VENGEFUL QUEEN

by St. Germain, Lili

  Carefully, Isobel takes the girl’s pale hand in hers and attempts to move her fingers. “Somebody call the Medical Examiner’s office, get a team down here.”

  Harker, one of the SWAT officers who led this raid, steps into the hallway, followed by our captain, Tommy. A few moments later, we hear Harker talking to someone at the ME’s office as Tommy radios the station to request forensics.

  I glance back at Isobel, watching her blue eyes as they pore over every inch of our Jane Doe’s face.

  “This girl has been dead for hours. She’s stiff.” Isobel lets the girl’s hand go gently and braces herself against the side of the bathtub. “I don’t get it. This is where the signal is coming from.”

  “Does this place have a basement?” Tommy asks from the hallway. “A crawlspace?”

  I chew my lip. “Not on the original plans. But that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Shit,” Isobel says. “Look.”

  I follow her gaze to the tub. It’s one of those old Victorian clawfoot ones. Unlike most modern houses, which have the tub cemented into the floor, this one is freestanding, and when Isobel leans on the edge, it rocks ever-so-slightly. She steps back, taking her weight off the side of the tub so that it doesn’t tip over and send a dead body slip sliding across the tiny room.

  I look at the floor where the bath is, noticing a clear difference between the tiles underneath the tub and the tiles we’re standing on. It’s not just that they’re lighter from lack of sunlight fading them over the years; the tiles under the tub are freshly laid, in a perfect rectangle. “Do you see that?” I ask Isobel. “The tiles?”

  Isobel takes a step back, pulling her gloves off. “Shit.”

  Adrenaline surges in my veins. “Tommy!”

  “You found something?” Tommy asks, suddenly beside me.

  Isobel points to the floor. “The tiles under the tub are fresh,” she says.

  We’re all thinking the same thing. Maybe the signal is coming from underneath the house. More specifically, underneath this bathtub that is currently housing a dead woman.

  “We have to move this tub,” Isobel says.

  “If we’re wrong, and we disturb a crime scene, we’re fucked.”

  “If we don’t move it, and Avery Capulet dies underneath us, we’re more fucked. Which would you prefer? Getting fired or getting cut into tiny pieces and fed to sharks by the Capulet family?”

  Tommy thinks about that for about three milliseconds before he nods in agreement. “We need to move this tub now.”

  It takes four of us to lift the tub off the tiles. It weighs a ton and the only compromise we can make is keeping the dead girl—and her blood—inside of it. Fucking with the crime scene is small potatoes compared to losing Avery Capulet. Sweat breaks out under my collar, but we get it done. We fucking get it done.

  The tiles turn out to be one piece. Clever. They lift up as a panel, revealing a hidden sub-space accessible by a rough-hewn staircase. Gnarled concrete. It was probably a root cellar entrance at some point. We make our way down in formation, Tommy leading this time, followed by myself, Isobel, and the rest of the team. A few stay upstairs to keep watch. Last thing we need is to all end up downstairs in some sick trap.

  At the bottom of the stairs, we fan out into a hallway. There’s another staircase here—this is a second entrance. What fresh hell is this?

  Isobel points forward to the thick door. “Four fucking locks,” she says. “There, there, there.” Her voice is urgent. Everything is urgent.

  Three of the locks are deadbolts that she opens easily, but the fourth lock requires a key. Tommy lines his foot up and kicks the door. Once. Twice. It doesn’t budge a millimeter.

  “Harker!” he yells. “You got a breaching round ready to go?”

  Harker makes his way to the door, a shotgun in his hand. “Locked and loaded,” he replies, lifting the shotgun in gesture. Tommy nods, pointing to the fourth lock. We don’t have a key, so we’re going to have to blow this door open.

  A breaching round is a type of shotgun shell that is designed specifically for door breaching. We want to bust the lock, but we don’t want to kill anyone who might be on the other side. As always, there’s a margin for error, but Harker is a ballistics expert—I’m sure he can get the round fired without harming whoever is trapped behind the door.

