by Maria Luis
Jude doesn’t miss the insult.
The smirk evaporates as he jabs a finger in my direction. “You better not be thinking about going to London or I’ll—”
“We’ve been over this, Calvin. I don’t answer to you.”
“According to your brother, you do. And Guy told me not to let you leave the Palace—dead queen or not.”
My nostrils flare.
As a spy for the Crown, Jude should have been first in line to rescue Queen Margaret from Buckingham Palace. Instead he’d hovered by my side while Guy rattled off assignments, inspecting his nails before murmuring, “Looks like yet another day will pass before you get to play the hero again. How does it feel being universally despised?”
Like I’ve waited my entire life to fulfill a destiny my mother predicted from birth.
Fucking prick.
“Instead of worrying about me, you should have gone to London.”
Jude raises a brow. “Matthews is here, too. So is Paul.”
“Matthews is a surgeon,” I growl tightly, “and he needs to prep the OR. As for Paul—”
“The thing about keeping an eye on you, Priest,” he cuts in with mock gravity, pushing away from the railing to move toward the spiral staircase, “is that it’s a two-person job. You rarely do what you’re told.”
Like a dog, I’m expected to piss, shit, and sleep where directed.
I may stay out of obligation but I don’t do it eagerly. In Guy’s attempt to save me, he’s only managed to trade one prison cell for another. My bars are the Palace’s sixteenth-century walls; my chains a metaphorical collar that no one—especially not my oldest brother—intends to remove any time soon.
I’ve become the king of the damned.
“We both know how this works,” Jude murmurs, stepping down from the stairwell. “I tell you to heel, you sit. I tell you to run, and you bloody sprint. And if I tell you that you won’t be going to Buckingham Palace to save the queen, who’s more than likely already dead, anyway, then you’ll fucking stay.”
Irritation festers beneath my skin.
Seven months.
Jude’s shoes clip against the ancient tiles.
One step.
Two.
“Don’t tell me that the cat’s got your tongue.” His mouth twists with anticipation, like there’s nothing he enjoys more than seeing a Priest—a Godwin—backed into the proverbial corner. “And here Paul thought we were going to have a big problem on our hands tonight. You know, considering that you’ve been kept here against your will and all.”
My feet remain rooted in place.
“But”—that sneer hardens—“I told him that the fight’s gone out of you, that we have nothing to worry—”
The words stutter into silence the second my gun kisses his forehead.
His eyes go wide.
Mine only narrow.
“Pulling the trigger,” I murmur coolly, “would be the highlight of my year.”
“You wouldn’t.”
I fit my finger over the polymer lever. “There’s really not much I wouldn’t do.”
“If you kill me, your brother—”
“Won’t give you a bloody thing. No other reason you’d be crawling up my ass unless he promised you something.” I stroke the trigger, a gentle, loving caress that turns Jude’s gaze cross-eyed. “So?” I prompt, voice low. “How much are we talking?”
His hands flex down by his sides as though there’s nothing he’d like more than to stab me in the gut. Not that he can when he’s clearly unarmed.
His mistake.
There’s no one here to stop me. He knows it as well as I do. Matthews is on the other side of the Palace, prepping the operating room, and Paul is no doubt squirreled away somewhere, still nursing his wounded shoulder from when I stabbed him three weeks ago.
“Cat got your tongue, Calvin?”
His dark eyes narrow into slits. “Don’t mock me.”
My finger never wavers, and the muzzle never retreats from his pale skin. If he were smart, he’d swing out a leg and kick me in the knees. Turn the tables around so that I’m the one begging for life. He won’t though. Jude Calvin should never have been allowed to take Holyrood’s oath, and I’d be doing us all a favor by ending his contract here and now.
“Damien . . .” Warily, Jude’s gaze darts from my face to the gun. “You can’t actually shoot me. You know that, don’t you? It’s against the—”
“Get the hell out of my sight,” I clip out, then turn away.
