The Princess

by Jones, Lisa Renee

  He narrows his eyes on me. “You know about the attacks?”

  “Yes. I know. He isn’t good right now.”

  “My God, Grayson,” Mia says. “If he’s that bad and she’s as bonded to him as you told me she is, then let her call him. Get him back. Make sure he’s okay.”

  Grayson stares at Mia, seconds ticking by before he pulls his phone from his pocket and punches a number before handing it to me. “It’s ringing.”

  I eagerly take the phone and listen as the ringing continues, and then goes to voicemail. “Eric,” I breathe out. “Please come back. Don’t meet with him tonight. Talk to me. Be with me. Take a breath and just think. Please. I need you and I don’t want to lose you.” I hang up and redial, but it goes to voicemail again. This time when the line beeps, I say, “Please come back to me, now, before you meet with him.”

  I disconnect and hand the phone back to Grayson before I walk into the living room, barely seeing the room, my destination the floor-to-ceiling windows. I stop at the glass and stare out at the inky night, not a star in the sky. There is just the darkness eating away at Eric, and holding us captive.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Harper

  Fifteen minutes after Eric leaves me in his apartment with Grayson and Mia, I’m fretting and then fretting some more over where he is and what he’s doing. I’m also still standing at the window of Eric’s apartment, watching the fog expand and consume all remnants of the city lights. The way this family consumes both Eric and my mother. “He’s one of the strongest people I’ve ever known,” Grayson says, stepping to my side.

  “But he’s human,” I argue, turning to face him.

  “Barely,” he replies softly. “More so with you in the picture.”

  “I thought you were more than his moral compass. I thought you were his best friend?”

  “Part of being his friend is seeing him clearly.”

  “And yet you just said he’s barely human. He’s always human.”

  “He doesn’t think like you and me. He lives with numbers first, and people second.”

  “Those numbers are his wall, his shield he hides behind and inside. And while it’s hard to explain why, I know him. I understand him, and in his mind, those numbers tell one story over and over. The Kingston family killed his mother, the only person he’s ever loved, besides you. Distance and your friendship allowed him to bank that, to compartmentalize his pain, but they pulled him back into their world. They brought it to the surface.” My fist balls on my chest. “And I helped them.” I turn back to the glass and press my hands to the bar there. “I came here to get him. I helped set this in motion.”

  “You didn’t know you were being used.”

  I can’t even look at him for the guilt spiraling inside me, a sharp blade that won’t stop cutting me. “I should have known. I knew the family couldn’t be trusted.”

  “My understanding is that’s exactly why you went to Eric. Because you knew they couldn’t be trusted and you felt he could help. And he is helping. He’s the reason you’re alive right now.”

  “I have coffee,” Mia exclaims, joining us, two mugs in her hands, one that she hands me and another that she hands Grayson.

  “Thank you,” I say, accepting the mug. “I think I’m going to lose my mind if I don’t calm my nerves. I’m really worried.” I eye Grayson. “He told me he hasn’t had an attack in years.”

  “Not since college,” Grayson confirms.

  “But he did today. Driven by the emotional trigger of his father. That was obvious.”

  He eyes Mia and seems to share a silent conversation with her before he refocuses on me. “The last time I saw him like that, he left Harvard the next day. He knew Isaac was pushing his buttons. He put distance between the two of them. He removed the triggers.”

  This comment doesn’t take me to a good place. “And yet he knew his father was a trigger, and he just went right to him.”

  “He’s not a college kid anymore,” Grayson reminds me. “He’s a man who walks into problems, rather than away from them. I know this. I see it every day.”

  “Is that good or bad?” Mia queries, crossing her arms in front of her. “Because if he really cares about Harper, and they, the Kingstons, I assume, tried to hurt her, the numbers in his head may calculate the odds of them succeeding next time as too risky. He might take the action, but the wrong action. We both know how much he hates that family.” She looks at Grayson. “A man held me at gunpoint and you tried to get him to shoot you instead of me. Think about Eric doing the same.”

