THEIR_VIRGIN_PRINCESS (35 page)

Dane stood, placing both hands on the table. “Do you want to
explain why you chose to cover this up until now?”

Dominic went positively arctic. “I didn’t cover up anything,
Mitchell. We just got confirmation today. At any point in time, she could have
bolted and she has the resources to disappear. I wanted her brought here so she
couldn’t escape. Besides, it was rather safe since Alea wasn’t in the palace.
Now she’s under guard, and I suspect you three won’t let her out of your sight.
She’s locked up in her room. She’s not allowed visitors.”

“I never said she couldn’t have visitors,” Tal said, picking
up that phone again.

Cooper didn’t wait for the order. He shoved his chair back
and took off running. He prayed Alea was safe and sound and locked away, but
his instincts were screaming otherwise.

Even as he shoved through the doors and into the vestibule,
he felt Dane and Lan beside him.

Whatever happened, he wouldn’t be alone.

* * * *

Alea looked down at the floor and wondered how long Oliver
had. He was bleeding badly, curled on his side. She couldn’t see exactly where
he was hit, but it had been somewhere in the torso, perhaps his stomach or
right at the bottom of his rib cage.

Oliver probably didn’t have long, but then she wasn’t sure
she had much time, either.

“You’re home for just a few hours but you’re already all
over my husband.” Yasmin stared down at the man she’d promised to love and
cherish, a disgusted look on her face.

“I have never touched Oliver. Not ever.” Alea tried to keep
her voice calm. Where was the guard? How had Yasmin gotten in? She looked over
to the door.

Yasmin’s lips curled into a wicked smile. She was dressed to
kill in all black, from her tight slacks to the shirt that clung to her. It had
a plunging V-neckline that showed off her nearly skeletal chest. Yasmin had
always been obsessed with being thin, but she was gaunt now. She sported a pair
of leather gloves on her hands. She’d obviously been concerned about leaving
fingerprints. “The guard isn’t going to help you, cousin. He was a little too
trusting of females. He let me get really close, so I shot him. Do you like the
silencer? It really helps. And of course you never touched Oliver. He never
wanted you, you stupid cow. Who would want you when they had me? God, Lea, you
were even in a brothel and no one wanted you.”

Panic got shoved down in the place of anger. “You were
behind all this?”

“Of course. Look, all of our lives, you’ve always gotten
everything. Poor little Alea. Her mommy and daddy died so she gets to be the
princess. You were ugly and fat and everyone felt sorry for you. But it should
have been me. I’m princess material. I should have been the one who lived in
the palace.”

Alea seriously wanted to slap the bitch. Yas was seriously
screwed in the head if she thought that losing her parents and being an orphan
had all been made better because she had Her Royal Highness in front of her
freaking name. But she couldn’t do what she wanted because that gun would take
out more than just Alea. It would take out her baby. Her baby with Cooper,
Dane, and Landon. She had to stay calm and give herself time until she could
find a way out or her men came for her. Someone
would
come for her. As soon as that meeting was over, they would be
beating down her door.

Unless they were still furious at her for what she’d done and
wouldn’t talk to her tonight. They might go back to their rooms and let her
stew. She wouldn’t blame them. She’d basically told Dane that she didn’t love
them. She’d put him in a horrible position.

Oh, god, she couldn’t die like this. She couldn’t die when
they thought she didn’t love them.

Everything she’d suffered before seemed to fade away. She’d
spent so much time holding her pain close to her that she hadn’t embraced the
love they gave her. Tears blurred her eyes.

She had to keep Yasmin talking. The balcony doors were open
to her left. Her bedroom was to her right. If she got the chance, she could
bolt one way or the other. Yasmin loved to talk about herself. “Why didn’t you
just have them kill me? Why have them take me to a brothel?”

She glanced back at the door, but then turned back, the gun
held casually in her manicured hand. “I didn’t care where they took you, but I
laughed my ass off when I found out it was a brothel. I had a blast thinking
about you taking it up the ass from anyone with a couple of pesos.” She
frowned. “They were supposed to ransom you. I was going to get a twenty percent
cut as a finder’s fee and for working Talib on this end. The assholes decided
to squeeze me. If you hadn’t been found when you were, I was going to be in serious
trouble. They were going to turn me over to Talib.”