I anticipate the counterattack as soon as I hear the air sing.
Balancing on the balls of my feet, I evade his swinging fist with a sharp twist of the waist. My fingers snag the material of his shirt, and then he’s flying forward, stumbling over his feet, and crashing down onto his hands and knees. The sole of my heavy boot lands on the center of his spine, and—crack! his chin collides with the tiled floor.
“Jesus,” he groans, hands splayed out on either side of his head. “Get the fuck off me.”
Without remorse, I dig my heel into the bones of his back as I holster my gun.
“I’ll tell him.” Jude’s lungs wheeze with a harshly drawn inhale. “I’ll tell Guy that you’ve tried to kill me twice now. D’you hear me?”
Dark laughter reverberates in my chest. “You go ahead and do that.”
Lifting my foot, I wait for Jude to rise before ruthlessly driving him back down. No mercy. Wasn’t that what Mum whispered to me minutes before she died? You are a weapon, she’d said, and you will be shown no mercy when they come to destroy you. If the last number of months has proven anything, it’s that. I’ve been hunted by the Met—by its bastard police commissioner Marcus Guthram—and even here, in my own home, I’m hunted.
Chained.
Collared.
No fucking mercy.
Fisting the back of Jude’s hair, I snap his head up, so that he has no choice but to look at me. “Stop me from leaving one more time,” I mutter, jerking him closer with my foot propped on his spine to stretch his neck, “and you’ll be lucky if you ever piss again without a catheter.”
Fury bleeds from his gaze.
Too bad that I don’t give a damn.
I leave him sprawled on the floor.
Holyrood has bigger problems than Jude Calvin, starting with the fact that no one ought to have been able to breach Buckingham Palace’s security. Cameras positioned in every hallway. Fingerprint-activated sensors on every single doorknob leading into the queen’s apartments. If an unlicensed hand so much as brushed one, they’d receive the shock of a lifetime. The wiring was dialed with enough voltage to initiate instant cardiac arrest—and someone bypassed all of it.
I wrench open the heavy oak door, its hinges squealing with age and regret. Guy told me to remain at the Palace, but if Saxon were here, he’d understand. We were raised to put the Crown above all else.
If war is in my blood, then Holyrood is embedded in my bones.
The wooden planks of the drawbridge groan beneath my feet. Heavy fog conceals the moat, just as it shelters the surrounding forest and swallows the stars. The first time Pa brought me and my brothers here, to the Palace, he convinced us all that ghosts haunt the property.
Nowadays, I know better.
The living are the monsters that the dead could never be.
Shadows tunnel my vision, but the crunch of gravel snaps my attention to the darkness enveloping the front drive. Unmistakably footsteps, but none that are familiar. If it were anyone from Holyrood, they’d be running—either because they had the queen, and she was injured, or because she was dead, and we’d all failed her.
I reach for my firearm.
Cock my head when I hear another rustle of gravel.
The hairs on the back of my forearms stand tall, but my heart doesn’t hammer with fear. Seven months of being locked away hasn’t erased the familiarity of dancing with the devil. A dance that I once welcomed with reckless abandon.
Weapon raised, I pro
wl across the drawbridge on silent feet.
Come out, I ache to purr, come out, wherever you are.
A snapping twig draws me forward.
A smothered hiss strokes adrenaline down the length of my spine.
Let me see you.
My eyes adjust to the night, tracking the curve of a tall bush and then, finally, a figure emerging from the fog.
No, not emerging but dragging.
Doubled in half, a hand clutched at its middle, it creeps forward with a distinct limp that renders me momentarily motionless. A hand shoots out to grasp the bush, as though praying for stability, but the branch doesn’t hold. It yields with a snap! just as the figure teeters.
“Don’t move.”
Labored footsteps inch closer.
“One more step,” I say, my tone thick with warning, “and I’ll put a bullet in your head.”
“Please.” That voice—feminine, raspy, pained. “P-please. Are you—”
“Your name.”
