VENGEFUL QUEEN

by St. Germain, Lili

  Will shoots her a look that’s pure venom. “I did not save files of you, Avery, you have got to believe me. They’re lying.”

  “I can show you your laptop, if you’ve forgotten, Mr. Hewitt,” Isobel fires back. “There are plenty of video files on there. Your password was pretty fucking basic. Really? Avery2019?”

  This, more than any other thing, makes my knees weak enough to buckle.

  “This is a setup,” Will spits. “Come on, Avery, you’re actually buying this?!”

  It was one thing to know my captors were recording the ultimate humiliation of being ground down to nothing. To less than nothing. To a bleeding shell of a woman desperate for a single bite of food and a sip of water. What a fucking joke. Those painful webs I thought my father’s money kept at bay were already around me. They were already choking me, suffocating me, and that was before the XO killer took me into a dark room and shattered the rest of my soul.

  My throat throbs with sobs I won’t let surface.

  “You piece of shit.” My voice is tight with unshed tears. If I start crying now, I’ll never stop. Not for the rest of my life. And I’m Avery Capulet. I’m not the kind of woman who’s going to fall apart now that everything’s over. “You watched that?”

  Will’s eyes go a little wider. “I am being framed.” He’s all urgency, all insistence.

  I shake my head bitterly. “You know, the least you could do is admit you did it.”

  Will opens his mouth, but he’s clearly at a loss for words.

  “It’s time to go.” Elliot tries to guide Will toward one of the cop cars, but Will digs his feet in. I’m dimly aware of the rest of the SWAT team circling us. Tension thickens the air. It’s a wretched, stinking thing. Police officers are coming out of the house, coming toward us, packing in.

  “Avery,” Will yells. “You know me! You know I could never–”

  “I thought I knew you,” I cut him off. “Turns out I never really knew you at all. Because the Will I thought I knew could never do something like this.”

  Will almost manages to pull himself out of Elliot’s grip. “Listen to me! Somebody is setting me up. Somebody wants you to think the worst of me. I’m hardly the first boyfriend your fucking family has deemed unworthy and had carted away to prison! What, you think I don’t know what they did to that Montague kid? How they locked him up and threw away the key for something he didn’t even do?! I fucking know what they’re capable of. No wonder that motherfucker came back for revenge.”

  His words cut me to my core. He knew about Rome being put in prison?

  “How do you know that?” I whisper. “How could you know? That happened before I ever met you.”

  Will rolls his eyes, still struggling. “You really think it’s a coincidence we met right after that happened? Avery, our fathers were friends. They arranged for us to meet. Do you really think anything in your life happens by chance?”

  This is too much for Nathan. He leaps forward, fist cocked. “That’s the last word you say about her or to her, understand?” Nathan’s face is a mask of pain and vengeance.

  The front yard fills with shouts, and three cops pile onto Nathan and drag him away from Will. Nathan’s shouting, the police officers are shouting, and I’m standing here, silent in the middle of the whirlwind. I am a blank, empty space, a black hole floating in space. I watch on as Elliot violently corrals Will toward the nearest police car and shoves him in, making sure to smash his head against the car doorway on his way. Everyone is at top volume, but I can’t hear any of it. And even if I could, it wouldn’t matter.

  Because here’s the thing.

  All those weeks in that room, through all that torture, I thought the XO killer was taking everything from me. Every possible thing. I thought that when Rome and I got out there would be nothing, other than him, for me to lose. It turns out I did have something else to lose.

  And Will Hewitt fucking stole it.

  * * *

  Back in the car, Nathan starts the engine, but makes no move to pull away from the curb. He just sits there and watches me silently.

  “I would have gotten you a new phone if you’d asked me,” he says finally.

  I don’t say anything. I’m still staring at the facade of Will’s house, still milling with several police officers who have stayed behind to finish executing the search warrant. Will is long gone, thrown into the back of a car in cuffs and taken down to the police station for booking. A cold sensation pools in my gut as I imagine him being strip-searched, interrogated, thrown into a cell until he can get a bail hearing. Ironically, I wonder if he’ll cross paths with Rome. What an interesting conversation that would be, one that would probably end up with someone dead. The terrifying thing is, I don’t care if Rome kills Will. In the state I’m in, I almost pray for it. Something vital has snapped inside me, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fix it.

