VENGEFUL QUEEN

by St. Germain, Lili

  He looks anguished. I have to say, his explanation is pretty damn solid.

  “Does my father know about you being gay?”

  Joshua nods. “He’s the one who suggested the arrangement, after he found out about Patrick.”

  I calculate in my mind how long ago that would have been. Not for my marriage arrangement. For my sister’s. How many years ago did my parents sit Adeline down and tell her she’d be marrying a strange man, a decade her senior?

  “When?”

  “When did he suggest it?” Joshua looks up to the ceiling. “A long time ago. It would have to be at least fifteen years ago.”

  I nod slowly. “Fifteen years? That’s how long you’ve been with Patrick?”

  Joshua smiles sadly, and I can’t help but empathize. I know what it’s like to love somebody you can never have. I’ve done it twice now. “Longer,” Joshua replies. “We met in college, freshman year. We were roommates. I’ll spare you the details.”

  Nobody speaks for several moments. I’m well aware that the minutes are ticking by and soon, I’ll be asked to leave this man, this room, this jail. I might not get another chance to speak with Joshua on my own, so I need to make sure I get every shred of knowledge I can before the guard comes back to collect him and return him to his cell.

  Tears sting my eyes when I think of my sister. I’ve never been able to get the image of Adeline’s death out of my head, the way she floated so peacefully in the water she’d drowned herself the night before she was to be married to Joshua.

  “Adeline didn’t know any of this,” I say flatly.

  Guilt creeps across Joshua’s features. “No.”

  “You know, if you’d told her the truth, she probably would have happily married you. Probably would have thought it was the deal of the century, getting our family off her back. She was in love with somebody she wasn’t supposed to be with, too. She was willing to die, so she didn’t have to be without him. And you’re telling me she could have had everything she wanted.”

  “I wanted to tell her,” Joshua mutters, pressing his fingers against his closed eyes. “I knew she was struggling. I would have done anything to make her realize marrying me wasn’t the death sentence she thought it was. That it would have freed her, in some strange way. But the baby. It complicated things.”

  I can feel the blood drain from my face as his words sink in. The baby. It complicated things. I swallow back a scream.

  “What baby?” I whisper.

  Joshua’s hands drop from his eyes, and his gray stare meets mine. His sorrow is so palpable, it’s as if I can reach out and touch it.

  “What baby?” I repeat, a little louder this time.

  “Your sister was pregnant when she died,” Joshua says, looking up at the ceiling. “You didn’t know. I thought you knew.”

  My grief hits me like a tidal wave from calm seas, the shock striking me out of nowhere. I look at Joshua, at the table, at the scratched windows that look out onto an empty exercise yard. Shock. I’m in shock.

  “It wasn’t yours,” I concede.

  Joshua shakes his head, his facade breaking as he witnesses my reaction to his revelation. “I’d never been in a room alone with the girl, much less touched her. If it was mine, it wouldn’t have been a problem for your family. The wedding date was set. But they knew I’d never been alone with her. They knew there was no way it was mine.”

  My hands are balled into fists, and I’m squeezing so hard I can feel my nails breaking the skin of my palms. I’ve become a master of compartmentalizing over the years. It’s been a long time since I’ve cried about my sister’s death. But this is new knowledge. And it feels like it might destroy what fragile composure I’ve managed to scrape together since waking up in the hospital two weeks ago. I feel like a live wire, an exposed nerve, being tugged at by villainous fingers.

  “Whose was it?” I ask hoarsely, even though I already have my suspicions.

  Joshua shrugs. “She didn’t tell a soul. At least, not a soul who decided to share that information. She was seeing more than one guy before she died, I know that much. I just don’t know who. I swear, I would tell you if I knew anything.”

  I’m hot. This room is stifling. I need to get out before I start trying to claw my way out of my own skin. But before I can do that, there’s one more thing I need to know.

  “The embryos.” The next sentences stick in my throat like poison. “Mine. And yours. Our embryos.”

