VENGEFUL QUEEN
Lili St. Germain
Contents
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
PART TWO
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
About the Author
Also by Lili St. Germain
Also by Lili St. Germain
Copyright
“And where two raging fires meet together, they do consume the thing that feeds their fury.”
- William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew
PROLOGUE
AVERY
My father controls the state of California as if the entire, sprawling place is a dutiful dog, harnessed and ready to obey. One jerk on the leash, a single command, and Daddy Capulet gets anything he wants. Only, he isn’t asking corrupt politicians to sit or stay or roll over; he’s telling them which land development projects to approve, which cargo shipments to allow through customs unchecked, which shares to buy, which companies to bury in red tape and legalities. And sometimes, darker things. Sometimes, my father controls life and death.
He’s not a bad man. He’s not a good man, either. He exists in that gray area, in the last moment of night - in the first moment of dawn before the sun pushes up over the horizon. He stands at the edge of the shadows, directing the show, even if nobody can see him in the dark beyond the stage lights. All-powerful. All-consuming. A charming dictator, if ever there was one.
But what’s the point of owning the haystack if you can’t find the needle?
I am that needle.
His only surviving daughter. The reluctant heiress to an empire of unfathomable riches.
And nobody can find me.
I’ve been missing for weeks, stolen away on my twenty-fifth birthday, the night I was publicly betrothed to a man I hate. A man who was lined up to marry my older sister until she killed herself, ten years ago, and cemented my fate.
I don’t blame her. The burden of Queendom is heavy. In Adeline’s death, she passed her fledgling power to me. If I die now - which I’m beginning to think I will - there will be nobody to take my place. My father could have more children, I suppose - but my father might already be dead. I pray he survived the bullet wounds he suffered the night I was taken, a brutal diversion that had my bodyguards escort me to what they believed was safety - but what was actually an elaborately planned trap to capture me. A bag over my head, strong hands wrapped impossibly tight around my arms, and I was stolen before anyone even knew I was gone from the rooftop party where my father was still bleeding to death.
That’s how I came to be here, the prized possession of a serial killer. The XO killer, they call him. I know all about him because he’s been terrorizing the city of San Francisco, without detection, for almost ten years. I know all about him because, the night he took me, he painted an XO, his signature modus operandi, across my bare chest in my own blood.
Raped. Beaten. Starved.
Locked in a basement with my sworn enemy - the son of my father’s archnemesis - who just happens to be the first boy I ever loved.
Rome Montague.
He’s trapped down in this hellhole with me.
Shot. Stabbed. Tortured.
My blood and his might be opposites - his Montague to my Capulet - but in the dark, we both bleed just the same. There’s no real way to tell where his bloodshed ends, and mine begins. The bitter, broken heir who resides in this dungeon with me is my only constant. My only hope. My only protector.
I don’t deserve his salvation. I betrayed him once. I did something horrible to him. But for some reason, he still tries to keep me safe from our violent fate.
All the money in the world can’t save us now, because it’s not a ransom our captor is asking for. It’s our pain. Our blood. Our tears. He takes and takes, and just when I think there’s nothing left to take from us, when Rome and I are empty and bloodless and that this time I’ll stay unconscious, and sink into that velvety blackness of death...
I wake up.
And I’ve got to say, considering I’m the sole heiress to a vast fortune and the bloody throne it entails, I kind of thought there’d be a little more fanfare around my disappearance.
A front-page spread in a national newspaper. Some kind of fuss. At the very least, I thought they’d have fucking found me by now.
I guess I was wrong, though, because I’m still sitting here, in the dark, counting the seconds as they pass in time with my heartbeat. It’s dangerously slow, my pulse, which is a worry for a girl who is used to having a resting hummingbird heartbeat.
It’s the blood loss. The body needs a certain amount of blood to pump around, a minimum volume, and mine desperately needs replenishing. With very little food, multiple wounds, and an increasingly blood-thirsty captor, my body can’t quite seem to catch up and replenish itself.
I wonder how much more blood I can lose before I’ll die.
I wonder how long it will be before I want to die.
Mostly, I wonder which one will come first.
PART ONE
Purgatory
CHAPTER ONE
AVERY
“I’m not going to hurt her,” the man in the mask says to Rome Montague, handing him a large butcher’s knife. “You are.”
“The fuck I am,” Rome replies, his words thick with fury and venom. With the desire to keep me safe. But his hand closes around the knife handle anyway. I already know what he will try to do.