  I’m broken. Destroyed. The girl who woke up in the hospital isn’t the same girl who was at that engagement party. The old me is dead, and in her place, this shell of a human being is hobbling around, gaunt and pale, pretending I’m still her. The old Avery wasn’t vengeful. She wasn’t full of rage. She had no idea how fucking good she had it. She had no idea that she could have said no to all of it–the engagement, the future, everything. She could have withdrawn her hefty trust fund from the bank and run off to an island for the rest of her life. She could have been anything, done anything, demanded anything.

  I miss the old me, but I hate her, too. She had no fucking spine, but the new Avery does. The new Avery has a spine, beautiful and strong, and it holds her wounded body together like armor. The new Avery is not meek. She is not merciful. She does not do what she’s told, and she definitely does not let her family decide who she fucking marries and breeds with.

  “Avery,” Nathan says. “Did you hear me? I said I’d get you a new phone if you wanted one. All you had to do was ask.”

  I look at him, the white-hot anger in my eyes obviously apparent; he shrinks back slightly, blinking several times.

  “I don’t have to ask you for a phone,” I say. “I don’t have to ask you, or anyone, for anything. I’m Avery fucking Capulet. I can get what I want all by myself.”

  Nathan lets out a breath, switching his attention to the road as he pulls the Range Rover away from Will’s front yard. “You’re Avery fucking Capulet,” he agrees. “You don’t need to ask anyone for anything. I’m glad you finally figured that out.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ELLIOT

  “Not a damn thing.” Isobel drops a thick folder on the corner of my desk and drops into one of the chairs next to me. “That guy isn’t giving up anything.”

  “Maybe there’s nothing to give up.” We’ve been interrogating Will for hours, and there is nothing—not a single fucking thing—to tie him to the kidnappings.

  “He’s got airtight alibis for every single time the live video stream was happening.” Isobel rubs her temple and glares at the file on the desk. “I don’t know, Elliot. Maybe he’s just a pervert and a control freak and not a serial killer.”

  “Maybe.” I plunk down a fresh coffee in front of her. “But we need to rule it out completely. If we miss something, we’re fucked.”

  My office resembles the spoils of a shipwreck, if that ship were only carrying evidence bags and stale cups of half-drunk coffee. Isobel settles in on the other side of the desk, downs half her Americano in one go, and we start again.

  This is the bullshit part of an investigation like this—looking three times at every piece of evidence, trying to get it to point somewhere. But once your mind has made a decision about a video or a footprint, it’s hard to switch that original interpretation off.

  The sun sinks down, darkening the parking lot outside, and I get two more coffees for us. Then three. Then four. I’d go for five, but we’re already way over-caffeinated as it is.

  Around nine, I resurface from reading through the interview files from after the party
to find Isobel looking down at something intently, her brow furrowed. The hairs on my arms pull up. I know that look on her face. I know it.

  “You got something?”

  “I’ve got something weird. I don’t know what it means.”

  She snaps it forward. It’s a newspaper. A bloody one.

  “Is that the first one we were sent? Forensics has already analyzed it. Avery Capulet’s blood, Rome Montague’s fingerprints.”

  “Yeah, but the thing is...hang on.” She drops the newspaper on my desk, brittle and brown from Avery’s blood. I hear her greeting people in the bullpen. Asking a question I can’t make out. My body is fucking ready for this. If she’s got something, a lead, anything. Isobel comes in a minute later, cheeks flushed. “Check this shit out.”

  It’s another newspaper. I scan the front. “Is that—?”

  “The same date as this one. See?” She puts them side by side, so we both know we’re not making shit up. “This is a first edition copy of the newspaper. A test run.”

  “Newspapers don’t have test runs.”

