Death of a Prince | ✓

EP 21: CURIOUS CATS BITE DUSTS

EPISODE TWENTY

'curious cats bite dusts'

    

    

"YOU KNOW, YOU'RE the last person I thought of who'd kidnap me but also one of the firsts now that we're in this situation."

Keeping calm was my first priority, and hopefully getting that ringing in my head that was making me wince out as well. I did that by taking stock of my surroundings (a basement of sorts, damp and smelled — there was a door at the corner but no windows), the number of people in the room (four men with bored looking faces, two of them guarding the door), the number of exits (only one, guarded too heavily). Who could overpower me in seconds and what movement wouldn't shock them enough to shoot.

I had it in my best interest to know that if they're willing to kidnap someone in broad daylight with about as much witnesses — as one of those, a Scotland Yard police — then they had firepower. Or that they wholly believed they could overpower me in seconds.

From the odds tipping so heavily out of my grasps, I had no choice but to agree.

I sat up slowly, hissing through gritted teeth at the pound in my head. Nausea rose but I kept myself from vomiting and met Aoi Nakamura's eyes. I hadn't seen her at all during her own engagement party — its was either we were too focused on the doctor or getting caught, but the photos I had already obsessed over didn't do her looks justice.

Aoi Nakamura was doll like, sitting on the lone chair in the room. She had such a porcelain skin with a porcelain face; her button nose, her small but fully pouted lips. Her eyes were more doll-like than the rest of her — they were half glass. A cold emptiness that I couldn't see or figure anything out of. There was not a single emotion — fleeting or otherwise — I could glean from them.

And despite the built and fear the other men in the room possessed and surely showed, Aoi Nakamura who I couldn't read at all, was the most dangerous one in the room.

"And why is that?" she asked as soon as I was properly sat up. I was on a dirty mattress, pushed against a wall.

I didn't want to think what a mattress was doing in a place like this, but I leaned against the wall, a support I needed from the weakness in my system. I felt like I had cotton in my mouth, the nausea getting worse in my head, and there was a painful throb at the back of it that pounded, just at the top of the nape of my neck.

"You're kind of hard to read," I admitted, taking a lot of energy with just talking. "A friend of mine had a hard time trying to piece your profile, and even then it felt too glossy. Like a magazine where every word is fixed to one journalistic trajectory; that you work in the fashion industry, that you were all over in high class New York and Paris before you met Lorenzo Moretti. That you were the girl he was having an affair with, splashed across news sites before the year started. That the actress he was married to for four years, Eleanor Wayne, was caught leaving the house they had in California in tears, no wedding ring in place, and divorce papers filed as soon as the morning broke.

That despite all this bad drama on your spotlight, you kept your head high, your smile in place. Because you have the man in your corner, and you won the war." I shifted against my laboured breathing. Aoi's face had not changed at all, the polite mask still perfectly in place. I needed something, anything, and I had one card in my deck. I had no choice. "But that wasn't the real war isn't it? It was all to put things in place. Dominic said, in his video, that you were part of his past. His true past. And I only found out today what that was."

I exhaled, my head swimming. There was no concrete proof yet, all we had were pictures and suspicions. But I trusted my gut. I trusted my conclusion. I just needed to see one shift — a single shift on her face — to confirm it for me. I had to find something. I had to make this count.