Instinctively, I try to spit them out, but she’s lightning-quick, swinging her knee over my lap and straddling me, one hand pinching my nostrils, the other pushing my mouth shut. I thrash in her grasp, but it’s no use. I hold my breath until I’m passing out, because I’m nothing if not stubborn. Just as the edges of blackness are starting to close in over me, my body takes over, convulsing for breath violently enough that the pills make their way down my throat. I pass out, anyway, my arms stretched out crucifix-style against the bed frame, my chin slamming into my chest.
CHAPTER FOUR
ROME
I don’t want to wake up.
A searing pain in my shoulder snaps me out of my dream state, back into reality. I blink heavily, and all of a sudden, I’m back in the room upstairs, high as fuck from whatever those pills were. The psychotic bitch who drugged me is twisting her fingers into my partially healed bullet wound to wake me up. It works, too. I roar at the sharp agony she’s inflicting with her gloved fingers, as she tugs and twists and prods. She stops after a few seconds. My howls must be enough to satisfy her that I’m awake.
It takes me a few seconds to understand what I’m seeing - a multicolored wig, bobbing up and down in my lap, a wet mouth sucking at my cock like it’s a goddamn lollipop. I’m hard, and that confirms my suspicions about the pills she shoved in my mouth and forced me to swallow. I can’t move, though, my limbs heavy, my head fuzzy. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s given me a cocktail of Viagra and muscle relaxants. Great. Just fucking great. My shoulder is on fire, and I feel the first warmth of fresh blood as it seeps from my wound. Fucking bitch.
“What are you doing?” I ask her. The light in here is too dim to make out her face, now that she’s removed the face bandanna. She’s kept the sunglasses on, unfortunately, and if I make it out of here alive, I’ll forever be haunted by the image of my own drugged-out expression I see in the mirrored reflection.
I fade in and out of consciousness. The next time I open my eyes, her face bandanna is back on, obscuring her features, and she’s rolling a condom down my painfully erect penis. I black out again, and the final time I come to, it’s to her lowering herself down onto my dick. The double-edged sword of Viagra is that it’s great for guys who need a little help in the boner department - but for me, at my age and level of fitness, it hurts. I can’t come, which seems to be her endgame. She bounces in my lap for what seems like hours, and when I finally reach climax, it doesn’t feel satisfying. It feels numb. The drugs pull me under again, and this time, I don’t wake up for what feels like a long time.
It’s completely dark outside when the guy kicks me awake. I’m not restrained to the bed frame anymore; my wrists are cuffed in front of me, now, and somebody has gone to the trouble of dressing me, pants and all.
So that happened, I think to myself, knowing how much worse Avery had it. The guy pulls me back downstairs, unlocking the heavy door, shoving me back into the basement. I land face-first on the mattress, the clicking of the heavy locks back into place the last thing I hear before it goes dark again.
CHAPTER FIVE
AVERY
Rome is back with me. And he’s hurting, I can tell. But when I ask him what happened while he was gone, he tells me nothing. Perhaps he thinks that if he sacrifices himself, if he bears the pain, that I will be spared.
Rome Montague might know about how the world works, but he doesn't understand how the mind of a killer works. I mean, neither do I, not really. But I do know that this depraved man calling the shots behind the one-way glass divider thinks in a far more cunning way than either Rome or I could ever begin to fathom.
Rome’s body is a testament to pain. His tattoos span the length of his body. There’s barely a spot that isn’t engraved with some kind of ink. He chose to sit for countless hours while somebody carved a needle through his flesh until blood and ink settled into the spaces left raw. He paid for that pain. He wears it like armor.
So, to a man who chose pain so many times, giving himself up to protect another might not seem like such a stretch. Even if that person he’s protecting is me, the girl who betrayed him. The girl who sent him to prison.
The girl who ruined his life.
The thing about pain, though, is that it has so many different degrees. The pain you choose to ink over your skin is a pain you control. A pain you ask for. The pain that Rome wants to take on my behalf in this hellhole is not a pain that anybody would ever ask for. It is savage and vicious and violent.
And I don’t deserve his protection after the things I’ve put him through.
All of these thoughts turn in my head as I watch Rome affix a butterfly clip to the clean bandage he’s just wound around my arm, from wrist to elbow. He smells like antiseptic and earth, like fresh-cut grass and rain. And he’s still weak. The bullet might have been surgically removed from his shoulder, but the wound is still deep and raw and terrifying. It’s bleeding again, which means he’s injured it somehow. It hasn’t bled for days. It makes me wonder if somebody reopened his wound on purpose.
The fact that the wound is from a bullet he took for me makes it even worse. I’m guilt-ridden on top of everything else. I want to know where he went when I was alone down here. But I can see that whatever happened, it was bad. Bad enough that his bullet wound is bleeding again.
I think they hurt him terribly.
But I’m too much of a coward to ask for specifics.
“What?” Rome asks, readjusting the butterfly clip against my wrist. He feels my stare, even when he’s 100% focused on bandaging me up.