  Joshua looks visibly relieved at the new subject, but he shouldn’t be. Is it really better talking about stealing a teenage girl’s eggs and creating embryos with them than it is discussing a pregnant teenage girl who committed suicide to escape an arranged marriage? “That was fucked up. Your family’s lawyers told me they needed a sperm sample to test. They never told me what for until much, much later. Years later. By then, I’d stopped being surprised by your family and their ideas of forward planning.” He sags in his chair. “I think that was the worst thing they ever told me, though. I felt like some piece of me had been stolen. I can only imagine you felt the same.”

  What a strange sensation, to empathize with the man I dreaded marrying for so many long, bleak years. Now he’s in prison overalls, and I’m the one calling the shots, drawing a confession out of him that, it seems, has been years in the making.

  It hardly feels like that, though. Everything he’s told me is swirling around in my head, each piece of new information screaming over the rest. I can barely separate them into coherent thoughts. Adeline was pregnant. Joshua is gay. The embryos weren’t his idea. My family is crazier than I thought possible.

  I wonder how much my father knew about all of this. He needs to hurry the fuck up and get out of his coma, so I can interrogate him.

  “Where are they?” A bright, swelling anger blooms amidst the numb confusion buzzing in my brain. “Tell me exactly where they’re stored.” I haven’t thought about the embryos in what feels like forever. “The embryos.”

  “New Life Fertility, over on second street.” He doesn’t even hesitate. I stand up before I know what I’m doing. “Avery?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  A part of me that’s been frozen solid begins to thaw. I’m not looking at another murderer. Another accomplice. For the first time, I see Joshua Grayson clearly. And...I think he might be an ally, if not a friend.

  “Thank you.”

  He doesn’t try to stop me when I head toward the door.

  “Watch your back,” he calls after me, and when I turn around, there’s an urgent, raw look on his face. “There’s somebody pulling the strings here, Avery. Somebody we don’t know about yet.” A beat. “Be careful.”

  “I will. Thank you.”

  The door swings shut behind me and Elliot looks at me, a barely restrained hope written all over his face.

  “He doesn’t have any information about the videos.” I’m sure of it. I’ve been wrong a lot lately, but I don’t think I’m wrong about this. “Did Will agree to meet with me?”

  Elliot shakes his head, his hope crumbling. “He was adamant. No visitors. I couldn’t even bribe a guard to go around his lawyers. Plus, he’s in solitary for beating a guard up the day he stepped in here. Did you know the guy has a black belt?”

  “Yup.” That’s not altogether surprising that he’s refused my visit. I blew Will’s cover on the spyware he installed on my phone and then showed up at a moment of total, utter humiliation for him. No wonder he doesn’t want to meet me for a casual chat. My brain swims with all the things Joshua just told me. It’s probably not a good time to have another high-stakes conversation anyway.

  It’s time to do something else.

  I need to right a wrong that was committed a decade ago.

  “Hey, Elliot.” The plan forms in my mind, crystal clear, like I’d been thinking of it for weeks. “Could we stop off on the way back to the station? There’s somewhere I’d like to go.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE


  AVERY

  New Life Fertility is the kind of nice, unassuming place I could see myself visiting if my life hadn’t gone completely off the rails. Somewhere out there is a version of Avery Capulet who maybe isn’t filthy rich but is also free, and the one thing to go awry with her pampered little life is that her husband’s sperm don’t swim well or her eggs don’t pop out on time.

  Unfortunately, that’s not me.

  As Elliot pulls into the parking lot, I open my purse and pretend to dig for my wallet. The gun is there, just like it’s supposed to be. Perfect. I never thought I’d be the kind of person who had to carry her own gun. Three months ago, there was actually another version of me who knew that security would always be available. I’d never have to buy a gun.

  How things change.

  I give Elliot a tight-lipped smile. “Thank you. I’ll be right out.”

