by Maria Luis
I won’t do it, not even to be free.
“Sod off.”
If he’s at all surprised by my change of heart, he doesn’t give me the satisfaction of an audible reaction. But his pacing recommences a moment later, that loose-limbed stride of his surrounding me, cornering me, until I find myself shifting in my seat, just to alleviate the mounting tension threatening to choke the air from my lungs.
“Get on with your little game, Godwin.”
“When was the last time you saw your father?”
My head begins to pound. “Are we seriously back to that again?”
“Answer the question.”
“For God’s sake, my father is not trying to kill Margaret. The sooner you get that through your thick skull, the sooner—”
The chain between the handcuffs jerks forward, nearly sending me sprawling from the chair to the floor. But I hang there, in the delicate balance of neither here nor there—heart in my throat, fingers searching for purchase—fully prepared for an abrupt landing.
“This game,” Godwin growls, “will only turn out well for you if you play along.”
“And if I refuse?”
“There are hundreds of different ways to break you, Miss Carrigan.” The handcuffs clink and clank as his fingers wrap around my wrists, binding them together. He yanks me off the chair, so that my arse leaves the seat while he holds my weight in just one hand. It’s a move designed to intimidate, and I hate that it does. “I’m giving you one last chance to give me information without coercion,” he adds.
A soft, disbelieving laugh climbs my throat. “You don’t call this coercion? You have me bound.”
“Almost gentlemanly of me,” he husks, “when all the alternatives would leave permanent damage.”
Permanent damage.
As if the last twenty-four hours haven’t already left me scarred in more ways than are even evident right now.
Ten years. That’s how long I’ve spent doing everything in my power to separate myself from Edward Carrigan. But there’s no denying that if Father were here, he’d find a way to spin this conversation to his advantage. He would shield the truth, butter up the lies, and do what has to be done to come out of this alive. A future that’s becoming less likely with every second that I hang from Godwin’s hold.
Margaret was my sister when I had no family. She was my best friend when I trusted no one and nothing, least of all the man whose blood runs through my veins. Last night, I saved her life at the risk of my own, and, injured or not, her absence now speaks louder than words ever could.
I’m on my own.
Donning the mask that I once wore so often, I push a soft, tempting smile to my lips. Make a deal. Beat him at his own game. The smile doesn’t waver, not even when I feel the blistered skin along my jaw pull grotesquely tight. And so, with the confidence that I’ve faked for most of my life, I put Young Rowena on stage for her grand reentry into society:
“I’ll play, Godwin, but only on my terms.”
9
Damien
“Terms,” I echo, tasting the word on my tongue and finding it . . .
Intriguing.
With her dangling helplessly from my grasp, the last thing Rowena Carrigan ought to be trying on for size are negotiations. But here we are—me, standing with my legs spread shoulder width apart; her, fighting to maintain that prim composure of hers as her feet struggle to touch the ground. Composure, I note, that splinters every time the handcuffs crack together.
Still, she manages a decisive nod. “I’ll answer your questions, but you’ll answer mine too.”
I stroke my thumb over her pulse, just to see her flinch. “I’m not the one who’s bound.”
The smile on her face turns lethal. “And I’m not the one so desperate for information that I’d assault an innocent woman just to have my way.”
My jaw clenches at her implicit dig.
There’s no double-standard here.
If Holyrood has taught me anything, it’s that a person’s sex means nothing on the battlefield. Women are just as ruthless as men. Soft curves belie sharp, analytical minds; gentle touches underscore brutal fighting skills that would lay any man flat. I’ve gotten this far in life because I never underestimate my opponent.
Especially not when the opponent in question is the prime minister’s daughter.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Whoever came up with that blasted proverb clearly never dabbled in British politics.
“When was the last time you saw Edward Carrigan?” I ask again, acquiescing to the terms without giving her the satisfaction of saying so out loud.
That lethal smile dims, just a little. “Two months ago.”
“Where?”
“Tsk tsk, Godwin. That sounds a whole lot like two questions.”
“You don’t think I know that?” I lift my arm, my core muscles tightening with her weight, and put her face even with mine. “Answer the question,” I growl.
Her legs swing outward, and this time she manages to nail me in the knee. It doesn’t hurt. Barely even registers. My gaze is locked on her full mouth when she snaps, “Put me down and I will.”
I stare at her—at this woman hanging from my one hand. The bandages around her head have drooped to cover her nose and reveal the upper curve of her right ear. She looks ruined. She looks weak.
The fire in her voice argues otherwise.
If she were anyone else, I might even feel . . . impressed.
“Put me down.” And then, with her teeth bared in what’s probably meant to be a smile, she adds, “Or I’ll kick you where it hurts.”
I jerk her closer, putting us nose to nose. “Lie to me and you’ll hang yourself.”
“I’d welcome that day,” she says, her breath a hot whisper over my mouth, “with wide open arms.”
Insolent. Impudent.
I wasn’t lying when I said that that mouth of hers would get her in trouble.
With one last squeeze of my fingers around her wrist, I drop her onto the chair. Its feet clatter against the floor, but Rowena’s weight settles it onto all four legs. With her cuffed hands in her lap, she angles her chin so that she’s looking in my direction.
For a moment, it’s almost possible to imagine the intensity of her glare. If she had her way, I have no doubt I’d incinerate on the spot.
Sorry to disappoint.
Grabbing another chair, I plant it down in front of hers and straddle the back.
It’s a silent order to get on with it, and Rowena doesn’t mistake it as anything else. Her palms press together. “We don’t speak, my father and I, but I listen and I watch.”
“Why?”
“My relationship with him is none of your business.”