  I don’t know what she’s talking about, or who held a gun to her head and I don’t ask. I can think of only one thing. She just said that Grayson tried to take a bullet for her. “Eric’s trying to take the bullet for me, too, in some way, shape or form.” I take a sip of my coffee, just to do something, anything. “I need the phone to try to call him again.”

  Grayson breathes out, scrubbing his jaw and dialing the number before handing it to me. It rings and rings, and I walk to a coffee table of black stone—a part of the black theme to the room that is as dark as I believe Eric’s past is—and set my mug down. Voicemail picks up and I leave a message he may never hear. “I need you to come back here alive right now. I need you, period. I do. Come back so I can tell you that in person.” I disconnect and dial again, and again, I get voicemail.

  Grayson and Mia are looking at me when I hang up and Mia walks toward me. “Let’s busy ourselves unpacking what I brought you so you won’t worry. Or so you’ll fill up some of the space in your mind where the worry wants to live.”

  A space the size of the city.

  “I have such a bad feeling about this night,” I whisper.

  “He will be back and safe,” Mia promises me.

  I need her to be right.

  No.

  I just need Eric. Here. Now.

  ***

  Eric

  In the short time it takes for me to get an uneventful update from Adam, and exit my apartment building alone, my phone rings with a call from Grayson. “Sorry, brother,” I murmur. “Not now.” I hit decline. If anything important is happening, the Walker team will contact me

  I place the phone on mute and cut right, walking toward my father’s hotel, bypassing the use of a hired car with a driver that might remember my travels. I push through the fog-laden, cold night for another three blocks and once I’m at the hotel, I dial my father.

  “Back of the building in the alleyway.”

  He snorts. “I’m not meeting you in the back of the hotel.”

  Just the sound of his voice cuts me all the way to my black soul he helped create. “You afraid of the dark? Good thing I’m not or Harper would be in a dark warehouse dead right now.”

  “I heard what happened, son. Why do you think I’m here?”

  “You mean you ordered someone to kill her.” It’s not a question.

  “You’re confused, son,” he says, using a familiar snide tone, “which is why we need to talk. Here. Now. In my room.”

  “Not a chance in hell, even your version of hell, where you’re the devil that always gets his way. You have five minutes and then I’m gone. Back service door.” I disconnect the line and a notification pops up with a voicemail from Grayson. I ignore it and head down the alleyway toward the back of the building. If my father won’t come to me, I’ll go to him, but on my terms, in my way. I walk to the back of the building, finding the alleyway dark, with a dim overhead light spiraling down on a dumpster. I take a position in a dark corner by the door I’ve named, where I’ll wait to discover how desperate my father is to talk to me.

  Three minutes pass and I become aware of someone else in the alleyway and he isn’t my father. He is, however, dressed in all back. He steps behind the trashcan and disappears. Waiting on someone, and of course that someone is me.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Eric

  The past…

  I
leave the social worker’s office on the heels of my father, who never looks back at me. When we get to his fancy car, he flicks me a look. “Backseat.”

  His message is clear: I don’t belong in the front with him. I want to punch him. I want to hurt him like I know he hurt my mom. God, I want to kill him. He must see it in my face, too, because he charges up to me, grabs my shirt and shoves me against the car. “You got a problem with me, boy?”

  “You’re an asshole.”

  “Yes. I am. I’ll teach you how to do it just like me and then maybe you’ll belong with us. Right now, you don’t. You forget that—you won’t like the results. Backseat.” He releases me and walks to the front of the car.

  I consider leaving, but my mother’s letter is still in my hand. She wanted this for me. She wanted him for me. I get in the car and when I settle into the backseat, my “father” says, “People die. You’re going to have to deal with it.”

