Heartless Prince: A Dark Captive Romance (Dark Dynasty Book 1)

by Stella Hart

  And god, was his family rich…

  The Kings were practically a national institution here. After amassing enormous wealth in the oil and petroleum industries a couple of hundred years ago, they now possessed the largest private fortune in the world, making even the Rockefellers look like peasants. Richer than God, richer than sin.

  The fortune was split between all the descendants and branches of the family, and despite nearly everyone being aware of their existence, the majority of them shied away from the media, opting to keep their lives as private as possible.

  Of course, this enigmatic behavior only added to their popularity due to the intrigue swirling around them, so they were a household name to most people. Our very own American royalty.

  I turned my attention back to Willa, who was still talking about them.

  “Honestly, they’re worth so much that they make me feel super poor,” she said. For reference, her family—the Van der Veers—were worth about seven billion dollars. Their main house alone was worth about forty million, not to mention all the other real estate they owned for different seasons and vacations.

  Greer looked at me and rolled her eyes heavenward with a good-natured smile. I grinned back. Like me, she was here on a scholarship after being born and raised in a family that always struggled to pay the bills. She knew what it was like to rub shoulders with the elite and come out feeling like she’d stepped into a particularly savage episode of Dynasty, and she liked to tease Willa and Mellie whenever they accidentally said something oblivious, just to balance things out a little.

  “Yes, I know how bad that sounds,” Willa added, playfully nudging Greer. “I’m just saying, that’s how filthy rich they are.”

  “Don’t worry, I get it,” Greer said.

  “Cool.” Willa clasped her hands together on the table in a pyramid shape. “Anyway, Tobias King is pretty much the patriarch right now. He’s the one who controls the most wealth out of every branch of the family. So he’s basically like the king of America. I guess that would make Elias a prince. He sure acts like one.”

  I snorted. “Please. We live in a democracy, not a monarchy.”

  “Maybe that’s just what they want us to think,” Greer said with her brows raised.

  “Oh, you and your conspiracy theories,” I said with a teasing grin. “Look, Elias King is just a stuck-up asshole with too much money. He can glare at me all he wants, but he can’t exactly hurt me or throw me in a castle dungeon like an actual prince could back in the day.”

  Willa worried her bottom lip between her teeth. “I don’t know. I agree with you about the Kings being arrogant asses, especially Elias—believe me, I’d know, because he’s friends with my brothers—but on the other hand, they’re still powerful as hell. I told you about Brad Wellings, right?”

  “No.”

  “He was friends with one of my older brothers. He got on the wrong side of a King a few years ago. One of Elias’s cousins, I think. Slept with his girlfriend. Next day, he was fired from his Wall Street job for no reason, and he couldn’t find a single lawyer on the entire East Coast who would represent him for unfair dismissal. Couldn’t find another job, either, even though he was really smart and qualified. He’d been blackballed. Last I heard, he had to move to Montana to work on a ranch.” She said the state’s name as if it were a dirty word.

  “Hey!” Greer said indignantly.

  “Oh. Shit.” Willa’s cheeks turned pink. “Sorry, I keep forgetting you’re from there.”

  Greer reached behind her and messed up her perfectly-styled blonde locks. “Now we’re even.” She snickered.

  Willa smiled at her, then turned back to face me. “Anyway, if Elias doesn’t like you, that’s not a good sign. He could ruin all sorts of stuff for you with nothing more than a phone call.”

  I sighed. “I hope not, because I have no idea why he doesn’t like me, so I can’t exactly do anything about it.”

  “Are you sure you’d never met him before my party last year?” she asked, forehead wrinkling curiously.

  “Hundred percent sure. It’s like he just took one look at me and decided to hate me.”

  “Maybe he has a thing for you,” Mellie said, leaning forward on her elbows. “It could be a love-hate thing. Like, he hates how much he loves you, and it drives him crazy.”

