Page 27 of Vengeful Queen (Violent Kingdom)

Isobel points forward to the thick door. “Four fucking locks,” she says. “There, there, there.” Her voice is urgent. Everything is urgent.

Three of the locks are deadbolts that she opens easily, but the fourth lock requires a key. Tommy lines his foot up and kicks the door. Once. Twice. It doesn’t budge a millimeter.

“Harker!” he yells. “You got a breaching round ready to go?”

Harker makes his way to the door, a shotgun in his hand. “Locked and loaded,” he replies, lifting the shotgun in gesture. Tommy nods, pointing to the fourth lock. We don’t have a key, so we’re going to have to blow this door open.

A breaching round is a type of shotgun shell that is designed specifically for door breaching. We want to bust the lock, but we don’t want to kill anyone who might be on the other side. As always, there’s a margin for error, but Harker is a ballistics expert—I’m sure he can get the round fired without harming whoever is trapped behind the door.

He lines up his aim, making sure his shotgun is at a 45 degree angle. We all cover our ears as he pulls the trigger, but the noise is still deafening in this small space. A plume of dust explodes from the door frame, as Harker tests the handle. It works. The door opens into a dark, cavernous room.We’re in.

We step into a reeking torture chamber, and it’s a fucking assault on the senses, just the state of the room itself. Bloodstains and spoiled food on the floor. A red-spattered chair in the middle of the room. The desk that’s been the scene of so many crimes.

And two people lying on a mattress.

Isobel curses and leaps forward, going straight for the two bodies. They’re thin and pale. Too pale. I can’t tell if they’re breathing. Isobel leans her head down to Avery’s chest.

“Her heart’s beating. Only just.”

I take the other side. Rome Montague. A tattooed ex-con who’s done enough to get his ass put in prison for the rest of his life. I’m not going to let him off easy. No. Fucking. Way. He doesn’t get to die down here without being punished for what he did to this girl.

But his pulse is thin, thready, and he’s barely breathing.

Isobel starts CPR on Avery, and I put my hands to Rome’s chest.Get ready, bitch,I think, looking down at his bruised face.I’ll crack your ribs if I have to.

“Tommy,” I yell above the sound of Isobel pumping, pumping, pumping. “Call an ambulance. Shit, call two.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ELLIOT

This girl is a fighter.

I saw it in the ambulance when she was, for all intents and purposes, clinically dead.

And I see it now in the hospital as she opens her eyes and scans around the room, her eyes red, her pupils tiny pinpricks swimming in gold-flecked brown eyes. She searches the room, her gaze landing on me, and then on the monitors, her heart rate skyrocketing through the fucking roof.

I didn’t think her heart would be capable of beating so fast after she almost died of a fentanyl overdose, but apparently, she doesn’t care about that. Avery Capulet finds her hands and brings them up to her mouth, and then starts trying to rip the breathing tube from her throat.

Bad idea, girlfriend. She’s going to tear up her throat if she does that. There’s a reason most patients are sedated when they’re intubated. I guess nobody expected her to wake up so quickly, and full of so much frantic energy. I don’t want to scare her, but I also don’t want her to choke to death on her own blood, so I launch at her, pinning her wrists to the bed as she thrashes.

“Hey,” I say. A doctor bursts into the room. “She’s trying to rip the tube out,” I explain.

“Avery,” I murmur to her, quieter this time. “It’s okay. You’re at St Mary’s Hospital. You’re safe.”

She does not stop thrashing. She’s trying to talk around the tube and getting nothing out except a series of low grunts and a string of gibberish. I look at the wound on her arm, the one I just watched a nurse thread twenty-nine excruciating stitches through. Her handiwork was all for nothing. The wound is open again underneath the thin bandage, blood seeping to the gauze’s surface.

“Listen to me,” I say, a little firmer this time. “I’m a detective with the SFPD. We got you out. You’re safe.” I still keep hold of her wrists, which are so thin I’m worried about snapping them. I’m walking a delicate line between protecting this girl from herself and freaking her the hell out.

She looks like she’s possessed by a demon. A demon that wants to rip my fucking eyes out.

“If you stay still, I’ll get the doctor to take the breathing tube out,” I offer. She slows her frantic struggling, as if digesting my words, and then stops cold.

God, they’ve really beaten her down, those sick fucks. Avery’s perfectly still, looking up at me with wide eyes. She points to my shirt pocket--she’s been out for the count long enough for me to run to the station and change out of my SWAT gear into a less abrasive dress shirt and pants. I look to where she’s pointing.

“My pen? You want to write something?”

She nods furiously, her hands reaching as I pull a pen and a small rectangular notepad from my breast pocket. I hand her both, and she snatches them to her as if they’re the most precious things in the world.

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