Page 28 of Violent Reign (Violent Kingdom)

Chapter Seventeen

ELLIOT MCRAE

I’m scrolling the news,looking for anything relevant to any of our open cases, but wouldn’t you know it? There’s nothing but wall-to-wall coverage of the Capulet wedding.

Something’s off about it. “Hey, Isobel.”

She’s burning through paperwork at a desk, all of it set up assembly-line style. “If this is one of your random factoids, I don’t have time. I’ve got to get this stuff turned in.” Isobel purses her lips, scans the folder in front of her one more time, and flips it shut. “Done,” she whispers under her breath.

“C’mere and look at this.”

I’ve caught her at a good moment, because Isobel doesn’t put up a fuss. She wheels her chair over to my desk and looks over my shoulder. “Ooh, yeah. I haven’t been able to look away from that.” Isobel leans in closer, narrowing her blue eyes. “It’s like a train wreck in slow motion. You can’t do anything to stop it, because you’re in slow motion too, but you also can’t look away.”

“What makes you think it’s a train wreck?” Of the pair of us, Isobel’s going to be the one who has some apt description of it, even if I don’t totally agree with a slow-motion train wreck. A slow-motion train wreck is something that can definitely be avoided by virtue of its speed—slow. This wedding happened fast. Too fast for what it is. It hasn’t been long enough since we boosted Avery and Rome out of that hole for her to be walking down the aisle in a dress that looks more expensive than all the clothes I’ve ever bought in my lifetime combined. Last time I saw Avery Capulet, she had eyes for one person: Rome Montague. This marriage is… odd. And I’ve seen some weird shit over the years.

“Look.” Isobel wheels up closer to me so we can both peer at the screen at close range. “That Nathan guy has always creeped me out. He’s as media-trained as the rest of the Capulets, but that look in his eyes? I’m not loving it. Most grooms don’t look like they won a battle when they’re standing at the altar. They look, you know, a bit misty over the long journey of love, or scared shitless, or somewhere in between. This guy? He looks like he’s just won the war.”

She’s right about the unsettling glint in Nathan’s eyes, especially in the close-ups of him and Avery saying their vows. I zoom in on Nathan while Isobel wheels back to her desk, grabs her coffee, and comes back.

“What’s the saying?” I muse. “All’s fair in love and war?”

Isobel shakes her head. “Nope. Look at her eyes. See?”

I look closer at Avery’s expression before Isobel says it out loud, and a shiver trickles down my spine.

Isobel takes a long sip of coffee. “Her eyes look dead. Like she’s not even really there. Either that is a robot made to look like Avery Capulet, or she really does not want to be marrying Nathan to the point that she’s totally dissociated.”

This makes me suspicious as fuck about what, exactly, has transpired in the last month since I last laid eyes on Avery Capulet and Rome Montague. I’ve briefly spoken to Avery on the phone, but that doesn’t mean much. Because the photographic evidence that not all is well in the kingdom of Capulet is here in front of my face.

“How do you swallow a handful of pills because you’d rather die with your lover than live without him… and then go and marry your weird fucking cousin?” Isobel muses. “It’s not right. It’s just not right.”

“What’s this guy up to, then? When he’s not throwing lavish weddings for his own cousin.” The media has helpfully given a backseat to the fact that Nathan and Avery were raised as cousins. They’ve decided—or been paid by the Capulets to report—that it’s not salacious because the two of them aren’t actually blood related, and barely spent time together in their formative years.

I’m not sure I believe that.

“No honeymoon.” Isobel rolls back to her desk, puts down the coffee, and picks up her next folder. “There are no paparazzi shots of them landing in the Maldives or anywhere else. They’re Capulets. They could afford to go on a yearlong honeymoon, but zip. All they did was move back into the family mansion and set up house.”

I turn around in my chair to stare at her. She notices my gaze without looking.

“What?”

“Are you following this story that closely?”

She shrugs, lifting her chin an inch. “You call it a story, I call it a case I need to solve. It’s in my morning news scroll. Not up to me to decide what’s worthy of reporting on.”

“I guess your morning news scroll is just TMZ, then.”

“And who cares if it is?” She takes another drink of coffee and picks up her pen. “Let me know if you find honeymoon evidence, though. I’m curious.”

I don’t find evidence of a honeymoon. Not to the Maldives or Paris or anywhere else. Odd, right? Nathan has just married Avery, a woman who has barely survived the events of the past couple of months with her life, and he’s not even going to whisk her away to a European honeymoon or a private resort in the Virgin Islands?

Nope. There’s a single paparazzi shot of him going back into the office at Capulet headquarters. He’s all suited up. The date stamp says it’s from this morning, an hour ago.

“Field trip,” I tell Isobel. “Right now. Let’s go.”

* * *

There are many hard ways to get a DNA sample from someone without them knowing. The hardest, I think, would involve bluffing our way into a meeting in Nathan’s office, getting his secretary to offer us some kind of beverage, and then hiding the evidence in Isobel’s purse on the way out. I’m already thinking of excuses as we pull into the parking ramp across from Capulet Tower. Isobel has three separate ideas for diversions.

---