SWNOVELS Dukes of Madness: Chapter 1
It takes me an hour to get back to the tower. I take one left for every two rights, meandering down side streets and grimy alleyways in a slow crawl back to West End. It doesn’t look like I’m being followed, but this whole getaway driver thing is more Nick’s thing than mine. The whole time, my phone buzzes away like an angry wasp in the center console, stopping only to begin its insistent whirring once again. By the time I get halfway down the Avenue, it’s become background static that I can almost ignore.
I shake my head, muttering, “Jesus Christ, Remy.” He’s such a picker. Once something gets in his head, he just… fucking picks at it, over and over, until it drives him and the rest of us up the wall.
Every now and then, I turn to glance at the sad heap currently curled in the back. She’s so still that if it weren’t for the jerky rise and fall of her ribs, she’d look like a corpse. I guess I always knew Lionel Lucia was a sick bastard. The Counts have always had sadistic tendencies. What house in this town doesn’t?
Still, the children of Kings have always been protected. Privileged. Sacred. It’s why the Princes kick them out like machines. Nothing has ever been as precious to Forsyth as its own blood. It’s why Nick could waltz right in and get a straight shot to the belfry.
Tainted goods or not, Lavinia Lucia is Royalty.
Wrong. That’s how it felt in Lavinia’s bedroom, standing over that chest, a wave of realization crashing into me. Before I even opened it, I knew I’d find her inside. I didn’t grow up in the Royalty, but I’ve been touched by it enough that the sight of North Side’s heir, stuffed into the confines of an old cedar chest by her own goddamn family, struck me as so wrong—so fucking profane—that my stomach still squirms uncomfortably at the thought.
Davis Bruin’s decision to abdicate his position, and my mother and father going with him, suddenly makes more sense. The Kings aren’t just powerful. They’re monsters.
I wait until we’re a little closer, the tower looming just to my left, to pick up my phone and finally answer. “What?”
“It’s been three fucking hours!” Remy explodes. I can practically hear him pacing over the speaker. “I’ve had one foot out the door and my finger on this trigger all night.”
“Would you chill the fuck out?” I snap, checking my rearview. “We’ll be there in five.”
“We?” Remy’s tight, stunned voice comes through the speaker. “You found her? You got her?”
It wasn’t technically the plan. I was just going to scope it out first, try to figure out where Lionel had shunted her off to before calling in for Remy. I could tell him it just seemed easier, in the moment, to get her from Lionel’s mansion than to wait until she’d been secured in the Counts’ own territory. But it’d be a lie. The truth is, no part of me could have closed her back up in that chest. It would have been the more strategic move. Lionel was only out for a few minutes. I didn’t have any lookouts.
But the second she flung herself into my arms, I knew I couldn’t do it.
“I’ve got her.” But even as I say the words, I shoot her a dubious look. I’m not sure what Remy’s expecting to see when we get up there, but this isn’t the Duchess I drove away from several nights ago. “I need you to get some supplies. Remember that weekend after you pledged?”
Remy responds in a confused tone, “When I got shitfaced?”
Shitfaced is a really nice way of putting it. He was so dehydrated that I had to pilfer the gym for something medical grade. “The bags are in with the other things. Just have it ready.”
There’s a short pause before he asks, “She needs IV fluids? Why?”
“I’m pulling up now,” I tell him. “Flip the breaker on the elevator, would you?” I hang up before he can respond. Remy’s not the best guy in a crisis, but I’ve found that giving him clearly defined tasks makes him focused and less prone to catastrophizing. I pull up to the curb and jump out, wrenching open the back door, but all that greets me is Lavinia’s motionless figure, curled into the same fetal position I found her in back at her father’s house.
I take a deep breath and scrub my fingers through my hair, thinking. She’s pale and gaunt-looking, shivering, bruised all over. She’s injured, but it’s hard to say how badly. I form a mental list of priorities. Dehydration is first. This means I need to get her up that tower before anything else.
I lean in, ducking my head to observe her face. “Can you walk?” When she doesn’t answer, I reach out to touch her hip, giving her a gentle shake. “Lavinia. Hey! You have to get out now.” I watch as her eyelids flutter, two dazed eyes appearing beneath wet lashes. “Come on, up, up.”
