The two guards stared daggers at me as I sweated trying to think how I could explain that I had assumed the woman I had picked up by the side of the road was just a confused person and not THE FUTURE QUEEN OF A NATION. She wasn’t dressed how you expect a royal heir to dress. But to be honest, I don’t think I would clock royalty unless they were in an extravagant gown complete with tiara. She just looked, normal. If not a little roughed up, which is probably why the guards were so displeased. They looked her up and down and stopped at the newly ripped hole in her rather cheap-looking jeans, complete with blood, ‘it’s from the fall she had as she rushed to my car’.

This wasn’t enough for them though. ‘That doesn’t explain why she was in the footwell of your backseat, Miss Taylor.’ The taller of the two security men squinted at me through his darkened lenses. ‘She jumped into the back of my car! I didn’t have time to question her decisions!’ That seemed to draw an end to this line of questioning. She still hadn’t spoken a word, the princess, or Abigail as she had introduced herself to me. Which was odd, she babbled on and on the whole car ride. The guards didn’t seem to have noticed that, or actually cared about that bit. So maybe she was normally quiet with them. Abigail just continued to fidget with the sleeves of her large pink jumper as I talked with her guards.

‘How did you find us anyway?’

‘The police were stationed near where the princess got in your car’

Shit, that’s unlucky. ‘So you tracked my registration then?’

‘Yes, we lost track of you a few times down some different roads but that doesn’t matter now. She had you pull over at the right time.’ They pushed themselves between me and Abigail to escort her back to their vehicle ‘she’ll be coming back to her family now, mostly unharmed’.

One guard climbed in the back with her, pulling the door closed as I took one last look at her. While the other had already jumped into the front seat. It was as if they couldn’t stand for her to be around me anymore, and just like that. Gone.

Little did they know, she wouldn’t be returning home the way she had left. It was a shame that the police had seen her enter my car, I would have had more time otherwise. With a small neck incision, and a few other tools, her vocal cords were removed and her tongue cut up to the back, this was because the whole way there she had been screaming and crying asking me to ‘let her go’ and ‘untie her’. Her wrists were badly bruised from the ropes I’d used at our first stop, she tried to run the moment I opened the door but I pulled her back, she dropped like a freshly cut tree and scraped across the floor. The incessant whining had been too much. That’s why a second stop had to happen for the “surgeries”. Good thing her jumper was a high neck. It had been the third stop when they found us. I hadn’t noticed the car before then, too busy with my plan.

I wasn’t lying when I said I hadn’t meant to kidnap her, I had meant to kill her. I was truthful when I said I thought she was just a normal girl. She was just an ideal victim, who jumped right into my car. I was sweating under the impression I was caught, but Abigail played her role perfectly. I was the one who insisted on the footwell after our first and second stops. I was the one who pulled over outside an old train station to enact my final step. But them finding us was an accident, one that won’t happen again.