  He lines up his aim, making sure his shotgun is at a 45 degree angle. We all cover our ears as he pulls the trigger, but the noise is still deafening in this small space. A plume of dust explodes from the door frame, as Harker tests the handle. It works. The door opens into a dark, cavernous room. We’re in.

  We step into a reeking torture chamber, and it’s a fucking assault on the senses, just the state of the room itself. Bloodstains and spoiled food on the floor. A red-spattered chair in the middle of the room. The desk that’s been the scene of so many crimes.

  And two people lying on a mattress.

  Isobel curses and leaps forward, going straight for the two bodies. They’re thin and pale. Too pale. I can’t tell if they’re breathing. Isobel leans her head down to Avery’s chest.

  “Her heart’s beating. Only just.”

  I take the other side. Rome Montague. A tattooed ex-con who’s done enough to get his ass put in prison for the rest of his life. I’m not going to let him off easy. No. Fucking. Way. He doesn’t get to die down here without being punished for what he did to this girl.

  But his pulse is thin, thready, and he’s barely breathing.

  Isobel starts CPR on Avery, and I put my hands to Rome’s chest. Get ready, bitch, I think, looking down at his bruised face. I’ll crack your ribs if I have to.

  “Tommy,” I yell above the sound of Isobel pumping, pumping, pumping. “Call an ambulance. Shit, call two.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ELLIOT

  This girl is a fighter.

  I saw it in the ambulance when she was, for all intents and purposes, clinically dead.

  And I see it now in the hospital as she opens her eyes and scans around the room, her eyes red, her pupils tiny pinpricks swimming in gold-flecked brown eyes. She searches the room, her gaze landing on me, and then on the monitors, her heart rate skyrocketing through the fucking roof.

  I didn’t think her heart would be capable of beating so fast after she almost died of a fentanyl overdose, but apparently, she doesn’t care about that. Avery Capulet finds her hands and brings them up to her mouth, and then starts trying to rip the breathing tube from her throat.

  Bad idea, girlfriend. She’s going to tear up her throat if she does that. There’s a reason most patients are sedated when they’re intubated. I guess nobody expected her to wake up so quickly, and full of so much frantic energy. I don’t want to scare her, but I also don’t want her to choke to death on her own blood, so I launch at her, pinning her wrists to the bed as she thrashes.

  “Hey,” I say. A doctor bursts into the room. “She’s trying to rip the tube out,” I explain.

  “Avery,” I murmur to her, quieter this time. “It’s okay. You’re at St Mary’s Hospital. You’re safe.”

  She does not stop thrashing. She’s trying to talk around the tube and getting nothing out except a series of low grunts and a string of gibberish. I look at the wound on her arm, the one I just watched a nurse thread twenty-nine excruciating stitches through. Her handiwork was all for nothing. The wound is open again underneath the thin bandage, blood seeping to the gauze’s surface.

  “Listen to me,” I say, a little firmer this time. “I’m a detective with the SFPD. We got you out. You’re safe.” I still keep hold of her wrists, which are so thin I’m worried about snapping them. I’m walking a delicate line between protecting this girl from herself and freaking her the hell out.

  She looks like she’s possessed by a demon. A demon that wants to rip my fucking eyes out.

  “If you stay still, I’ll get the doctor to take the breathing tube out,” I offer. She slows her frantic struggling, as if digesting my wor
ds, and then stops cold.

  God, they’ve really beaten her down, those sick fucks. Avery’s perfectly still, looking up at me with wide eyes. She points to my shirt pocket--she’s been out for the count long enough for me to run to the station and change out of my SWAT gear into a less abrasive dress shirt and pants. I look to where she’s pointing.

  “My pen? You want to write something?”

  She nods furiously, her hands reaching as I pull a pen and a small rectangular notepad from my breast pocket. I hand her both, and she snatches them to her as if they’re the most precious things in the world.

  She grips the pen in her right hand, her fingers clumsily gripping the plastic as she tries to write on the notepad. Her left hand is struggling to keep the notepad steady, so I reach over, helping her to keep the notepad still. She gives me a small glance of thanks, before resuming her sloppy scrawl of letters, blue ink across white lined paper.