She doesn’t protest as I coax her into a sitting position. I can only barely stop my nose from wrinkling. If I had to guess from smell alone, Lavinia was in the box the entire four days, and the thought comes to me again. The wrongness. What the fuck?
“What time is it?” Her voice is a quiet, painful-sounding croak as she stares out the open door, eyes glazed.
“Almost midnight,” I answer, giving her arm a soft tug. “We need to get inside. Someone could be watching.” I have no idea how long it will be before someone notices she’s gone. An hour? A week? Jesus. I shoot a glance down the alley, half expecting to see headlights. This wasn’t as clean as I wanted it to be. The initial plan had phases and contingencies, fail safes and back-ups.
This one just has a disoriented girl in my back seat, staring unseeingly into the night.
I snap my fingers in front of her face. “Lavinia!”
This spurs her into a stiff, mechanical sort of motion, her legs awkwardly scooting her battered body toward the open door. I stand back as she emerges on unsteady feet, a hand gripping the door. I know her knees are going to give out before she even takes the first step. I shoot forward, catching her around the middle, and she lets out a soft, pained sound that makes me wince.
“Like this,” I say, slinging her arm around my neck. I hold every pound of her frail, trembling weight she’ll allow me to, and I’m struck by something foreign and upsetting. I don’t quite understand it, but it’s what compels me to pull her close, ducking my head to say, “That’s good. You’ve got it. Just step here.” Then, quieter, “Good girl.” I don’t stop to question the impulse, and despite the seemingly patronizing tone, she doesn’t so much as shoot me a glare for it.
That’s how I know it must be bad.
I get us through the doors, but don’t allow myself to feel any relief. I may have made it back in one piece, but eventually, her father is going to notice her missing. “This way,” I tell her, guiding her toward the elevator.
She lifts her head, blue hair brushing the too-sharp points of her cheekbones, and then freezes.
Any color that might have returned to her face on the drive here vanishes instantly when she sees the elevator. Something cold and dark slams over her expression, and suddenly, I’m looking at the same crushed, desperate girl that had clung to me in her bedroom.
She lurches backward so fast that I almost don’t catch her when she stumbles. “No,” she groans, long and miserable. “I said I’d be good. You said I was good.” I’m expecting the tears this time, but it’s still such an alien thing to see her face crumble into a body-wracking sob. It doesn’t seem right. For all that I’ve thought Lavinia weak in body, she’s never been weak in spirit. It isn’t until now I realize how much I’d come to appreciate that about her. It was such a non-Royal trait.
A West End trait.
A Duchess trait.
I’m so caught up in the loss of it that it takes a long moment for me to understand why it’s happening.
“Shit. Look at me.” I grab her face in my hands, forcing her to look at me with those big, terror-filled eyes. “You can’t walk up all those stairs. They’re too narrow for me to carry you, or I would. This is just to get us to the top. It’s not like your father. It’s not…”
It’s not like Nick, I want to say.
But that’d be admitting I knew about those times my brother had chucked her into the elevator for safekeeping. Whatever fragile trust she’s put in me since opening that chest will probably disappear if I tell her that. It’s not like I had anything to do with it. Most of the time she’s spent under this belfry, she’s been more Nick’s Duchess than mine. But she’s not thinking rationally, and that’s made all the more clear when another of those deep, agonizing, body-shaking sobs escapes her throat.
“Don’t make me. Please, don’t make me.” She stares up at me with exhausted eyes. “I can’t.”
“You can. It’s only a couple of minutes.” Without thinking, I thumb away a tear, that dull upsetting feeling turning my stomach once again. “I’ll be in there with you.”
She pulls in a wet, shuddering gasp, eyes so wide and bloodshot that she looks downright unhinged. “I’ll die. I’d rather die.”
“Hey!” I snap, something hot flaring in my chest as I pull her to her full height. “You see that door you just came in? When a Duke loses a fight, he spends the night somewhere else, because losers aren’t allowed to walk through it. To the victor go the spoils, Lavinia. A Duchess is no fucking quitter. Pull yourself together!”
“Make me sleep again,” she pleads, breaths coming quicker. She winds a fist into my shirt, voice rushed and insistent. “Do the thing… make me pass out.”