  “I seriously doubt that. Besides, that whole ‘boys are only mean to girls they like’ thing is so junior school.”

  “True. But I still think he might have a crush. I can’t think why else he’d stare at you all the time. He must think you’re super-hot. Which you are, by the way.”

  My cheeks turned warm, and I knew I was blushing hard. “Thanks.”

  “When was the last time you went on a date, anyway?”

  I shrugged. “A few weeks ago. That blond guy from my media class. I haven’t seen him again, though.”

  I’d actually been on several dates since I started at Roden. A ton of funny, interesting guys went here, and unlike high school, where I’d basically been invisible, they actually seemed to take notice of me. I couldn’t help but be a little concerned about my love life luck, though, or lack thereof.

  The dates always seemed to go really well, but the budding relationships would fizzle out right afterward with the guys never calling or texting me again. One of them even quite literally ran from me when he saw me walking toward him outside a lecture hall the other day, and I wasn’t even going to speak to him. I was just headed that way for a class. He actually looked afraid, as if I might bite his head off for ghosting me.

  No wonder I was still a damn virgin at the age of nineteen. It wasn’t like I didn’t want to have sex, it was more like the universe was conspiring against me in order to prevent me from ever having it.

  Or maybe I was just a terrible date.

  “So it didn’t go well?” Mellie asked.

  I gave her a rueful smile. “It was fine. Really good, in fact. But he stopped returning my texts afterwards.”

  Greer frowned. “What the hell? Isn’t this the fifth time this has happened with a guy?”

  “Sixth,” I said miserably. “Be honest, you guys. Am I boring? Or unintentionally mean?”

  “No,” my friends all said in unison.

  I shrugged. “I just don’t know why else these guys are all ditching me. It always seems to go well, so it’s almost like someone is paying them to ghost me. But maybe I’m missing something. Maybe I really suck.”

  “No, you’re great. They’re all just assholes,” Willa said.

  “Maybe they get pissed that you don’t sleep with them?” Greer added.

  I let out a frustrated sigh. “But I want to! I just figure I should wait until at least a third or fourth date so I know we’re really connecting. Is this really what the world is like now? You get ditched if you don’t immediately jump into bed with them?”

  “Um. Yeah, pretty much.” Greer pressed her lips together in a thin line.

  “No, don’t tell her that!” Mellie tossed a balled-up napkin at her. “There are some nice guys out there. You’ll find one eventually,” she added soothingly, turning her attention back to me.

  “I hope so. Anyway, what’s on everyone’s schedule today?” I asked, trying to change the subject to something less gloomy.

  “Back-to-back accounting and economics lectures,” Mellie said.

  “Same,” Willa chimed in. “That’ll be fun….”

  “I have to hand my article in and do some research for an assignment. What about you, Tatum?” Greer asked.

  I glanced at the clock at the far end of the dining hall. “I have a media class in an hour. Before that, I’m gonna go back to my room and have a serious Google session. I really need to come up with an idea for a paper for Professor Halliwell’s class.”

  “Is that your sociology class?” Greer asked.

  I nodded. “Yeah. The paper’s due at the end of the trimester and it’s worth sixty percent of my entire grade for the class. It's a really cool subj
ect, but there’s so much stuff to pick from. I can’t decide.”

  “Maybe we can help?” Mellie said. “I hear Halliwell is super tough.”

  “Yup. Someone told me she’s never given anyone an A. Ever.”

  “Jeez. Okay, so what’s the assignment subject?”

  “Urban legends.”

  “Ooh!” Greer said, clasping her hands together in front of her. “That sounds like fun.”

  “It is. We have to pick one legend and look at where it originated, how it’s transmitted, why it persists, what its purpose within our society is, what that says about our culture, and so on. It’s really interesting, and if we write about something local, we get extra credit. I was thinking about the killer in the back seat legend, because someone told me that started here. But I don’t know. I think a few people are already doing that, and I want to stand out.”