But there’s a reason you don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.
A blade can’t beat a bullet.
And just as Rome raises the knife to attack our gun-toting captor, a searing jolt cracks at the base of my throat, and I immediately fall to the floor. I scream as the collar around my neck delivers a measured current of electricity via two tiny metal prongs, straight into my skin. It travels through my body, hot and loud, a burn with no flame. On my back, I struggle to keep my eyes open, blinking furiously, as I watch the rest of this horror show unfold above me.
Rome stops moving, the knife’s blade midair, as the guy in the mask slowly shakes his head. The message is clear: If Rome tries to hurt our captor, he’ll deliver another punishing electric shock to me via the collar around my throat.
I
want to be brave. I want to tell Rome to attack him anyway. That even if the shocks never stop coming, that even if I die, he should fight his way out of this hellhole with every ounce of energy he has. But I’m still gripped by the current that pulses through my body, as if somebody has injected acid into my veins, the white-hot agony unrelenting. And I’m not that brave. I’m not brave at all.
Rome drops the knife to the floor, putting his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Stop. Stop! I dropped the knife, man, fucking stop whatever you’re doing to her!”
The man in the mask delivers one more jarring jolt of electricity to me before he stops. I have a feeling he doesn’t like being told what to do.
“Pick up the knife,” the masked man says, his voice heavily distorted by what I can only guess is a voice-changing device of some kind fitted under his mask. He sounds like the murderer from the movie Scream. And, right now, I might as well be the fucking Drew Barrymore character, about to be disemboweled.
Rome haltingly picks up the knife, just as our captor produces a rolled-up newspaper from somewhere inside his layers of black clothing and tosses it in my direction.
“Her blood. On the newspaper. Or I shock her until she pisses herself.”
Rome picks up the newspaper, his face contorted with confusion, with worry. “Why?”
I brace myself for another shock, but it doesn’t come. Instead, our captor backs toward the door, his gun still trained on Rome. “Proof of life,” he says, opening the door and stepping out of the room. Seconds later, I hear heavy locks being bolted outside the door, making it impossible for us to escape.
Rome drops the knife and newspaper at his feet. He throws himself at the door, pounding his fists against it. He pounds and pounds, until blood blooms fresh along his knuckles.
Too bad it’s not his blood we need.
“Rome,” I croak, my voice weak from the shock-collar’s relentless assault. He turns slowly, letting his fists drop to his sides. When he looks at me, he flinches. There’s something dark in his eyes. Longing. Loss. A mournfulness, as if we’re already dead.
Maybe it would be easier that way. Today, though, I’m still surviving on threads of hope. Maybe we’ll get out. Maybe this will all be a terrible nightmare one day, and we’ll finally be free of this room and its horrors.
Physically, anyway. Instinctively, I know that, even if our bodies make it out of this place, a part of us is always going to be down here together in the dark.
I struggle to sit up, my body complaining loudly as I manage to raise myself onto my elbows, my legs stretched out in front of me. I feel lucky that the electric shock didn’t make me pee all over myself. It seems, even down here, even after everything, I still have a tiny shred of dignity buried somewhere inside me.
I hold one arm up, shaking at the exertion. “Let’s get this over with.”
Rome’s face, normally so composed, crumbles. Perhaps my casual acceptance of the violence he must inflict upon me is terrifying. He doesn’t see the frantic dread working its way through me like poison. He kneels beside me, checking me over for injuries. I brush his hands away, on the verge of a panic attack. If he doesn’t get my blood onto the newspaper quickly enough, I know our captor will deliver on his promise, sending enough electricity through my shock collar that I’ll wet myself. Or worse. How much voltage does it take to stop a heart so that it never beats again? I don’t know. I don’t want to know.
“I can’t hurt you,” Rome mumbles, “there has to be another way.”
I find my way to a sitting position, tucking my legs underneath me, as I take hold of Rome’s hand, guiding the knife toward my wrist. “We don’t have time,” I mutter, pressing the knife he’s holding into my flesh.
“Jesus!” I jump as the blade sinks into my skin, ruby red blood springing up immediately.
“Shit,” Rome mutters, as he tries to pull the knife away. “I’ll cut myself. Not you. Not you.”
I still have my hand over his, and I guide the knife back down to my wrist forcefully. “Didn’t you hear what he said? Proof of life. As in, my life. My blood. My DNA. The engagement ring must not have been enough.”