I growl in frustration. “Your body is already stressed. Cutting off oxygen to your brain was risky enough the first time. You’re going to have to woman the fuck up.”
Her face crumbles into a wretched sob, but she just as quickly sucks it back in. It’s fascinating to see, like her whole being flinches to hold back the force of it. God, do I know that feeling. I experience it every day, forcing my impulses down beneath the churn of my mental ocean. The terror is still in her eyes, but there’s also a hardness that covers it. It isn’t real. It’s a flimsy performance that’s given away by the hitch of her shoulders. But it’s enough.
I jab the button to open the doors before that determination can fall away, reaching out one-handed to yank the gate open. Inside, a dim bulb illuminates the space, flickering anemically. I give it a brief, wary glance, because it’s almost too small a space for my comfort, and I’m not the one who just got out of a cedar chest.
She’s going to fucking lose it.
“Close your eyes,” I order, pulling her against my chest and thrusting us inside.
I try to make quick work of it—closing the gate, slamming my hand over the button—but she’s hyperventilating before the elevator even lurches into motion. Her body trembles like a leaf against mine, and my arms wind around her shoulders instinctively.
“It won’t be long,” I promise, although I don’t know why.
It must be because she’s so small, so afraid, so…vulnerable. That must be why I feel the urge to wrap her up and hold her against me. That must be why I feel this sense of responsibility, like I want to protect her all of a sudden. That upsetting feeling in my stomach churns and flips, and I can’t put a name to it, but it’s some strange mixture of anger and tenderness, and fuck me.
Maybe this is what Nick feels.
No wonder he’s such a fucking headcase.
Lavinia’s hands ball into fists around two palmfuls of my shirt, so tightly that I can feel them shaking against my ribs. I’d know that tremble anywhere. It’s the vibration of restraint, pushed to the very edges of someone’s capability.
She’s gasping, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” and every inch of her feels impossibly tense, as if she’s been made of stone.
In an effort to keep her focused, I ask, “When did they put you in there?”
Her forehead digs into my sternum as her back jerks with rapid breaths. “Immediately,” she says, confirming my fears.
“The whole time?”
A jerky nod.
Fuck.
There’s another suspicion niggling at the back of my mind, and as the elevator chugs upward, I allow myself to voice it. “That wasn’t the first time, was it?” Her forehead rolls against my chest, and I duck my head, watching her strained face. “How often? Come on, tell me.”
The point is to get her to speak—to think. But her answer is so instant that she obviously didn’t have to put any thought into it at all.
“All the time,” she wheezes, flinching when the elevator shakes. “When I’m bad, he… sometimes once a month. Sometimes every week. Sometimes every day.” Her breath speeds, and I realize she’s thinking about it, being trapped in that tiny box, unable to move or break free.
It’s almost a relief when she goes limp, her body giving out under the stress of it. I still spit a curse as I gather her up against me, that upsetting feeling returning to the pit of my stomach. Suddenly, I regret not choking her out downstairs. If she was just going to pass out anyway, it would have saved her the stress.
I keep my fingers against her jugular as the elevator climbs. Her pulse is strong, but too fast. Her head lolls to the side, still etched with tension even in unconsciousness, and her skin is clammy, cool to the touch. So much of this could’ve been solved with some intel and a solid plan, and I’m mentally berating all three of us when the elevator finally grinds to a stop.
Remy is waiting so closely that his tattooed fingers are wrenching the gate open before the door even stops sliding. The second he lays eyes on us, he freezes, a divot digging into his brow.
“What happened?” he breathes, shoving the gate the rest of the way open. “What the fuck happened to her?”
I bend down to sweep a wrist beneath her knees, hoisting her into my arms as I burst through.
“Run a bath,” I say, brushing past him. “Make it really warm, but not too hot.”
“Sy,” he says, eyes tracking her limp form. “Tell me what happened! She looks fucking dead!”
There’s a thread of enraged panic in his voice that brings me up short, and I turn to him. “Listen to me, Remy,” I wait until his wild eyes meet mine to say, “She’s in shock. She’s dehydrated. We need to warm her up and get that IV in her. Got it?”
