Page 46 of Violent Reign (Violent Kingdom)

“She doesn’t have any other sons.”

The nurse pales.

Breathe deep. Don’t fucking lose it. “You have security tapes, right? They record all the visitors to the facility.”

“We do.” I can see in her eyes that she’s in over her head, but she’s a nurse. They’re good at keeping their cool under pressure. “I’m assuming you’re going to ask to see who the visitor was.”

“I have to insist on it.”

For a wild, tumbling instant I think I might have to pull a gun on this nurse and the other two until they give me what I want. I’ve done worse, and recently. But she glances over her shoulder and then motions for me to follow her down the hall.

One of the doors opens onto a small closet with just enough room for five monitors and a chair. “We usually have a guy,” she says. “He’s on his break.” Lucky me. “But we all have training on how to cover for him, if—” A side-eyed glance at me. “This is the other visitor.”

She’s scrolled back through the footage, but there’s nobody on the screen. Is everybody part of my mother’s hallucination?

“Oops, sorry.” And she scrolls forward, time passing in a quick succession of jerky frames.

And then he’s there, moving down the hall in the halting way of all security footage.

Nathan Capulet.

My skin pulls tight. My heart stops. It doesn’t want to start again, but it does, against its own will.

Nathan. That fucker.

“I take it he’s not your brother?”

I lean down close to the nurse’s face and let her see the hate shining in my eyes, the way it’s poised to rip me in two. “Don’t ever let that man in here again. That’s not my fucking brother. And if I find out you gave him access to my mom, I will make you regret it.”

I’m sorry,I hear myself say in the back of my mind.I’m so sorry. I’ve been through some shit. But I don’t say it. I leave with the rage still stripping every breath away and go out, out to the car, out to the highway. Nathan’s a dirty fucking Capulet who stole Avery away and had me locked up in a hellhole in Mexico.

And he’s going to pay.

Chapter Thirty

ROME

Nathan Capulet,that motherfucking piece of shit, is the one behind this.He is the one behind all of this. The thought beats in my head, an endless drum. But why has he been visiting my mother? Why? She’s been in that psychiatric hospital for most of my life. Most people assume she died in the fire that took my little brother Sebastian’s life when I was just a kid and he was barely out of diapers. I still haven’t said his name in all these years.

Sebastian.

I still have nightmares about that night. The fire was so fucking hot. The smoke burned in my lungs as I cried for my parents. As our neighbors held me tightly, held my mother tightly, and stopped us from running back into the fiery ruins of our house to find my baby brother. Enzo Capulet held my mother back as she fought and kicked and bit. I can’t remember who held me - Avery’s mother, perhaps? I remember crying into a woman’s shoulder as the scent of her lilac perfume engulfed my senses. I remember looking over her shoulder to see Avery and Adeline, two tiny girls in their pajamas, their faces pressed against a window as they watched the fire burn.

As Seb burned.

I was just a little kid. There was nothing I could do. I know that, even if I can’t say it out loud. I kind of, sort of, forgave myself for not being able to save my baby brother as he burned to death in his crib that night. But my mother… She never, ever forgave herself. She literally went insane with the grief and the guilt of not fighting harder to run back to him.

Sometimes I think it would have been more merciful if she’d burned alongside him.

I still remember the funeral. My mother couldn’t be there. She was sedated. My father waited a week to bury his youngest son, then two, and three, before he finally had to admit that it might be months before my Mom would be well enough to attend a funeral for her little boy. The funeral was bleak, held on a rainy San Francisco afternoon, everyone dressed in black. The coffin was tiny.

I didn’t find out until I was much older that there hadn’t even been enough left of my brother to bury. That the fire had raged so hot, and it had taken so many hours for firefighters to extinguish the massive blaze, that all that they found was a couple of charred bone fragments and a whole lot of ash.

I don’t even know if those bone fragments made it into his casket, to be honest. Maybe it was completely empty.

The rage inside me burns, now. An endless inferno that will only be extinguished with the blood of the guilty. The blood of the people who brought this torture upon us. The rage doesn’t stop when I call my father for backup. It doesn’t stop when my father meets me at a Park and Ride and we switch cars. He trails me all the way to San Francisco in the middle of the fucking night. It’s almost dawn, gray light seeping into the horizon, when we get to the other Capulet house on the hill. When was the last time I properly slept? It feels like it’s been years. It probably has.

Enzo and Eliza Capulet’s mansion isn’t far from the Capulet mansion. It’s not nearly as opulent, but it’s still built on a grand scale, a sweeping circular driveway and a large water feature beyond the gates. The unlocked, wide open gates. One small mercy in a lifetime of locks and chains. I speed through them, parking in front of the door, not caring about making a quiet entrance. I hope these motherfuckers greet me at the door with weapons. It would give me an excuse to beat them to death.

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