  She holds the pad out to me, one word scratched into the paper: ROME.

  I look at the paper a beat too long, then back to her as her eyes fill with tears. She takes the paper back and writes a second word, underlining it three times.

  ALIVE?

  I nod slowly. “He’s alive. He’s under heavy police guard. You don’t have to worry about him. There’s no way he can get to you.”

  She sags in the bed, seemingly relieved. More tears flood from the corners of her eyes, as she sobs around the tube in her throat. She turns to a fresh piece of paper and writes one more thing, not even looking at what she’s doing this time. She closes her eyes, handing me the pen and paper as she lets the exhaustion pull her down again.

  I look at the messy letters, and it takes me a few moments before I piece them together. Three words that confuse the hell out of me.

  ROME IS INNOCENT.

  I look at the words, willing them to arrange themselves into a more logical sentence. But try as I might, there’s nothing else these three words can say. I watched on the cameras as he raped a girl in front of Avery. As he spent days with her barely conscious. As he tended her wounds - the wounds that for all intents and purposes, I assumed he had given her.

  ROME IS INNOCENT.

  Avery Capulet sure seems convinced that Rome Montague is a victim in this too. But for the life of me, I can’t work out what she means.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  AVERY

  “You’re lucky we found you when we did. Another few minutes and that overdose would have finished you both off.”

  Those are the first words I hear after I wake up from death for the second time. How lucky I am. But I don’t feel that lucky at the moment. Mostly, I feel pain.

  One stroke of luck is that they’ve removed the tube that was stuck down my throat. A small act of mercy. My throat is raw from being intubated, but the pain barely registers among the more serious injuries I’ve sustained. A nurse fusses with the IV in my hand as a doctor writes on my chart at the foot of my bed. I don’t acknowledge any of them. For all intents and purposes, I’m not even here. I’m still in that room, swallowing those pills dry. Letting them pull me under. Surrendering to death with the one person in the world who knows what I’ve been through. The one person who knows why I didn’t want to survive.

  “Your family is here to see you,” the cop’s words slice through my addled thoughts.

  Oh, God. My family? I feel a stab of guilt as I realize I didn’t ask about my father when I first woke up. Is he alive? Did he survive the bullet that signaled the beginning of this nightmare? I want to ask now, but I’m too scared. I can’t hear that he’s dead. I can’t bear it.

  I blink rapidly, my senses on high alert. Everything is too cold, too metallic, too loud. I know they’re only trying to help me, these nurses and doctors and police officers. But it’s not helping. Nothing is helping.

  I want Rome.

  We’ve become fused as we bled under the earth in the dark. I have become his; he has become mine. Now he’s gone from my side, and I should be relieved that we’re getting medical treatment. But I’m not relieved, because his absence is agony.

  “Where is Rome?” I ask the detective who was sitting next to my bed when I woke up. He doesn’t look like he’s slept, deep circles under his eyes. He looks at the floor. My heart drops - did he lie to me before?

  “Is he dead?”

  Please don’t let him be dead. We took the pills at the same time, and he’s bigger than me. If I survived, he should have survived.

  “No,” the police officer replies quickly. “He’s not dead. He’s downtown, being processed.”

  My eyes sting. The damn fluorescent light. Something wet dribbles down my neck, and I bring my fingers up to the tender spot where the collar’s barbs were embedded into my skin.

  It won’t stop bleeding. The symbolism of that doesn’t escape me.

  “Processed?”

  The guy clears his throat. “He’s been charged with murder.”

  I sit up so fast, my head swims. The old me would have started panicking right now, but when I put my hand to my chest, it just feels empty. Aching. There’s a void that only he can fill.

  Murder?

  “He didn’t murder anybody,” I protest. “You have to listen to me.”

  Elliot looks at me curiously. “You saw the cameras in that room?”

  I nod.

  “Then you have to understand, this looks pretty bad for him. He’s been charged with murdering the girl he raped. He did it right in front of you.”

