Page 10 of A Princess, Stolen (A Kiss of Revenge, Blood, and Love #1)

“Staten Island,” I whispered, aghast. That was in the middle of nowhere. People were disappearing on Staten Island! Whole buildings were disappearing on Staten Island. At least that’s what Penelope and her Upper East Side friends said.

With shaking hands, I opened the car door, something I had never done before—opening a car door myself. “Good evening, sir,” I tried to say politely, but my voice broke. The mustachioed Indian only gave me a fleeting glance. “Can you drive me to Staten Island?”

“Hm,” he muttered in agreement and turned on the meter.

“You’ll find money in your coat pocket.” The man I was speaking with on the phone was not the taxi driver. He was further away, somewhere out there, but that was not reassuring.

I got in and slammed the door.

“Where to exactly, miss?” The driver didn’t even turn around.

It was strange because when I was out with Dad, people showered me with attention and compliments. “I…”

“Brielle Avenue, corner of Babe Ruth Stadium,” the man on the phone said again.

I repeated it. Now the driver behind the wheel turned to me. “That’s a lonely place, miss. If anything, there are a lot of riffraff hanging around.”

“I…I’m meeting…a friend there,” I said hastily, surprised at how swiftly that popped out since I usually valued honesty so much.

The taxi drove off and I wanted nothing more than to hang up the miserable phone call, jump out of the car, and run back to Dad.

The driver remained silent and turned the radio up.

It was playing “Hello” by Adele, a song that Dad and I loved, but all I could do was stare at the elephant god, Ganesha, dangling from the rearview mirror.

On the other end of the line, I heard the man breathing. It sounded heavy and deep as if he was shaking off tension. “You did well, my heart.”

His calm, dark voice paralyzed me. I stared straight out, but there were only blurry, colorful points of light.

“Don’t call me that,” I replied quietly but firmly.

He laughed a strange laugh, staccato, cold, and superior. “The two of us have more in common than you can imagine, but you’ll find out all that. We’re only at the beginning of our journey.”

The word journey made me think of Rosewood Manor and how I probably wouldn’t be there this summer, maybe never see it again.

The fear of not making a mistake so as not to put Dad in danger gave way to something else: The sheer dread of what they were planning to do to me.

But even in that fear, he wouldn’t leave me alone.

“Talk to me. Say something nice. Pretend I’m that friend you’re meeting and never, not once, mention the word Hampton.” He took another deep breath and my stomach clenched.

“I don’t want to talk.” I was completely dizzy. I still couldn’t think clearly.

“Then I’ll tell you something. You know little Sophie, right? Delilah Jordan’s niece?”

“What about her?” I asked, alarmed, recalling Delilah’s wide eyes. God, please make sure the little one isn’t hurt!

“Well, she helped us get your phone number. In the broadest sense, obviously. Delilah did the rest. Not with any bad intentions, of course.”

It was still a shock. “How?”

“Oh, it was simple. Miss Jordan comes and goes at the same time every day. We’ve been watching her. How does she spend her evenings? Who is important to her? Who does she visit regularly?”

“The home. You were at the home where her dad is staying.” Maybe that’s how they got Delilah’s cell phone number. “They went through his things.”

“Call me Isaac, little lady. It’s irritating when you speak so formally to me. I’m only twenty-seven.”

It sounded like it was the truth. But if it was, it wasn’t good that he was revealing so much about himself.

The driver took the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River, and suddenly, I felt buried alive in the narrow space. “I don’t even know you,” I replied shakily.

He laughed again, that laugh as cold as permafrost. “No, of course not. But you’d better do what I ask of you, Willa Nevaeh Rae. And that’s going to be a lot soon.”

His words sickened me. He also knew my middle name, which hardly anyone knew. And he had said it so familiarly like we had some kind of relationship. An intimate relationship even.

“Who are you?” I whispered, looking out as if he was there in the tunnel, under the river, in the blinding lights of the cars coming toward us.

But that was nonsense. Or was it? I stared out the rear window to see if he was following us, but I couldn’t see the driver of the car behind us.

And even if I had, I wouldn’t have known if it was him.

Suddenly, I felt like I was running out of oxygen. The heat was building up under my raincoat and I could feel sweat trickling between my breasts.

“Do you know what it feels like to have to scrounge your food from a garbage dump?”

“No.”

