“They’re going to think you did this to me,” I whisper, my throat aching as I swallow back tears.
“I think it’s enough, now,” Rome says, ignoring what I said, as he takes the knife away. I open my eyes again, peering down at the newspaper, now soaked in my blood. I reach down with my good hand and turn the paper over, making sure the blood has soaked through to the back of the pages. As I do, I notice the date in the top corner of the front page. My mind does the math, even as I try to force it not to.
“We’ve been here for two weeks,” I whisper to Rome. My entire body starts to tremble violently, and I can’t breathe, can’t see, can’t hear. “Two weeks. Why haven’t they found us?”
I’m bleeding all over myself, all over Rome, all over the damn floor in this fucking room that I can’t get out of. And Rome’s holding the knife, and he did it. He hurt me. He took the knife and drew it along my skin, a choked sound of disbelief coming from his throat, as my blood sprang forth. And we’ve been here for two goddamn fucking weeks.
“We’re going to die down here,” I choke. “You and me, in the dark. He’s going to murder us.”
“No,” Rome protests. “We’re going to get out of here.” And something shifts in his expression. Falls away. The armor he wears fades just a little, and I remember the face of the boy I fell in love with, underneath all of that violence and sorrow and tough-guy exterior he has to put on for survival.
Recognition flickers in his eyes. He knows I’m about to lose my shit and have a total fucking meltdown before I even know. He’s always been this way. He’s always known me better than I know myself. How could I have forgotten that about him?
I start to sob. I’m pretty sure I am losing my goddamn mind. “We’re not,” I cry. “We’re not getting out.”
“I promise you we’re getting out of here,” Rome says, pulling me to his chest, wrapping me in a bear hug. He’s careful to hold my injured arm higher than the rest of me, his large palm acting as a makeshift seal across my bleeding skin. I’m crushed against him, both of us on our knees, but he’s supporting his weight and mine. This isn’t the first time he’s rescued me from a panic attack. I was having them long before somebody decided to kidnap us and put us in hell.
“It’s okay, it’s alright,” Rome murmurs, his words hot against my neck. He buries his face in my long hair and breathes loudly, slowly, as if he’s demonstrating the rhythm for me to mimic. I can’t stop shaking though, the numb safety I’ve managed to ensconce myself in - mentally, at least - sliding away like a fucking avalanche. It all hits me at once. Two weeks ago, my worst fear was being married to a man I loathed. Since then, my father has been shot, I’ve been kidnapped, beaten, raped, I have internal injuries from my IUD that I’m pretty sure are causing me to slowly bleed to death, and I’ve watched Rome get shot while our captor rutted into me at the same time. I’ve kept my cool throughout the lot, even with the crying and the begging and the screaming; I’ve never once lost my shit, not like this. But there’s something about the collar around my neck, about the newspaper soaked in my blood, about the sheer amount of time we’ve been down here, that just absolutely fucking destroys me.
Is this what it feels like to lose your mind?
“I can’t b-breathe,” I gasp, desperately trying to slow down my panting. Ironically, I am breathing, just far too quickly to stay conscious. I’m hyperventilating, something I’m, unfortunately, intimately acquainted with, only normally, the end result of a panic attack is a brown paper bag, a dark room, and, occasionally, a Valium washed down with a glass of Pinot Grigio. Now, I’m terrified that if I pass out, I’ll really, truly be dead.
“Tighter or looser?” Rome asks me. He remembers. After all this time, he still remembers how to comfort me.
“Tighter,” I whisper, smiling mournfully, as he wraps his arms tighter around me.
“What’s your favorite color?” he asks.
“Blue.” I don’t even need to think about it. It’s blue, like his eyes, like my dead sister’s skin, like the dress she was still wearing when he pulled her from the pool all those years ago and tried to resuscitate her.
“Favorite food,” Rome continues, squeezing me harder and harder. It probably hurts him, the way I’m pushed into his chest, snug against his shoulder that still sports a nasty wound from the bullet he took for me just days ago.
“I can’t-“
“Favorite food.” He’s firm. “Come on.”
“Ice-cream,” I manage. The room spins around us, as I cling to Rome.
“Favorite ice cream,” he whispers.
“Baskin-Robbins Love Potion.”
