Page 30 of Vicious Prince (Violent Kingdom)

He’s going to murder me.

I raise my eyes to look at him again, in time to see him place the knife on the ground at his feet. My captor comes at me, crouching in front of me, placing his gloved hands on my knees and pushing them wider. Without the pressure of my other thigh, my wound bleeds faster, more urgently, as I struggle to get enough air through my nose. He takes one glove off, making a show of trailing the limp plastic across my skin, throwing it to the ground as he aims his index finger toward my vagina and pushes in. I groan through my gag in protest, the breach of my most private place horrific, his finger large and rough and trying to push somewhere with zero lubrication. I tighten up every muscle involuntarily, wanting to keep him out, wanting to fold in on myself and die right here before he can molest me any more.

The resistance frustrates him, I can tell. He stops trying to finger-fuck an unwilling orifice and turns his attention back to my thigh. He pushes his fingers into the cut he’s made in my thigh, and a muffled groan tries to fight its way through my gag. Sharp white pain rings clear all around me as the damaged nerves in my leg scream for mercy. He uses his blood-slicked fingers to breach me again, and this time, he finds purchase. I’m impossibly tight down there, from fear and my body’s desire to expel the painful intrusion, but all that does is tighten my walls around his finger as he pushes and pulls, in and out. His thumb finds my clitoris, nothing more than the gentlest brush over it’s protective hood, but the motion causes my entire body to jump in response. He tips his head to the side, cupping my ass in his palm as he pulls me forward in the seat.

I scream again; but really, what’s the use? Nobody will hear me. Nobody will help me. How would they? My ass is now right on the edge of the chair, the position causing the back of the chair to dig into the exact spot in my spine where I laid against the hard edge of the mausoleum alter less than twenty-four hours ago while Will drove himself inside me. Was that a different life? It feels so far away, so hard to grab onto the memory, but with every bite of the chair’s hard edge into my back, the memory of being with Will sharpens.

Will. Where did you go? Are you looking for me?

A second, more sickening thought.

Were you a part of this? Is this your way of getting your life back?

No. He wouldnever.No, the man kneeling between my legs as I slowly bleed to death on this chair is a stranger, of that I am sure. I have never been more sure of anything in my life. You couldn’t know a person and subject them to this. You couldn’t love somebody for eight years and then have any part in something so terrifyingly cruel, so deviant.

Just this morning I was lamenting my situation, cursed to bear the Capulet name, and now all I want to do is use my name and my power to free myself from this situation, this place, this man, his rough fingers.

And they’re just his fingers, aren’t they? I should be thankful that he’s not trying to stick his dick in me. But I’mnotgrateful. I’m rocked to the core, literally, every push of his fingers, every scrape of his fingernails inside me a brutal reality, a violent awakening.

This is how I die.

Through my gag, I scream.

He slaps me again, hard enough to snap my head back with force. He raises himself from his spot on the ground, just high enough to pull the wet blindfold out of my mouth. He fixes it over my eyes, and I’m blind again, this time the saliva-slicked material sticking to my skin like glue. “Please,” I beg him. There’s a small gap in the bottom of the blindfold, and I hold my breath in horror as I watch him roll up the balaclava just enough to expose his chin and mouth. It’s too dark to make out much detail, and I can only tell that he’s clean-shaven. It’s too dark to make out the shape of his jaw, the color of his skin, anything.

I can feel his hot breath drift over my thighs, as he pushes my knees wide and settles between my legs again, the sharp back of the chair making my back feel like it might break in half. I focus on the pain, though, a welcome distraction from what I fear he’s about to do.

Please don’t.

He does. He pushes and pushes at my knees, until it feels like my hips will snap, and he plants a long, lingering kiss right on my swollen bud of nerves. He kisses it like you would kiss somebody’s mouth, his tongue massaging me in long, rolling waves, until I’m panting, until I’m no longer trying to pull away because all I’m doing is making more friction between his mouth and my skin, my energy spent, my limbs like lead weights. It feels dirty, this contact. It feels disgusting. It’s something a lover does. Not the stranger who has taken you hostage.

“Help!” I scream. “Somebody! Help!”

He laughs against my clitoris, and the vibration only makes it worse. I would prefer to be beaten on the ground, to be tasered. Anything but this.

He pulls away, and then I feel fingers tugging at the rock on my hand. Of course. My gazillion-dollar engagement ring. What I’d give right now, to be the unhappy fiancé of Joshua Grayson, milling around my birthday party, making small talk.

What I’d give.

Chapter Ten

ELLIOT

You know it’s going to be a shitty night when there aren’t enough body bags to clean up all the dead people.

I’m standing in a loading dock underneath a hotel that sits on the edge of the financial district in San Francisco, trying to figure out what happened to all of these highly trained, ex-military guys to cause them to be dead and scattered all around me. Why somebody shot the owner of the building, and then snatched his daughter from under everyone’s nose.

I’m also trying to figure out whythe fuckmy boss would put me on a case like this. It’s high-profile — the Capulet family would normally be taken care of by senior ranking Federal Officers, not ones who, by rights, probably shouldn’t even have a badge and gun.

Yet, here I am.

Three feet from me, I know my partner is probably feeling the same. It’s an uneasy feeling, knowing that there’s probably a fucked-up reason behind being assigned to a case you should be running from. But when the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations personally calls you at home on a Sunday night and tells you to get down to the Palatial Hotel to investigate the shooting murders of at least six people, a high-profile abduction, and the attempted murder of one of the most powerful men in California, you get your ass down to the crime scene, a-fucking-sap.

“This is a mess,” Isobel Sazerac murmurs, stepping over a dead security guard to get to me. I nod at my fellow Detective in agreement. “It’s a shit show, alright.”

“We got what we need from here?” she asks.

I shrug. “I think we should leave Forensics to do their thing. Get some more statements before the rest of the guests find a way out of there.” I point above me, to the ceiling, and beyond, where tired, frazzled party guests are starting to complain loudly and throw around words likelawyerandcivil rights.

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