Page 15 of Vengeful Queen (Violent Kingdom)

Tears stream down her face, soaking the gag, but she lifts her hips up.

“Spread your legs.”

The girl obeys, shakily. Her wet, ragged breathing fills the room. What the fuck is this guy’s plan? To rape her in front of us?

“Oh, no,” Avery whispers. “Oh, fuck. Oh, no.”

The captor pulls a gun.

He crosses the room with an easy stride and by the time I’m ready to fight him, to kill him, he’s grabbed Avery around her neck. She folds into his arm. There’s only the slightest twitch as she tries to get away, but she doesn’t try hard. She only looks at me with an unbearable sadness in her eyes. Avery understands something that I don’t. Why can’t I understand it?

It’s because my mind cannot comprehend what comes next.

The masked man puts the gun to Avery’s temple. It’s almostgentle, the way he does it, the way he places his other hand tenderly at the base of her throat. Then he jerks his head toward the girl on the mattress.

“Fuck her.”

I almost choke on my response.“Fuck her yourself.”

He presses the gun into Avery’s flesh more insistently. “Fuck her, or I shoot this one in the head.”

Ah. There it is. The curtain comes tumbling down, letting in the light.Thisis their next move. It’s not enough for me to torture Avery, or for Avery to let me do it.

I meet Avery’s eyes.I can’t do this. Not to some poor girl whose only crime is likely being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

They’re going to get us where it hurts. They’re going to force us to sacrifice an innocent.

A nameless pawn in exchange for the Queen of Verona.

I shouldn’t even be entertaining the idea of how to get through this. I definitely shouldn’t be putting Avery on some pedestal that makes her worth more than the crying girl on her hands and knees before us. Because Avery and me - we’re not even anus. We’re nottogether. I mean physically, we’re together in this unbelievably fucking depraved situation, but we’ve never said that we’re together. She doesn’t love me. I don’t love her, not really. I did, once, but that was another life.

It doesn’t matter. What’s left of my conscience recoils from the thought of doing this in front of her. It was one thing when I got fucked by the Harley Quinn knockoff. That hurt, sure, and I’ll never be able to sleep again without the image of her on top of me - but this right here is somethingmuchdarker.

I don’t know I’m clenching my fists until one of my fingernails draws blood from my palm. I look around at the cameras, observing the angles they capture, the dark corners they can’t reach. My mind does all sorts of calculations as I notice the way Avery is being held in one of those dark corners, outside of the camera’s fields. My stomach drops as I begin to understand what this will look like when I fuck this girl I don’t know to save the girl I love.

When I rape one girl to save another.

Put it this way: it won’t look like I’m a captive down here. It will look like I’m a captor. I think of the newspaper each morning with my prints all over it, the way these cameras are angled, even the very first night we were here, and Avery, herself, thought I’d fucking kidnapped her. We’re going to die down here, because the only way to make it look like it was me who did this, is to make sure there is nobody else to blame. That sickening realization spreads through my veins like poison, hot and sharp, and for a moment, I’m dizzy. Drunk with the finality that we are never getting out alive.

I can’t do this. I have to stop this.

“Not everybody shares your kink,” I tell the guy. “You know this is some cheap-ass porn shit, right?”

The bastard responds by stepping closer, just long enough to kick the girl on the floor. He kicks her hard, right in the ribs, and she’s tossed across the mattress with a muffled groan, landing on her back.

“Take out your gag,” he tells her.

Wordlessly, she obeys, pulling the dirty, balled-up cloth from her mouth with a small retching sound. Great. Now I have to look her in the face and listen to her scream.

“You have one minute,” our captor says, cocking his gun and digging it harder into Avery’s temple. She whimpers. The girl on the mattress trembles violently. I almost throw up.

My heart rate skyrockets.You have one minute. One minute to turn into a monster.

How am I supposed to get it up for this?How in the fuck?A feeling akin to acid rushes through my veins. What other fucking choice do I have?

I start to unbutton my jeans.

No choice.Pull down the zipper.

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