The Forgotten Royal: A Reverse Harem Urban Fantasy (Annabelle's Harem Book 1) Read online

  The Forgotten Royal

  Anna Hill

  Contents

  Copyright

  Follow Me!

  Prologue

  Two Years Later

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Read Book 2 Today!

  Chapter 1

  Free Bonus Chapter!

  Copyright

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © Anna Hill 2018

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  Prologue

  “But I thought you weren’t going to be back until next week,” I said, with my ear to my cellphone, still carefully scanning my surroundings because it was getting dark and I didn’t live in the safest of neighborhoods.

  “Change of plans. I’m actually just down the street. Do you want to come by?”

  “No.” I sighed. “I can’t. You know I can’t. It’s still a school night and it’s my parents’ day off. I know they want to have dinner with me.”

  I made my way to the right of the sidewalk, making room for the troll that was bounding down my way. He was bulky, like most trolls, and his purple hair hung in strands around his head. His brow was furrowed in frustration… though I’ve never known a troll that didn’t look angry.

  I didn’t make eye contact. That wasn't a thing you did with trolls. Had it been a fellow human, I would have smiled and waved. The same went for elves or shifters. Actually, with most species, I’d smile and wave.

  But never with a troll.

  “You still there?” I asked, once the troll had passed and I moved back toward the middle of the sidewalk.

  “Yeah, just disappointed. I feel like I never get to see you.”

  “It’s just temporary,” I assured him. “In a year I’ll graduate, and then my schedule will be completely open. You’ll get to see me all the time.”

  “Yeah, well, a year feels like a long time away.”

  “Jacob, please don’t guilt me about this right now. I can’t control the fact that I need to finish school.”

  He relented. “Yes, I know. I’m sorry, I just miss you. Are you sure you can’t get away for even a little bit?”

  “I really can’t. I’m sorry. Maybe you can pick me up tomorrow after school?”

  “You’re really going to make me go back to that horrific place again?” he teased.

  I had to admit, our high school was truly awful. Well, I supposed it wasn’t Jacob’s high school anymore. He’d graduated last year. But it was where we met.

  We’d been dating for two years now. I knew I was young and in the grand scheme of things, two years wasn’t that long. But it felt like forever to me.

  I loved him so much. I truly wished I could see him tonight, especially after he’d been out of town for two weeks on a work trip. There was nothing I wanted more than to spend some quality time with him.

  But I wanted to spend quality time with my parents just as badly.

  I was a weird teenager for that, and I knew it. Most kids my age would love to run off and hang out with their boyfriend instead of going home to have quality family time.

  What could I say? My parents only got one or two nights off a week and they loved spending that time with me. And I loved spending it with them. We were incredibly close. We never fought. We didn’t have much to fight about. They respected my independence and let me hang out with my friends or with Jacob when I wasn’t in school, and they weren’t particularly strict. I got to do pretty much whatever I wanted. And because of this, part of what I wanted to do was hang out with them.

  “Hey, I’m at my building,” I told Jacob.

  “Okay, well, last chance to change your mind and come see me.”

  I laughed. “Fat chance. See you tomorrow?”

  “Alright, see you.”

  I hung up the phone as I made my way up the filthy steps that led to our apartment building.

  Like much of the population these days, we lived in a total dump. The economy wasn’t at its best right now… Actually, it couldn’t have been worse. We were just struggling to get by.

  I had friends at school who were a little better off, but not many. It had been this way as long as I’d been alive. I was told that about a hundred years ago, things couldn’t have been more different. This country was thriving. There was no poverty; there were no slums.

  I could kind of picture it if I tried. I imagined how my own building must have looked before it was allowed to fall to pieces. What if there weren’t chipped bricks outside and chipped paint inside? What if the carpet when you stepped into the entryway hall wasn’t stained to shit? I think it was white at one time. I tried to imagine it looking as white as snow surrounded by shiny, golden walls and a gorgeous spiral staircase…

  The spiral staircase was still here, of course. It just wasn’t gorgeous anymore. The black railing was rusted. There were steps that were cracked or even missing entirely. This whole building was a safety hazard. It wasn’t kept to the safety standards of humans… or any species, for that matter.

  But I’d lived here my whole life, and I learned to make it home despite its crumbling appearance. It was a mess, but when I walked through that entranceway and into our crummy building, it still felt like home.

  I made my way up the steps until I hit the third floor where my parents and I lived. I remembered that when I was very young, we didn’t have to go up the staircase. There was an elevator once. But when it broke, the landlords refused to fix it.

  I was pretty sure there were laws against this, but none of the tenants ever reported anything because they couldn’t. Most people were often behind on rent or utilities. They were lucky to have a roof over their heads at all, so property owners had a lot of power. They had the room to break laws. If they ever were reported, they could just evict their tenant for late payment.