“And you don’t think Tal is going to be mad that you killed
me now?”

She shrugged a little. “I’ve set everything up so it looks
like you killed yourself and poor dumb Oliver. You couldn’t handle the truth.
Everyone knows you helped your kidnappers torture those girls. No one will be
surprised you couldn’t handle the guilt. And Oliver was having an affair with
you. I’ll tearfully testify to that. His brother already thinks very little of
him. When he hears about this, he’ll think even less. He’ll open the checkbook
to me.”

“Is this about money?”

“It’s about everything, Alea. I’m not about to just accept
my place in the world. I fight for more, unlike you.”

Her heart was racing, pounding in her chest like a barreling
freight train. She was so mad, but that anger had to come second to survival.
Which safe haven was closer? The balcony. But the doors to the balcony were
made of glass. She would have to climb down the trellis. The bedroom was the
safer bet, but it was much farther away and lacked cover. If Yasmin was any
kind of shot, she would hit Alea in a second. What should she do? She had to
make the right decision. Her baby was counting on her. And she wasn’t the only
one with a baby.

“What about your baby, Yasmin? How could you kill the father
of your baby?” Keep her talking. She could still see the faint movement of
Oliver’s chest. He was still alive. She had to hope that he stayed that way.

A nasty laugh came out of Yasmin’s mouth. “Are you kidding?
I’m not pregnant. I’m not some dumb animal who’s going to allow a parasite to
suck me dry and make me fat. I pretend to be pregnant every so often and then I
tragically lose the baby. To soothe me, he’ll buy me whatever I want for a
while. I’m not wrecking my body for some disgusting infant.”

So pleading to her maternal side wasn’t going to work. Alea
drew a deep breath. Her cousin was lost, truly without any redemption. She
wasn’t sure how it had happened, but there was something missing in Yasmin that
had allowed her to become a true sociopath. Nothing Alea could do would save
her. The childhood they had shared had been a lie. The face Yasmin showed the
world had been a mask.

Yasmin sighed as though the whole exercise bored her to
tears. She reached into the pocket of her pants and pulled out a second pair of
gloves. “I need you to put these on.”

Yasmin tossed them her way, but Alea allowed them to hit the
sofa that came between her and Yasmin. The black gloves hit the cushions and
fell to the floor.

“Why?” It was obvious, but Alea would do just about anything
to put off that time when she had to make the decision. Her men just needed a
little more time. They would be here. She just knew it. She let her eyes roam
the room for anything she could use as a weapon.

“Because if you don’t, I’ll shoot you here and now.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Oliver move slightly,
his head coming up. He was trying to change positions, turning very slowly.

“It’s not going to work,” Alea said quietly.

“It is. Men in this country can’t believe a woman would do
anything terrible. I used to get away with a lot when we were kids. I’m just
moving on to murder. And after this, I’ll be set. The truth of the matter is, I
got lucky when those mercenaries found you because they killed anyone who could
have identified me as the person who set you up. I really owe them a lot. And
now I’ll get an even bigger slice of the pie because I’ll get Oliver’s
insurance money, since you’re going to go crazy and kill him.”

“I’m not going to cooperate.”

Oliver got to one elbow. She could see blood on his hands as
he pushed himself up. He was behind Yasmin, his stare finding her back and his
fists clenched, red dripping from his palms. How much had he heard? Did he know
she wasn’t carrying their child? Did he know she’d never loved him, wasn’t
capable of love?

Yasmin frowned. “Yes, you are because I’ll shoot you
otherwise.”

Another thing Yasmin rarely did was to really think
something through. All throughout their childhood, Yas had come up with
outrageous plans only to run up against a wall of logic anyone with half a
brain could have seen a mile away. She needed Alea to cooperate, but there was
no real incentive to, beyond making Yasmin’s job of getting away with double
homicide easier, and Alea just wasn’t in a giving mood.

