Page 34 of The Princess and the P.I.

Maurice threw darts at the board in the corner of his favorite hole-in-the-wall. He’d left his office because sitting there felt like slow asphyxiation. Every time he glanced at the couch, he saw Fiona. Saw himself sinking into her.

Beautiful, he could have resisted—shelved somewhere distant like a bottle of something French and unpronounceable.

No, Fiona was…and this sounded embarrassingly straightforward, but she was good.

Not the sugary, Sunday school–type shit, but in the marrow-deep, unshakable way that made a man like him, who had, after all, made a profession of strategic moral ambiguity, feel small and shabby by comparison.

Case in point: just last week, they’d found a wallet outside the MGM casino—one of those fat, bulging ones, practically begging to be relieved of its contents.

Maurice, whose light-fingered tendencies hadn’t fully retired with his teenage years, had one thought: Let’s fucking go.

But before he could even reach for it, Fiona’s voice cut through like a school bell. I wonder who this belongs to? she’d said. It might as well have been a prayer. She deserved more than him, more than the very thorough, frankly gymnastic cheek-clapping he’d planned for her on that couch.

He didn’t know how to walk back what they were doing.

That night in her suite, when she laid him down so gently, she’d probably saved his life.

His thoughts had been on the pills, velvet-tongue oblivion.

He wanted them in a way that made him grit his teeth at night, and it scared him—the single-minded pull of it, how it could swallow everything else.

Just one night of nothing, Maurice.

One night of forgetting.

She’d seen him crying, scared, overwhelmed by what the world expected of him, and hadn’t run. His throat was thick thinking of the fragile intimacy of it. For that single night of tenderness alone, Fiona had made a devotee of him.

He saw her with such clarity, but Fiona didn’t know who she was or what she wanted. Maurice clocked her sister as controlling and dismissive from the jump, and Fiona just bowed her head.

Who am I to get into their family business?

But the difference between Fiona with her family and Fiona in literally any other context was starting to feel almost whiplash-inducing to Maurice. Which one is the real her?

He took a big gulp of his warming beer. That the Jiggle Joint was well past its prime was an established fact to everyone in Prince George’s County.

The smell of stale beer and Old Bay seasoning relaxed him, though, and with its sticky floors and dark wood paneling, old blues crooning over the speakers, it was a place that didn’t bother with pretensions.

Insomnia had robbed him of his good sense.

He had to get his mind off Fiona’s mouth closing around his thumb.

God, her touch still buzzed under his skin, the heat between her legs when she ground herself into him.

It was ludicrous how thick and lush she felt under his palms, how beautiful she looked arching and open for him with the neon sign of the vape shop tinting her skin hot pink.

She was going to jail—at least for stealing a fifty-million-dollar vest, and if he couldn’t break this case, then murder to boot.

And the only thing on Maurice’s mind lately was what else he could take from her.

But he would have taken whatever soft, wet punishment she’d given him on that couch.

He would take her apart with his hands and with his mouth and with every desperate, selfish thing inside him that wanted to keep her. And that was why he never would.

She deserved more. He’d make it out clean this time. Leave a woman better than he found her. Fall resolution, scribbled in invisible ink: keep your damn hands off Fiona. No matter how hard she sucks on your fingers .

He picked up a set of darts from the small, scuffed table beside the dartboard. As he lined up his next throw, a dart whizzed past his ear and landed just off-center. Maurice whirled around, and Detective Ryan tilted his head.

“Always running back to the same places,” he said.

“What are you doing here?” Maurice asked.

“What do you mean? I introduced you to this place.” Ryan smiled.

“But I got it in the divorce,” Maurice said.

“I heard Robert Thorpe’s wife hired you to sniff around the case,” Ryan said, cutting right to the chase.

Maurice threw the dart. It hit dead center with a satisfying thud. “Your information’s old. She found religion.”

Ryan snorted. “That cult?”

“That cult,” Maurice echoed, already lining up his next shot. The dart flew, landing just shy of the bull’s-eye.

“Man, their pockets are deep,” Ryan continued, circling like a shark around Maurice. “I’d hate to have those folks after me.”

Maurice flicked his eyes toward him but stayed quiet. No point giving Ryan anything. “There’s another dart board across the bar, Ryan.” Maurice tried to dismiss him.