“Nothing,” I whisper. Rome stops what he’s doing to raise his eyes to mine. Damn. Even in this dark room, they’re the coldest blue I’ve ever seen. Something about the hardness behind them makes me flinch. Rome must see the pain in my eyes, because his hard stare turns to concern. In this moment, it’s as if the way he treated me just hours ago was a dream. The way he calmed me when I was having a panic attack, the familiar distractions he employed to settle me down. It was like looking through a window to the boy I used to love, and now that window has been slammed shut.
“Did I hurt you?” he asks quietly, carefully moving the butterfly clip higher along the bandage. “No,” I say quickly. “It’s fine. Thank you.”
Truthfully, the cut on my arm was the least painful of all the injuries I’ve sustained since being down here. There are many things that hurt a great deal more. A sharp blade across my wrist, inflicted by the man I used to love, pales in comparison to anything else our captor has done to me.
It hurts most for Rome, though, because he was the one who helped the blade along. I know this, even without discussing it with him. Maiming me hurts him more than any bullet, deeper than any electrical current, harder than any blow.
It’s awkward, now. Without thinking, I reach for the edge of the square bandage affixed to the bullet wound on Rome’s chest. It’s so close to his heart, I was convinced he was going to die on the floor in front of me when it first happened. Rome pulls away before my fingers can make contact.
I search his eyes again and find nothing but hard walls.
“Sorry,” I mutter. I wasn’t going to touch the spot where blood still seeps through his dressing. I was just going to offer to redress his wound the way he’s dressed mine.
“It’s okay,” he says, backing away from me. He crouches down in front of the first aid kit we’ve been gifted, amongst our dungeon of horrors, ducking his head so I won’t see how much it hurts him to move. I chew on the inside of my cheek as Rome struggles to change the dressing covering his bullet wound.
“You should let me help you,” I say, trying not to let the irritation moving along my skin enter my voice. He doesn’t deserve my frustration, my impatience. He took a bullet for me. He almost died for me.
“I don’t need your help, brat,” he snaps, sitting on the side of the mattress that fills most of this small, windowless room we’re locked in together. I suck in a breath upon hearing the name he bestow
ed upon me in high school. Brat. I haven’t heard that nickname in a decade.
I watch him as he carefully takes a breath, struggling to fill his lungs properly, a brief wince of pain as his chest expands with air.
Getting shot will do that.
I use his temporary distraction to snatch the clean gauze from his hand. “You don’t want my help,” I correct him, as I kneel in front of him. “But yeah. You do need it.”
He stares at me like he wants to murder me.
“Lay down,” I say, dragging the first aid kit closer and taking what I need - a roll of tape, some surgical gloves.
“Jesus, buy me a drink first,” he snarks. At least his sarcasm means he’s not dead, I suppose.
I freeze when I feel the gloves against my palms. These are the same kind of latex gloves our captor has been wearing whenever he touches me.
I forego the gloves in favor of dousing my hands in sanitizing alcohol gel. The stuff burns my eyes as I work it into my palms. I turn my attention back to Rome, who hasn’t laid back on the mattress. The pained look on his face tells me he can’t.
“It’s okay,” I say quickly. “Just sit there and stay still.”
I set the gauze and tape next to me and take the taped, square edge of Rome’s gauze bandage, carefully pulling it away from his skin. As I peel it, my eyes can’t help but travel down his torso, past packed abs and endless inked images. I run my other hand down his chest, ever-so-gently. He breathes in sharply at the slight touch of my fingers, but he doesn’t push me away. I stop when I brush along a deep, jagged scar, an old wound that looks like it was stitched together by a five-year-old with knitting needles. The wound is thick and raised, and even the bright red and orange ink covering it can’t disguise the violence that happened here.
“Somebody stabbed you here?” I ask, letting the tips of my fingers rest lightly against the raised flesh. Now it’s my turn to feel Rome’s eyes burning into me, but they don’t contain curiosity. When I meet them, they’re full of thinly bridled hatred. An odd sensation crawls down my spinal column, imaginary spiders against my flesh. I haven’t been this close to Rome Montague for this long in a decade, and suddenly, the proximity dizzies me.
“A prison fight,” Rome says tightly.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, unable to tear my eyes - and my fingers - away from the scar. It’s my fault he’s damaged. My fault he’s scarred beyond repair.
“Don’t,” he says. Don’t go there, he means. I blink back tears, remembering the day I discovered his plea deal had been rejected, that he had been sentenced to a prison term. I tried to visit him in the state lock-up before he was transferred to a more permanent facility, but he refused to see me. Once upon a time, I thought the guilt of what I’d done to him might kill me. After time, once I knew he’d been released, the guilt didn’t lessen, but it became like grief does over time - a little easier to bury.
I focus my attention on peeling the rest of the blood-soaked bandage from Rome’s shoulder, and what I see underneath shocks me. His wound looks, quite literally, as if someone has jammed their fingers into it and broken apart the stitched, healing flesh.
