Page 64 of His Accidental Princess

“No, no. My daughter is just like you, and she’s only ten. She likes to go crying to her spineless father for everything, just like you go crying to that ex-fiancé of yours. And my ex gives in, just like yours does.Papa! Papa! Mom broke my arm! She killed my bird! She’s going to kill me! Help!” she cried in a false, high voice.

I swallowed over a sudden bout of nausea at the kind of abuse her poor daughter must have had to endure.

“Did you do all that?”

“I. Am. Her. Mother. I have the right to punish her!” yelled Sandhya.

I shook my head.

“But you don’t have the right to hurt her,” I said, with contempt, but she wasn’t even listening to me. She was lost in a world of her own.

“And what do I get for raising her? My own husband believes her word over mine. And he threatens to call the police if I don’t go away immediately. And then, he divorces me without even giving me any alimony! So I have to work for a living whileyouplay at being an adult all your life,you useless waste of space,” she screeched suddenly, her eyes focusing on me in a way that made me start trembling with fear.

I took a calming breath and kept talking to her, trying to distract her from her instruments of torture.

“So, you hate rich people?”

“Not of the male variety,” she purred. “But they only want girls of their own class.”

“You have Percy,” I pointed out.

She was dating Freddy’s son, wasn’t she?

Sandhya began to laugh, a crazy, scary laugh that made my throat go dry.

“Percy? Darling Percy… who happens to be the dimmest bulb in the box, and yet, who is smart enough to turn me down. Did you know that? That loser thinks he can do better than me! He took me out on one date after I arm-twisted him into it, and then, he stopped answering my calls. Butyou! You dump a man, break off your betrothal of so many years, and he still comes running after you. Howdoyou do it? Does your pussy have superpowers?”

I really, really hoped she wasn’t planning to check! I tried to cross my legs, but they were still tied at the ankles. Ugh!

“Why did you kill Vishal?”

It was time to get some answers before this crackpot stabbed me with the contents of that syringe or worse.

“That was all his fault,” she said promptly. “He lost his head.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing! I just talked to him. He was such a sleazebag, no? He had no friends in the commune because of that, so he was very easy to manipulate. One drink and he told me all about how you turned him down. I had to work on him for a while before he worked up the courage to put that chicken in your bed. I told him it was just like the time with the dead snake. But he liked you too much to do something so nasty.”

“Butwhy? Why would you do such a thing?”

“Jeez, relax! It was just a prank! And also, my way of telling you I didn’t like you,” she added, with a creepy grin. “How was I to know you were going to call in your own SWAT team?”

“Did Vishal get scared?”

“That was an understatement! He panicked and wanted to confess his part in the prank. So selfish. All he could think about was his job. He didn’t spare a thought for me or my future. Freddy would throw me out of the commune if he found out what I did, and then, where would I go? I told him to leave the commune before Samar and DV caught up with him. But he wouldn’t stop calling and texting me,” she said scathingly. “That’s why I had to get rid of him. Plus, it gave me so many opportunities to mess with your life.”

“How did that work out for you?” I asked sweetly.

She stared at me for a minute and then spoke in a very casual tone that belied the venom in her words.

“I will gouge your eyes out one by one with those shears,” she warned. “Don’t try to sass me.”

I shut up prudently and looked away.

“Do you have a special guardian angel or something?” she asked drily. “No matter what I did, you always came up trumps. The darling of the media, the heroine of the police. I felt like the Tom to your Jerry.”

I did have a guardian angel. A very fierce avenging angel called His Highness Digvijay Singh. And he couldn’t do anything to save me. I wished I had told him how much I loved him. He deserved to know that much. And that I didn’t really believe he was the killer. But there was no way to tell him now.

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