The good news or the bad news. This felt like a trick question. There was no way anything she was about to say was good. Maybe I could make her evil head explode. “The good news,” I said.
“Splendid,” Isabella said. “The good news is…I’m probably not going to kill you tonight. Even though I don’t understand why, killing you would make Daddy very mad. And I don’t want to make Daddy mad. So if you follow my instructions precisely, I suppose I’ll allow you to live.” She lowered the gun to her side and I felt like my lungs inflated with air for the first time in ages.
It was good news. Maybe. It kind of depended on what she was going to make me do.
“But the bad news is that you’re leaving town.” She grabbed something out of the box and walked over to me. “Here’s a map.” She tossed it onto the ground in front of me. “It’s about 10 blocks to the nearest bus station. You can use the walk to clear your head. Sound good?”
I was literally in my underwear. She didn’t even let me keep my shoes. And I didn’t have any money. Not that they were going to allow my half-naked self into the terminal anyway. “Isabella…”
“I don’t even care where you go. Just so that you’re out of the city. Gone. Poof.” She snapped her fingers.
“You can’t just make me disappear.”
“Of course I can.”
Her ridiculous pink gun was still lowered to her side. She loved her dad. She didn’t want to disappoint him. Which meant…she wasn’t going to kill me. If she was, she already would have done it. Right? I took a deep breath. “No.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not leaving.”
A smile broke over her face. “Oh, I was actually hoping you’d say no.” She took a few steps toward me. “Do you want to know why I’m doing this?”
“Because you’re insane?”
“Oh Sissy, you’re hilarious.” She tapped the gun against her thigh. “You know the actual funny part of all of this? I did want a sibling when I was younger. We could have been friends. I could have at least tolerated you. But no. You sunk your claws into everyone and everything that’s mine! You’ve been ruining everything!
“First you took Daddy. I don’t know what you did to wrap your poor fingers around him, but you can’t have him. I’m Daddy’s princess. Not you. Daddy is mine.”
Gross.
She took a deep breath. “And then with James…”
“Isabella, I’m sorry about kissing James. It didn’t mean anything. We were just…”
“James is just another minuscule blip, you imbecile. You’re not letting me finish!” She stared at me like I was the insane one. “I don’t love James. You think I want to be someone’s second choice? He doesn’t love me. And I don’t love him. His parents were in Daddy’s debt. And James is smart and has a good future ahead of him. So they paid off the debt by offering me James’ hand.
Whoa. What?
“And I’m going to marry him because Daddy says I have to. And I like making Daddy happy. But I still have four years until I’m supposed to do that. Four years to do whatever I want with whoever I want, as long as it’s not in the public eye. Only four years to be free. And then you came in. And you ruined all my plans.”
“Isabella, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Matt.”
“What about him?”
“I love him.”
Oh my God. I remembered when she first started torturing me in school. I thought it was because I was staring at the Untouchables’ table at lunch. But it was because I was staring at one Untouchable in particular. Matt. I thought about how she was blackmailing him with that made up sex scandal between him and Rachel. She used it as leverage so Matt couldn’t hang out with me. She made her minions watch him in class. I thought about her death stare when Matt sang to me at the homecoming game. It was all about Matt the whole time.
“I love him,” she said again. “So you need to leave.”
But he doesn’t love you back. Love doesn’t work that way.
“I get him for the next four years because he’s the one thing in my life I get to choose, and I choose him. Once you’re gone, everything will be perfect. Matt will be mine. And then once I have to marry James, I’ll keep Matt as my house boy.”
What the hell is a house boy? I didn’t even want to know. “You don’t get him for the next four years. You can’t just say something and it becomes real.”
“Yes I can. I’m a Pruitt.”
“No you can’t. Matt doesn’t love you. He loves me. And I love him back.” Apparently a conversation with a psychopath was all I needed to see everything clearly. Or maybe it was getting a gun pointed at my head. Or the freezing air against my exposed skin. But I saw it. I saw my future with Matt. And she couldn’t have him for the next four years. Because he was mine forever.
“He’s infatuated with you because you’re new in town. It’ll fade. Now grab your map and get lost.”
“No.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to leave? Maybe this will help you decide.” She walked over to the cardboard box and lifted out some kind of black device with wires and a timer on it. Another thing I’d only seen in movies. I was pretty sure it was a bomb.
I waited for her to throw it at me or something, but she just walked over to the limo and placed it on top. She pressed something on the side and the timer started ticking down from three minutes.
No. Kennedy!
Isabella turned back around. “If you don’t leave in two minutes and 58 seconds, Kennedy will go boom.”
“You can’t. You’re not allowed to kill people, Isabella. Your father told me the rules.” I wanted to believe it. For some reason I did believe that she wouldn’t kill me. But Kennedy? I had no freaking idea what Isabella was capable of.
“There are ways around rules, Sissy. Accidental limo explosions are one of those ways. Besides, no one’s going to miss her. For some reason it’s so much more fun now that I got to know her first, you know what I mean?”
No, you crazy bitch! “Sir Wilfred is in there! You can’t blow up your dog.”
“Hmmm. Good point. But moot. I saw you pet him. Sir Wilfred is officially tainted. Besides, he’s hardly trained. I’ll just buy another.”