For a moment, there was a hissing sound in the line and I hoped the connection would simply break because of the tunnel, but the network stabilized again.

Isaac continued. “I’ll tell you. It’s like you’re the scum of scum.

The lowest filth, the cockroach that everyone likes to crush under their soles.

Sometimes, the putrid stench of the garbage is so pungent that your eyes swell shut.

Sometimes, rats bite you, and for days, you wonder if the wound will become infected and your fingers will rot off like your buddy’s.

” His voice dropped an octave. “Have you ever watched anyone die, Willa Nevaeh Rae?”

“No,” I whispered. The last bit of courage in me sank.

I unexpectedly recalled the Lindbergh kidnapping.

The infant was found dead in a dumpster six weeks later even though his father had paid the ransom.

What if they killed me on Staten Island?

What if Dad never discovers what happened to me?

I swallowed several times. He would die of grief.

My gaze fell on the ring’s ruby heart and the red turned into a pool of blood before my eyes.

If they killed me, his sacrifice would have been in vain. Mom would have died in vain!

“Are you not well, miss? Should I pull over?” The driver’s voice pulled me back from the nightmare, but it was not over.

“No, I…I’m fine.” I hadn’t realized I was crying. I quickly wiped my cheeks but left my sunglasses on.

“Hey, little lady! Don’t lose your nerve, got it?”

“I don’t mind, miss. I could pull over…”

“No, I…really, I’m fine. I just…I just really need to get to Staten Island.

” I peered out the window and only now realized that we had left the tunnel.

We were on the New Jersey Turnpike and the distant city lights flashed by, blind eyes that didn’t see me.

For a few seconds, there was silence on the other end of the line even though I could still hear that breathing that sounded so heavy as if the person had been hunting me all his life and had finally caught up with me after an exhausting marathon.

“Do you know what I’m looking forward to?” he asked at some point.

“No.” I touched the ring fearfully and felt a rough, sharp spot.

“To you.”

His intimate, low voice crept into every cell of my body. To you. To you. To you . I wanted to throw the phone out the window, but I merely gripped it tighter.

“I wonder what you’re like.”

Suddenly, I thought I knew what lay beyond the concrete threat.

It was a feeling of torment and being driven, of wanting to have something and not getting it.

And anger. As if I had stolen something from him that he had to get back.

As if he wanted to strangle me with one hand and explore me with the other to learn something about me, to find out what I had that he didn’t.

For a moment, I closed my eyes to block him out, but I couldn’t.

I barely noticed that we were taking the Goethals Bridge.

It wasn’t until the driver stopped at a tollbooth that I awoke from my fearful paralysis. I had lost all sense of time.

“I’ll include the fee in the fare,” he said without turning around.

I nodded weakly. I caught his eye in the rearview mirror and he looked at me searchingly, but he couldn’t see my eyes because of the sunglasses.

“You’re as white as a sheet, miss.”

I wanted nothing more than for him to solve the situation for me.

To see the situation I was in and refuse to let me get out on Staten Island.

Then it wouldn’t be my fault if this plan failed.

However, he turned his gaze back to the road and the moment was over.

Besides, if something went wrong, they’d probably kill Dad no matter whose fault it was.

I briefly considered writing HELP on my skin with eyeliner since I didn’t have any paper in my purse but even that seemed too risky. What if the driver asked me what I was doing? Or maybe said HELP out loud?

No, that was out of the question.

“Where are you?”

I looked out. “Staten Island. Bradley Avenue,” I read off a street sign we passed. We had left the four-lane freeway.

“You’re almost there, little lady.”

Bradley Avenue led through a suburban-like neighborhood, and at the end of the street, the driver turned onto Brielle Avenue.

My heart was pounding. Pounding and pounding faster and faster.

This straight road led to solitude. Thick trees grew on both sides, but what lay beyond, I couldn’t see in the darkness and I didn’t dare ask the driver.

When he stopped at the corner I had requested, I almost started crying again and wondered when I had stopped. I didn’t want to get out because I might have allowed myself to be driven to my place of death.

“We’re here,” I stated as I dug the money out of my coat unable to control my fingers.

“He can keep the change.”

“Keep the change,” I repeated, trembling, and gave the driver the bills. Absurdly, I recalled what my dad had said about me when I was eleven. Willa is a good child. Dreamy, absentminded, but easy to control .