“You’ll shoot me anyway, so I don’t see why I should help
you out.” Besides, if she moved, she left the relative safety of the sofa. It
was an antique with a high back that reached the middle of Alea’s chest. It had
been a piece from her mother’s childhood, handed down from generation to
generation from the seventeenth century. It would survive a bullet better than
she would.

Yasmin huffed a breath from her mouth in a frustrated sigh,
but a grim light hit her eyes, and she leveled that gun again. “Fine. I’ll put
them on you afterwards.”

Oliver was still fighting, now almost to his knees. “Am I
supposed to have shot myself in the head from ten feet away? You know the rest
of the world watches TV. Everyone knows that the police can figure out the
distance a gun was fired from. You need to be closer. You need to make this
look like I shot myself in the head and my arms aren’t that long, Yas. You
always sucked at math.”

If there was one thing Yasmin loved more than her clothes
and shoes and money, it was complaining about how terrible things had been for
her.

Yasmin’s face went a dull red. “Well, how could I compete
with the egghead? I just went to school. I didn’t have an army of tutors to do
my work for me.”

Yasmin had gone to the world’s most expensive private
schools, but that had never been enough for her. There was something deeply
empty inside her cousin, something no amount of money or fame or possessions
could ever fill. Even if Yasmin succeeded, she wouldn’t be happy. She would
find all the flaws in life and hold them tight to her because she believed the
world to be against her. She saw herself as a victim. It was how she excused
everything she did. It was how she managed to live with herself. What a
miserable existence. But it was all Yasmin understood.

Alea realized that she could have become just like Yasmin if
she’d kept trekking down the path to empty bitterness. She would have shut out
anyone who could have loved her, and resentment would have ruled her life. Her
men had saved her from that. The island had saved her, and now she wanted life
and love in the real world, too. It wouldn’t be easy, but nothing worthwhile
was. That simple truth was what Yasmin had never understood.

“This isn’t going to work, Yasmin. No one is going to save
you from your short sightedness this time. Put the gun down, and I’ll talk to
Talib about sending you to a place where you can get some help.” A psychiatric
hospital would be a good place for Yasmin. They could figure out if she was a
complete sociopath.

For the first time, Yas looked a little uncertain. “I can’t.
I’m not going down for this.”

“I disagree, bitch,” Oliver’s words were guttural as though
forced through sheer willpower from his chest.

Yasmin screamed and turned, her gun firing wildly, hitting
the balcony doors and sending glass flying out. The sound filled the room and
her ears, making her heart pound again. Now she had to decide which way to run
toward safety.

Oliver shoved at Yasmin, toppling her and sending her to the
floor. His dress shirt had turned a horrible muddy red and she could see the
gray cast to his skin. His hands shook as he reached for his wife’s throat.
Yasmin scrambled, the gun still in her hand. She kicked out and got to her
knees.

The bedroom was too far away, and Yas had a direct line of
sight. If she could get a shot off, it would likely hit Alea in the back.

Another little ping zipped through the air as Yasmin fired
wildly.

Alea dashed to the doorway, sprinting as she looked back,
trying to see what was happening with Oliver and Yasmin. Yasmin kicked out,
catching Oliver’s chin and sending him flying. Alea heard his body fall, then
another little ping.

She made it to the balcony before Yasmin turned. Alea forced
herself to not breathe as she moved around the glass at her feet.

“Where did you go, bitch? Do you think I won’t find you? I
don’t care about anything now. I just want to kill you! You wrecked everything!
Everything!”

Alea clung to the marbled walls, inching away from the door.
She had to get to the trellis and hope that she could still make it to one of
the trees that were planted close. When she’d been a child, she’d been able to
make it to the ground by jumping from the railing to the tree and shimmying
down. Her aunt and uncles had been horrified. Talib had called her a little
monkey. Who knew the skill might come in handy now. God, would the branches
even hold her?

She heard a door slamming open. No doubt Yasmin was
searching for her in the bedroom.

This was her one chance. She stepped across the glass,
crunching it under her shoes and stepped up on the terrace railing. Shit. It
was a long way down.