Max and the Prince Read Free Page B

raw and more controlled. If Max didn’t know better,
he’d say they were from a completely different person.
    All it said was You don’t need to worry any more. I’ve
dealt with him .
    “The suspicion was that this was a different person,” Lucien
said. “Then—” He squirmed a little in his seat. “—the police found a body in a burned-out
car, a man named Oscar Sheiver.”
    “You think that was OS?”
    “His apartment wall was covered in photos of me, my family,
and he had these printed wedding invites between me and him. All they could
determine was the dead man, Oscar, had been murdered before being placed in the
car, killed by several blows to the head. There was no evidence to link to who
killed him, and for the longest time I thought my parents had cleared up the issue.”
Lucien lowered his head. “I didn’t know what to think.”
    “Okay, so letter six is someone admitting what they did,” Max
summarized. “That they ‘dealt’ with OS.”
    “That is what the police thought, but with no more leads, it
was done. I sobered up, became more of who I should be, and applied for a university
place here.”
    Max turned to letter seven, the first of the ones with the
Cardiff police station tag. I’ve seen what people are like around you. Be
careful. The paper was again different, which ruled out a connection that
way, but still, the tone of it was a warning and wasn’t threatening in any way.
    “That was pushed through the door,” Lucien said.
    “And you think it’s by the same person who might have
removed OS from the picture?”
    Max shook his head. “I don’t know. No one knows. It
certainly looks like it, but it’s been so long since the first six letters,
it’s anyone’s guess.”
    If the author of the last letter six had followed the prince
to his school in a completely different country, then it didn’t matter the tone
wasn’t threatening. Not good.
    Letter eight rambled on for two pages, all in capitals,
talking of the kind of people that Lucien should watch out for: the teammates
in the swim team who were lying to him and the housemates who wanted nothing
from him but money.
    “This seems pretty specific. Do you have a feeling that
someone is lying to you on the team?”
    “No.”
    “And is someone in your house taking money from you?”
    “No, nothing more than lending a fiver here and there,”
Lucien said. “No one knows who I am apart from the uni authorities.”
    Letter nine was on different paper, a pale yellow cheap
stock from the weight of it. This was both somewhat of a threat couched in a
demand for Lucien to ‘see’.
    It ended with a strange sentence. I can’t always keep you
safe, why don’t you see that? I need you to see or you’ll end up getting killed.
    Just that. A simple collection of words that were stone cold
in their finality and intent.
    Max considered the last part: or you’ll end up getting killed .
That wasn’t the same as ‘I’ll kill you’? The words were subtle in difference
and it didn’t sit well with Max. “He or she didn’t say they would kill you,
just that you’ll end up being killed. That suggests a dissociation from hurting
you directly.”
    “I can’t see the difference,” Lucien said. “At the end of it
I’m dead, according to whoever wrote these.”
    “You want my advice?” Max asked. He pushed forward before
Lucien could say a thing. “Go home to the castle or palace or whatever with
Teddy, and get as far from here as possible until the authorities track the letter
writer down. If it’s the same person who dealt with OS and that person is here
in the UK now, then you should be keeping your head down.”
    “We don’t have a palace or a castle,” Lucien snapped. “And
I’m not going home. That is exactly what my parents want. I’m in my last year, and
I want to stay. The deal so I get to stay is that I have security. They sent
Teddy over—he’s the head of security at home. But you’ve seen him with his