Our home base was a clearing in the center of a bunch of the girls’ cabins. As the princess, I was required to start on a red platform, but after the games began, I would be permitted to run and hide.
My inner circle stood next to me. I tried to ignore how good Tanner looked in his battle gear. I’d seen him in sweatpants, suits, and tuxedos. But seeing him dressed for battle took his sexiness to a whole new level. The way his muscles bulged as he held his laser rifle…Yum.
“Are you sure you can’t come with me?” I asked.
He thought about it for a second. “I want to. Believe me, I hate the idea of leaving you alone out there with Cole hunting you down. But if we really want to sell this illusion, then I have to stay with Isadora.”
Was that really why? Or did he just think she looked better than me in the princess dress? I tried to shake the thought, but whatCole had said about Tanner having a different girl on his arm every night at Club Onyx had really gotten into my head.
“You have to trust me,” he said.
Like I trusted you with my heart three months ago?I knew he was right, though. We had to try to sell the illusion that Isadora was me. “I do.”
“Good. We got this.” He gave me a high five and then started barking orders at the rest of our team. I almost tried to get his attention again, but I was distracted when Ocelot walked over and started securing the locks on my boots. He tugged on each lock to make sure it wouldn’t come free. When he was all done, he said something into his radio and then asked, “Red team ready?”
“I think so,” I said.
Tanner jogged over. “Troops are all set. Let’s take this cocky asshole down.Save Ravenon three.” He put his hand out. The inner circle all put their hands in.
Tanner counted down, and on three, we all yelled, “Save Raven!”
I hope this plan works.
Ocelot’s helper blew his whistle and the game began.
Phase 1 of our plan was simple - we were going to take out as much of the blue team as possible by decorating the tree with false blossoms. In this case, the tree was Isadora, and the false blossoms were her princess outfit.
Diablo swept me up in his massive arms and carried me away from the platform. I could have walked, but that would have left heel marks in the ground. And the only heel marks we wanted to leave were the ones being left by Isadora as she walked towards the ambush Tanner had set up with the bulk of our team. She made a halfhearted attempt to cover some of her tracks, but that was just to help sell the illusion. If we made it too easy to track her, Cole would smell the ambush coming from a mile away.
It would have been fun to watch Cole get totally demolished, but me staying that close to the camp would have been too dangerous.
“I can probably walk the rest of the way,” I said when we were five minutes out of the camp.
“Nonsense,” said Diablo. “You’d leave tracks. And anyway, carrying you is nothing. You weigh like ten pounds.”
“Ten pounds?” I asked. “What do you think I am? A two-month-old baby?”
“But mainly I just love touching your ass.” He shifted his hand down and gave my ass a squeeze.
“Hey!” I yelled.
“Shhh,” hissed Angel. “I think I heard someone.”
Diablo put me on the ground and then he and Angel bent a small tree down to cover us. I had no idea how they were strong enough to bend the tree. And I also had no idea how the tree didn’t snap. But I didn’t really care, because our hiding spotworked. A pair of blue scouts walked by us, none the wiser to our location.
“Shouldn’t you shoot them?” I whispered. The scouts’ had their backs turned to us. It would have been so easy for Diablo and Angel to pop out and take them down.
“No,” replied Diablo. “Even if we take them out, they could still run back and tell Cole where they’d seen us. We’d be surrounded in minutes.”
“But you’re supposed to freeze when you get hit. And you definitely aren’t supposed to communicate intel. That would be cheating!”
“Sure is.”
Oh right. Cole’s a dirty cheater.
Once the coast was clear, we continued towards the zipline course. We didn’t encounter any more scouts on the way. I had been wondering how they’d hoist me up onto the zipline platform. But it turned out that there was no hoisting at all. Instead Diablo just gave me a good old-fashioned piggyback ride as he climbed up some boards nailed to the side of a tree. It was absolutely terrifying. If my hands slipped, I would have fallen right off his back and literally broken my ass.
Speaking of my ass, Angel probably had a pretty sweet view of it as Diablo climbed up the ladder. But at this point, I didn’t really care anymore. I was pretty sure that just about everyone in the Society had already seen it. And that would be the least of my worries if we lost this game of Capture the Princess.
