Will. Where did you go? Are you looking for me?
A second, more sickening thought.
Were you a part of this? Is this your way of getting your life back?
No. He would never. No, the man kneeling between my legs as I slowly bleed to death on this chair is a stranger, of that I am sure. I have never been more sure of anything in my life. You couldn’t know a person and subject them to this. You couldn’t love somebody for eight years and then have any part in something so terrifyingly cruel, so deviant.
Just this morning I was lamenting my situation, cursed to bear the Capulet name, and now all I want to do is use my name and my power to free myself from this situation, this place, this man, his rough fingers.
And they’re just his fingers, aren’t they? I should be thankful that he’s not trying to stick his dick in me. But I’m not grateful. I’m rocked to the core, literally, every push of his fingers, every scrape of his fingernails inside me a brutal reality, a violent awakening.
This is how I die.
Through my gag, I scream.
He slaps me again, hard enough to snap my head back with force. He raises himself from his spot on the ground, just high enough to pull the wet blindfold out of my mouth. He fixes it over my eyes, and I’m blind again, this time the saliva-slicked material sticking to my skin like glue. “Please,” I beg him. There’s a small gap in the bottom of the blindfold, and I hold my breath in horror as I watch him roll up the balaclava just enough to expose his chin and mouth. It’s too dark to make out much detail, and I can only tell that he’s clean-shaven. It’s too dark to make out the shape of his jaw, the color of his skin, anything.
I can feel his hot breath drift over my thighs, as he pushes my knees wide and settles between my legs again, the sharp back of the chair making my back feel like it might break in half. I focus on the pain, though, a welcome distraction from what I fear he’s about to do.
Please don’t.
He does. He pushes and pushes at my knees, until it feels like my hips will snap, and he plants a long, lingering kiss right on my swollen bud of nerves. He kisses it like you would kiss somebody’s mouth, his tongue massaging me in long, rolling waves, until I’m panting, until I’m no longer trying to pull away because all I’m doing is making more friction between his mouth and my skin, my energy spent, my limbs like lead weights. It feels dirty, this contact. It feels disgusting. It’s something a lover does. Not the stranger who has taken you hostage.
“Help!” I scream. “Somebody! Help!”
He laughs against my clitoris, and the vibration only makes it worse. I would prefer to be beaten on the ground, to be tasered. Anything but this.
He pulls away, and then I feel fingers tugging at the rock on my hand. Of course. My gazillion-dollar engagement ring. What I’d give right now, to be the unhappy fiancé of Joshua Grayson, milling around my birthday party, making small talk.
What I’d give.
Chapter Ten
ELLIOT MCRAE
You know it’s going to be a shitty night when there aren’t enough body bags to clean up all the dead people.
I’m standing in a loading dock underneath a hotel that sits on the edge of the financial district in San Francisco, trying to figure out what happened to all of these highly trained, ex-military guys to cause them to be dead and scattered all around me. Why somebody shot the owner of the building, and then snatched his daughter from under everyone’s nose.
I’m also trying to figure out why the fuck my boss would put me on a case like this. It’s high-profile — the Capulet family would normally be taken care of by senior ranking Federal Officers, not ones who, by rights, probably shouldn’t even have a badge and gun.
Yet, here I am.
Three feet from me, I know my partner is probably feeling the same. It’s an uneasy feeling, knowing that there’s probably a fucked-up reason behind being assigned to a case you should be running from. But when the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations personally calls you at home on a Sunday night and tells you to get down to the Palatial Hotel to investigate the shooting murders of at least six people, a high-profile abduction, and the attempted murder of one of the most powerful men in California, you get your ass down to the crime scene, a-fucking-sap.
“This is a mess,” Isobel Sazerac murmurs, stepping over a dead security guard to get to me. I nod at my fellow Detective in agreement. “It’s a shit show, alright.”
“We got what we need from here?” she asks.
