Prince of my Panties (Royal Package 2)

I balk, certain I must have misheard her. “Excuse me?”

“A tattoo. Of Zan’s baby footprint from her birth certificate. On her left butt cheek. She had the artist come to the castle and do it since she doesn’t like to leave the house unless there’s some sort of national emergency.” She shudders. “I couldn’t eat dinner for weeks. Every time I sat down at the kitchen table, I kept remembering Mother lying on it naked, flopping and wailing while that poor man tried to finish the tattoo, and I’d lose my appetite.”

“Why a tattoo?”

“Because Zan was dead to her for refusing to come home for a full week at Christmas,” Lizzy says, matter-of-factly. “And Mother read somewhere that tattoos were one of the ways indigenous people honored their dead. Sabrina pointed out to her that she’s not an indigenous person, but Mother insisted everyone is indigenous to somewhere. She recorded the entire nightmare so she could send a copy of the video to everyone in Zan’s office in Zurich.”

My eyes bulge. “All because she wasn’t coming home for the holidays?”

“Because she was coming home for three days instead of a full week.” She nods in confirmation as my eyes grow even wider. “See? Can you even imagine what she’ll do to punish me for ruining her entire reason for being? She’s been daydreaming about this wedding for two decades. She already has a dress to wear and she hasn’t been out of her pajamas since I was eighteen.”

Beginning to think mental illness runs in the family, I say as diplomatically as possible, “Has she considered getting help? Professional help?”

“She’s not mad, she’s an eccentric narcissist, and there’s not much a psychiatrist can do with those. Not unless they want to stop being a narcissist, which most don’t, and my mother is no exception.” She threads her slim fingers together and clasps her hands to her chest, resting them at the bottom of the V of her silky blue pajama top. “So, you see…I need to stay for a little longer. You don’t have to stay with me, of course. But if you decide to go, would you keep my location just between us? At least until Monday afternoon? Pretty please?”

“I have a better idea,” I say, a plan forming even as I’m suggesting it. “Why don’t we take a little trip?”

“A trip?” she echoes.

“A road trip—to see what we can find out about the woman who took you.”

Her mouth tightens. “No, way. No.”

“Now, hear me out,” I begin.

“No.” She shakes her head so vehemently that her hair flies around her shoulders. “I won’t. I can’t. I’m too busy, and—”

“Too busy to save your own life? What if you’re trapped in a placebo scenario, Elizabeth? What if you’re making these things happen somehow? What if finding this woman and realizing she was a sick person who played a cruel trick on a little girl—”

“She believed it,” Lizzy insists, but her stubborn little chin dips closer to her chest. “She believed every word, I could tell. She wasn’t trying to hurt me. She was trying to warn me, prepare me for the inevitable, she said.”

I frown. “Tell me everything she said. Everything you remember.”

She takes a deep breath and pushes her empty plate away, apparently no longer in the mood for seconds. “She took me to this shed in a part of the forest I’d never been to before.”

“A shed? Were there tools inside it?”

“No, it was…” Her eyes narrow. “There were animal skins hanging from the ceiling and…a fireplace. I remember that felt strange. To be in this small space, but there was still somewhere to make a fire.”

“So, it could have been her home.”

“It had a dirt floor, but…maybe.” She frowns. “I never thought of that before. There was a chair and a small table. No bed, but…”

“What happened next?”

She closes her eyes. “She took the bag off my head and started talking really fast. Later, I realized she was probably in a hurry, but I thought she was angry. I was so scared that I didn’t hear most of what she said at first. I mean, I heard it, but I couldn’t make sense of it.” Her lids crack, and she reaches for her water glass, taking a sip. “That’s when she gave me a drink—from a silver flask. It was just water, but it had a lingering sweetness to it. It calmed me down, and I started to think maybe she didn’t want to hurt me, after all.”

I want to pull her into my lap and promise her I’ll never let anyone scare her like that again, but I sense she doesn’t talk about this often—maybe ever—and that if I interrupt it won’t be easy to get her started again.

“Then she told me about my family, that my ancestors had done terrible things, and about the curse on the firstborn of each generation. But she didn’t seem mad, then, just sad. I guess I looked skeptical because that’s when she told me what she’d seen in the future for me and my sisters. It was comforting, to hear their names…”