Page 70 of The Princess and the P.I.

He nodded. “I know Sara had evidence of Robert’s wrongdoing. If you show me the texts she had, we can piece the case against him together.”

Fiona blinked. “Dad, you don’t have to—”

“Hey.” He cut her off, a teasing glint in his eye. “I may not have a leather jacket, eh? But—”

Fiona huffed out a laugh despite herself. “Papa.” She rolled her eyes, the word pulling her straight back to childhood, to a time when he was the only star in the sky.

And then he got to work. And Esi joined. And somehow, impossibly, the Addai family sat together, heads bent over screens and old notes and half-deciphered messages, putting together a case that had been buried for too long.

Esi lifted something. “This looks like a thing,” she said and held up the golden drive. Esi had quit her Maurice-help embargo, and now she worked tirelessly and spitefully with the mental acuity of four interns.

Fiona saw the golden drive glinting in the dim lighting, and her heart leapt. One place she hadn’t rechecked three times. After they scanned it the first time, Fiona’s embarrassment kept her from looking too deeply at the drive again. Maurice had called it Robert’s spank bank.

Fiona raced to the open laptop and pushed the cord in.

“It’s asking for Wi-Fi?” Fiona did not have the time to rummage through her notebook for Maurice’s Wi-Fi, which he had named Wu-Tang LAN, so she used her own hot spot.

“It’s a personal cloud,” Esi said. “Like a Google Drive you can walk around with. You can upload files from anywhere.”

“Yep, and there’s definitely a reason why he walks around with it,” Fiona said.

Everything looked the same. Sixty files of slippery bodies. Still, she would watch sixty videos of fake moaning for Maurice.

Except there were sixty-eight files. Eight new files in as many weeks since they skimmed this drive.

Fiona clicked on the last file, and her stomach lurched. Video taken this Saturday. Of an innocuous bridal shower. But that wasn’t even the most important thing. The place. She knew that place. Would never forget it as long as she lived. It was the black room of Club Dominie.

She clicked on the file before that.

A book club. In the same room.

Robert Thorpe was getting downloads of his mistress’s escapades in the black room.

His hard drive! He liked to watch. Fiona’s heart raced as if she’d run five miles.

“Why, Fiona? Why do we care about this?” Esi was looking over her shoulder, thoroughly confused.

Fiona didn’t answer. She was on a tear.

Fiona clicked on the fifth new upload, her eyes glued to the screen as the footage began.

Men and women in masks moved about, a chaotic blur of activity.

After twenty minutes, the camera panned, and there she was—herself and Maurice, looking almost unrecognizable.

She had just come on his hand, and he had kissed her like a possessed man. Good god, how he had kissed her.

“Fiona, is that you and Maurice?”

Esi’s voice snapped Fiona out of a mental detour. “You two look like different people!” Her sister narrated with the excitement of a football commentator. “Wait, he’s kissing another woman…Oh, I see you. Oh, you got her phone! Oh, it was sexy teamwork!”

Fiona held her breath. Sara paced back and forth after Fiona and Maurice left. She called someone.

“Who did she call?” Fiona mumbled to herself.

The video continued, and Fiona’s stomach tightened, bracing for impact. “Get out of there, Sara!” she cried, even though she knew what was coming.

A figure on the screen flickered into view, blurry at first, then sharpening. Sara moved, just slightly, tilting her head enough for the camera to catch the unmistakable curve of her profile. They were spraying something on the wall— W. H .—then Sara pushed the can out of their hands.

Fiona leaned in closer. “You can still make it.”

And then the figure in the camera faced the camera.

Damn. He was masked.

But she knew that build. Like he was born to strike an anvil. He was leaning forward, invading Sara’s space, throwing what looked like anointing oil over Sara’s body.

Sara hadn’t expected this. She hadn’t expected him.

Fiona’s throat tightened as she forced herself to keep watching, dread pooling in her chest.

The argument escalated rapidly. The man was demanding something.

The manuscript, Fiona guessed. Sara was backing away.

Shaking her head. In a horrifying instant, the man lunged at Sara, grabbing for her phone.

They tussled at the edge of the balcony, a desperate struggle.

Sara got out one deep scratch across the man’s face with something blurry in her hand.

And then, in a heartbeat, he pushed Sara over the railing. The finality of it, the casual brutality, left Fiona sitting in stunned silence for three minutes, unable to process the horror she had just witnessed.

The footage was damning. Fiona realized she was holding her breath. It was a direct hit, and it had been in their possession the whole time.

Fiona’s face was grim as she copied the video onto her secure drive.

The video needed to be in the hands of the authorities.

She didn’t know what to do with this information, but she was tired of waiting.

