbed some lotion into her palm.Mylotion. The one I kept on my kitchen counter.

I looked around me slowly and bit my tongue to keep from provoking her again.

I was in my living room, next to my coffee table. And on it, was a syringe. A full syringe. I didn’t know what it contained, but I didn’t want to find out. And on the floor next to the coffee table was a long length of cloth. Probably a saree. And a dangerous-looking pair of garden shears.

“That’s in case you try any stunts,” warned Sandhya, nodding towards the shears. “I’ll gut you from chest to navel in one stroke if you so much as twitch wrong. You’ll bleed to death before I even walk out of here.”

I laughed softly.

“You’re never walking out of here, and that’s a promise.”

Sandhya shook her head and tutted a little.

“So much attitude. It must be all that blue blood. Do they send you royal kids to some sort of training school for the rich and clueless? With special lessons on how to be arrogant?”

“Why?” I asked curiously.

She tilted her head to the side like a confused bird.

“Why what?”

“Why did you do it? Why are you doing any of it? I loved you like a sister, Sandhya.”

“You’re very loose and easy with your affections, Tasha. How can you love me if you don’t even know me? And baby, you know nothing about me,” she said with a feral smile.

“You’re right,” I admitted. “The Inspector asked me whom I had pissed off. Let me ask you the same question. What did I do to piss you off to such an extent?”

She shrugged in reply.

“You exist,” she said simply.

“I’m going to need more of an explanation than that, Sandhya. You can’t just kill me without telling me why.”

She sighed dramatically.

“I guess you’re right. But I don’t even know where to start. You.Exist. In a world of privilege that I can’t even begin to comprehend. The minute you turned up on Freddy’s doorstep, it was all Tasha this and Tasha that. Like you were some sort of princess.Oh, wait,” she said sarcastically.

“It had nothing to do with me being a princess. Freddy loves me like a daughter. And he felt sorry for what I’d just gone through.”

“What did you go through? Oh, yeah. You knocked your mother out and had her thrown in prison. You ungrateful bitch! That’s the thanks you gave the woman who carried you for nine months and brought you into this world?” she spat.

Umm, was this nutcase upset on my mother’s behalf?

“What does that have to do with you?”

“I’ll tell you what! I have a daughter just like you. Another ungrateful bitch who doesn’t know a good life when she has one. And she’s the reason I’m living here all by myself, with no one to love me,” she ranted.

“Sandhya, you’re living here because you’re recovering from alcoholism. You told me so yourself,” I pointed out.

She waved that aside.

“Pfft! That was just a story to make everyone feel sorry for me. And it worked for a while until you came along with a bigger sob story, and suddenly no one wanted to talk to me. You were so much more interesting. The poor little rich girl,” she mocked.

Then she shook her head.

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