“Favorite person.”
“Adeline.” My voice cracks with grief as I say my dead sister’s name in the room where I’ll most likely die.
“Favorite living person,” Rome clarifies.
“You.”
I answer him, without even really thinking. I suppose I could have said Will or my father or Nathan or Jennifer. But I didn’t say any of those people.
“Me,” Rome echoes, his voice softening with disbelief, with tenderness. Something inside my chest cracks open and spreads through my veins. I might have destroyed what we once had. I might have spent the better part of a decade estranged from Rome Montague’s cold blue eyes and his insistent mouth. I might have loved another boy for that entire time, but loving one person doesn’t mean you erase the other. I never really stopped loving Rome, even as my hatred for his family burned alight in every orchestrated move my family made.
When my father had his first heart attack, shortly after Rome went to prison, I begged him to sell the house so that we could start fresh somewhere else. The horror of being anywhere near the pool where my sister, Adeline, drowned, of looking out of the windows and seeing the crumbling, half-burned Montague mansion next door, even more acute after what happened. The flowers, vases upon vases of bright red, long-stemmed roses, that kept coming to the house every day.
Condolences.
So sorry for your loss.
Thinking of you.
In the weeks after my sister was buried in the family mausoleum, all the flowers wilted and died, and the house turned into some kind of living burial ground. Daddy was catatonic. Wouldn’t let us throw a single stem away, and I could understand why. Clearing out the cards, the flowers, the vases would mean it was really over.
Cleaning up the aftermath of Adeline’s suicide would mean that she was really, truly dead.
Daddy had dismissed every single staff member from his house, including the kitchen staff, and the only person allowed beyond the front foyer, apart from me, was my cousin, Nathan. Even Daddy’s brother, Uncle Enzo, and his wife, Aunt Eliza, were forbidden. My father’s grief was a living thing, a dark sickness that almost killed him.
Nathan broke all the vases after weeks of us all living in a rotting pile of dead roses, in various states of decay, stale vase water with scum around the rims only making things smell worse. Took each one in his hands, his face red from the bitter words he’d exchanged with Daddy, and threw them at the living room walls. One by one, they shattered, sending cloudy, dirty water and sharp glass all over the tiled floors. Piles of damp red rose petals and twisted, thorny stems everywhere.
He didn’t mean to hurt my father. He was horrified when Daddy clutched at his chest and collapsed, the first heart attack for a man who was far too young and healthy to worry about such things. Nathan was just angry, the same as the rest of us. Being adopted didn’t mean he loved Adeline any less than we did. If anything, he loved her more. He chose to love her in spite of the fact that he wasn’t linked by blood to any of us.
I don’t know why I’m thinking about that now. Maybe because I thought I’d escaped the Capulet family curse. Survived even as everyone I loved either died or was sent away. Made it to my twenty-fifth birthday. Endured my public betrothal to a man I could never love.
How silly I was to think my bloodline wouldn’t taint me the same way it taints all who
bear the Capulet name. Power doesn’t just corrupt. Power destroys.
Maybe I’m thinking about Nathan and my father now because I hope they’re trying to find me. If Daddy is even alive, that is. Maybe it will just be Nathan coming to my rescue. Maybe he and Will are plotting my escape, right this moment.
Maybe they’re planning my funeral.
Who fucking knows.
Not me. I don’t know anything, other than the biting pain of the fresh cut on my arm. I don’t know anything, other than the arms squeezed tightly around me. I don’t know anything, outside of this room.
Rome’s lips brush against my forehead in an almost-kiss that sears my skin in the most delicious way, the comfort of his affection like a balm to my steadily eroding soul. “You’re okay,” he says one last time, releasing his tight grip on me. He takes the bloodied newspaper and places it in front of the door, an offering for our merciless, masked god who decides everything in the universe he’s constructed for us down here.
Rome finds the first aid kit - the same one I was using to bandage his bullet wound only days earlier - and sets to work on my arm. My tears are dried now, precious water that I probably shouldn’t have shed from my thirsting body. Now there’s just salt tracks lining my cheeks, stiff and uncomfortable.
“You should lay down,” Rome says, after he’s finished bandaging me up, now that today’s copy of The Verona Times is sufficiently soaked in my blood.