“That girl…is she your client or something? Surveillance team have you two out at a nightclub? Look…I get it. She thicker than a bowl of cold grits…but this ain’t a good move.”

“What girl?” Maurice asked.

“All right.” Ryan sighed and stepped closer, giving up on that angle. “Look, no matter what went sideways between us, I wouldn’t wish that Tameka case on my worst enemy.”

Maurice threw another dart. It missed the board entirely, crashing against the wall with a dull thud.

Ryan kept going, his tone casual, almost friendly.

“Been talking to those podcast people. They want dirt on you, man. I told them no way. We’re not releasing any files from that night.

Your blood alcohol level…You were high as giraffe pussy, my friend.

” He chuckled, low and mean. “But I said no way. I wouldn’t turn on one of my boys. ”

He paused. “Oh…but you’re not one of my boys anymore, are you?”

“You better tell me what the hell you’re getting at.” Maurice’s next dart whizzed past the board and crashed against the clouded windows.

“Okay, I forgot you don’t like the cute shit. Tell me what you’ve got on that woman, and I can lose that thick file on the Tameka case. No one has to know how the church iced you out. Outsmarted you.”

Maurice’s breath hitched, just for a second. He felt the world tilt, slow and heavy, dragging him back to that night—the ransacked house with graffiti everywhere, the blood in the snow, the sound of church bells echoing in the dark.

Ryan smiled, slow and sharp as a switchblade. “That can stay top secret…if you help us close this up nice and neat.”

The offer dangled there.

Damn.

He wanted it. It would be so easy—one word, one lie, and the questions would stop. The podcasts, the Tameka file, the church—they could all vanish, like breath in cold air.

“There you go…” Ryan said, smiling like a man who’d already won.

—

Esi drove for twenty whole minutes talking about the horrors of single motherhood. She was never a single mother, but she wouldn’t let that stop her expertise.

Esi kept saying their father had a plan to save Fiona, to get her out, off the hook, scrubbed clean. But—she said this part slowly, heavily, like Fiona was bending her fingers back one by one—“ You’re not going to like it. It’s David.”

Of course it was David. Of course Kofi would try to barter her off like livestock at a holy market.

David’s sermons meandered and never quite landed. She, and the entire congregation, endured him more than they enjoyed him.

Fiona’s lip curled. “But I don’t like him.”

“No one likes him. That’s his problem. They still love Kofi. He must think marrying you makes him legitimate .”

Fiona thought of Maurice, the way he shrugged like nothing in the world could penetrate him. She tried it on. She needed some protection. “What am I getting out of this? A lawyer?”

“David is offering anything,” Esi said. “Everything.” Fiona’s sister went quiet for a minute. “Just know that Dad is going to try to pitch you tonight. You don’t have to say yes.”

Fiona looked out the window.

“Says the woman not facing federal prison.”

When they rolled into her father’s driveway, Fiona’s shoulders dropped three inches.

Fiona had been gone only six weeks, but already her father’s house smelled like someone else’s home. It was also strange to see the house full with everyone. Well, everyone left.

Fiona walked past her brother’s room, then backed up slowly, turning the cold doorknob.

This room was off-limits to all of them.

It was a silent agreement. Do not touch anything in his room.

But Fiona wondered if his sweaters still smelled like him and if anyone had fixed his Lego reproduction of New York City.

The room was cold and stale. Pictures of Ghanaian pop stars and American muscle cars dotted the walls. Even frozen in time like this, the room felt sunnier than hers. Everything was just as he’d left it—except it wasn’t. There was something wrong.

Fiona caught a glint of something gilded in the corner, partially obscured by an old chemistry textbook. It was garish, kitschy—a strange fit in her brother’s otherwise practical world. Slowly, she reached out and set it upright.

It was a photo frame.

Kwesi stood smiling in the photograph, his arm casually looped around a young woman. Thin, awkward, her olive-toned skin offset by the gleam of thick, brutal-looking metal braces stretching painfully across her teeth.

The young woman’s eyes had been gouged out, scraped away with violent force. The jagged scratches cut deep into the glossy surface, leaving behind dark, empty voids where her gaze should have been.

Even with the manic gouges in the eyes, Fiona knew that face.

Sara Al Haddad.

—