Chapter 17 Starling
SEVENTEEN
STARLING
“Wait, you want to do what?” Sammy asks, her expression a mixture of baffled and outraged.
“I want to let her kidnap me.”
“Yeah, that’s what I heard the first time,” Sammy says, her eyebrows raised, her eyes wide as she turns to Sebastian. “And you’re just okay with that?”
“Yes,” he answers, tightening his arms around me.
When we’d gotten here, instead of letting me sit alone, he’d dragged me into his lap and positioned me on top of his still hard cock.
We’ve had sex so many times in the last twenty-four hours, I’m amazed we haven’t died of dehydration from losing so much…
fluid. But no matter how many times we fuck, neither of us seems to be able to get enough.
“Wait a fucking minute. You don’t mean she actually kidnaps you?” Hunter questions.
“No,” Sebastian says. “Starling thinks that we should set Courtney up to get caught kidnapping her.”
“But how the fuck would that work, without her actually kidnapping her?” Evan growls, his expression unimpressed.
“Okay, so I haven’t figured out all of the logistics, but I’m thinking that we lure her somewhere, and then I get tied up and put in the trunk of her car.
You figure out a way to make her think she’s meeting Tom somewhere, then you call in the cavalry and report me missing.
You and the cops track me, and you find me tied up in the trunk of her car, it’ll be impossible for her to claim innocence when I’m the literal smoking gun in her trunk. ”
“That’s fucking insane,” Sammy announces. “Absolutely fucking insane.”
“That’s…” Clay says slowly. “That actually might work.”
“That might work?” Sammy shrieks. “That’s all you have to say?”
“Look, I know it sounds insane, but think about it. We could go to the police. We could show them the messages. We could say we think she’s dangerous.
But so far, she hasn’t even done enough for a judge to grant us a restraining order.
She must have planned all of this; it can’t just be a coincidence that she ended up dating my security guard.
She went from blackmail to pain and suffering in an afternoon, so how long do we let her carry on plotting?
Do we just hope she gets bored and forgets about us?
” I ask, staring at my friend and imploring her to understand.
“I don’t want you to get hurt, Starling. What happens if she realizes you’re incapacitated in her trunk? She could disappear. She could drive into the ocean. She could shoot you. You’d be completely at her mercy,” Sammy argues.
“We’ll be tracking her. We’ll know exactly where she is the entire time, and if we get even a hint that Courtney is onto us, we’ll get her out of there,” Sebastian assures her.
“So, what’s the plan? How do you intend on getting Starling into her trunk? Does she even have a car?” Hunter asks thoughtfully.
“Her car is in the parking lot at Kingsacre, it’s the same Mercedes her parents gifted her in high school,” Clay says, tapping at his laptop.
“Did you have a chance to look into her family?” I ask him.
“I did. It seems like Courtney and her parents had a falling out earlier this year when they tried to arrange a marriage between her and Jeramy Bradshaw. His family is new money, his dad owns a large law firm, and the alliance would have meant a merger between the two firms. Both sets of parents and Jeramy were happy with the match. Courtney wasn’t,” Clay says, hitting play on a video as he spins his laptop around to face us.
The video shows a red-faced Courtney screaming at her parents in a skin-tight gold dress.
“I am not marrying…that,” she shrieks, pointing behind her to an admittedly weedy-looking guy in glasses who is standing in front of two people who I suspect are his parents.
“I don’t care how much money he has; I’d rather be destitute than marry someone who looks like a geek, has acne, and whose micro dick is probably so tiny he can’t even find it with a magnifying glass.
I am your daughter, I’m a princess. I deserve a prince, not a freak show. I won’t do it. I refuse.”
“Wow.” Sammy chuckles. “I’m a princess,” she mocks, imitating Courtney.
“He’s kind of cute in a gamer, nerdy way, but I’m surprised her parents tried to set her up. They were always working too hard to get involved in the society stuff,” I say.
“This merger would have meant a massive step up the ladder for the Ortegas. Bradshaw, Bradshaw, and Landry handle clients who are multi-billionaires. They have oil barons, foreign royalty, mafia—you name it, they work with them. Courtney and Jeramy getting married would have been a major coup for the Ortegas. Right now, their law firm is treading water. They have plenty of clients, but they’re working hard for their money.
Partnering with the Bradshaws would have changed the game for them. ”
“And Courtney refused,” Sebastian states.