“What happened while you were gone today?” I whisper, horrified. Rome looks down at the wound and frowns. “Some bitch got her claws into me,” he says cryptically.
He frustrates the fuck out of me. Why can’t he just tell me? “What bitch? Where did you go? Did you see anything, any way out…”
I want him to give me some kind of hope. As he meets my eyes again, it’s clear to both of us that he’s going to disappoint me.
“There’s a shitty old house up there,” he says, as he looks up at the ceiling. “A couple empty bedrooms. And there’s a woman up there.”
A woman? “He’s keeping her up there?” I ask, the cogs turning in my brain. “Like he’s keeping us down here?”
Rome shakes his head. “No.”
“Then what?” I explode. “Just tell me!”
I see anguish in his stricken expression for the briefest of moments, before his mask slams back into place. “I can’t.”
“Rome.”
“I’ll tell you,” he says, “if you tell me something first.”
“What do you want to know?”
He waits until I’ve stuck clean gauze to his wound before he asks me. “Why did you lie?”
My heart sinks. I know exactly what he means. What he’s asking. And I know nothing I say will ever make up for what I did to him.
“I don’t know,” I say weakly.
“Bullshit.” Rome grabs my wrist, pulling me closer to him. “You got up on that stand, and you lied. You told a judge and twelve jurors that I beat your cousin Tyler almost to death because I had anger issues.”
I glance down at his hand, squeezing my wrist almost tight enough to snap it. “You do have anger issues.”
He pushes my wrist away in disgust. “Fuck you. I should have walked away that night and let him kill you.”
I gasp, covering my mouth with my hand to stop any more noises or ill-timed words from spilling out. The image of that night is burned into my skull. The night Rome turned eighteen. The night my own cousin, Tyler Capulet, slipped roofies into my drink and forced himself on me. The night Rome walked in on him choking the life out of me, and beat Tyler almost to death. And then, a couple hours later, it was the night my sister killed herself.
“I didn’t mean that,” he says, through gritted teeth.
Neither of us says anything for several minutes, until finally, I can’t bear it. “I lied because I was a fool,” I say quietly. “They tricked me. Tyler’s parents told me you’d accepted a plea bargain. That you wouldn’t do any jail time, that the conviction would be expunged after two years, so long as nobody testified about the… “
“The part where he drugged and raped you?” Rome supplies.
“Yes,” I mumble.
“And you believed them?” Rome asks incredulously.
I shake my head. “It wasn’t just them. It was the whole family. My father. My uncle. My grandparents. Everyone was more concerned about the bad press around a Capulet raping his own teenage cousin than they were about you being punished. At least, that’s what they led me to think.” I take in a desperate breath. “My uncle Enzo convinced me that the lawyers would tear you apart in court if I didn’t go along with the plan.”
“Well, he got the first part right,” Rome says. “They sure did tear me apart.”
“I was a stupid, sixteen-year-old girl,” I say ruefully. “I believed them. I did! I was a fucking idiot, and I’m so sorry.”
“That might explain how I ended up in prison,” Rome says, “But it doesn’t explain how I stayed in there. You could have done something once you found out, Avery.”
He’s right. I could have. And for the rest of my life - if it lasts for days, or months, or years - I don’t think I’ll ever be able to make him understand why I left him there to rot.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says, his words sharp, his voice hard. “We don’t have time for that.”
“What do you mean?” I ask dumbly.
“Avery,” Rome says urgently, “we have to find a way to get out of this fucking hellhole.”
CHAPTER SIX
AVERY
Spoiler alert: We do not get out.
We adapt to a new life, down here in the dark. A picture of domesticated bliss, if that bliss involves daily bandage changes and electric shocks, of bloodletting and lapsing in and out of consciousness. The occasional beating. There’s never enough food or water to be satisfied, only enough to stave off actual death, and I start to appreciate what sailors adrift in the ocean must feel like as they break down and start drinking the salt water that surrounds them, even if they know it will kill them even quicker.
That’s how I feel, down here, in this hellhole. Like I want to find the equivalent of salt water and drink it until I can’t fit another drop in my belly. Maybe it’s my mind trying to preserve itself, to not hope for to
o much, because as the days drag on, dark and unending, I gradually stop hoping to be saved. I start to think about how we can take things into our own hands and escape.
It’s an impossible task. Rome tells me about the house upstairs, about the multiple locks on multiple doors, about the woman who drugged him. We don’t talk about his prison sentence anymore. We don’t talk about the past much at all. We both fall into a rhythm that consists entirely of keeping ourselves - and each other - alive for one more day.
We’ve been down here for thirty-two days when I wake up on our bare mattress and realize I have given up. I don’t turn to Rome and squeeze his hand, or touch his face, or give him a sad smile. I don’t take a sip of water. I don’t lust for food. I don’t require warmth.
I don’t do anything.
Rome must sense the change in me. He’s already awake - he barely sleeps, in comparison to me - and he leaves his spot next to the door, coming to sit by me.
VENGEFUL QUEEN Page 4