Avery Capulet is missing.

Taken by a madman. Kept in the dark.

She might not survive.

He’ll use her body. Destroy her mind. All before he ever lays a hand on her.

---

Rome Montague is a drug dealer. A criminal. A thief.

Rome Montague is missing – but nobody will miss him.

Not that it matters; after the things he’s done to this girl, he doesn’t deserve to be found.

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The CALIFORNIA BLOOD series, set in the criminal underbelly of San Francisco, follows two warring families who are ruled by blood, power and twisted desire. 

ROME

There is a girl on her knees in front of me. A beautiful girl. I don’t know her name, or her age, or what she loves or who she aches for; but I know her better than anyone has ever known her. Better than her mother, who grew her from a tiny seed and birthed her and fed her and nurtured her. I know her better than her father, who held her newborn feather-weight body and loved her so fiercely, it probably caused him physical pain; the knowledge all fathers of girls are burdened with, that one day their baby daughters will grow up and become things for men to inflict their own anger upon.

I know her better than the family she grew up with, the people she knew, the people she adored.

I know her better than anyone, because I know her sorrow. I have kissed my cracked lips against her hurt. I have seen inside her soul, every time I hold it between my palms and squeeze until it bleeds, and what a pretty soul it is.

I know everything about her, but she knows nothing about me. She thinks I’m a madman, and that slams into me like a knife every time she raises those doe eyes to me and begs. I see the cogs in her brain turn as she tries to outsmart me, to outthink me, to outplay me.

But what move could a naked girl on her knees ever have? What weapon? What thing that could save her? That could save us both?

She has nothing of power in this place, and we both know it. Her only power is her obedience. Her silence. Her ability to endure.

She is slipping. She is losing her mind.

I don’t dare tell her that I am losing mine, too. Because there are three things I know for sure. Firstly, that we will die in this room. I think she’ll go before me, because I’ll have to choke the life out of her with my own hands; but I won’t be far behind her. My death will be far more horrible. I’ll need to preserve her beauty in death, but my role in this story is not a beautiful one. I am the monster. I am her torturer. Whatever my final moments entail, there will be rivers of my blood as I cut into my own guilty flesh and try to dig out an eleventh-hour salvation.

The second thing I know is that I’m going to hurt her so much before this is over. Brutally. Sadistically. She knows it, too, her big eyes shining with unspilled tears and terror. There’s still hope inside her—a hope so thick I could almost plunge my hand into her chest and pluck it from her ribcage, along with her heart.

The third thing I know is that this is not my fault. She thinks I’m crazy. Everybody will think I’m crazy. I am not a good man – I am a very, very bad man. I have lied, I have cheated, I have killed – I am a monster, but I am not this monster. I only hope that in her final moments, I might be able to tell her this. As I drain the life from her, I pray that I can send her off to sleep one last time with the knowledge that I only ever wanted to save her.

---

But I digress.

There is a girl on her knees in front of me. A beautiful girl. She whimpers as I squeeze her cheeks, as I force her mouth open and glimpse her wet, pink tongue. I don’t know her name, or her age, or what she loves or who she aches for. I only know that in a moment, she will ache for me.

AVERY

The man I’m kneeling in front of looks pretty ordinary for a psychopath. I’m ashamed to admit that when I saw him across the bar at The Cleopatra Club in downtown San Francisco, I would have even called him handsome. Cheekbones that could cut glass and a gaze so intense a less confident girl would have looked away. I didn’t look away. I was a stupid girl, and now I am being punished. I caught his eye across the bar and my cheeks flushed. Moisture pooled in my panties, a damp spot that he found later, in this place, with rough fingers and a desperate need to sate himself while my bound arms went numb underneath me and my tears pasted his cruel red blindfold to my eyelashes.

I do not think he is handsome right now. The word for the man looming above me, his jaw so tight his teeth might shatter inside his mouth, a long-stemmed red rose clenched in one fist? Definitely not handsome.

No, the word I would use to describe my captor is terrifying.

From his back pocket he pulls out a length of red fabric. More blindfold. Fresh. I bled too much over the last one. I flinch as he presses the new material to my eyes and knots it behind my head. He’s turning my world red, one blindfolded torture session at a time.

“Stick your tongue out,” he says. His voice is always quiet, barely a gravelly rasp. He sang to me the first night I was here; fractured nursery rhymes and Christmas songs, the only words he claimed to remember. His voice is beautiful. He was nice to me then. Nicer, at least. He begged me to forgive him in those first hours as he dragged a washcloth over my broken and battered body. And when he pressed my thighs apart and entered me for the first time, I couldn’t see him crying, but I felt every single one of his tears fall upon my naked chest as I drifted in and out of consciousness. And then the singing. He held me to his chest and sang to me as I drifted back into the inky blackness.

That was before I woke up with the collar around my neck. Now, he doesn’t hold me. He doesn’t sing to me. He stays as far away as possible from me — unless he’s trying to break me with the pain.

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