  “If you saw him do that, you must have seen the other guy shoot her,” I spit. Alarms start to go off; my blood pressure is suddenly sky-high. The doctor at the end of the bed jostles the cop out of the way, adjusting some monitors, pressing an oxygen mask to my face. “No more questions until she’s stabilized,” the doctor instructs Elliot. “Her blood pressure spikes much higher, and she could go into cardiac arrest all over again.”

  Cardiac arrest. Huh. Sounds serious. So why don’t I care?

  “Can’t you give her something for that?” Elliot asks impatiently. “I still need to get her statement.”

  “I can’t give her anything because of all the opiates in her system,” the doctor says sternly. “The Narcan is staving off the worst of it, but her body has been through a lot. The only reason she’s even conscious and breathing on her own is because she’s a fighter.”

  “Okay,” Elliot says, taking his hands out of his pants pockets and holding them up in a gesture of surrender. “No problem, doc. I won’t take her statement. I just have a few pressing questions that I need Miss Capulet-”

  “No more questions,” the doctor barks. I’m kind of impressed by her tenacity. She’s barely five feet tall, and the cop towers over her. I guess she’s dealt with his kind before.

  “Avery,” the doctor turns her attention to me, smiling warmly, “How are you feeling?”

  Like death, doc. How do you think I’m feeling?

  “Everything hurts,” I say, my voice still husky from when the breathing tube was down my throat.

  “We’ve given you some local anesthetic and cleaned you up, but you’ll need some more stitches and possibly surgery,” the doctor says. “Can you tell me the pills you took?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know. They had red hearts stamped on them.”

  Elliot looks up sharply. He whips his iPhone out, scrolling through photos before holding it up in front of my face. “Did they look like this?”

  The doctor keeps her mouth shut. I guess she wants to know just as much as him what drug I took. I study the close-up photo of a single white pill, a red heart stamped in the center. “Yes,” I say dejectedly. Those pills didn’t kill me, I want to tell them. Those pills saved me.

  “Fentanyl, oxycontin, LSD and some other stuff,” Elliot tells the doctor. “At least, that’s what the batch we seized was comprised of.” They keep talking, but I’m not listening. The doctor pats my leg gently, promising to return, and then it’s just me and the cop again.

/>   An unspoken moment passes between us. He seems to have relaxed about the questioning, which is a mercy I’m happy to accept. I can barely talk, let alone dig up and rehash everything that’s happened to me in the past weeks. How long has it actually been since Daddy plunged into that pool, bullet-ridden and bleeding out?

  I push the tragedy from my mind. I can’t think about that right now. Instead, I’m trying to think of who could be the family he’s talking about, the one that’s apparently here and ready to see me.

  As if reading my mind, Elliot repeats, “Your family is here to see you. Do you want to see any of them?”

  I blink in confusion, remembering the night I was taken. My twenty-fifth birthday. It seems like another person’s life now, an alternate universe. I have lived an entirely new existence in the dark, and I can barely recall what came before. It’s as if the memories of my first twenty-five years of life are so bright, they hurt my eyes just as much as if I were staring at the sun. So bright that they’re completely washed out, overexposed, so that I can’t see them at all.

  Who could be here to see me? Aren’t they all dead now? My mother. My sister. Our baby brother. And Daddy. Daddy was shot. He fell in the pool. The last bright memory, strings of fairy lights illuminating the blood that pumped from his bullet wound and stained the blue water red.

  “My father was shot. At my party. Did he die?”

  “He’s in the ICU,” Elliot says. “He’s alive. He hasn’t woken up yet.”

  I nod, looking down at my hands. They’re pale, but more than that, they’re sickly. It’s strange what happens to your skin when you’re deprived of any sunlight.

  “Will he die?”

  “He’s getting the best care money can buy.”

  “That’s not what I asked. Is he going to die?”

  A beat. “He might. It’s not looking great.”

  I close my eyes. Oh, Daddy. Not you, too. The bright light is making my head pound.