I want to die.
I want to drown.
My heart beats harder. Faster.
The man moves back into the hall, and a frustrated growl tears from my lips. I want to die with Rome. I want to die with Rome. Let me die with him.
Our captor comes back with a wide plastic bag. I smell food. I sense warmth. My tongue comes alive at the mere suggestion of food. And my body, my poor, brittle body, would do anything to get that food. I would kill a person to get that bag of food. I would let our twisted captor rape me. I would sign over every cent to my name, from now to eternity, to get just one goddamn forkful of whatever he’s got in that bag.
The plastic doesn’t matter. The styrofoam doesn’t matter. I’m already starving and the tease of the food inside those bags is like a hard punch to my stomach.
With my arms tied tightly behind me, I can’t reach out. Can’t grab at any of the delicious morsels he’s brought here to torture me with. How am I supposed to eat without my hands?
“Please,” I whimper. I fucking beg him. “Please!” My voice is pitiful. I have been reduced to a mere shell of a person, a shadow who begs and pleads for something, for anything.
I don’t have the energy to be ashamed at the way I lurch forward against the bonds. It’s not even me, it’s my body. The sooner I can be free of my body; the sooner everything will be better.
We’ll be in a hole in the ground, or dumped in the ocean for sharks to feed on, or burned to piles of ash and bone. All of those eventualities would be an improvement over this one.
The masked man kneels in front of me and opens the bag. The slick sound of the plastic makes my mouth water. Is Rome still alive? Yes. Still breathing, though he’s not taking very deep breaths.
Finally, shame floods my chest. I can’t look away from the fucking styrofoam containers in the asshole’s hands.
I’ll do absolutely anything, and I’m terrified he knows that.
He lays out a fork on the plastic bag and reaches for the first container. Then the second. Then the third. The man in the mask opens each one, placing them in a neat row like the monster that he is.
Mac and cheese. Fries. Mashed potatoes.
Fuck me. It’s all my favorite things. I’ve never smelled anything like I’m smelling this. Not in Paris, not in Venice, not in a thousand fine dining restaurants.
This is heaven. Maybe I’ve died, after all.
My stomach growls. I’m still alive. What a fucking betrayal. My mind splits in two. The sane part of me wants to spit at the smug bastard in front of me, to close my mouth up tight, to refuse to take a single bite. Fuck this guy and his food. I can’t look away as the fork flashes down into the macaroni and cheese. Big noodles. Thick cheese. It’s hot, fresh, looks homemade. Not some boxed bullshit.
He lifts the fork to my lips.
And god help me, I can’t keep them closed.
Bite him.
I take the first bite of mac and cheese instead.
The flavor bursts over my tongue, lighting me up from head to toe. It’s better than silk against naked flesh. It’s better than expensive champagne. It’s better than an orgasm. It feels so fucking good going down. Damn it, I would sell him my soul for just one bite more.
He sits back.
“Look at that,” he comments, and even though I can’t see his mouth, I imagine it’s twisted into a cruel smirk. “You’re a slut for this, aren’t you?”
Spit at him. Bite him.
But now he’s lifting a french fry to my mouth and I can’t do it. I can only bite down through the perfectly crunchy surface and the steaming potato within. Were these made in animal fat? Oh my god, I think they were. These are not McDonald’s fries. I would fucking love McDonald’s fries right now.
The mashed potatoes bring tears to my eyes.
They’re whipped together with butter, with cream. Calories have a taste all their own, and it tastes like life. My chin drops down to my chest. Let me worship at the altar of this feast.
This food, this life—it fills me with rage.
I don’t want to live down here. I don’t want to repeat this torture over and over again. Send me back to the brink of death and finish it off.
I lift my head. Tense my shoulders. I wait.
Another bite is coming toward me. Macaroni and cheese. My flesh is fucking weak. My flesh wants it. But three bites of food have revived me enough to give me a flash of courage like a broken match. There’s still just enough left to strike.