  A swell of anger and pain fills my chest and I cut my gaze to the window. He starts the engine and I fight the burn of tears in my eyes. I won’t cry in front of him. Once we’re moving, I open the letter again and the first thing I read is: You will not fight your father. You will not go after him or anyone in the family. You’re smart enough to do it. You’re smart enough to hurt them, but DON’T DO IT. That is my final wish. That is my plea to you. Don’t do it. Because family doesn’t hurt family and they’re your blood, they’re your family now, until we meet again one day in a better place.

  ***

  Present Day…

  My father did exactly what I expected.

  He hired someone to shut me up, if not kill me.

  If my mother was alive, if she’d written that letter she wrote me so many years ago, knowing what I now know, she’d show the side of her that was a fighter. The side that went after a DNA test and forced me on the Kingstons. She’d tell me to fight back. She’d tell me to win.

  I stand in the dark corner, and I reach in my pocket and pull out a quarter, focusing on walking it through my fingers to calm my mind. Taking myself to that place I went all those years ago when I had to kill or be killed. It was natural then, an instinct that didn’t require honing, but I’m not in that place anymore. I’m in the one that came first. The one where my father lives, which makes this not quite as simple as the “kill or be killed” warfare presents. I’ll still kill if I have to, but I want answers.

  The alleyway is an unmoving box, not even a shadow flickers. I listen for the enemy, and the man behind that dumpster is an enemy. Seconds tick by and turn into minutes and he doesn’t move, but neither do I. Anyone my father hired worth any salt knows my skill level. Knows I’m here, watching this fool, waiting to act. One of us has to make a move and I decide what the fuck. I’m game. It’s been too damn long since I played a game like this one and I find I missed the hell out of it.

  I flip the quarter into the center of the alleyway and it lands and then clanks as it wobbles. It’s an invitation. Come get me. I wait then and wait some more, but there is no impatience in me. I don’t need to move to feel relief. The numbers in my head are running and running for me, calculating risk, assessing my next move. I don’t even flinch when the other man must decide he doesn’t like his odds, and darts out from behind the trashcan and starts running. Smart man. The odds were against him, but that hasn’t changed. I might still be wearing part of a suit, but I’m fast and I run behind him, yanking him back and shoving him against the fence in thirty seconds.

  “What were your orders?”

  “Fuck you,” the man growls.

  I smirk. “My mother was good and kind, unwilling to hurt anyone. In many ways, I’m not my mother’s son.” I knee him and he groans. “I’m my father’s son,” I add, “and I suspect she knew that when she asked me not to go after the Kingston family. She knew if I did, I’d destroy them. That’s who you’re working for, right?”

  “Fuck you again!” he shouts.

  “Again it is,” I say, giving him a repeat knee, this time with such force that when I let him go, he crumbles to the ground. He groans and moans, and when a homeless man wanders into the alleyway, I point at him, telling him he’s next if he doesn’t back off, and he runs away.

  My would-be attacker rolls to his back and I press my foot to his crotch. “What were your orders?”

  “To scare you.”

  “We both know that’s a lie.” I pull up his shirt and eye the gun there, complete with a silencer. “Who sent you to kill me?”

  “Your father,” he bites out and then tries to spit at me, like a fool. Obviously, my father doesn’t know how to hire a good killer, which works for me right about now.

  I reach for my phone and snap a photo of him and then grind my foot into his crotch. He screeches and rolls to his side. I grab his wallet. “You’re lucky I don’t want a mess to clean up tonight. I know who you are. I know how to find you. We’ll talk soon. That’s a promise.” I stand up and start walking.

  When I step out of the alleyway, Savage joins me. “I didn’t ask for your help,” I say, cutting left toward my apartment.

  “You didn’t need it either,” he says. “Which was kind of disappointing. I haven’t had a good brawl in like three days.” He doesn’t wait for a reply. “One of our guys followed you. I caught up. I’m your front line guy until Adam gets here. And there’s no interesting movement back in Denver. I just talked to him.”