“Holyrood,” she says instead, the second syllable breaking on a fragile gasp, “I’m l-looking for Holyrood. Please.”
If there was moonlight, I’d demand that she reveal herself. But she’s nothing but shadow, nothing but a strange woman appearing on our front lawn in the middle of the night, all while asking about a secret agency that she should know nothing about.
“Give me,” I growl, “your name.”
“Rowan.” The name teases forth a memory, but I barely have time to grasp it with both hands before she exhales on a shattered breath, “Rowena Carrigan . . . and I have the queen.”
And then she falls, hands meeting gravel on a broken cry, and the fog—and the moat—swallow her whole.
3
Rowena
I’m being flayed alive.
Razors scour my flesh, digging, prodding, scraping.
My back bows.
Lips part on a strangled cry.
And then a calloused hand fits against my bare shoulder and lowers me back down with a firmness that speaks to a lifetime of being obeyed.
“Don’t move.”
A command I may have heeded, if not for those razors hacking away at my spine, until there’s nothing left but the sensation of being butchered. Stop. Please, stop. Temples pounding furiously, I fling out an arm and strike something sharp.
Metal crashes to the floor.
“Jesus. She needs—”
“She doesn’t need a damned thing, Matthews.”
“You bloody well may be a genius, but you’re not the doctor here. I am.” Metal meets metal with a startling clang. “And I’m telling you, she needs to be sedated.”
“No,” I gasp, slicking my tongue along the dry roof of my mouth. “No more.”
Matthews curses under his breath. “She shouldn’t be awake. Not yet. Give it here, Godwin, before I string you up by your bollocks.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
Steel cloaked in velvet. That voice belongs to the sort of man who baits you to the edge of a cliff with nothing but a husky purr and a curve of his lips before hurling you into the swirling waters below. Even now, I feel the crash of the waves threatening to pull me under, to drag me so far deep where no hope exists.
Godwin, Matthews called him.
The irony isn’t lost on me.
In this moment, with my naked back exposed to a pair of strangers, my fate is in the hand of God.
“The sedative,” Matthews persists, “give me the blasted sedative before she realizes what she’s lost.”
Lost?
I lift my head from the thin pillow cushioning my cheek and open my eyes.
A blanket of night greets me. No shadows. No stream of sunlight pouring into the room. There’s nothing but the uneven hitch of my breathing and the faint beeping of a machine off to my right and the startling realization that something is very, very wrong.
My pulse skips.
“Hold her down.” Godwin.
My lungs shatter as I draw in great gulps of air.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Matthews. “She’s not read—”
“I can’t see.” Panic crawls under my skin as I pitch forward, evading grasping hands. My legs tangle with the sheets. Arms flail outward, reaching, reaching, reaching. But there’s nothing, no one, but the blanket of night that dredges terror from the depths of my soul. “I can’t see!”
“Miss Carrigan—”
A gentle hand finds my arm but not my flesh. There’s something there, something between me and the surgeon. Overwhelmed, I push away. Twist my body around until my knee accidentally slips from the table and I’m teetering into oblivion.
Darkness descends and gravity wins.
I fall, hurtling toward the unseen ground.
Calloused hands catch me, roughened fingers digging into the bare skin of my aching back. The razors—the glass. From Buckingham Palace and the shattered windows. Heat flares everywhere Godwin touches, and I grit my teeth to keep from screaming. They must have been removing the shards of glass from my skin, and the fire . . . the fire—
Those fingers move south, leaving a trail of agony in their wake, before clutching my waist.
My feet graze the floor for barely a second before I’m effortlessly lifted onto the table. Legs dangling over the edge; fingers finding the outside of my thighs. Like a child about to be scolded or, worse, like an invalid who can’t be expected to do anything on her own.
I can’t see.
