Page 93 of Royal Games (The Royals of Monterra)

“Tracker?” That seemed familiar.

“After you got the postcard, Rafe had his team install a tracker on your collie key chain.” It was a leather figure of a shepherd collie, like Laddie. He could have easily put something inside of it, and I never would have noticed. I remembered that morning when my keys had gone missing, and how Rafe had been the one to find them. He must have done it then.

“Why didn’t he tell me?”

“He thought it would make you mad.”

It did make me mad. He had promised not to put a tracker on me.

He promised not to put it on your phone.

So he used a technicality to lie? Okay. He didn’t put it on my phone, but he was still tracking me.

Which made it so that he could save your life.

True, which I was obviously grateful for, but part of me still felt betrayed.

“How long has it been since ... everything happened?”

“Two days,” Max told me. “They’ve had to keep you sedated because you were having night terrors that were worsening your injury.”

Fantastic. Rafe had been gone for two days, and I was now a mental basket case.

Suddenly my eyes felt heavy, like I couldn’t keep them open. I heard Aunt Sylvia say that they would be back soon, and then I fell into a dreamless sleep.

I woke up screaming, still inside the trunk, not able to get out. Nurses and a doctor ran in to check on me and tried to reassure me, telling me I’d had a nightmare. The doctor said that it was normal given the trauma I had experienced, and he recommended that I see a psychologist when I was released. He left a referral card on my bedside table.

It was pitch black outside, which meant it was probably the middle of the night. There was no way I was going back to sleep.

I still couldn’t believe Rafe was gone. I mean, I would get over the tracker thing. Was he worried that I wouldn’t?

And if I’d said those things to him, that I didn’t love him and I wanted him to leave, I was obviously out of my mind. I didn’t mean them. Didn’t he know that I didn’t mean them?

I had always thought that he understood me so well. How could he not know what his leaving would do to me?

Didn’t he know how much I needed him?

“Knock, knock,” a soft voice said at my door. “I heard you were awake.”

“Whitney?”

She came into my room wearing a hospital gown and a bathrobe, pushing a small, wheeled, see-through bin that had her baby inside. “Auntie Genesis, meet Marco Rafael.”

The baby was wrapped up in a blanket like a burrito, his little head covered with a blue knit cap. “He’s so small!”

“That’s what happens when they come early,” she told me, putting him right next to my bed so I could see him. “Fortunately, he was strong enough and far enough along that he didn’t even have to go in the NICU.” I reached out to touch the skin on his cheek with my fingertips, the only parts of my hand that weren’t bandaged up. His skin was the softest thing I had ever felt.

“He’s so beautiful,” I breathed, looking up at Whitney.

“I know.” She smiled, sitting down in the chair that Aunt Sylvia had occupied earlier.

“Why did you choose that name?”

“We didn’t quite make it to the hospital, although Rafe did his best. Marco delivered this little guy in the backseat of Rafe’s SUV. I don’t recommend childbirth without an epidural, by the way. Anyway, I was so hopped up on pain that I demanded he be named Marco Rafael after the two of them, and Christopher was so relieved we were okay that he was fine with it. So Marco it is.” She put her hand on top of little Marco’s chest.

I started to cry.

“What is it?”