“Engagement ring?” Rome asks suddenly. It’s a good distraction, me talking about my impending nuptials. Well, now the only thing impending on my schedule is my eventual escape or death - but before we landed in this hellhole, I was very much a taken woman. Never mind the fact that the man I was to marry was nothing to me. An arrangement I inherited from my dearly departed older sister, a future husband I could never love.
“Yes, engagement ring,” I echo, moaning through clenched teeth, as I cut deep enough to get a steady flow of blood - but, hopefully, not deep enough to kill myself. There’s a fine line between self-mutilation and death, and I pray I’ve stayed on the right side of it for now.
Who knows, if we have to stay here much longer, my proof of life wrist-slashing mission might become my proof of death suicide mission.
“Jesus, Avery,” Rome protests, using his considerable strength to wrench the knife away. “Stop.” He places the knife on the ground beside him, just out of my reach, and drops the newspaper beside it.
“No,” I cry, reaching for the rolled-up newspaper. “I have to get enough blood on the newspaper.”
I watch as scarlet liquid courses from the wound along my inner wrist, pooling at the spot where Rome’s heavily tattooed fingers are wrapped tightly around my hand. It looks surreal, the black ink on his tanned knuckles and fingers against my milky skin and my bright red blood. “You’re wasting it!” I struggle with him.
“Avery, look at me,” Rome demands. I meet his gaze, his normally indifferent blue eyes suddenly burning with emotion. “I’m going to get us out of here, okay? Do you hear me?”
I shake my head, grabbing again for the newspaper with my good arm, the one that isn’t currently bleeding. This time, I succeed in snatching it up. I shake it open, wrenching my arm out of Rome’s grasp, laying my arm flat across the newspaper to ensure I get the rest of my blood soaked in.
I stay there as the minutes drag past, squeezing my arm, trying to get more blood to rise to the surface. But it’s no use. In my weakened state, my blood pressure is probably too low to pump out enough blood to get more than a few drops on the paper. I know that might not be enough for the police to test for DNA, because I’ve watched a true crime series or two in my life, and I know what proof of fucking life means.
“Avery,” Rome tries again. I push him in the chest, hard, avoiding the side where he was shot. “Shut up,” I whisper, getting up on my hands and knees, snatching the knife from beside him. “It’s not enough,” I explain, gesturing to the drops of blood on the newspaper. “It’s not enough!”
“Okay,” he says helplessly. “Tell me what you want me to do.”
I want you to save me. I want you to get us out of here. I want you to forgive me for the way I betrayed you all those years ago.
“Cut me again.” I press the knife handle into his hands, guiding it toward the slash already decorating my wrist. “Make it deep. My pulse is barely registering enough to pump my blood out as it is.”
He hesitates over the cut. “You’ve lost too much blood already,” he says weakly.
I want to scream at him. We don’t have a choice! But I don’t have the energy to make words. I just look at him, and something in my eyes must tell him how important this is, how much I don’t want to be shocked again by the collar.
It kills him to do it, I can tell. His eyes film over with trepidation, with guilt, as he presses the blade down into my already broken flesh. It fucking hurts, it fucking huuuuurts, but I bite down on the inside of my cheek and will my blood to flow faster, because it’s better than the alternative.
A whimper escapes my lips, but I don’t fight him. I just watch, dead inside, as my blood drips steadily onto the front page of the newspaper sitting on the floor between us.
Proof of life, the masked man had said. Today’s copy of The Verona Times, i
ts headlines too hard to make out in this dim light.
I swallow thickly, watching as Rome twists my arm this way and that, as gently as he can. He’s trying to get as much blood out of the cut along the inside of my wrist as he can. He picks the newspaper up and presses it to my arm, getting every last drop he can onto the inked paper. I know he doesn’t want to have to cut me again. His hands are covered in my blood, his fingers making sticky oval-shaped marks every time he shifts his grip.
“Your fingerprints,” I say, swaying where I sit. I should really lay down, but if I lay down, I’ll pass out, and if I pass out, I might die.
Rome nods, still focused on the task at hand. “I know.”
Whoever gets this - my father, Enzo, Nathan, the FBI … the evidence will be clear: Rome Montague’s fingerprints. Avery Capulet’s blood.
They’ll think he had something to do with this. They’ll think he took me, as payback for our family’s relentless greed for power. I can’t think about that right now. It’s too much to fathom, and besides: Who says we’re ever getting out of here? I have to get out of here.
I close my eyes and let him press the blade deeper, then even deeper, until it feels like he might hit bone.
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