  It was awful… but it was life for us.

  I fished out my house keys from my backpack as I approached our door. Like all the other doors, it was a dusty red color. Since I had the past on my mind, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would have looked like when it was newly painted.

  I knocked first, hoping that one of my parents would just answer the door and save me the hassle of unlocking both locks. It wasn’t terribly time consuming, but the keys stuck often so it was just easier if they answered, and they usually did.

  But not today. I gave an audible groan and started to work over both locks. The first one did require a little jiggling, but the second one opened easily.

  “Hey, I’m home—” I began to call out as the door swung open.

  I stopped mid-sentence as my eyes scanned the living room. I had to blink once… my brain wasn’t processing what I was seeing. For a moment, it seemed unreal—like maybe if I closed and reopened my eyes, it would all disappear. Maybe this was a nig
htmare that I’d wake up from.

  That was too much to hope for.

  I began to gasp for air as I fell to my knees.

  Both of my parents were laid out before me on the living room floor, lifeless, in a pool of their own blood.

  My vision began to get blurry and tunnel. I felt hot all over, like I was going to vomit any second. I should do something, I thought desperately. I knew I should be doing something, but I was frozen on the floor. What should I have been doing? What do people do when they walk into their home to find their parents dead?

  I had no idea and wasn’t able to think of any rational action. Instead I just started… screaming.

  My voice felt like it wasn’t my own. Like some other girl was screaming somewhere and I was hearing it through the walls. The sound that came from my throat was somehow… underwater. I was screaming at the top of my lungs, but it just didn’t sound that loud.

  It was loud, though, it had to be… Because the sound of my own scream had drowned out the sound of the voice that was coming from behind me. So I was shocked to feel a strange hand on my shoulder.

  I whipped around. I didn't even think of turning around, my body just seemed to do it for me.

  “Annabelle?” he asked, in horror. “Annabelle, what’s happened?”

  It was Jacob. His arms were reaching out against mine, horror on his face. I could see him mouthing ‘are you okay?’ but I couldn’t hear it audibly. I couldn’t hear anything audibly.

  Slowly, my world began to tunnel into blackness.

  When I woke up next, my vision was entirely different. I was not staring at blood red carpet. There was no gore in my view. Quite the opposite, actually.

  I was staring at pristine, white walls. Everything in the room around me was white. The tables, the chairs, even my hospital bedsheets. And before anything else came to my mind, an odd question overcame me…

  If blood is so dark, why do we make hospital rooms so damn white? And how do we keep them that way? How do they clean away the stains of blood on the sheets? Or the blood that drips onto the floor? Why wasn’t everything just a deep, maroon red? Wouldn’t that make cleaning a little easier?

  I didn’t know what I was going on about in my head. I was confused. I didn’t feel like myself. But I did feel a sense of… what was it? Calmness, maybe? Yes, I was calm, but not in the same way you would be if you were to tell yourself to relax. I was calm in a weird, robotic, inhuman way.

  I glanced down at my arm as I began to scooch up in my bed, trying to sit up, but I felt a tug in the crook of my elbow. It was an IV. Why did I need an IV?

  Why was I even here?

  I remembered the world going black. I remembered seeing my parents lying on the floor, but… it didn’t make sense why I was now in a hospital room.

  Maybe something had happened to me. Perhaps something was wrong with my brain. Maybe what I’d seen wasn’t even real, but some kind of insane dream induced from medical complications.

  That actually made sense. It made way more sense than the idea that I had just seen my parents dead on the floor. That made the least sense. Why would that ever happen? Who would ever come into my home and do that to my parents?

  I lived in a bad part of town, but we didn’t have crime like that. We didn’t have brutal, random murders. We had robberies, muggings, even assaults… but this was a whole different thing entirely. There was just no way that what I had seen was real, right? How could it possibly have been? My family and I lived a quiet, little life. My parents did very little outside of going to work and spending time with me.

  “H-hello?” I tried to call out, but my voice caught. It felt hoarse and dry. Like I had been screaming at some concert all night or something. I tried to swallow to relieve some of the dryness, but that only resulted in more pain.

  Suddenly, someone rushed into the room and I recognized them immediately. It was Jacob.

  “Oh, baby,” he said, and he rushed over to me and threw his arms around me. “You’re awake.”

  “Yeah…” I said softly. “Jacob, why am I here? What happened? Is something wrong with me? Am I sick? I’m… I’m very confused.”

  He nodded slowly. “The doctors gave you a couple drugs to calm you down… that’s probably why you feel weird. But nothing is wrong with you. They ran a bunch of tests. It seems like you just passed out from shock.”

