The Tag

"What the hell is this?" I yelled on my way into the house office. The big brute was standing beside an old man who was sitting behind a desk, seemingly interviewing someone. Did I feel bad for bursting into the middle of whatever illegal things they were doing? Absolutely not. What I had found during my morning routine earlier was too much to forgive. "You put a tracker on me?"

Marco looked like he wanted to kill me, and his hands that had come down to his sides were clenching and unclenching into fists. The look in his eyes said he would strangle me without a second thought if he could. Too bad for him, I was here to stay. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Answer me!" My pointer finger met his chest and repeatedly jabbed at his pectoral muscle. "Did you put a tracker on me?"

"Katarina, stop yelling. Can't you see that we have a guest?" He motioned towards the man sitting in front of them both, who looked absolutely terrified and confused at the same time. I glanced at the man in question very briefly, but did a double take when I realised that the floors had been stripped bare of the giant decorative rug that had been here when I first visited the room. Now that I thought of it, he looked a little familiar?

"I don't give a rat's ass if you have the pope in here. Did you put a tracker on me?" I shoved my forearm in his face so he could look at the bump under my skin. The past few days I'd been feeling a little itchy in my forearm area, and I didn't know why. My first thought was that maybe I'd gotten bit by a mosquito, but while applying my perfume I noted that the bump moved a little. I'd seen this exact technique before. My dad placed a tracker in my thigh when I was a teenager so he could monitor where I was.

Marco's silence was enough to confirm my suspicions and a maniacal chuckle slipped past my lips. Controlling my anger wasn't my forte at all, and depending on the level, different things would happen. Maniacal laughter meant that my lid was about to blow, and right now, I was livid. "Unbe-bloody-lievable," Marco's jaw clenched and his eyes flashed with something unrecognisable.

"Marco, you should really control your woman," the old man chimed in, sending me a cold smile. Calling him old seemed a little too much. He was middle aged and showed no signs of ageing, but since I knew that he was Marco's father, I called him old. Hate was a little bit of an understatement when it came to what I felt for that man.

"I see you're still croaking your way through life, Vincent."

"And I see you are every bit a Montenegro," he spat back at me. Every time Vincente spoke my surname, it sounded like a vulgar curse coming out of his mouth, but that's only because he pronounced it that way.

I decided to ignore him and turned my focus back to Marco, who was currently staring at me like he'd seen me make a fool of myself. "One day I will personally wipe that stupid smug smirk off your face, and you will feel like an idiot for ever underestimating me."

On my way out, I saw the man they were interviewing giving me a strange look, so I leaned down and whispered in his ear. "I hope you don't have a wife to mourn you."

The man immediately began blubbering and fell to the floor, begging for his life in a most pathetic display. This is the part I hated the most about killing people. Why did hey have to beg so loudly? The sound would surely be heard from my room and I did not need him disturbing my peaceful beauty routine.

"That was quite a display," Aurelia DiBiancci rounded the corner and smiled at me, effectively stopping me on my way back to my room. Out of all the people in this wretched house, she was the one I liked the most. She understood me. "Nobody other than I has ever had the guts to yell at my son before."

"Nobody else has the title of Montenegro heir, either," My smirk sealed the message loud and clear. "He is terrified of me."

Aurelia laughed almost gleefully. She was a strange woman, but I liked her nonetheless. "Yes, he is. Honestly, if it wasn't for the stupid blood feud, I'd think you were perfect for him. You really know how to put him in his place."

"Do you know the real reason why he kidnapped me?" I adjusted my robe and tightened the belt. Sometime during my heated moment of anger towards Marco, the belt had become loose. "I haven't exactly been treated like a hostage, and I doubt he only wanted to meet me. He would've made it happen if he wanted to."

"Do you want complete honesty from me?" Aurelia asked, making me raise an eyebrow. How bad was it that she had to ask that? He wasn't planning to keep me forever and make me a personal servant, was he? Upon my confirmation, she proceeded. "Marco wants your power. I think he was planning to kill you, but if he was planning so, he would've done it already. Of course, he's probably planning to do something else to you. I can never know what goes on in that boy's head."

Okay so maybe being his personal servant wasn't the worst idea. I knew the basics of cleaning and the theory of tidying up. Even though I'd never moved a single object for the purpose of organisation in my life, I had spent a lot of time watching Tidying Up with Marie Kondo when pneumonia took cruel hold of my lungs. It was obvious that ordering my maids to organise my room the way Marie had said to do it wasn't the same as actually having to do it myself, so cleaning up after Marco would take some getting used to.

Somehow, the idea of Marco killing me to take my inheritance by force brought comical thoughts to my head, so I couldn't help but laugh. As if he didn't know that doing so would backfire on him big time.

I had only been here for a week, and already the thought of escaping to run back home was becoming an appealing idea. I was nowhere close to cracking whatever device was in Marco's closet, but maybe it wasn't important at all in the first place? What was important was my safety, and I wasn't about to put that in jeopardy any time soon.