Page 8 of Broken Princess

Just like our lives, thanks to you, I thought bitterly. Every single person in this country was a pawn in her sick fucking game, whatever the hell it was.

I watched her slide the phone back in her pocket out of the corner of my eye, wishing she hadn’t kept her gaze locked on the screen the entire time. I couldn’t blame her, though. If I was the secret leader of the Order and needed to conceal my identity at all costs, I wouldn’t let anyone use my phone without watching them like a hawk. In fact, she’d probably only let me take it for a few seconds because I was her son. Anyone else would’ve been shit out of luck.

The few seconds she gave me weren’t entirely fruitless, though. In the split second I had the call log up on the screen, I’d managed to verify that her most recent call wasn’t to Willow’s number. I didn’t have time to memorize the whole number she’d called, but I saw enough to know that it had three nines at the end and was saved as a contact named ‘T’.

I looked back at the roaring fire, frowning as I wondered who T was. The only people I could think of whose names started with that letter were Teddy Rutherford and his father, but they were both stone cold dead, so it obviously wasn’t them.

Then again, T was probably yet another code name. He—or she—could be anyone in the world.

I couldn’t give up on trying to figure out who it was, though, because my mom was a total dead end. She wasn’t going to give me a single scrap of useful information regarding Willow’s real whereabouts. That left me with only one option.

If I wanted to have a chance in hell at rescuing Willow before it was too late, I needed to follow this lead, as tiny and fragmented as it was.

I needed to find T.