  Willa rolled her eyes. “Please don’t do the back seat one. That’s so played out. Besides, I’m pretty sure it originated in Indiana. I saw a movie about it.”

  “Oh, really? Crap.” I slumped back in my seat.

  “I have an idea, though,” she went on. “What about the Roden Strangler? That’s definitely a Connecticut thing.”

  My eyes widened. “Yes! Oh my god, I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”

  “The Roden Strangler?” Greer looked confused.

  “You haven’t heard about that?”

  “Nope. Born and bred out-of-state, remember?”

  “Oh, right, duh. It’s an old urban legend here. I think it originated around the sixties or seventies. Basically, it claims that the rate of young missing women is higher in New Marwick than anywhere else in the state. Especially around the Roden campus. I don’t think it’s actually true. We probably have the same amount of missing girls as anywhere else. But anyway, I guess someone decided to started a rumor that there was a crazy guy going around strangling all these women who disappeared, and it’s persisted ever since then.”

  “Yeah, so now people around here will sometimes say stuff like, ‘careful, don’t walk home alone at night or the Roden Strangler will get you’,” Mellie said.

  “Right. Did anyone actually ever get strangled?” Greer asked, her forehead wrinkled quizzically.

  “No.” Mellie frowned. “At least I don’t think so. There’s no proof suggesting it happened, because out of all the young women who’ve gone missing around this area, none of them have ever been found.”

  “Except that one in the eighties they wound up finding in a forest,” Willa chimed in. “But she wasn’t strangled. It was a drug overdose.”

  “So no one knows what happened to the rest of them?” Greer said, her eyes widening.

  I shook my head. “Nope.”

  “That’s so creepy. How many missing women are we talking about?”

  I frowned, racking my brains. “About four in the sixties, another three in the seventies, also three in the eighties. Not sure about more recent decades.”

  “Two in the nineties and another three since then,” Willa said. She was peering down at her cell phone. “I just looked it up. Camille Gorham went missing in 1992, Laura Cecchettini in 1999, Ali Ryan in 2005, Tamika Beck in 2011 and Kylie Burns in 2015. Three of them were Roden students.”

  Greer shuddered. “Jeez. That’s actually a lot of missing women for such a small city,” she said. “I mean, the population’s only a hundred thousand, right? That’s tiny compared to places like New York.”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t mean there’s a serial killer on campus. With most of them, there was some sort of background that could explain it. Like Kylie Burns. Apparently she had a major coke problem, and her friends were worried she was getting involved in some really shady stuff to pay for the habit. Also, Tamika Beck had pretty serious mental health issues. I know it’s horrible, but those sorts of things are way more likely to have contributed to them vanishing than some creepy old strangler legend.”

  “Yeah.” Mellie nodded. “That reminds me. Have you ever heard the other legend about why all these young women go missing? I think it’s way more interesting than the Strangler theory.”

  Willa frowned, then nodded emphatically. “Yes! Crown and Dagger!”

  I tilted my head to the side. I’d heard that name before, but I couldn’t remember where. “Who or what is that?”

  Greer clapped her hands together. “Okay, now that I can answer. A guy at the paper told me about them a few weeks ago. He said he doesn’t know if they actually exist, but they’re supposedly a secret society which recruits right here on campus. Men only. Very clandestine. Lots of shady rumors about them.”

  I frowned. I’d heard about a few secret societies here at Roden. They tapped upperclassmen in fall and had weird initiation rituals. Other than that, they were mostly just networking groups for people in similar fields. For example, Book and Quill was known to be a society for writers, and another one called Skull and Key was known to recruit law students.

  I’d never heard anyone at Roden talk about Crown and Dagger and who they recruited, though.

  “There’s always been a ton of weird stories about them,” Willa said, picking up where Greer left off. “Most of it is just urban legend. I think that would actually make a really good topic for your paper.”

  “You’re right. I’m totally locking it in,” I said excitedly. “Is there any proof they actually exist?”

