Milly heads to the door but pauses. “Are you sure you’re okay? You seem...different. Not just the memory stuff. There’s something—”
“I’m fine,” I interrupt. “I’m just trying to piece everything together.”
After she leaves, I take a deep breath and open a new incognito window. Looks like I’ll find out more about the Pampered Princess website.
I drag my chair until it is in the center of the bedroom. I reach up to the ceiling fan blade where I stashed the diary for easy access. The book tips off the edge and lands with a thud on the floor.
I grab it and rush to the desk.
I open the page in the book that I’d marked for easy access. There it is—my login details for Pampered Princess, scrawled in my handwriting with a little heart dotted over the ‘i’ in Princess. My stomach tightens as I type in the information.
With a few clicks on the keyboard, I’m in. Suddenly, my face is in full view on the screen.
“Shit!” I need to turn off the camera.
I find a quick button on the keyboard and turn it off before I scroll through my feed. There are dozens of unanswered messages from men who seem to like me.
But as I read through them, the truth hits me. They don’t like me—they just want me to show them more in exchange for money. One offers five hundred dollars if I take off my top. Another wants a private session for twice that amount.
I gag.
I did this? Was my life so bad it resorted to this?
But when I read through my past encounters, it seems that I liked the attention. The messages I sent back were flirty, confident—nothing like how I feel now. Was I lacking something?
Was it just money I needed?
Or something else?
Then I read a message from someone called “HisPrincess”:“I’ll be waiting to whisk you away. Meet me at the Gold Coast airport at 4pm on Sunday.”
I check the date. Two days before I was hit.
The man hasn’t been online since.
Suspicious. I make a mental note of his username to investigate later before I read more messages.
“I’ll make it worth your while, SweetBunny,” one message reads. “Same arrangement as last time?”
My stomach churns as I click through to my profile picture. There I am, wearing a bunny mask that covers the top half of my face. I’m pouting at the camera, dressed in lacy lingerie that leaves little to the imagination. The mask is cute, playful even, but there’s nothing innocent about what I was doing.
I keep flicking through my feed when a name jumps out at me: SweetJustice. The same name I wrote about in my diary.
My heart starts pounding against my rib cage. This is it. My blackmailer.
I stare at the screen. My heart stops pounding, but sinks with each message I read. The words blur together when tears threaten to spill.
What have I done? This isn’t me—it can’t be me. Yet here’s the evidence, displayed in high definition across my laptop screen.
There are dozens of them, each more threatening than the last.
“Look what I found,” one says, with an attachment.
My hand shakes as I click on it. The image loads—it’s me, no mask in place, but I’m standing next to an older man, gray at the temples, wearing an expensive suit. His hand is placed possessively on my back.
The next message makes my blood run cold: “Mayor Anderson is a very important man. If this picture gets out, he is toast. Andso are you.”
I gasp, covering my mouth with my hand. Mayor Anderson? The man whose face is plastered across billboards all over the Gold Coast?