I shrug. “I think we should leave Forensics to do their thing. Get some more statements before the rest of the guests find a way out of there.” I point above me, to the ceiling, and beyond, where tired, frazzled party guests are starting to complain loudly and throw around words like lawyer and civil rights.
Truth be told, I want to get out of here as quickly as possible. I’ve seen my fair share of dead people, including some that met their end because of me, but this is different. The scent of blood is ripe on the night air, heavy and metallic, and death has always made me a little queasy. Not enough to stop doing what I do, but enough that I always manage to avoid attending the autopsies until the bodies are sewn back up and safely zipped back into their body bags.
We step away from the sea of bodies, conferring in a little alcove near the sidewalk outside the dock. The entire block has been cordoned off — no chance of press catching our conversation, what with the seemingly hundreds of SFPD officers forming an impenetrable wall around the Palatial Hotel building.
I take a proper look at Isobel; with her blow-dried brown tresses and heavily-lined blue eyes, she could pass for one of the party guests, not one of the FBI agents investigating the bloody aftermath of Augustus Capulet’s shooting, and his daughter’s disappearance.
“Were you asleep when they called, Grandpa?” Isobel asks, tipping her head to the side and studying my face.
“Were you pole dancing?” I reply. “‘Because those sneakers don’t exactly match your dress.”
Isobel pulls a face. “I was on a hot date, actually.”
“Oh. I was watching Frozen for the hundredth time.”
Isobel blinks.
“With Kayla,” I add.
Isobel pulls a notepad from her coat pocket. “Your daughter has excellent taste in Disney movies, then,” she says, flipping the notepad open and handing it to me. I take it, scanning down a list of names.
“Which one do you think is the most suspicious?” she asks.
I read off each name before settling on one. “Will Hewitt would be my bet,” I say. “Then again, Lorenzo Capulet stands to benefit if his brother doesn’t make it.”
Isobel shrugs. “That’s what I thought, too, about the brother, right? Enzo, they call him. But apparently that’s not how it works. I asked one of the cousins, a kid called Tyler?”
I nod for her to continue.
“As of tonight, Avery Capulet is the sole beneficiary of everything the Capulets own.”
“Everything?” I echo. “Isn’t that, like—”
“More money than you or I could ever fathom,” Isobel says. “Which begs the question — why haven’t they asked for a ransom yet?”
I shrug. “It’s only been a couple hours. They probably want to scare them first, you know, beat her up a little bit, maybe figure out their demands?”
Isobel shakes her head. “What I don’t get is — she was apparently wearing an engagement ring worth eight million dollars. Eight. That’s like, Beyoncé level. Why not just take the ring, dump her off a few blocks away, and high-tail it?”
We start walking toward the hotel foyer. “Maybe it’s not about the money. Maybe it’s something else they want with her, with the family.”
Isobel shakes her head, taking the notepad back from me. “No way. With people like this, it’s always about the money.”
We get statements from as many guests as we can, starting with the Capulet family members and spanning outward. The Will kid, Avery Capulet’s f
reshly dumped ex-boyfriend, is distraught. Too distraught for me to think he’s got anything to do with Avery’s disappearance, unless he’s an incredible actor. His old man has a wall of Academy Awards, so I make a mental note to look into the apple and see how far it fell from the tree. But actually, the one person in all of this who gives me the creeps is the fiancé. Joshua Grayson. I don’t know what it is about him — maybe that he’s the one who led her down to the dock? Or the fact that he was the only one to escape without a scratch, while six security officers were shot and killed in cold blood.
Then again, with her father on the brink of death, maybe the fiancé’s just been kept alive to make sure the ransom gets paid.
Back at the FBI Headquarters, I make a beeline for the coffee machine. “Yes please,” Isobel calls out, already knowing where I’m off to. It’s almost three a.m., and we’ve both been on call since eight yesterday morning. I don’t mind the long shifts, especially when the case is something as important as finding a missing girl, but I need caffeine to push through.