  I open the wallet, glance at the name on the ID that reads Joe Melton, and then hand it to Savage. “He was sent to kill me tonight. I took a photo to confirm the identity matches the driver’s license. I’ll shoot it to Blake since I have his number.” We cut across the street.

  “Who sent him?”

  “My father,” I say, “who I’m going to leave squirming in his room, hoping I’m dead for the time being.” I pull my phone out to listen to the messages, and the minute I hear Harper’s voice, her soft pleas undo me yet again tonight. I go warm the only way her voice can make me warm, and then instantly cold with the certainty that this attack on me confirms that the warehouse attack on her was, in fact, an assassination attempt. We reach my building and I stop to face Savage.

  “Find out what you can on the guy who attacked me. Make sure your team knows that I believe we’re dealing with hired killers. And I need an hour alone with Harper.”

  “Understood,” he says, giving me a mock salute.

  I enter the building, and suddenly, I can’t get to Harper soon enough. I will not feel as if she’s safe until she’s with me. I head for the elevator and dial Grayson to make sure there’s nothing I need to know when I get there. The phone rings. And rings. And rings again. I try Mia’s phone in hopes that she’s with Grayson or at least talked to him. She doesn’t answer. My heart starts to race. What if that amateur back there was a distraction and I fell for it? Fuck. Everyone I care about is in my apartment. I start running for the stairs.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Eric

  I call Blake on my race up the apartment building stairs. “Get in touch with your man. I need to know my apartment’s secure and everyone inside with it.”

  “Hold on,” he says, without asking why.

  In the time it takes for him to reply, in the dead space that is my seventeen flights of stairs, I die over and over again. The idea that everyone I love could be in trouble, and that I let it happen, guts me over and over again; a blade for every floor I have to travel to get to them. My mind starts playing a series of numbers. They calculate the odds of me being set-up. The odds of Harper, Grayson, and Mia laying dead right now, which are too high. The odds of them being held captive at gunpoint. The odds that I can save them if they are kidnapped, which are too slim. I don’t like any of the numbers. I reject them all. There’s a reason Grayson and Mia aren’t answering their cells, that the numbers in my head fail to offer me. It doesn’t matter that the numbers never fail me.

  Blake finally returns to the line. “Eric,” he sa
ys, his tone grim. “Our man isn’t answering.”

  Those words gut me all over again, as in it feels like I’m literally having my heart pulled from my chest as Blake adds, “Savage is on his way up and I’m sending back-up.”

  “I’m about to exit to the hallway,” I say. “I’m going silent.” I disconnect and finish my upward charge and approach my floor, pulling my gun as I do, opening the door a mere crack when I want to explode into the hallway. I scan and find the floor clear, but there’s no man from Walker Security standing guard at my door either. Adrenaline and dread swell inside me and I shove open the stairwell door, exploding into the hallway and running until I’m at my door. Once I’m there I pull my key from my pocket and unlock the door. I then aim my gun and kick it open, to enter the foyer.

  “Harper!” I shout, moving into the room and finding the living room empty, but no one there with guns or dead bodies either. “Harper! Grayson!”

  “Eric!”

  At the sound of Harper’s voice, it’s like an angel singing me out of the hell that the past few minutes have shoved me inside. And when she appears in the doorway that leads to my office, her dark hair in a beautifully disarrayed mess around her shoulders, that swell of emotions inside me from minutes before now includes relief.

  “Oh God!” she exclaims, eyeing the gun, stopping in her tracks. “Why do you have a gun? What’s happening?” She looks wildly around the room.

  It’s then that Grayson and Mia exit the office, both in safe condition. “Oh God,” Mia gasps, echoing Harper from moments before.

  “Oh shit.”

  That male voice draws my attention back to the office, where a man now stands, holding a gun. A man that I recognize as Smith from Walker Security. “Why the fuck are you not at the door and why is no one answering their phones?” But I know even as I ask the question. My office has crap for service. It always has. It’s like a cold spot in a room, haunted for about ten reasons no one but me has ever known.