It’s hard to lurch forward, tied to this fucking chair, but I do it. There’s a certain focus in the masked man’s eyes. He thinks I’m just a greedy bitch, trying to take a bite. And I am a greedy bitch. But there’s something I want more than a bite of the food.
My teeth sink down into the flesh of his latex glove-covered hand, in the tender webbing between his finger and thumb, and he grunts. The grunt turns into a howl that cuts off abruptly. Salty blood dots my lips, and I smile as he yanks his hand away. His blood tastes better than the food. It tastes like I’m fighting back.
I lick my blood-smeared lips, bracing as his other fist comes down in a flicker, out of the corner of my eye.
Pain blossoms in my thigh, a new pain, a scream that comes from my dry throat. I look down in horror at my exposed upper leg, at what he’s done to me now.
He stabbed me with the fork!
“Fuck you,” he says, pulling the sharp metal prongs back out of my flesh. I scream through gritted teeth, more from the surprise than anything else. It hurts.
I hover on the line between pain and madness, willing myself to tip away from the pain. I’ll take mad any day. The man stands up, the bloodied fork clenched in his fist. He has a grip on my hair before I have time to think, pulling it, twisting it, forcing me to look down while he kicks over the containers of food and grinds his shoes into the piles on the floor.
He crouches down again, eyes close to mine. My heart races. It sprints away and blasts through the walls and finds a way out, into the sunlight.
But not me. Not fucking me. The happiness in our captor’s eyes still somehow shocks me. How could I be shocked by anything at this point?
“I’m going to leave you down here forever,” he spits into my ear.
Then the pressure on my hair is gone, and the only thing left of him is the echoes of his heavy footfalls. The slam of the door. The locks hitting home. One, two, three, four.
On the mattress, Rome breathes in and out.
CHAPTER NINE
AVERY
“Rome.” I whisper his name like a twisted prayer. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. I can still taste the macaroni and cheese, but it’s turned into a bitter sludge at the back of my throat.
Rome is still asleep. It’s been hours. There are things you get used to when you’re locked in a room beneath...something. Beneath another building. There’s a faint, so faint, rhythm of footsteps above. People are up there. I wonder if they’re moving around freely, or if there’s just another cell like this stacked on top of the one we’re in. Rome told me it looks like a normal house up there, albeit one on the wrong side of town, but who knows what secrets are stashed up there.
My arms are in permanent cramps from being tied behind my back for so long. I tried to wriggle out of this position, but guess fucking what? It’s hard to be Houdini when your body is on the brink of death. I’ve heard stories about mothers lifting cars off their children. I can’t even get my arms out of these bonds.
“Rome.”
I let my chin rest against my chest. He could have killed me, and that would have been kind of the bastard. But he didn’t, and now I’m still alive. The silver lining to being alive is that I’m going to hold up my end of the bargain with Rome. We’re getting out of here together. It would be pretty selfish of me to float away on my own, wouldn’t it? Can’t do that.
“Rome.” I’ve been saying his name for hours. Maybe days. Maybe years. Soon I’m going to lose my voice, and if he doesn’t wake up befo
re then, we are well and truly fucked.
“Rome, wake up. Rome!”
Finally. He stirs, groans, and relief as pure as uncut cocaine washes through my veins.
“Rome, oh my god.”
Rome murmurs something unintelligible that sounds like a string of curse words, as he pushes himself upright on the mattress. Damn, he’s beautiful. Those blue eyes. That wiry body. It’ll be a pleasure to lay down next to him on the mattress and close my eyes for the very last time.
His eyes open wider. “Fuck, Avery, what happened? Christ.” He scrambles up, noticing the dart in his chest at the last moment. A swift yank removes it from his chest, and he lets it clatter to the floor. Rome takes in the food gone bad on the concrete and me, tied to the chair. “What did he do?”
Rome’s unsteady on his feet. I’m worried about it, briefly. But then I remember, we’re leaving this place. We’re getting out. He won’t have to be hurt anymore.
