Page 29 of Vicious Prince (Violent Kingdom)

Is he even alive to know that I’ve been stolen away?

“What do you want?” I finally ask the darkness that presses against every edge of me. My throat hurts when I speak, thirst piercing my voice and turning it into a rasp. How long have I been here?

Where is here?

My blindfold is thick, but soft, like silk. Maybe several layers of silk.

“My family will pay whatever ransom you want,” I say.

“Just tell them what you want. They’ll give it to you.”

I don’t even know if there is anyone with me.

Anyone watching me.

I could be buried alive, or in somebody’s attic, or in my own fucking house. I can’t see.I don’t know.

Fear continues to drip into my veins like poison. Behind the fear, the remains of my Capulet pride:Who on earth would be stupid enough to take Augustus Capulet’s daughter from him?

“Listen,” I say, trying to be convincing, which is hard when I’m tied to a chair, my wrists and ankles secured with what feels like duct tape, the blindfold tied tight around my face. “Just tell me—”

What feels like a large, rough palm smacks me so hard, I feel my lip split, taste the copper of fresh blood on my mouth. I let out a wail. I’ve never been so terrified in my life — I was so sure that I was talking to thin air. How long has this person been in front of me, waiting for me to wake up?

My mind struggles to catch up, to do something— but before I can think, before I can construct the perfect argument tolet me go, my blindfold is ripped off, and in the same breath, shoved into my mouth. A makeshift gag that makes me retch. I swallow down the urge to vomit, the material in my mouth an invasion, an assault on my senses. My eyes are twin orbs of lancing pain at the sudden weak light that hits them, as I try to decipher my surroundings now that I have sight. The gag irritates my throat, and I try to push it out with my tongue, but it doesn’t budge.

Fuck.Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.I forget about the gag as my eyes focus on the figure in front of me. He’s tall, over six feet, dressed entirely in black, the same black ski mask from earlier over his head. He’s wearing plastic surgical gloves now, the leather ones nowhere to be seen — to keep his DNA from getting on me, or in preparation to chop me into little pieces?

I glance down at myself. The bottom half of my dress is gone, the puffy gauze skirt a remnant of a night long left behind. It sits in a heap of tulle in one corner of this room I’m in, which I can now see is about the size of a large bedroom, the floor made of rough concrete. I can see a thin mattress against one wall of the room, a small dining table on the other. There’s a large, horizontal mirror that takes up almost one entire wall of the room, and beside it, a metal door that looks thick and heavy.That’s my escape route, I think, filing that information away for another time. I steal little glances around, trying to learn as much as I can about where I am, but at the same time never taking my attention away from the man in front of me.

The room is lit only by a single blue lamp on a table in the corner, the shadows in here long and menacing against the blank, grey cement walls. My captor reaches for something on the table, and I crane my neck to see what he’s holding.

A knife.

I start to hyperventilate, which is kind of fucking hard to do when you only have your nose to breathe through. He brings the knife up to my belly and rests it right between my breasts, still wrapped in the top half of the dress that I was sewn into just hours ago. Or was it longer than just a few hours ago? How long have I been down here?

It can’t have been that long, I think. My bladder is uncomfortably full, but not painful, yet — so it can’t have been more than a few hours that I’ve been here. I’ve not used a toilet that I can remember, and my underwear doesn’t feel wet. So by those calculations, it’s probably the early hours of the morning.

I recoil, squeezing my eyes shut as balaclava guy cuts my dress corset clear down the middle, yanking the material away from my body with a desperation that almost borders on hunger. My breasts bounce free from the once-tight material, my nipples immediately stiffening to hard peaks against the bitter chill in this tiny room. The dress corset had a bra built into it, so cutting it away leaves me naked from the waist up. All I have on now are my plain flesh-colored panties, seamless at the edges so that my dress sat properly, without a panty line. Even those are taken from me, the knife nicking the material at each of my hips so that the material falls away. My legs are parted slightly on the chair, and the cold air reaches inside my thighs, pulling a painful sigh from me that nobody will ever hear. My knees are shaking so badly against the cold, it’s a wonder I don’t make the chair topple onto its side, and me with it.

I wince as my captor places something cold on my bare thigh.The knife.I protest through the gag in my mouth, nothing but a garbled, muted noise filtering through the material. I’m naked, I’m begging, I’m shaking, I’m fucking sobbing, but he doesn’t pay my pleas the slightest bit of attention. My eyes go big and round as I watch him take that knife and press it into the flesh of my inner thigh. The pain is so hot, so acidic, that vomit rushes up my throat. I choke it back down with great difficulty, my nose burning with the sudden rush of bile that would have probably poured out of my nose if I hadn’t swallowed it back down. I stare at the burgeoning wound being sawn into my thigh, as if I’m a patient who’s just sat up in the middle of a major surgery and seen inside herself.

There is a major artery that runs through the inside of the thigh. I remember from biology class.What’s it called?If he hits it, I could bleed out in minutes.

Just hours ago, I was joking about how being married off was a fate worse than death. But I didn’t really mean those words, because I’d do anything to stop the slow, methodical slice of the knife’s teeth against my skin. I scream as my skin splits open, the knife impossibly sharp, my skin impossibly fragile. I stare down at the spot on my own body where a neat red line appears, and then starts to spill out like the water that gushes over the edge of a waterfall. There isso much blood. I’ve seen plenty of blood spilled in my short life — a by-product of my family name — but I’ve never been so intimately acquainted with my own blood as it pulses from my body. I’m unbearably cold, my teeth chattering. I have no idea if it’s actually cold in here or if it’s because I’m losing so much blood, so quickly, but either way, I’m so cold that every bit of exposed skin on my body breaks out in gooseflesh.

My captor dips a finger into my blood and brings it up to my chest. I’m folding forward, straining to see what he’s doing to my thigh, and so he takes a fistful of my hair and yanks, making me sit straighter in the chair. I shiver as the air in the room turns colder, my exposed nipples tightening painfully, or perhaps it’s me that is growing colder, as I swiftly lose blood.

Fingers paint letters between my breasts, a macabre action that reminds me of the crude paintings a small child would create with their hands and brightly colored paint. My faceless captor takes blood from my thigh wound several more times before he steps back, apparently satisfied, and it’s only then that I can see what he’s written on me.

Two letters.XO.

I blink in confusion as I stare at the two letters, my chin against my chest as I try to make them say something — anything — else. Everybody knows the XO killer doesn’t have any surviving victims. He only leaves death in his wake, naked and scrubbed clean and with a neat calling card painted on his victims' chests.

XO.

It’s so obvious now. He doesn’t want a ransom. He wants my terror. He wants mylife.

This silent psycho circles behind me, hands in my hair again, and then lower, exploring my face, my neck, pinching a nipple hard enough to make me yelp. He pulls my hair, forcing my head back and to the side, at the perfect height to grind his erection into my cheek. Under his black pants, he’s as hard as the steel the knife is forged from. I start to cry. He’s going to hurt me.

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