Page 45 of Vicious Prince (Violent Kingdom)

“I wouldn’t marry you if you had the last functioning dick on earth,” she said, pushing me away with a palm to my chest. Maybe I would have been offended, but the expression on her face wasn’t hateful; it was eager.

“The last functioning dick, huh?” I echoed, plucking the almost-finished cigarette from her fingers and taking the last puff. I blew the smoke back in her pretty face, and she didn’t even flinch. I stepped closer to her, caging her against the wall with my arms. “I don’t need a dick to make you scream, Avery Capulet. I’ve got a tongue, and two hands, and I wouldn’t need to marry you to make you come on either of those things.”

Blood rushed to her cheeks when I said that. I smirked, dropping the cigarette butt on the ground and crushing it beneath my sneaker. I turned and walked away, feeling her eyes as they burned into the back of me, both of us knowing that I had won this time.

Chapter Eighteen

ROME

Nobody ever paid attention to us when we were young. She was second-in-line for a throne that her older sister had already been molded to fit. I was the ruins of a family legacy that had soared too high, and crashed spectacularly, the sole survivor of a broken dynasty.

We were both afterthoughts to our fathers; mine, who had been driven out of town after the fire; and hers, who was focused only on Adeline, the oldest Capulet offspring, the prodigal daughter who would ascend the throne.

ButIpaid attention to Avery Capulet. And she paid attention to me. And something about the fact that we were forbidden only made me want her more.

Love isn’t always a happy thing.

Sometimes it’s a dirty habit, a vice that makes you miserable with need. A desperate addiction that threatens to kill you in every moment that you spend apart. There’s no happiness in love when you know it has an expiration date. Only an anxious, gnawing grief of a future you both already know, a day when you’ll be forced apart. Avery and I knew our time was finite. Our story’s ending was hurtling toward us at the speed of light. We just thought we had more time.

And then Avery’s sister died, and our end arrived quietly, like a snake, sinking its poison into us before we knew we’d been bitten. Even as I was breathing air into Adeline Capulet’s water-filled lungs, pumping her chest with my flattened palms hard enough to feel her ribs crack under the force, I knew I had lost Avery. Like a thief, death stole more than just Adeline from her family, and from my best friend, who truly loved her; death stole the future we’d all hoped could somehow one day be a reality.

Loving Avery Capulet didn’t make me happy. It made me heartsick. So when she betrayed me, it was the worst pain I’d ever endured; but it was also, in some strange way, a relief.

* * *

The next time I wake up, I wonder if it was all a dream. The two guys who operated on me. The car journey. The guy who raped Avery. Was it all just some fucked up nightmare?

Avery’s face swims in my vision. I’m back on the mattress, the cuffs gone, the bullet out of my shoulder, leaving a biting pain in its wake. I blink once, twice, my eyes focusing enough to see the look on Avery’s face, and I know none of it was fictional. It was a nightmare, yes, but not the kind you wake up from.

“Where did you go?” she whispers. “Where did he take you?”

I shrug, still trapped halfway between sleep and wake. “A little trip to the surgeon,” I mutter. “For someone who’s going to brutally murder us, he sure did seem to want me alive.”

Which is extremely fucking troubling. A killer who has underground surgeons save his victims. Who he shot. I can’t make it add up.

“I thought you were dead,” Avery whispers. She has new clothes on, a white t-shirt and a black skirt that ends mid-thigh; and she’s clean, no longer covered in our blood. She’s even wearing some kind of necklace, a thick black choker that looks like it’s made of leathery plastic.

“One little bullet isn’t going to kill a Montague,” I murmur. Avery smiles at that. And then immediately bursts into tears.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“Why?” I reply, a little too bitterly. “Youdidn’t shoot me.”

I ty to sit up, groaning at the flash of red-hot agony that sparks across my shoulder and through my body when I move.Motherfucker.Getting shot is so fucking inconvenient. Give me a good stabbing any day.

Avery moves to help me, and that makes me angry.

I shrug off her assistance, watching the hope on her face fade to resignation as she sits back on her heels. With difficulty, I eventually maneuver myself into a sitting position against the wall. I look down at myself, confused when I see I'm wearing a new black t-shirt, dark denim jeans. These aren't my clothes. I look Avery up and down again, taking in her new clothes, her clean hair. “Did you go to the mall or something while I was gone?”

Her eyes blank for a second. Her face falls, her hand coming up to finger the choker she’s wearing around her neck. Suspicion peaks in my chest immediately; I know where I’ve seen one of those before. It’s not a necklace. It’s a fucking collar.

A collar you would put on adog.

“What is that?” I ask, alarm bells ringing underneath the pain. I’m talking barely above a whisper, trying to speak without being heard by whoever is outside the room, watching us, but they can probably hear every word I say. Between the one-way glass and the cameras, I doubt I can think in this room without being heard.

Her amber-colored eyes, the same eyes I remember always being full of fire, are blank now, shiny with unshed tears. She looks so bereft, it's almost frightening. And I don't scare easy. But when it comes to Avery, I've never been able to regulate any kind of emotion. Raging lust. Forbidden love. Fierce loyalty. And then, the thing that replaced it all. Hate. Black, festering, hate.

My soul might have died every time I thought about her after she fucked me over, until I was hollowed out of anything good and filled with bitter hatred, but I can't hate the girl sitting in front of me with a collar around her neck. She's too pained, too damaged.

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