  He narrows his eyes, reading the sign out front. “No prob—”

  I hop out of the car and head toward the entrance before he can finish what he’s saying. No time to get drawn into a conversation about what we’re doing here. Only time to act. There’s a heady freedom in just deciding something and then doing it.

  It’s a freedom that has been denied to me for far too long.

  The glass sliding doors at the front of the clinic give me the opportunity to shake out my hair and put on a smile before they retract open and welcome me inside. With my sunglasses on, I look very close to normal. I could be the Avery Capulet with a few bad eggs and a lot of hope.

  But I’m not.

  The woman behind the counter in pink scrubs smiles at me. “Welcome to New Life Fertility,” she says. Another patient in the waiting room, a painful hope etched on her face, lifts her head at the sound of another nurse calling her name. The woman gets up and walks back through the door that must lead to the exam rooms. “How can I help you?”

  A twisting, breaking sensation in my chest, near my heart, brings me to the verge of tears and rears back again. I lift my purse to the countertop.

  “I would like to collect the embryos you’re storing for me. Right now, please.”

  She purses her lips, eyebrows drawing together. “Ma’am, I’m not sure I understand—”

  “You have several embryos here that were created with my eggs. That makes them mine. You’ll give them to me now. Look it up—Avery Capulet should be the name attached to the file.” I sound so even and cool. I sound like other-Avery. A little hopeful. A lot determined.

  The woman—Cindy, if her nametag’s right—bends over her keyboard with a sidelong glance at me. “I do have those records,” she says cautiously, “but I can’t just release embryos to you. There’s a proper procedure, forms to fill out. It can take weeks to approve a transfer to your new facility. You can’t just take them yourself. Frozen embryos are—”

  “They’re mine,” I insist, my voice raising an octave. “I’ll sign whatever you need me to sign. But I need those embryos now.”

  Cindy adopts a bitchy attitude, her eyebrows raised, her head cocked to the side. “It’s against policy,” she says, pausing for effect between each word. “If you take embryos out of cold storage and throw them in your car, they will be destroyed.”

  I smile coldly. “That’s the plan, Cindy.”

  She looks horrified, the bitchy attitude melting as she realizes I’m serious. “If you want embryos destroyed, that’s a different procedure. I can set up an appointment with our counselor, and you’ll need to bring your…” she clicks around on the screen, puzzled. “Your partner, I guess? Whoever the co-signer on your account is. It isn’t giving me that information for some reason.”

  I think back to who that could be. My father? Enzo? Joshua? Or one of the lawyers my family keeps on the payroll? It sickens me that I can’t even accurately guess which one of them it would most likely be.

  Joshua, probably. He’s the father, after all.

  “The father is otherwise indisposed,” I protest. “He’s in prison, and I don’t know when he’s getting out.”

  Cindy shrugs. “I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”

  I see red. And poor Cindy is the one in my direct line of fire. Ha. Line of fire. How fitting.

  “Cindy, listen.” I tip my open purse toward her, and at first, I can tell she doesn’t understand. Then she looks inside to where the shiny silhouette of the gun leans against my slim wallet. “I don’t have time for this shit. If you don’t get me what I’m asking for, I’ll take this gun out. If you still don’t get me what I’m asking for… well, I’m not a very experienced shot. I would hate to accidentally shoot you. It’s not personal. You know? I just will. I’m at that kind of point in my life.”

  The blood drains from Cindy’s face, leaving her pale underneath her auburn hair. Her mouth works. Does she feel that rush of adrenaline, just like I did? That thundering, beating fear of being firmly planted in the crosshairs of life and death? The difference is that Cindy gets to go home at the end of the day. I won’t actually shoot her.

  Not on purpose, anyway.

  She raises one hand—please, don’t—and hits a few other keys on the keyboard.

  “Ma’am.” Her voice shakes, but she keeps her head held high. Good woman. She hasn’t been broken yet. Not like I have. “The embryos are in our storage facility.”

  “Wonderful. You can take me there.”