I want to tell him that I shouldn’t, that if I close my eyes, I might never open them again, but I’m too tired to form the words. Instead, I let Rome guide me over to the mattress that sits bare on one side of this tiny room we’re locked in. He gently lowers me down, so I’m lying on my back, even though it must hurt the shoulder where he took a bullet. He doesn’t show his pain to me. He’s made of something far stronger than I am.
“Here.” I feel the ridge of a plastic water bottle at my lips. We have one small bottle of water to last us days at a time - I made the mistake of drinking the first one too quickly. I thought I was going to die when it had been days without a refill. There’s a bathroom attached to this room, and the faucet works, but the water made me sick when I tried to drink it. I haven’t been game to try it again. We’ve just rationed our water to a few sips, twice a day.
I choke a mouthful of the water down. I’m so tired my ability to swallow is barely existent anymore. Rome replaces the lid of the bottle, without drinking any himself. “Rome,” I whisper. “You have to drink, too.”
Reluctantly, he screws the lid off again and has a thimbleful of water for show. I would argue with him that he needs to have more, but I can’t. I’m slipping away again. I blink furiously, trying to stay awake, when I feel Rome’s cool hand against my clammy cheek, his fingers still sticky with my blood.
“Rest,” he says. And I have no option but to obey.
As I drift off, I think again about his bloody fingerprints all over the newspaper. Somebody is setting us up. For what, I don’t know yet. But it’s big, and it’s terrible, and I don’t know if we’re going to survive to learn what the bigger endgame is.
I just pray we survive long enough to figure out who’s really responsible for putting us here. I might be too weak to walk, too injured to escape, but there is one thing my blood still sings for in those endless moments.
Vengeance.
Red and crisp, like the apple the snake offered Eve. My heart yearns for it. If I make it out of here alive, I’m going to spend the rest of my days making sure the sick fuck who put us here - who is keeping us here - suffers.
Sometimes I think the thought of getting my revenge is the only thing that keeps me alive. It doesn’t worry me, though. It excites me.
We all need something to look forward to. A goal that pulls us out of bed each morning. Mine is quite simple. An eye for an eye. So what if the whole world goes blind? It’s already too dark down here in this hellhole to see.
CHAPTER TWO
AVERY
I wake up on my back, to the sensation of cold metal tracing a line from my sternum to my belly button.
This is it, I think. I’m dead. I’m a dead girl in a body bag, about to be opened up and searched for answers. This is my post-mortem.
I wonder what they’d find. A broken heart, crumbled into little pieces inside my rib cage. An emptiness. An aching void.
But would they find who did this to me? To us?
This is my post-mortem, but I’m not a dead girl. At least, not yet. The metal is gone, and now there are hands around my throat, squeezing. I panic, until I realize the hands aren’t squeezing - they’re removing the shock collar from my neck. I lie perfectly still, terrified that if I fight, the collar will go straight back on. I’d do just about anything to keep that instrument of torture away from me.
The fingers forcing my eyelids open are testament to that. My eyes, forced to focus, make out the blurry figure kneeling over me.
It’s not Rome.
It’s the man in the mask.
The one who took me. The one who raped me. The one who cut me so deeply I almost bled to death.
My stomach twists painfully at the cruel sight of him.
I recoil, sinking deeper into the thin mattress. The back of my head compresses the spongy foam enough that I feel the cold concrete floor underneath. I look to each side of me, driven by pure instinct, searching the small room I’m imprisoned in for the only safety that exists - Rome.
But he’s not here. My heart sinks as I feel his absence. He disappeared once before - right after our captor shot him, the bastard decided to get him medical assistance and arranged for a backyard surgeon to remove the bullet.
This time, Rome hasn’t been shot. He was here when I drifted off. That could have been seconds ago, hours, days - time is impossible to track down here.
“You had an accident,” the masked man says.
An accident?
I blink, trying to focus, as my heavy eyelids try to drag me back down into a cold void. My senses are stuffy, remote, and it takes a few seconds to realize I’m lying in my own urine. The mattress underneath me is wet, and it smells. There should be shame, but there’s not. I don’t care that I wet myself. Only that I need to find a way out of here.