It’s only a matter of time, now. He moves behind me and unties my wrists.
My body screams from the pain, and I tip forward, cramping up in every possible way. Rome is barely there to catch me.
“I’m fine,” I gasp, against his shoulder.
He lets out a rumble of a laugh. “You fucking liar.”
Somehow, somehow, he still smells like himself. I inhale it like I breathed in the food. “He tried to feed me,” I say into the cotton of his t-shirt. “So I bit him.”
“Nice.” Rome pulls away, scanning with more attentiveness now. “Did he hurt you?”
The anxious undertone to his voice smashes my heart on the floor along with the food. Who’d have thought that Rome, a Montague, would ever be worried about me again after what I did to him? Not me. Definitely not me.
“He stabbed me with a fork.” How has my life gone so wrong that he stabbed me with a fork is a sentence I casually utter to someone else? And it’s not even the worst possible sentence. “It hurt like a bitch.”
Another laugh bubbles up and floats out of my mouth. Rome doesn’t crack a smile. His blue eyes darken a shade. He pulls me close again, but it’s only so he can lift me into his arms and carry me to the mattress.
“I’ll take care of it.” Oh, this mattress feels so fucking good. That chair is hell. The mattress is six inches short of heaven, isn’t it? Rome’s breath reappears above me. Then there are hands on my skirt, lifting it away from my thighs. In another life this could have been sexy. Far in the back of my brain, an old connection snaps to life. Hands on my skin. Hands between my legs. The ache of desire. I let out a groan at the memory of it. Rome’s hands stop.
I open my eyes and look into his.
“You know, you don’t have to do anything for this...this fork stab wound.” He still doesn’t smile. “We’re not leaving here anyway. He said he was leaving us down here forever. That’s what he said.”
I give a little shrug, like I’m relaying something a professor said in college that didn’t affect me one way or the other.
Rome frowns. “I’m still going to clean it up.”
He dabs some rubbing alcohol on it with a torn-off piece of gauze, which draws a hiss out of me, as surely as it might draw out any infection. His fingers are quick and confident. How many people has he fixed up just like this? What has his life been like after I destroyed it? I know more of it now, but not all of it, not by a long shot. And that’s really too bad. Too bad there’s not enough time to know every single thing there is to know about Rome Montague.
“Why, though?” Isn’t that a surprise? My eyes were closed. Now they’re open again, for the moment.
Rome looks down at his handiwork on my exposed thigh. His eyes gloss over. “Because someone might find us one day. And I want them to know that I cared about you.”
My heart throbs. Oh. Oh. If someone comes across our bodies, he doesn’t want them to think that he didn’t take care of me.
My heart cracks inside my chest once more.
“And anyway.” He tugs my skirt back over my wound. “You bit that fucker. You think he’ll give up an opportunity to get his revenge?”
When I laugh, it hurts down to my bones. “Leaving us down here to starve is pretty good revenge.”
Rome winks at me, and for a split second, it’s like we’re flirting in the ballroom of a five-star hotel, not a care in the world. “We’ll get him.”
He hesitates, and for a moment, I think he might say something else. It’s a moment too long for my wounded body. I’m still partially in mourning over the macaroni and cheese, which I hate. How dare he put all my favorite things in my mouth like that and let me remember what home tastes like. What hope tastes like. How fucking dare he! I was so close to slipping away to the other side.
I have to take Rome with me, though. That’s the plan.
“Together,” I tell Rome, and through a dim haze, he nods back at me. The last thing I hear before sleep takes me under is the sound of Rome stretching out on the mattress.
It’s the only sound that carries me through the next few days. It turns out Rome was wrong. The locks on the door never scratch and slam. The door never opens. The masked man never comes back to get his revenge. Minutes bleed into hours. I think they do, anyway. The pain in my belly pulses and throbs, covering me in waves, head to toe then back again. At some point, I hear Rome say that there’s no more water. The only food left is the rotted remnants on the floor.