The coffee maker in our lunch room is one of those pod machines. I grab two mugs, heap sugar into them, and take two of the strongest pods, dropping one into the machine and selecting the largest shot of coffee. The machine roars to life, loud enough to wake the dead security guards who are by now probably en route to the city morgue. I watch as rich, brown coffee pours from the machine. Huh. It’s the exact color of the missing girls' eyes. How does a girl go missing like that, in the middle of hundreds of people? At her own party, no less? Whoever snatched her was prepared, I know that much. I also know the coffee machine is being a temperamental little bitch, pouring cold water into my mug. “Jesus,” I mutter, dumping the coffee down the sink and starting again with a fresh pod and more sugar.
“Agent McRae?” a voice calls from the doorway to the kitchen. It’s one of our young recruits, Veronica, fresh from Quantico.
“Yeah,” I reply, only half-listening, the majority of my attention still focused on getting the fucking coffee machine to work.
“You’ve got a package.”
A package? I stir my coffee absent-mindedly. Who’s sending packages at three a.m. on a Monday morning?
Not people who are sending anything I want, as a general rule. Packages with nice things tend to be delivered in daylight hours, by men in UPS uniforms, with those little machines you need to sign your name on with a plastic stylus.
Packages outside of normal business hours tend to contain things like severed heads, or bombs, or elaborate envelopes stuffed with glitter from your asshole co-workers.
I abandon the coffee, frowning as I close the space between myself and Veronica in three strides. I take the package from her outstretched hand, touching only the corner with my fingernails as I take it to my desk. “Thank you, Veronica,” I call over my shoulder, trying not to draw attention to how odd I must look. I clear everything from my desk with my free hand, setting the package down as gently as I can — in case, you know, bomb — and call Isobel over.
She knows straight away by the tone of my voice that something is up, and is standing beside my desk as I read the return sender on the package. There’s no return address, just a name.
Avery Capulet.
Isobel looks at me. “Should we open it?”
I step back from my desk ever-so-slightly. “We should wait until it’s been inspected.”
Isobel scoffs. “Oh, come on,” she says. “Bring it down to the lab. If it explodes, at least I won’t have to go on a second date with the douchebag from tonight.”
I nod in agreement. “And I won’t have to watch Frozen again.”
We take the package down to the lab, and get one of the crime scene techs to check it over for us. When it seems pretty apparent that the package isn’t going to blow our building apart, he opens it with sterile gloves, gently tipping the contents out onto a stainless steel exam table that probably had body parts on it earlier in the day.
Isobel and I, wearing full masks and biohazard scrubs, lay out the items as efficiently as possible. This is going to be the ransom demand, surely.
Sunday’s copy of the New York Times is folded up inside the lagel-sized envelope, drenched in what looks like blood. Gently, with tweezers, Isobel unfolds the newspaper, and I can’t say I’m not surprised with what greets us inside the layers of blood-soaked newsprint.
The engagement ring Avery was wearing. The one worth millions of dollars. Also covered in what appears to be blood. And curled into the middle of the ring, where her finger would have been just hours ago, is a small piece of plastic-coated paper that looks like it’s straight from a fortune cookie. Isobel carefully fishes it out of the ring, using two pairs of tweezers to unfurl it.
Isobel and I look at each other at the same time. It’s a simple message, but it’s not the one I thought it would be. Not a demand for money, or a private jet. Not even a taunting message. Nope, it’s almost kind of boring.
Check your email.
So we do, pulling off our gloves and grabbing our cellphones at the same time. And what do you know, we’ve both got the same message sitting in the top of our individual inboxes.
It’s a hyperlink. I click it without worrying about viruses, or bringing down the mainframe, or installing spyware. We can worry about all of that later. Right now, we need to do whatever it takes to find this girl, and that means moving quickly.
My phone has a brief seizure, the screen lighting up and then seeming to turn off a half dozen times, and then a video appears.
I turn my phone to the side, thankful I’ve got one of the larger iPhones with the big screen. At first, I have to squint to see what’s being displayed on the screen, but once I figure out what it is, there’s no unseeing.
“Holy fuck,” Isobel says next to me, peering at her own phone. “Are you seeing this?”
A girl, who I have to assume is Avery Capulet, based on her appearance as well as the nature of the package, sits on a chair, not a stitch of clothing on her — only blood. A lot of blood. The room isn’t well lit, but there’s enough light to tell she’s been injured badly. She’s deathly pale, and shaking, and blindfolded.
“Looks like she’s lost a lot of blood,” Isobel says. “How long do you think she’s got?”
“Not long,” I reply, mentally listing all of the things we need to do next.
All the things that will help us to find this girl and bring her home, while we watch on, unable to do a damn thing.
At the top of my list?
Find out where this damn video is coming from, before this poor girl dies.
Chapter Eleven
AVERY
The thing that wakes me up isn’t the throbbing pain in my leg — although that pierces my consciousness soon after rousing. It’s my bladder, screaming to be emptied.
Where am I? Am I in the hotel room? Has Will come back?
The knowledge of my situation smashes into me like a freight train running me over as I lie on the tracks, immobile, my limbs sliced to pieces by sharp wheels.
Damn.
It all floods my mind like a tsunami crashing into shore.
The party.
My father being shot, smacking into the pool’s surface before plunging down into it’s depths, bleeding and unconscious.
Joshua, practically forcing me down to the loading bay.
The security guards, dropping like flies.
And the two men, the ones wearing the balaclavas, grabbing me, injecting me with something, whatever it was smothering me into a dreamless void.
And after.
Waking up tied to the chair.
The fucking guy, the psychopath, the way he cut off my clothes, made me bleed. A choked sob escapes my lips when I recall his lips kissing between my legs, the low laugh that came from him and vibrated all through my body when he saw how distressed I was at such unwanted intimacy; and then, somehow, I was alone and bleeding.
I don’t know what happened after that. I was cold; my though
ts were slow and jumbled. I could feel my heart slowing down, a thud, thud, thuuuuuud, like it was trying as hard as it could to find the blood volume to pump something around my battered body.
I can still feel cold air on my thighs, and that makes me panic. Did he rape me? I don’t feel sore down there. No sorer than I did after Will and I got hot and heavy at the cemetery earlier, anyway. I flex my left hand, missing an engagement ring, but mercifully lacking any ropes or restraints, too. They can have the damn ring. I just want the use of my arms and legs, thank you very much. I move my hand between my legs instinctively, cupping myself protectively, but also checking if there is any evidence that they did something to me while I was passed out.
I mean, I’m not in the chair anymore, am I? I’m on my back. It feels soft underneath me. Scratchy, like cheap foam. A mattress. I’m on a mattress. But this ain’t a Tempur-Pedic pillow top, no. This is a torture-chamber special. It’s damp under me, either with blood, or my pee, or both.
I can’t see anything much, but I’m not blindfolded anymore. Am I still naked? I use my right hand to touch my chest. I’m wearing something cotton, soft, something that smells faintly of cigarette smoke and men’s aftershave, a sandalwood scent that I swear I’ve smelled before.
A t-shirt. That’s what I’m wearing. But it’s big. The sleeves are wide, and go down past my elbows. The hem reaches halfway to my knees. And the collar sits loosely around my collarbones. I’m wearing a man’s shirt, and underneath it, I’m as naked as the day I was born — and probably as bloody.
I explore my body further, still too weak to try to sit up. I’m pissed that I’ve lost so much blood. It sure would have come in handy to be at full strength to try and fight my way out of this place, away from these psychos. My thigh wound is wrapped now, in what feels like gauze or bandages, and there’s a little butterfly clip holding the material in place just above my knee. It seems as though someone has cleaned me up.