He’s gone before I even finish, dashing into the bathroom. A second later, I hear the gurgling of the bath getting started, so I lay her down on the nearest couch and get to work on her clothes. I work her boots off first, jostling her body as I yank them forcefully free. I’m just tossing the second one aside when Remy returns. The silver locks of his hair are standing in that special level of chaos that tells me he’s been pulling on it for the last four hours, but when he shoves it out of his eyes and kneels down on the floor beside her to rip open the packaging on the IV needle, I know his head is where I need it.
“Do you know how to do that?”
His green eyes rise slowly to mine. “Do I know how to use a needle?”
“Fair point,” I mutter, moving to the head of the couch to slide her shirt up her body, over her head, down her listless arms. “Let’s get her bra off before you put that in.”
It feels less strange than it should to undress her, Remy pulling her pants and underwear down her thighs as I struggle with the bra. I’ve got both hands crammed beneath her back, feeling for the clasp, when Remy hovers over her to touch the tattoo beside her hip. I watch his lips move as he counts the points of the star, but he’s not looking at it.
He’s looking at her. “Vinny,” he whispers, brushing her hair aside as he frowns at her slack face. “Hey, wake up. Why isn’t she waking up?”
Instead of admitting that I don’t know, I finally get the bra free—fucking annoying, overly complicated, bullshit contraptions—and fling it across the room. “Do the IV now.”
Remy is on top of it, settling on the floor beside her to open an alcohol soaked wipe. I watch as he takes her hand in his, his inked skin turning to reveal the bruises covering her knuckles, but he doesn’t fixate on them like I know damn well he wants to. He rubs the wipe over the vein on the back of her hand, and then gently pinches the needle to position it. This is the thing about Remy. He has the steadiest hands I’ve ever seen, and when he ducks his head, eyebrows furrowed in concentration, it’s with the same laser focus he uses to prick art into someone else’s skin.
I’m so fascinated by the sight of him easing the needle beneath her skin that I don’t even realize there’s someone standing behind me.
“What the fuck?”
A quick glance over my shoulder reveals Nick’s slack face. It’s probably the most he’s said since that night we returned from the cliff. He must have heard the ruckus, because lately, he barely shows his face outside of his bedroom. He’s completely stopped going to classes. He won’t answer Mom’s calls. He only made a perfunctory appearance at Remy’s fight on Friday, leaving immediately after to do god knows what. Not that he missed much. The celebration was weirdly solemn and short-lived, and some pledge we call Ballsack straight up asked me where the Duchess was.
Remy doesn’t flinch at the sound of Nick’s voice. “Get out,” he murmurs, pressing down on the plug. I have a piece of tape torn from the roll ready for him and he takes it smoothly, never looking away from the needle as he carefully fixes it to her skin.
The fact Nick is shirtless, clad only in a loose pair of sweatpants, tells me he was probably already in bed. He’s standing ramrod straight in his doorway, dark eyes glued to the naked girl currently occupying his couch. His lips form around words that never emerge. Not until he settles on, “What the hell is she doing here?”
I turn away, teeth gnashing against the impulse to shove and hit and hurt. “I went and got her. And good fucking thing, too, because she’d probably be dead otherwise, you fucking idiot.”
Remy makes quick work of uncoiling the tubing, and he still has that laser focus, but I can see the storm brewing in his eyes. “What happened?” Remy asks. “What did they do to her?”
They. It takes everything in me not to spin around, to ask Nick what the fuck he was thinking, to tell him that he’s the one that did this to her, but I just press my fingers to her jugular again, searching for her pulse. “She’s been locked inside a wooden chest for four days.”
Remy’s movements stutter and he looks up at me, brows crushed together. “What? Why?”
At this, I can only let out a humorless chuckle. “She said her dad used to do it a lot—as punishment. If I had to guess?” I turn to glare at my brother. “Collecting his daughter from the guy who’s been taunting him for months made Lionel a little aggressive.”
Nick’s normally a little difficult for me to read. I’m not sure when he got so good at hiding his reactions and painting over them with something else, but I know it was sometime around high school coming and going. And the real rub of it? His time in South Side just made him better at it. He left an angry, stone-faced teenager and came back this blank, stoic soldier. It’s part of why I might believe him—that he went to South Side to investigate Tate’s death—but I still can’t trust him. How could I ever trust something that hides from me?