  “Yes, they do. Seriously. It happens all the time. If big news breaks after a newspaper prints the first run during the night, they have to scramble to come up with second-edition copies. Those are the ones that go out to everybody. This one would only have been circulated within the newspaper office itself as a final draft. So.” Isobel takes a deep breath, working her face into an expression of professional calm. “Who would have had access to first-run copies of this newspaper?”

  Oh, damn.

  I turn around to my computer and beat on the keyboard until it does me the honor of starting up. I have to be sure before I say anything, but there’s one witness to the kidnapping who has a connection. I’m fucking sure of it. And there it is, part of his interview file.

  Majority stakeholder in The Verona Times.

  “Joshua Grayson. He’s a stakeholder. The majority stakeholder.”

  Isobel’s already reaching for her phone. “Let’s go have a little chat with Mr. Grayson, shall we?”

  Inside half an hour, we have a team at his house. Inside thirty-five minutes, they find the same videos on his laptop as we found on Will’s. They were obviously working as a pair. Inside forty minutes, Joshua Grayson is in handcuffs, headed for a jail cell, and I get to call Avery and tell her we have a new lead suspect.

  Her fiancé.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  ROME

  I’ll just say this—jail is easy.

  In jail, you can see where the torture’s coming from. The assholes who like to dole it out might as well be wearing neon signs above their heads. It’s a simple game to avoid them. It’s a game I’m playing at a fairly high level these days because I’m still fucking wounded, which is not the optimal condition for being locked up. But I’ve been here before. I’ll get out again. I will get out again. I tell myself that hourly, so I don’t go fucking insane.

  I’ve let the murder charges and all my little chitchats with the lawyer skim over my consciousness. Jail might be easy but that’s only as long as I don’t dwell on the fact that I’ve traded one dungeon for another. This dungeon is safer, even when taking the gang members into account. They have more targets on the inside. It’s not just me and Avery.

  That’s the other thing. I miss her.

  I will never say that out loud, not to anyone. But I miss her like I would miss my own arms and legs. It’s as if the XO killer has cut off all my limbs. I miss her like I’m coming off drugs. If I think about it too hard, I find myself fantasizing about the moment when I went under from what I thought was the final overdose. I was holding her hand.

  Lucky for me, detaching myself from all of the daily bullshit is a skill I gained early in life as a Montague. Avery did her part to reinforce it when she sent me to jail the first time. It’s a neat split. Mind and body, disconnected. Go through the motions. Survive another day. Dodge the sharp shank blades and surprise fists to the face. Live long enough to attend the next court hearing. Stand up in front of the judge, keep my eyes open, pretend not to care.

  That’s what I’m doing on the day everything changes.

  Sounds fucking dramatic, doesn’t it? Everything changes. But it does. I’m sitting in the pale sunlight coming over the exercise yard walls, listening to a drug dealer talk about his own bust and skimming along the surface. I’m here in body, but not in soul. Then the world reaches up and pulls me under, my lungs filling up with water. A boulder crashes in over my head, disturbing the ocean floor and flooding it with dirt and silt.

  The boulder is in the shape of Joshua Grayson.

  The other guys notice it, too.

  Jails like the one in Verona don’t get guys like Joshua Grayson that often. Guys with his bank balance and social standing are usually in minimum security federal prisons for shit like insider trading. So when he steps out into the courtyard, blinking in the sun, everything around him...pauses.

  It doesn’t stop, because when you’re spending your life in a ten-by-ten cage, you don’t fucking waste your precious outdoor minutes. It’s more like all the motion in the courtyard skips a beat. Guys stop talking. A basketball game halts mid-dribble, the dude holding the ball watching Grayson with interest.

  Joshua Grayson looks nothing like he did the last time I saw him.

  It was in the underground garage, the first–and last–time I laid eyes on him. He was in a tuxedo, looking every inch the new Capulet heir apparent. Avery clung to his arm, her face white. He wore a self-satisfied look on his face, even in the midst of chaos. That smug fuck thought he had everything under control. He was ready to hustle her into the back of a reinforced car and get the hell out of there.