  At hearing that, my heart sank. I knew what that had to mean. If nothing was wrong with me, then what I saw…

  “Shock from what?” I asked immediately.

  He cringed. “You… don’t remember?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him blankly. “Maybe I do, but what I remember… it doesn’t seem like it could possibly be real. It makes no sense why it would be real, so… if it was, I’m going to need you to say it. Say it so that I’ll believe it. Because right now, I don’t.”

  I could see the pain cross his face. “Annabelle, I’m so sorry. You have no idea how sorry—”

  I cut him off. “Say it, Jacob. Just tell me.”

  He looked down. “Your parents… were murdered.”

  This time, the world didn’t fade to black. I didn’t scream. For a moment, I couldn’t understand why. I didn’t even feel my heartbeat increase in my chest. Shouldn’t I have been feeling… something?

  Until I remembered I was likely on a cocktail of drugs designed specifically to make me feel nothing. Which was a scary thought, considering I couldn’t take them forever.

  But, for the moment, I was grateful for anything that numbed the pain even slightly.

  “There are police officers here who want to talk to you,” he said softly.

  I nodded. This was probably as good a time as any, considering I was at least calm in the moment.

  “Do you want me to go get them now? They’re just out in the hall,” he said. “Or they can wait, and we can just talk for a moment… I can just be here for you.”

  I didn’t see what there was to talk about. What was there to say now? What was there to do now? My entire world was flipped upside down.

  “What’s going to happen to me now?” I asked. I didn’t elaborate, but I was sure he knew what I meant. Where was I going to live? Who was going to take care of me?

  Those were the practical questions, at least. I had more impractical questions… like who was going to ask me about my day? Who was I going to go to when my life was falling apart, as it was now? Who would I have to be there for me for the rest of my life?

  “I don’t know,” was all he could say.

  I guess that was all there really was to say.

  I didn’t know either.

  Two Years Later

  “Do you know where my apron is?” I called out into the hall as I threw my hair up into a ponytail.

  I had overslept again, what else was new? But if I didn’t find my apron in the next two minutes I was going to be late, and I really couldn’t afford that. Last time I was late, my boss sent me home. I couldn’t afford to lose out on my tips for the day if we were going to make rent.

  “It’s in the bathroom on the counter,” Jacob called out after me.

  “Thanks,” I said, as I walked into the bathroom and wrapped the maroon-colored apron around my waist.

  I wore a black button-down shirt, black pants, and this maroon apron. That was my work outfit. I had only two pairs of pants and they were starting to get worn out, but I really couldn’t afford any more.

  I wrapped the apron around my waist, tying it at the front underneath the apron curtain. My check presenter with a notepad to take down orders was also on the bathroom counter, and I had pens in my apron pocket that I could feel, so I was good to go.

  I walked out into the living room—a very small room that barely fit a two-person couch. Jacob was in our even smaller kitchen, breakfast in hand.

  He looked at me with a smile. “I made pancakes and eggs.”

  “Oh… that’s nice,” I said quietly. “But I’m really not hungry.”

  He
frowned. “Babe, you have to take your meds.”

  “I did,” I told him.

  He looked even more confused. “Without eating?”

  “Yeah, I don’t really need food with them anymore,” I told him.

  The truth was that I actually didn’t even want food with them anymore. In the last few weeks I could feel their effects diminishing, and I wondered if they’d be stronger if I didn't eat. My hunch was right.

  “But the doctor said perodoxone needs to be taken with food.”

  I shrugged. “Jacob, it’s seriously fine. I’m fine.”

  I hated how he babied me this way. Ever since the loss of my parents, he felt the need to take care of me. You’d think I was incapable of doing it on my own. It had been two years, and I was an adult now. I could handle myself.

  I was a mess in the immediate aftermath, I couldn’t lie about that. But who wouldn’t be? Most adults would have been a disaster losing even one of their parents. And I was only seventeen.

  And it wasn’t just the loss of my parents, of course. It wasn’t like it was some accident. Someone purposefully killed them. They set out to harm them and they succeeded. That was a special kind of pain.

  What was worse, the cops never found anything. They had no leads. They had pretty much stopped investigating.

  But I hadn’t.

  “What time are you off?” Jacob asked me. “You want to go grab some dinner after work?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Jacob, we can’t afford that.”

  “I just thought… with the timing of this week and all… maybe I should do something special for you.”

  “Well, don’t,” I told him. “I don’t need that. I’m fine.”

  “Okay… sure. Yeah, so I’ll just see you after work, then.”

  “See ya,” I said shortly, as I stepped out the door and shut it behind me.

  I knew I was being cold to him, even though I shouldn’t have been. He was only trying to be nice. He assumed this was going to be a hard week for me, but somehow, it kind of wasn’t.