But he’s not hiding now.
I watch the force of the realization crash into him like a sledgehammer, and for the first time in years, I think I might finally see my brother. I see the breath punch from his lungs and the color bleed from his face. I see the jolt of self-loathing in his eyes, accompanied by something dark enough to be grief, and I want to say, yes. Yes, there’s no coming back from this. This isn’t some playground squabble. This is something big enough that even the way he’s been moping around this tower for the past four days doesn’t touch the gravity of it.
I don’t have the chance to say anything, though.
Not before Remy slams into him.
I didn’t even see him hurtle past me, and from the way Nick’s eyes are staring right through Lavinia, neither does he. Nick flies back, slamming into the wall. That dark, mournful look never even leaves his features.
“What gave you the right?” Remy snaps, bearing down on him with another shove. ‘You think because you’re a Bruin you own everything in this fucking tower?’
The third shove, which sends Nick’s head banging into the wall, snaps him out of whatever daze that seeing Lavinia had put him in. He jerks forward, shoving Remy back, to snarl, ‘How the fuck was I supposed to know what he’d do to her?’
Remy’s eyes narrow into slits, his toned muscles strained and flexing as he steps up to Nick. ‘You didn’t care. You never care. You do whatever you want and damn the consequences.’
The mask falls over Nick’s face, carving it into stone. ‘That’s rich coming from you. Exactly how much of that junk have you put up your nose this week?’
I’m off the couch before Remy’s punch lands, but not quick enough to stop it. ‘Hey!’ I bark, making a futile grab for his shirt. Nick’s responding punch has Remy stumbling to the side, but he rebounds with a hook at Nick’s jaw. The sound isn’t good, nor is the way Nick crashes into the end table, falling into a tense heap as the lamp flickers and goes dark.
The energy of it is an odd mirror of Remy’s fight on Friday, which had been void of his usual flash and showmanship. The fight had been difficult to watch, Remy going hard but a touch too determined. Out of the three of us, Remy’s always been the best at taking a loss. The fight isn’t about winning to him. It’s about the art of it, showing the crowd something beautifully profane. Remy usually has fun in the ring—a demented sort of fun, but fun nonetheless. But there’d been no performance to his relentless jabs and unforgiving hooks, and even after, when he was sitting sweaty and bloody in the locker room, perfectly victorious, he didn’t even look happy about it.
He just stared up at me, the cut on his nose bleeding sluggishly, and asked, “Don’t you ever get sick of losing people?”
And that’s exactly how Remy’s looked these past few days. Sick. Ill in the way that makes him too quiet and eerily still. It’s the reason I went to North Side tonight, because Remy was right.
I am sick of losing people.
Nick’s up in an instant, barreling toward Remy with murderous eyes, and I get this split second awareness that they might actually fucking kill each other. Remy’s got that mindless glint of casual destruction in his eyes, and Nick…
Nick is looking at him like Remy might as well be Lionel.
When it comes to anger, my brother copes in one of two ways: Beat the shit out of the person responsible, or just whoever is closest. It’s why I have such a hard time believing him about Tate being murdered. True or not, he needs someone to blame. Someone to hit.
I’ll be damned if that’s going to be either of us.
I leap between them, meeting Nick just in time to plant my palms on his chest and send him careening back. Nick lands hard on his ass, eyes flashing in rage as he staggers upright. Before he has a chance, I say, “Remy’s right. You need to leave.”
Nick pushes to his feet. He’s over by Lavinia now, towering over her, and he shoots her a glance before swinging his glare back on us. “Fuck that,” he says, as if he’s someone who has the right to look worried about her. “The only reason she’s here is because of me. Both of you would have thrown her back to the wolves if I hadn’t—”
“But only one of us actually did,” Remy counters.
I’m guessing from the twitch of his muscles that Nick has an opinion on that, but he never voices it.
Because Lavinia begins to stir.
She makes a soft, pained sound, and Nick’s gaze whips to her, face going slack again. I can see the exact instant he realizes he’s not ready to face her—to look her in the eye and accept the hurt and hatred that would meet him.
He grabs his shoes and keys, and then as my brother is wont to do, he runs away.
The door closes behind him with a decisive thud.