Page 31 of Vicious Prince (Violent Kingdom)

Truth be told, I want to get out of here as quickly as possible. I’ve seen my fair share of dead people, including some that met their end because of me, but this is different. The scent of blood is ripe on the night air, heavy and metallic, and death has always made me a little queasy. Not enough to stop doing what I do, but enough that I always manage to avoid attending the autopsies until the bodies are sewn back up and safely zipped back into their body bags.

We step away from the sea of bodies, conferring in a little alcove near the sidewalk outside the dock. The entire block has been cordoned off — no chance of press catching our conversation, what with the seemingly hundreds of SFPD officers forming an impenetrable wall around the Palatial Hotel building.

I take a proper look at Isobel; with her blow-dried brown tresses and heavily-lined blue eyes, she could pass for one of the party guests, not one of the FBI agents investigating the bloody aftermath of Augustus Capulet’s shooting, and his daughter’s disappearance.

“Were you asleep when they called, Grandpa?” Isobel asks, tipping her head to the side and studying my face.

“Were you pole dancing?” I reply. “‘Because those sneakers don’t exactly match your dress.”

Isobel pulls a face. “I was on a hot date, actually.”

“Oh. I was watching Frozen for the hundredth time.”

Isobel blinks.

“With Kayla,” I add.

Isobel pulls a notepad from her coat pocket. “Your daughter has excellent taste in Disney movies, then,” she says, flipping the notepad open and handing it to me. I take it, scanning down a list of names.

“Which one do you think is the most suspicious?” she asks.

I read off each name before settling on one. “Will Hewitt would be my bet,” I say. “Then again, Lorenzo Capulet stands to benefit if his brother doesn’t make it.”

Isobel shrugs. “That’s what I thought, too, about the brother, right? Enzo, they call him. But apparently that’s not how it works. I asked one of the cousins, a kid called Tyler?”

I nod for her to continue.

“As of tonight, Avery Capulet is the sole beneficiary of everything the Capulets own.”

“Everything?” I echo. “Isn’t that, like—”

“More money than you or I could ever fathom,” Isobel says. “Which begs the question — why haven’t they asked for a ransom yet?”

I shrug. “It’s only been a couple hours. They probably want to scare them first, you know, beat her up a little bit, maybe figure out their demands?”

Isobel shakes her head. “What I don’t get is — she was apparently wearing an engagement ring worth eight million dollars. Eight. That’s like, Beyoncé level. Why not just take the ring, dump her off a few blocks away, and high-tail it?”

We start walking toward the hotel foyer. “Maybe it’s not about the money. Maybe it’s something else they want with her, with the family.”

Isobel shakes her head, taking the notepad back from me. “No way. With people like this, it’s always about the money.”

* * *

We get statements from as many guests as we can, starting with the Capulet family members and spanning outward. The Will kid, Avery Capulet’s freshly dumped ex-boyfriend, is distraught. Too distraught for me to think he’s got anything to do with Avery’s disappearance, unless he’s an incredible actor. His old man has a wall of Academy Awards, so I make a mental note to look into the apple and see how far it fell from the tree. But actually, the one person in all of this who gives me the creeps is the fiancé. Joshua Grayson. I don’t know what it is about him — maybe that he’s the one who led her down to the dock? Or the fact that he was the only one to escape without a scratch, while six security officers were shot and killed in cold blood.

Then again, with her father on the brink of death, maybe the fiancé’s just been kept alive to make sure the ransom gets paid.

Back at the FBI Headquarters, I make a beeline for the coffee machine. “Yes please,” Isobel calls out, already knowing where I’m off to. It’s almost three a.m., and we’ve both been on call since eight yesterday morning. I don’t mind the long shifts, especially when the case is something as important as finding a missing girl, but I need caffeine to push through.

The coffee maker in our lunch room is one of those pod machines. I grab two mugs, heap sugar into them, and take two of the strongest pods, dropping one into the machine and selecting the largest shot of coffee. The machine roars to life, loud enough to wake the dead security guards who are by now probably en route to the city morgue. I watch as rich, brown coffee pours from the machine.Huh.It’s the exact color of the missing girls' eyes. How does a girl go missing like that, in the middle of hundreds of people? At her own party, no less? Whoever snatched her was prepared, I know that much. I also know the coffee machine is being a temperamental little bitch, pouring cold water into my mug. “Jesus,” I mutter, dumping the coffee down the sink and starting again with a fresh pod and more sugar.

“Agent McRae?” a voice calls from the doorway to the kitchen. It’s one of our young recruits, Veronica, fresh from Quantico.

“Yeah,” I reply, only half-listening, the majority of my attention still focused on getting the fucking coffee machine to work.

“You’ve got a package.”

A package? I stir my coffee absent-mindedly. Who’s sending packages at three a.m. on a Monday morning?

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