Remember when he winked at me? I do. There was still a wisp of hope in his voice. It’s gone now.
And I’m almost gone with it.
CHAPTER TEN
ROME
I can’t let her die like this.
It’s a bizarrely compassionate thing to say, coming from a motherfucker like me. Nothing changes you like being locked in some psychopath’s underground dungeon. Four locks. That piece of shit must really want to keep us here. And trust me, I never thought I’d be an “us” with Avery Capulet. Not after everything went to hell all those years ago. Surprise, surprise. It wasn’t hell, not back then. This is hell, and it’s a thousand fucking times worse than everything that came before.
Avery lies on her back on the mattress, breathing shallow breaths that scare the living fuck out of me. Her cheeks have gone pink, feverish. There aren’t any antibiotics in this hellhole. She needs those like she needs food and water. There’s none of that shit either.
And I could let her go. Shit, I could help her along, a hand over her mouth and nose until she smothered under my palm. It would barely take any effort, she’s so weak. I could let her slip away, then reach into my pocket and put myself out of my misery. But my fucked-up sense of honor says that’s not the best idea. What if I was wrong? What if she woke up to my dead body, here alone?
No. That can’t be the end to all of this. And I can’t bear the slightest risk that I’ll die and she will wake up, alone, without me to at least try to protect her.
The plastic over the mattress crinkles underneath my body. Time to roll over onto my back. My wrist has gone numb from propping up my own head, watching Avery hover at the edge of the chasm that separates life and death.
Time to stare at the ceiling and face facts.
Fact number one: the bastard who shot me with a tranquilizer dart hasn’t come back.
Fact number two: he told Avery that we’re going to die down here.
Fact one confirms fact two.
But fact number three—the pills in my pocket—definitely fucking confirms all of it. It’s a miracle that they haven’t found the little lumps like candies in my pocket. I’ve been resisting the shit out of the urge to reach into my pocket and check on them every fifteen seconds since we got here. You just never know when you might need some pharmaceutical assistance.
My pulse hammers, a weak thump. Deep down inside, some part of me doesn’t want to die. It still doesn’t want to die, the resilience of the human condition. But I also don’t want to live here. And I don’t want to watch Avery die first, feverish and hurting. That would be
the cowardly move. Fuck being a coward. I want none of it.
I give it a few more minutes. Or maybe it’s longer. Hard to tell down here. I listen as Avery breathes in and out a few hundred more times. She’s got a catch in her breath that gets deeper every time she exhales. If I don’t hurry up—if we don’t hurry up—then, eventually, her body will do the job for me. I can picture what that moment would be like. It would be the end of my fucking sanity. That’s what it would be.
I reach into my pocket as slowly as I can, as inconspicuous as I can manage, like I’m just shoving the pocket into place. Even touching the pills gives me a minor high. Almost there. They scatter onto the mattress between us when I roll over and face Avery.
This is going to be one of the last times I look at her alive. Or look at anything alive. My nerves lurch back from the finality of what I’m about to do. It’s like shoving my hand into a fire and holding it there.
I don’t want to do this. But it’s our only choice. We can’t waste away in this basement any longer. Or worse, get tortured to death. Or worse, have to do something the way I had to do what I did to poor Penny.
I’m done being somebody’s puppet. I’m fucking done.
My shoulder and chest try to protest the deep breath I take. Eyes on the prize. Soon, I won’t have to breathe this air in our own slice of hell. We’ll be elsewhere. On our way. It will be quiet and dark, and there will be no pain.
It’s time.
I give Avery a gentle shake. “Avery. Aves. Train’s coming.”
A ghostly smile passes over her face. “What the fuck are you talking about, Rome? There’s no train here.”
She’s barely whispering, half out of it. Good. Maybe she won’t have to feel this fear the way I feel it. Maybe it’s better that way.
“Remember our plan?”
VENGEFUL QUEEN Page 7