“Get up,” my captor says, in that monotone voice. His faceless mask peers down at me, his eyes hidden by shadows, and I have the unrelenting urge to tear his fucking face off, an urge that bleeds into every single cell in my body. I strike out with my fists, and I’m not sure who is more surprised when one of my terribly-aimed punches connects with a hard cheekbone.
He lets out a surprised grunt, retaliating with brute force. His fist slams into the side of my head, and little white dots dance in my vision for a second.
“Bad girl,” he growls. He fists a gloved hand into my matted hair and pulls hard enough that I feel like my scalp is going to be ripped clean off. I scream, following his lead, as he drags me alongside him, crawling desperately on hands and knees to keep up. The room is small, so it only takes a few steps to get to the bathroom.
Is he going to kill me now?
I don’t know. The bathroom is crudely fashioned, a toilet bolted to one end of the tiny space, opposite the large claw-foot bath that looks completely out of place in this dungeon of horrors. The ground in here is just dirt, and I wonder if worms will wriggle up out of it and eat my corpse once I’m dead.
I mean, I hope I won’t die here, but things aren’t looking so great right now.
The hand in my hair suddenly pulls harder, forcing me up off my knees. For the briefest of moments, I’m standing toe-to-toe with my captor, and then I’m falling through the air.
I crash down into the tub before I can even take a breath. The water is ice-cold, colder than it would ever be straight from the faucet. It’s as if this psycho has actually poured bags of ice into the tub and let them melt before dumping my ass in. My entire body freezes up, the shock of the cold rendering every muscle rigid. I open my eyes, the cold water stingi
ng, as it rushes into my vision. I feel a hand around my throat, trapping me underwater.
My heart takes off like a freight train at full speed, like a hummingbird’s frantic wings. The sound of my own pulse roars in my head, as my chest starts to seize, my survival instinct desperately kicking in as my lungs search for breath where there is none. The bath is deep, and the back of my skull rests on the bottom, a nice vantage point for an otherwise absolutely useless position. I have hold of my captor’s wrists underwater, covered by black hoodie sleeves and the edges of his black gloves. I find the spot where the two fabrics meet and dig my fingernails in as hard as I can, watching with a brief satisfaction as tiny trails of red blood diffuse into the water in front of my eyes.
My sharp nails work a treat. He pulls away, a muted roar reaching my ears through the cold water I’m still submerged in. As soon as his fingers release my throat, I reach for the sides of the tub, pulling myself upright, choking and spluttering as I draw air into my lungs. Briefly, I think of Adeline, my sister, the way she died all those years ago. People say drowning is a peaceful way to die? I call bullshit.
Something hits the surface of the water, making me recoil. I can just imagine this fucker throwing in a hairdryer and toasting me. After a few seconds of not being electrocuted, I relax minutely, peering down into the water. He’s thrown a square of soap in the tub. I wrap my fingers around it, pulling the slippery bar toward me.
“Strip,” he demands, holding out his hand. Without looking at myself, I remove the heavy, wet t-shirt clinging to my body, followed by the skirt.
“And?” he keeps his hand outstretched. Reluctantly, I take my panties off, cheeks burning, as I pull them out of the water and place them, dripping wet, into his open palm.
“Clean yourself,” he grunts, leaving the room. He slams the door shut behind him, and I’m alone again. I try not to hyperventilate as I look down at myself for the first time since he woke me up and dragged me in here. My body is covered in a rainbow of bruises, some old, most new, and atop it all, a coating of blood that starts at my forehead and ends somewhere around my ankles. I think about throwing the soap back at his face when the guy comes back, staying bloody - a small act of defiance. If I don’t die - if I make it out of this place - maybe some of the blood will have his DNA. But I think of the condom he used when he raped me, and the fact that I’ve not managed to hurt this guy enough to draw blood - my fingernails at his wrist being the only exception - and I cave. I really, really want to be clean. I also worry that he won’t let me out of this ice bath until I’m properly washed, and I’m already shivering violently, the skin around my fingernails turning a faint blue. I take the soap, and I scrub myself, being mindful to leave one hand above the water, my futile attempt to preserve some of the DNA under my fingernails from where I just sank them into his flesh.
VENGEFUL QUEEN Page 2