  This guy wears the standard prison jumpsuit like an uncomfortable second skin. He’s got the same smirk on his face, jaw set, but he’s a hell of a lot more rumpled than he was that night. The arrest came as a surprise, by the looks of him. Most arrests do.

  Somebody whistles long and low from the other corner of the courtyard. “You’re too rich to be here, boy.”

  Joshua Grayson cracks a smile but says nothing. This isn’t some boardroom where he can easily find the head of the table. My gut twists. Him and me, we shouldn’t be anywhere near each other.

  That realization penetrates slow and steady. I’ve been doing too well at not thinking about my life—not making any connections. But Joshua Grayson shouldn’t be here. He’s Avery’s fiancé. He got arrested and didn’t make bail? Impossible. The Capulets would have bailed him out.

  Unless he did something to one of theirs. In which case, they’d pull every string and call in every favor they’re owed to make sure he stays in prison for a very long time. It must be something bad, for him to be here, a businessman in the midst of killers, thieves and drug dealers.

  Did he do something to Avery?

  My brain roars back into life. Blood flows faster when you’re not pretending to be a dead man. My skin pulls tight, every inch of me preparing for action. The courtyard around me comes into focus. It’s not a big enough space for the fifty-odd guys who are in here. Patchy grass, long shadows from the brick walls. Barbed wire up top. It keeps all of us in a neat order. There’s me and twelve other guys in various spots on the metal picnic tables pinned to the ground in concrete bases, so we can’t pick them up and riot. Three others play a pickup game of basketball at a hoop with no net. The sound of the ball on the pavement drives reality into my brain like a spike.

  What the fuck is he here for?

  The dealer’s voice cuts back in from my left. “—had videos of her.”

  “What?” I whip around so fast it startles him. He narrows his eyes and leans back. The rest of the table sucks in a breath. I don’t smile because I can’t be an aggressive animal baring its teeth in this moment. Instead, I shrug. “Missed what you said. Something about videos?”

  The dealer looks at me for a beat. “That guy. Grayson. He’s here for that Capulet girl.”

  I can’t breathe
. I can’t fucking breathe. There’s no goddamn way that Joshua Grayson infiltrated the Capulet family and then turned on them. There’s no way he’d do that to Avery.

  But there is a way. I don’t know who I’m trying to kid. I’ve seen all the depravity the world has to offer. A nice suit and the ability to charm Avery’s father doesn’t exempt Grayson from being a monster. If anything, it makes him more likely to be one. It makes him far more likely to be some pedophile bastard who’s going to follow her around starting at age sixteen and woo her father into handing her over in the name of family dynasty.

  He’s a fucking monster.

  “What does that mean?” I hear myself say. I sound so fucking cool about it. Like I’m not going to leap up and murder this sick fuck with my bare hands, right now.

  “Heard when he was coming in.” The dealer leans close enough to smell the industrial soap and caustic shampoo they stock the bathrooms with. “That Capulet girl, the rich bitch who got kidnapped? He had the videos of it all going down on his computer. They think that guy had somethin’ to do with it.”

  Turns out the right words in the right order will make a person do things.

  I’m not going to hurt her, you are.

  Fuck her, or I’ll shoot this one in the head.

  The fact that he had the videos of it all going down on his computer makes me rise from the picnic table. Not too fast, because doing anything too fast in jail will put you on the ground underneath three guards before you can say boo. It makes me walk across the courtyard to where some asshole has already cornered Joshua Grayson. He’s looking down at the man, who gestures in quick, excited motions. That’s why he doesn’t see me until I’m almost on top of him.

  My fist connects with Grayson’s face in a glorious thud and crack. That’s my knuckles. I don’t care. Joshua’s head snaps back in a spray of blood, and he stumbles. He’s not ready for this. He’s not ready for any of this. I kick out, my vision focused by sheer hatred, and get him in the knee. He’s already trying to fight back, reaching for me even as he goes down. He might work out at his fancy gym every single fucking day, but it’s a rare guy who can stand up to a direct hit like the one I just gave him. My fingers curl around his short hair.