Page 105 of Jaded Princess
Unconscious demand had me stepping back, as if hiding behind Theo could drown out what would happen.
Gordon caught my movements, however subtle they were.
“You’re next.”
Theo’s hand gripped my forearm. “Go ahead and try, Father. I’m not the seventeen-year-old I once was.”
Gordon turned to his eldest. “Trace, you understand what must happen.”
“I do.”
“That’s a good boy. You fled when you shouldn’t have. Stopped communications when the first thing you should’ve done was come to me. Made quite a few messes across the ocean that I’m left to clean up.”
What made a man so cruel and crafty, oh so willing to inflict pain, bow entirely to a higher force was beyond my comprehension. Yet here Trace was, ceding to his father without a fight. It made me wonder—
“Why’d you run?” I asked him. The question was startling, and Trace raised his chin to me.
“If you were just going to let your father do what he wanted, anyway. Take from you, why did you give him a reason? Why meet Drea?”
At the mention of her name, Drea’s Bambi eyes skittered back-and-forth in their sockets, finally resting on me.
“You’ve only given him more ammunition,” I said to Trace.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Trace said. There wasn’t a single crack to his guise as he regarded me, his father’s words having their effect.
I gripped Theo’s arm, praying Gordon’s intimidation tactics would continue bouncing off his scarred exterior.
“Here’s what you’re missing, dear girl,” Gordon said to me, his baritone burying deep into my blood cells. “Every time, my boys will come back to me. They. Are.Me. And as a result, they will never leave. Not fully. Not ever.”
“You’re not going down with them,” I murmured to Theo.
I pulled a bobby pin out of my shorts’ pocket. Because I’d practiced in mirrors—on Theo’s charter plane, at Rada’s, at Kai’s—I was able to stick it in the hole at the back of the necklace without looking down.
Theo registered my movements, his neck moving, then the rest of his profile, until he faced me dead-on.
And his expression registered fear. “Scarlet …no!”
* * *
Too late.
I pushed the button.
Theo lashed out, swiping my necklace and ripping it off my neck so hard and fast it burned, then stung as blood seeped through the rings of cuts the gold chain left behind. When it landed near a wooden barrel, Theo’s eyes stretched wider.
My gasp was cut short when Theo grabbed my elbow, tossed me over his shoulder and sprinted to the staircase.
Confusion was in full swing as the necklace pooled silently in the far corner, tiny green light flashing in-out-in-out, Gordon’s mouth opening and closing—he must be making sound, but I couldn’t hear it due to the clang of adrenaline rushing my ears.
As Theo sprinted up the steps, I spotted Trace screaming after us and pulling out a gun to shoot—
“Oh, God,Theo!”
That was me, screaming at Theo that Trace was going to fire at us—
My vantage point erased when Theo took the last step, but the sound of a bullet,another fuckingbullet from Trace, tore through the crush of blood swelling my ears and I swore it was headed for my back this time.
I couldn’t breathe. There was a sting of impact in my thigh, my carotid artery hit, blood seeping down my legs, losing life the same way a fish loses water. I bucked against Theo, but it was useless, because he wouldn’t stop. I was dying and he was running, unknowing of the hit, completely clueless that I was going to sag on top of him, dead weight since he hadn’t known to save me.