Godwin hovers just out of reach, and even though he no longer touches me, I can feel the disdain physically vibrating from his body. It clenches like chains wrapped around my throat, suffocating the air from my lungs as I desperately try to gather my bearings. He expects me to crack, to shatter like ancient glass. And bloody hell, I want to do just that. I want to claw at my eyes and crawl out of my skin. I want to tear out of this room, only to fall to my knees and let the tears spill free.
I spent years dying under the thumb of my father, only to become this.
Imprisoned by my own body.
Fighting the urge to laugh hysterically, it takes all my strength to turn in the direction that I think Godwin stands and pull myself together. No weakness here, I want to hurl in his face, even as bleakness grips my heart. I will not break—not for you, not for anyone.
“The queen,” I rasp. “Is she—”
“Alive.” It’s Godwin who responds. There’s no audible relief in his voice, though my ears catch a certain lilt in his vowels that I can’t quite place. A hint of an accent buried so deep that it’s nearly undetectable. “She’s lucky.”
I swallow, roughly. “She was shot.”
“And came out of surgery quite well, all things considered,” Matthews says from my left. “It’s you we’ve had to worry about, Miss Carrigan.”
Me.
The glass entrenched in my back.
The fire that ravaged my skin.
The wooden beam that fell, seconds before I ushered Margaret from the palace, and took me down with it. I remember heaviness clamped across my middle, flames dancing so close that its fiery breath teased my hair and face, before I somehow managed to shove myself free.
Charred flesh. Bubbling blisters.
So much pain.
I peel my fingers away from my legs and whisper them across my stomach. The roughened texture of medical bandages greets me, proficiently wrapped and revealing nothing about what lays beneath.
But I know.
The same as I know that if I lift my hands to graze my face, I’ll find more of those same dressings tucked around my head, over my eyes.
Luck doesn’t come twice in a single lifetime, and I’ve already escaped once unscathed. To hope for a second chance . . . I curl my fingers into a tight fist and lower them to my lap. “Am I blind?”
Silence greets me, as if the two men have stopped to exchange a look.
Dr. Matthews, if he really is a surgeon, clearly thinks the same as Godwin—that I’ll break under the weight of the truth.
But I’ve been broken enough times in my life to know that while this pain is unbearable, I’ve survived worse.
So much worse.
“It’s a yes or no question. Yes, I’m blind or no, I’m not.”
“Actually, it’s more of a wait and see.” There’s a tiny pause, and then Dr. Matthews adds, “You’ve transient post-traumatic cortical blindness. Most likely from blunt-force trauma, based on the scarring on your skull.”
My mouth grows dry. “I don’t know what that means.”
“There was a case, not that long ago, where a woman fell from a six-story building. She suffered a break in her tibia, as well as calcaneal fractures. Doctors found she had no external injury to the head. Two hours after she was brought to the hospital, she had a complete bilateral loss of vision.”
I clutch the table, trying to stave off the swirling nausea. “What does any of this have to do with me?”
“Your eyes were unresponsive when Godwin carried you in. To cut a very long story short, Miss Carrigan, your MRI matches the woman’s case study.”
“I don’t—” Clearing my throat, I angle my face toward Dr. Matthews. “I don’t understand. If I’ve lost my sight, shouldn’t it hurt? Shouldn’t I feel something?”
“The woman experienced no other symptoms, not even headaches. You may, however, see dark streaks across your vision or even floaters. No, no, don’t—” He stills my attempt to jump down from the exam table with a hand on my shoulder. “It’s alarming, yeah? It will be. It’ll be disorienting and require adjustment on your part, but things should clear up.”
“Things should clear up?” It takes every bit of self-control not to snatch the bandage from my face and throw it to the ground. “Don’t you mean that things will clear up?”
“That’s where the wait and see element comes in. The woman’s vision returned to her completely on its own within a matter of days, and I imagine yours will do the same. What’s truly a miracle is how you managed to find yourself here at all,” Dr. Matthews hums, as if the entirety of my diagnosis is nothing but medical curiosity for him. “With the impacted infarcts in the Broadmann area 17, you shouldn’t have been able to—”