  Willa and Mellie exchanged glances. Then Willa leaned forward and spoke in a hushed tone. “Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but my older brothers and my dad are in it. They were recruited when they were here, and apparently it’s a lifetime membership thing.”

  “Me too,” Mellie said, turning slightly pink. “My dad, I mean. He’s a member. My brother isn’t.”

  “Why can’t you tell anyone?”

  “We’re not supposed to talk about it. It’s all pretty silly, really, but still, my family might get pissed at me,” Willa said. “I can tell you a few things about them, though. They all wear a ring on their right hand with a Star of Ishtar engraved on it. Membership is also very exclusive. Unless you come from a very rich or very old family, you won’t get tapped. Oh, and like Greer said, it’s for men only.”

  I briefly glanced over at Elias and his friends. They all wore rings with a star engraved on them. Could they be in Crown and Dagger? Or were they part of some other secret club which also required ornate membership rings?

  I looked back at Willa. “What were you saying about the society and the missing girls?”

  She waved a hand. “Oh, that’s one of the legends. According to those who believe it, Crown and Dagger kidnapped all those girls. The story came about after they found that dead girl in the forest in the eighties—the one I mentioned earlier. Even though she overdosed on drugs, which was ruled as self-inflicted, she had a crown brand on her lower back. Authorities said it was just a sorority hazing incident that left the mark and closed the case, but people talk, and everyone knows it wasn’t a sorority. Some of them blamed Crown and Dagger.”

  “Creepy.”

  Greer nodded. “Yup. Also, Crown and Dagger’s motto is apparently Deliciae Dolor, which makes it even creepier. It’s Latin for ‘the delights of pain’.”

  Willa rolled her eyes. “That’s just a rumor. My brothers both said it’s bullshit.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. They said Crown and Dagger is the same as every other exclusive secret society. Just a bunch of rich guys getting drunk and partying hard.”

  Greer frowned. “I dunno. I’ve heard they’re hiding a lot of really shady shit.”

  Willa sighed and rubbed her temples. We all knew her well enough by now to know that this meant she was about to deliver a long, critical monologue.

  I leaned forward in my seat, waiting with bated breath.

  “Trust me on this,” she began. “Almost everyone likes to believe there’s all these deep, exciting secrets about the real order of the world out there. Something only a chose
n few can know, hidden in exclusive clubs, arcane riddles or ancient paintings. It makes the world seem way more interesting than it would if everyone knew the truth: that there’s nothing. No secrets. No esoteric elites who run the whole world and control every aspect of every government.”

  “But how do you know that?” Greer asked, raising a skeptical brow.

  “Because I just do,” Willa insisted. “All those secret societies… all they really do is have wild parties, get a few bones thrown to them by politicians for making campaign donations, and ensure their power mostly stays within their ranks via family and company mergers. That’s no secret, though. Everyone knows the rich work to keep themselves rich, and everyone knows they donate to political campaigns to make a few things go their way here and there. But they aren’t hiding anything like messages written by God, or some Renaissance sculpture that gives them directions to the fountain of youth, or a code that fills them in on the meaning of life.” She paused to take a breath. “So I guess that’s the real secret: that there is no secret. Yeah, the world is unequal, and yeah, it sucks. There are lots of ‘haves’ and way more ‘have-nots’. That’s just a boring, open fact.”

  “Then why are all the rich dudes in these societies so secretive about them?” Greer asked, pouting slightly. She loved conspiracy theories, and she clearly didn’t like hearing that something like this might all be bullshit.

  Willa shrugged. “It benefits them to be shrouded in mystery. I guess it helps them maintain their positions.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “How?”

  “Well, if everyone else thinks they have all these big, dark secrets that they’ll never personally know, and that they’ll always be on the outside, they’re less likely to try and get a look in. Most people will think there’s no point because they can never join the club or know the secrets. So they don’t bother trying, and all these rich old white dudes stay put.”