Total pages in book: 51
Estimated words: 49415 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 247(@200wpm)___ 198(@250wpm)___ 165(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 49415 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 247(@200wpm)___ 198(@250wpm)___ 165(@300wpm)
Hyacinth angrily kicked a loose stone out of her way. She didn’t care what people thought. #nofilter truth was overrated, and it only hurt more than it healed.
“Dammit, goddammit, dammit.”
She started pacing, her mind sifting through her bank of ready-made excuses in search for a perfectly plausible, fail-proof explanation she could feed to her homeroom teacher.
“I’m...”
A fake.
A goddamn fake.
And I’m unable to breathe—-
Her hands flew to cover her mouth before the words could escape. She could never ever say such things, never –
Thump.
Hyacinth froze, her anxieties immediately disappearing as her mind instinctively went on survival mode.
Thump.
Her head snapped towards the sound, and her heart jumped in fright when she saw the tall, powerfully built man standing by the entryway. He was dressed entirely in black, a helmet and balaclava that hid all but his eyes, and a Kevlar vest strapped over his chest.
Oh...shit.
Two
A shower, a bed, and a beautiful woman to fuck, Rayyan Al-Atassi thought wearily as he shoved the boulder to the side, just enough to slip into the passageway that burrowed all the way back to the palace.
That was all he needed, preferably in reverse order, and he could die a contented man.
His side started stinging like hell when he had to exert effort in shoving the boulder back into place, but all he could do was grit his teeth against the discomfort. Sooner or later, the painkillers should kick in, and he’d be able to make better time. But until then, every tiny movement would be like having a thousand needles pricking his side, and there was nothing he could do about it.
A faint voice reached him when he was about a hundred meters in, and the sheikh froze. Was that...a woman?
He waited, tense and unmoving, but when only silence followed, he allowed his breathing to ease a little. The painkillers must be making him imagine –
Pluck!
It was the sound of a stone hitting another hard surface, and Rayyan had already drawn his handgun out in the next second. He moved forward, letting his instincts lead the way through the maze of damp and narrow passageways. The ground was rough and uneven, but even so his footsteps fell silently on its surface, his dark, blood-speckled boots a startling contrast to the streaks of gold streaking down from the tunnel’s wall-mounted sconces.
“Dammit, goddammit, dammit.”
Rayyan stiffened. So he hadn’t been imagining it, after all. There was someone else, but it wasn’t a woman. It was someone who sounded noticeably younger, and a moment later, he came upon her, the unexpected sight of her arresting his movements.
Hyacinth Kahveci?
The teenage girl stood inside an unmarked chamber, hands planted on her tiny waist, and glaring so hard it was almost as if the wall before the girl had done something to offend her.
Prior to this, the girl had only existed in the fringes of the sheikh’s all-too-hectic life, and Rayyan frowned as he strove to remember anything essential about her. They might have been living under the same roof for over a decade, but the years that had gone past only afforded him the vaguest memories: a young, well-behaved lady with a sunny nature, never the kind to make trouble with anyone.
Which was why, he thought absently, he would never have expected to see the girl here, trespassing and as seemingly well versed in swearing as the next drunken sailor.
He was curious to know how a girl like her had ended up in the palace’s secret tunnels, but because he was also never the type to get unnecessarily involved, the thought of letting the girl know of his presence didn’t even occur to the sheikh.
But just as he turned away, he heard her choke out a word.
“I’m...”
And that was when he saw it.
The look on her face, reminding him of the past, and the sheikh reacted instinctively, his feet moving forward before he could even understand what was happening. He watched her look up, and it was as if the whole world was in slow motion – he knew he still had every chance to conceal his presence, but even so he remained there, almost as if he wanted to be discovered.
Terror flashed in her big, dark eyes when she saw the gun in his hand, but before Rayyan could tell the girl who he was in order to assuage her fears, she had already started speaking.
“Did Al Afea send you?”
Rayyan slowly sheathed his gun.
This, he thought, was going to be interesting.
ADRENALINE PUMPED INTO Hyacinth’s blood the moment she saw the man poised by the entryway.
Shit. Oh, shit. Goddamn shit.
And then she noticed the gun in the man’s hand, and her mind wasted no time making a lightning-quick assessment of the situation.
Objective: to stay alive.
How?
Establish her value as a hostage.
By doing what?
Make use of your years’ worth of firsthand experience and knowledge of palace life and lie about having a deeper connection to the royal life.