“She did, and not long after, her parents cut her off. They’ve paid her school tuition and housing for the year, but they canceled all of her credit cards and cut off her allowance and trust fund.
Courtney’s been selling stuff to fund her lifestyle since then.
She’s even pawned some stuff, but she’s broke.
We might have been taunting her about finding a husband, but right now, that’s basically her only option, unless she wants to quit school and get a job.
“Then why not blackmail us for money?” I ask.
“Because according to her online journal, her multiple vision boards, and her daily manifestation affirmations, the husband she’s hoping to land is you,” Clay says, looking at Sebastian.
Sammy chokes out a laugh. “So, she wanted to blackmail Starling into divorcing Sebastian so she could marry him?”
“That’s what it looks like to me,” Clay confirms.
“So, she’s the actual real-life psycho.” Evan laughs, fighting to talk through his amusement.
“Are you sure about this?” Sammy asks, eyeing me warily.
“Definitely. This needs to happen before Tom tells the cops who she is and we lose our opportunity to end this for good,” I tell her.
“And you can definitely cover our tracks?” Sammy asks Clay.
“I definitely can. But the cops won’t care to look, we’re going to serve psycho Courtney up on a platter for them. All they’ll see is a deranged girl, escalating from obsession to violence,” he assures her.
Staring down at my cell, I read, then reread the text I typed out a few minutes ago before I hit send.
Starling : Hey, I need to talk to you about something, somewhere private.
I’ve managed to slip away from my security.
Can you meet me in the parking lot at Kingsacre?
I’ll find your car and wait there for you.
There’s an entrance ramp behind the admin buildings.
I’m on my way, I can be there in thirty minutes. Please, Court, I need you. Starling xx
The message shows as read almost immediately, and I hold my breath waiting for her to reply.
“What happens if she refuses to meet me?” I ask, suddenly panicked.
“She’ll meet you, we know she will,” Hunter assures me, reaching out to squeeze my arm.
It’s only been two days since Courtney was at our house and the cops took Tom into custody. He’s still being held, pending a hearing, but more than likely a judge will grant him bail, so we needed to get this done before he and Courtney have a chance to regroup.
Bunny and January are in Florida with Hunter’s mom and Bunny’s Nana and the rest of us are sitting in a restaurant just around the corner from Kingsacre.
The moment that she agrees to meet me, we’ll all head to campus.
The guys have graduated, but with me and Sammy still enrolled, it’s not super strange that they’d come with us to campus.
Once we’re at school, we’ll all head to the coffee house we accidentally on purpose bumped into Courtney at a few days ago.
Using his laptop and the hacked access to the campus security cameras Clay has had since I started my freshman year, he’ll make sure that the cameras see both me and Courtney walking into the parking structure.
While we’re waiting for Courtney to arrive, Evan will tie me up, gag me, then drug me and put me in the trunk of Court’s Mercedes.
If everything goes to plan, Court will wait for me, possibly with some malicious intent of her own.
But while she’s waiting, she’ll receive a message from who she’ll believe is Tom, asking her to meet him at a remote warehouse, where we’ve set up my pseudo cell and murder room, complete with latex gloves, plastic sheeting, bleach, rope, knives, and a gun.
By the time Courtney gets to the warehouse, Sebastian will have made a frantic phone call to Chief Turner, telling him that I’d had a text from an old friend, and had gone to meet them while the others had coffee.
When I didn’t come back, he became worried given the threats they found on Tom’s cell and decided to call the cops.
He’ll explain to the chief of police about the kidnapping attempts on his family in the past and how we all have trackers.
Then he’ll explain that instead of being on campus, my tracker is moving, and he’ll beg him for help.
If we were normal people and not insanely wealthy, I’m confident they’d ignore him and tell him to call back if I haven’t shown up in a few days.
But we’re not normal, and we’re banking on the fact that the very large donations Sebastian’s family have been making for years to the police department will curry us some favor, and that Sebastian and the cops will find Courtney, the cell, the murder room, and then me bound, drugged, and terrified in the trunk of her car.
If everything goes to plan, once I’ve been rescued, they’ll discover her obsession with Sebastian, and Courtney will end up incarcerated or institutionalized by the end of the day.
While my mind is working through the plan, my cell beeps. It’s a text from Courtney.
Courtney : Okay, I’ll see you there in thirty minutes x