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Damn it.
Might it be in the other room? Where he’d taken her when she fainted? She looked down the corridor, decided to chance it, and jogged to that door, pulled it open. A quick inspection showed the room to be empty. But her bag was also missing.
The only conclusion she could draw was that Benedetto had taken it, and, with it, her only way of contacting—
But who would she have called anyway?
Her family? Who’d clearly ordered this kidnapping? They might sympathise with her plight but inwardly they’d be rejoicing at her imminent return, even if it was against her will. And who else was there? The friends she’d unceremoniously dumped when she’d left the country because she wasn’t sure if she could trust them either? After Daniel, she hadn’t known where to turn. And who could blame her?
Suddenly, Amelia felt so unspeakably alone, so awfully ganged up on, that she ran just as quickly back through the boat, to the solitude of her room. She closed the door and slumped against it, falling to the floor in a heap and dropping her head to her knees, a silent tear trickling down her cheek as she acknowledged the helplessness of her situation.
Going home would be a disaster. She knew it would be.
She knew her family would want to know why she’d left. They’d asked her over and over in email and text, even in the voicemails they’d left when she’d first disappeared. But Amelia hadn’t answered. She hadn’t been able to.
The discovery of her illegitimacy was still too raw, too painful to discuss, too dangerous to everyone she loved most. Even to her family’s position?
That was one of the thoughts that had tortured her most. The civil war was all but a distant memory now, something that had happened three generations back, and yet, for Amelia, the thought of her family being deposed and thrown out by the people had always struck her as particularly horrifying. She’d known even as a young girl she’d do everything she could to avoid that fate.
Unfortunately for Amelia, no matter how well behaved she was, she seemed to find herself getting into some sort of scrape or another. A scandal in high school to do with her friendship group taking drugs—never Amelia, but far be it from her to tell other people how to live their lives—or a cheating scandal at college. Amelia hadn’t cheated, but the mud had stuck, and rumours continued to swirl. Even in her own family, she was sure there were suspicions about her grades. The media had loved to print stories about her, so many of them made up, some of them so wild they actually made Amelia laugh, but at the heart of it all was a deep and growing sense of not belonging. Of being different.
And then she’d learned why she’d always felt that way. The root of her sense of displacement.
She didn’t belong.
She wasn’t royal.
The blood of which her family was so proud didn’t even flow through her veins.
And in her being she held the power to destroy her parents’ marriage, her family’s happiness.
Worst of all was the knowledge that the one person she’d turned to when she’d learned the truth, whom she had believed she loved, and had loved her back, had used her secret to blackmail Amelia for financial gain. She’d confided in Daniel because she’d needed to speak to someone about it, and he’d betrayed her. That he still held this piece of information about Amelia, and could use it at any point to damage her and her family, was what had kept her in hiding for two full years.
How could she go back?
How could she risk it?
Fear made her skin crawl.
She stood and began to pace the suite she’d been dumped into, distractedly investigating it simply to assess her situation for the next week. A bathroom, palatial in size and appointment, with a window right on the edge of the boat showcasing yet another spectacular view of the still ever-diminishing Spanish mainland, framed by timber, and placed perfectly behind a claw-foot bath. There was a large shower, a double sink, and when she idly opened one of the drawers she saw that it had been stocked with high-end products—moisturisers, cleansers, even a set of nail polishes, and make-up.
The next drawer housed hair products—a brush, hairdryer, straightener, leave-in conditioner. A quick inspection of the shower confirmed that she’d also been supplied with shampoo, conditioner, toner. A very thoughtful kidnapping indeed, she admitted, but without a hint of a smile, because there was no atonement for what he’d done to her. No atonement for what he hadn’t done to her either.
Leaving the bathroom, she pressed on the next door along, gasping to discover a full wardrobe of clothes just her size. Her hands ran over the brightly coloured designer outfits—dresses, skirts, bathers, shirts, jackets, everything she could want for a year, not just a week. There were shoes too—sandals and sneakers, as if she might be going to do more than pace a hole in the floorboards of her bedroom!
The final door revealed an office of sorts. It was very small, designed to be tucked out of the way, with a narrow desk pressed to the wall, and cables for a laptop, screen, charger, anything she might need to use while here. But Amelia had brought only her camera and phone, for the simple reason that she hadn’t intended to be staying long.
With a sigh, she turned back to the bed and lay down, determined to stare up at the ceiling in the kind of grumpy state a teenager would be proud of, and she spent the next several hours mulling over her predicament and trying to fathom exactly how she could escape this situation.
Because there was no way she could go back to Catarno, and definitely not for Anton’s wedding... She simply couldn’t risk anything happening that might ruin his happiness. Staying away might have seemed heartless but Amelia had long since decided it was one of the ways in which she was being cruel to be kind.
So how could she get her grumpy captor to understand that?
By eight o’clock, Amelia was famished. She’d been in her room a long time, with no food, no drink, and no desire to go out in search of either. Pride had made her stick to that point. But as he’d ‘invited’ her to join him for dinner—or rather demanded—she supposed it wouldn’t hurt to accede.
She had to work out how to get through to him, after all.
He’d said they had a week together, from which she could only presume he intended for them to travel to Catarno by boat, and that the journey would last that duration. Okay, she could go along with that. A week would definitely afford an opportunity to make him see that she wasn’t the person he believed her to be.