Her father had done a valiant job, meticulously gathering the evidence from Sara’s notes before disappearing downstairs to pray again.

The urge to feed him was high, primal even, but she knew he’d take it as an insult, as if hunger was some personal failing instead of an essential biological function.

She just didn’t like the frailty that had come over him.

—

The sun started to dip into the Potomac. Maurice had been gone all day.

Fiona and Esi sat in the dim hush of the living room.

“So, what, we just sit here like debutantes waiting for their dance cards to fill up while those assholes out there decide what to do with us?” Esi asked, gesturing vaguely toward the windows. “What are they waiting for? What do they need?”

“I think both in my suite and at Dad’s house they were looking for something,” Fiona said, rubbing her temples. “Something they think is incriminating. If you remember the video, they were arguing over her phone.”

“The manuscript,” Esi finished. “They think we have it. Except they’d be idiots to bust down the doors of DC’s only Black billionaire’s little brother.”

“They’re waiting us out?” Fiona guessed. “But they weren’t there when I went to Mark’s.”

“I think they followed Maurice out and came back here,” Esi said, shifting her feet. “What does his location say?”

Fiona hesitated, glancing at her phone. “It’s either that new sandwich shop or the police station.

” She flicked a glance at her sister, both of them understanding immediately.

One was benign. The other? Not so much. He could be turning in their father.

He could be in trouble himself. He’d been so cagey on the phone, his words clipped, like he was parceling them out under duress.

“This is so fucked up.” Esi shifted again, jittery.

Fiona got up, disappeared into Maurice’s room, and returned sometime later in one of the outfits his sisters had thoughtfully brought for her.

She was waffling between the Yes, I belong here outfit and the No, you cannot afford me one.

She leaned into option one, and when she walked back into the living room, she was holding out her phone.

She felt like a new woman. Not new since sleeping with Maurice. No, older, deeper. Like she’d remembered a version of herself that had existed forever.

“I’m tired of waiting, Esi. My best guess is the police station. If Dad ever stops praying, tell him I’ve gone.” She made a move toward the door.

Esi stood and held up a hand. “Good lord, girl, your father will tell you that you look like you’re about to meet the devil himself.”

Then Esi narrowed her eyes. “Try this.” Esi passed her a lipstick tube with the gravity of a surgeon handing over a scalpel. “Trust me, you want a matte red with that ’fit. And take those kitten heels off—hell, burn them . Slide into those Jimmy Choos like you’ve actually been somewhere.”

Before Esi could fix her hair, Fiona was already turning back toward Maurice’s room.

“Wait, where are you going?”

A memory hit her—quick, sharp. Maurice had another exit.

“I’m going to go do something. You tell me what moves out here.”

She ran straight for the bookshelf, scanning low, eyes searching, her boots tapping over the wood floor. Then—there. The book Maurice had smirked about last night.

She pressed it.

Nothing.

“Esi!” she shouted. “What door opened?”

A pause, then from the kitchen: “Uh, something just moved back here!”

Fiona bolted, skidding into the kitchen. A low, barely visible door was set into the wall.

Esi shook her head. “This man is so weird.” She pushed at the door. “And you’re not the least bit embarrassed to be fucking a magician?”

Fiona shot her a look but said nothing. Then, just as she reached for the door, something else caught her eye. As Esi shifted, the oversized sleeve of her shirt slipped down, exposing a tattoo curling over her shoulder.

Fiona stilled.

It was new-ish. A tattoo of their father’s stained glass Lazarus tableau—the lone decoration in their childhood home, which itself was a replica of the massive stained glass mural on the church doors. Kofi had been obsessed with the image. Fiona had hated it.

“When did you get this?” Fiona asked, her voice quieter than she intended.

Esi flexed her fingers, glancing down at the ink like she was seeing it for the first time. “It was my promise to myself.”

“To always remember Kwesi?”

“To never speak to you or Dad again.” Esi met her gaze then, steady and unflinching. “But now…now it’ll have to mean something else.”

Fiona didn’t know what to say to that. So she didn’t. She just swallowed and reached for the evidence their dad had prepared.

She ducked down and pushed through, nearly eating cement in her boots as she stumbled down a narrow, metal staircase.

The space was absurd—a sliver of basement, too small for storage, too cramped for anything useful.

At the bottom, another door. Metal. Hidden.

A release latch sat behind a fake electrical panel.

She pressed it.

The door swung open into a forgotten community greenroom wedged between properties, full of half-dead plants and abandoned furniture. A final tiny service door at the far end let out onto the next block, completely out of sight from the street Maurice’s place was on.

Fiona exhaled sharply, bent at the knees, and limbo-ed the hell out of there.

She was on the damned street! No fanfare, no spectacle. Just another pedestrian at dusk, blending into the city, gone.