  I put my hand in my purse and pick it up. Cindy hesitates. I hold my breath. She steps out from behind the desk and takes the other door, not the one the patient took earlier. Better and better. It’s not like I actually want to hold a woman up in front of a bunch of people who are struggling to have babies. If we can avoid that spectacle, it’ll be easier for everybody.

  I wait until I’m sure we’re alone to take the gun out of my purse and press it to Cindy’s back. She stiffens, gasping, and it’s fucking sick, but I’m relieved. She’s going to give me what I want and then at least one small part of this nightmare will be over.

  We walk down a long, narrow hallway together and through a door marked STAFF ONLY. Cindy punches in a code on the keypad set into the wall and the lock releases. She keeps her eyes forward and leads me into a room marked COLD STORAGE.

  It’s nothing special. A room filled end-to-end with tall metal shelves, each one crammed with metal containers that remind me of giant milk jugs. That must be for the liquid nitrogen, to keep all those unborn babies safely frozen, floating in their own life-and-death crosshairs until someone thaws them and gives them a warm uterus to burrow into.

  Or until they’re thawed and left to die.

  I knew going in that there would be a lot of these. Women want to get pregnant, right? Women will do anything to have a family. But there are so many. This isn’t even a huge room, by my standards. I’ve been in ballrooms that could fit thousands of these cryopreservation tanks.

  There are just so goddamn many.

  I swallow down a hard lump in my throat, baffled at the tears gathering in the corners of my eyes. Now is not the time to break down over this. It’s just that standing in a room filled with so many possibilities when my life, which was supposed to be all possibility, has come to this point...

  Fuck.

  I pull myself together just in time. “Where are mine?”

  “Row E. Canister 15.” Cindy glances back at me. I lower the gun. I’m not going to fucking shoot her in the middle of all these frozen lives, waiting for something new to start. Also, the gun isn’t loaded. She doesn’t need to know that, though. “It’ll have an ID number on it. E-631.”

  Cindy and I pick through the shelves together, scanning the ID numbers on the tanks.

  “There,” she says. “Okay.” She shoots me another hard look. “Help me get this down.”

  We lift it together. It’s heavier than I would have thought. Cindy crouches over the tank and does something to the top. It pops open to reveal a group of metal canisters.

  She traces the labels on the tops of the canisters, double- and tripl
e-checking. Then she lifts one of the canisters out of the liquid nitrogen and grabs a towel from one of the shelves to wrap around it.

  “Here. Here you go.” Cindy drops it into my hands with all the fervor of a woman who wants to live.

  “My father had these made without my consent when I was sixteen years old.” I can’t stop staring at the canister. “He took a sperm donation from the man he chose to be my husband, and while I was put under for another surgery, they stole my eggs. And had these embryos made. That way, they wouldn’t have to count on my cooperation with the pregnancies if I resisted.”

  Cindy’s mouth drops open.

  “I know. Fucking horrifying, right?” It is horrifying, but it’s not even the most horrifying thing to happen to me. “I need a bag, Cindy. These won’t fit in my purse.”

  She moves quickly to a table at the end of the room and digs around underneath it until she comes up with a black duffel bag that’s covered in a fine layer of dust.

  “Take it,” she whispers. I unzip it and put the vial of embryos in while she watches.

  Back out in the hallway, she locks up the COLD STORAGE room again. I stay behind her on the way back to the waiting room. Cindy goes back behind her desk, just like this was any other appointment.

  “Thank you,” I tell her, playing my part. “For all your help today.”

  Her hands are shaking, and she’s crying. I feel her eyes on me all the way out of the building.

  “What’s that?” Elliot eyes the duffel bag. The wheels are already turning in his mind, no doubt.

  “Something I’ve been meaning to pick up.” I give him a rueful smile. “If you don’t mind, I need you to take me to the cemetery in Colma. Holy Cross. Can you do that?”

  He can. Thirty minutes later, he leaves me silently at the entrance to Holy Cross and drives away, a deep, brewing suspicion on his face.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO