Kiss Me in the Dark Anthology - Monica James Page 0,152

as you think it is.”

I turn on my little podium to face my cousin directly. “Nathan,” I reply, “Come on. Don’t bullshit me. You and I both know it’s going to be worse.”

I hope you loved getting the first glimpse into Verona and meeting Rome, Avery and the rest of the Montagues and Capulets.

Download the full-length version on all retailers here:

www.lilisaintgermain.com/vicious-prince-kiss-me-in-the-dark

BONUS CONTENT

This bonus content is the first chapter of the upcoming release Vengeful Queen — Book two in the Violent Kingdom Trilogy.

Avery

My father controls the state of California like a dog on a leash. One jerk on the leash, a single command, and his every demand is obeyed.

He’s not a bad man. He’s not a good man. He exists in that grey area, in the last moment of night - the first moment of dawn before the sun comes up. He stands at the edge of the shadows, directing the show, even if nobody can see him in the dark beyond the stage lights. All-powerful. All-consuming. A charming dictator, if ever there was one.

But what’s the point of owning the haystack if you can’t find the needle?

I am that needle. His only surviving daughter. The reluctant heiress to an empire of unfathomable riches.

And nobody can find me.

I’ve been missing for weeks, stolen away on my twenty-fifth birthday, the night I was publicly betrothed to a man I hate. A man who was lined up to marry my older sister until she killed herself. I don’t blame her. The burden of Queendom is heavy. In her death, she passed it to me. If I die now - which I’m beginning to think I will - there will be nobody to take my place. My father could have more children, I suppose - but my father might already be dead. I pray he survived the bullet wounds he suffered the night I was taken, a brutal diversion that had my bodyguards escort me to what they believed was safety - but what was actually an elaborately planned trap to capture me.

That’s how I came to be here, the prized possession of a serial killer. The XO killer, they call him. I know all about him, because he’s been terrorizing the city of San Francisco without detection for almost ten years. I know all about him, because the night he took me, he painted an XO, his signature modus operandi, across my bare chest in my own blood.

Raped. Beaten. Starved.

Locked in a basement with my sworn enemy - the son of my father’s arch nemesis - who just happens to be the first boy I ever loved.

He’s trapped down in this hellhole alongside me. Shot. Stabbed. Tortured.

My blood and his might be opposites - his Montague to my Capulet - but in the dark, we both bleed just the same. There’s no real way to tell where his bloodshed ends, and mine begins. The bitter, broken heir who resides in this dungeon with me is my only constant. My only hope. My only protector. I don’t deserve his salvation. I betrayed him once. I did something horrible to him. But for some reason, he still tries to keep me safe from our violent fate.

All the money in the world can’t save us now, because it’s not a ransom our captor is asking for. It’s our pain. Our blood. Our tears. He takes and takes, and just when I think there’s nothing left, when Rome and I empty and bloodless and that this time I’ll stay unconscious, sink into that velvety blackness of death...

I wake up.

And I’ve got to say, considering I’m the sole heiress to a vast fortune and the bloody throne it entails?

I kind of thought there’d be a little more fanfare around my disappearance.

A front-page spread in a national newspaper. Some kind of fuss. At the very least, I thought they’d have fucking found me by now.

I guess I was wrong, though, because I’m still sitting here, in the dark, counting the seconds as they pass in time with my heartbeat. It’s dangerously slow, my pulse, which is a worry for a girl who is used to having a resting hummingbird heartbeat.

It’s the blood loss. The body needs a certain amount of blood to pump around, a minimum volume, and mine desperately needs replenishing. With very little food, multiple wounds, and an increasingly blood-thirsty captor, my body can’t quite seem to catch up and replenish itself.

I wonder how much more blood I can lose before I’ll die.

I wonder how long it