Narrowing my eyes at her obvious attempt to weasel out of answering, I opt to swap tracks and catch her off guard. “Ask your first question.”
Her lips part, then clamp shut.
“Didn’t let yourself get that far ahead when you were plotting terms?” When she doesn’t respond right away, I drop my elbows to the back of the chair. “You have three seconds before you forfeit your round.”
She jerks her head down, her thumbs working over each other in a clear attempt to settle her nerves. Then, quietly, “Has Margaret mentioned me? Since she came out of surgery, I mean. Has she . . .” Her shoulders fall forward. “Has she said anything at all?”
She said that you can’t be trusted.
A good man would evade the question entirely.
A better man would lie and tell her exactly what she wants to hear.
But, at the sliver of raw vulnerability in her voice, I find myself saying, “Don’t bother asking something when you already know the answer.”
Not a lie. Not the truth either.
My response lives in the murky gray, and it’s enough to have her inhaling a short breath through her nose. A beat passes, heavy with tension, and then she shakes her head with a low, pained chuckle. “Right.”
I don’t speak.
Finally, she straightens her shoulders. “I saw him at the Jewel Tower.”
At Westminster? Built centuries ago, the Jewel Tower was first intended to hold King Edward III’s treasures, but it’s been used as nothing but storage for decades now. Which, now that I think about it, makes it the perfect place for a secret meeting.
Fuck.
“Who did he meet?”
Rowena shifts in the chair but keeps her mouth shut.
I narrow my eyes. “Miss Carrigan—”
“Don’t you think that I know what you’re trying to do?” she says, her voice rising sharply. “Don’t you think I know that if I say one wrong thing, you’ll pass judgment on him? And even if we . . . even if he and I aren’t—dammit.”
With my elbows propped on the back of the chair, I scan her face—what little of it I can see, at any rate. If Buckingham Palace hadn’t exploded last night, if Clarke hadn’t been murdered, if the queen herself hadn’t nearly died . . . I may have dropped the issue.
But Hell literally landed on our doorstep less than twenty-four hours ago, and, taking my hatred for the prime minister out of the equation, our leads are still slim to none. We’re short on time, down one agent, and stuck with the hand that we’ve been dealt.
Rowena Carrigan is all we have.
Resting my wrists on the chairback, I link my fingers together. “Ask me why Alfie Barker is chained in that cell.”
Her chin jerks back. “What?”
“Ask me.”
“I don’t . . .” Her mouth twists to the side in chaffed resignation. “Fine. Why?”
Leaning forward, I drop my voice to a husky murmur. “Because he tried to have your best mate killed. Because, in case you haven’t figured it out already, that’s what we do. We protect the Crown at all costs.”
She huffs out a grim laugh. “So, what? You’re heroes?”
“To some,” I allow.
“And to others?”
“We’re the monster in your dreams. The villain you don’t ever want to meet on a dark, quiet street.”
Her throat bobs with a convulsive swallow. “And to me? What are you to me?”
Your worst nightmare.
Because even if she had nothing to do with the fire at Buckingham Palace, she’s still my best way to cut Edward Carrigan down at the knees. Revenge isn’t pretty. There are always casualties, and I’m willing to shed blood to get what I want.
Vengeance.
The chance to leave the Palace behind and not look over my shoulder every other step, always watching, always prepared to find a knife plunged deep in my back.
Carrigan’s lackeys already managed to get me once.
“Godwin?” Rowena asks, her tone wary.
“I’m your judge, jury, and executioner,” I tell her softly, without a hint of warmth. “Now tell me who your father met with.”
It’s not a request.
With a sigh of frustration, she collapses back in the chair. “They were all MPs. The room was packed, shoulder to shoulder.”
Of course it was.
If this meeting took place two months ago, that means Carrigan started plotting the queen’s removal from the throne almost immediately after King John’s assassination. Definitely a quick turnaround, though . . . Does it make sense to burn your competition to the ground when you already plan to strip her of her identity?
A life taken versus a life politically ruined.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive, and I’m not sure the motives align.
“What’s the likelihood of you letting me walk out of here sometime soon?”
I tear my gaze away from my hands to look at Carrigan’s daughter. “This room or the Palace?”
“Both.” Her fingers knot the fabric of her shirt. “No, not both. The second. I’ve cooperated.”
“Barely.”
“I answered your questions,” she returns sharply. “You asked and you received. And now I’m telling you that I want to leave.”
“There’s no end date to treason.”
Her mouth falls open. “Treason? I’m not . . . there’s not—”
“You say that you just happened to visit the queen and then all hell broke loose.” I pause, letting that point hit home. “Then you tell me that you don’t speak to your father, but clearly you’re protecting him.”
“I-I—”
“You watch,” I drawl, “and you listen. Isn’t that what you just said?”
The handcuffs rattle as she scrambles to sit forward. “Godwin, I’m telling you right now, I don’t know—”
“You do,” I say, cutting her off. “You know exactly what was said in the Jewel Tower, and I don’t hear you rushing to tell me a damn thing.”
“Taxes!” she cries out. “They were talking about bloody taxes.”
She’s not the only one who watches and listens, and one look at her body tells me everything I need to know. Rowena Carrigan is lying. Maybe it’s a front to save her old man. Maybe it’s nothing more than a last-ditch effort to save herself. Either way, I’m no fool. She’s hiding something.
“Like I said, we have time to figure out if you’re telling the truth.”
“You can’t just keep me here.”
“Miss Carrigan—”
“Stop calling me that!” Her shoulders heave with fast, panicked breaths, and the sliver of exposed pale skin at the base of her throat turns a flushed pink. “I don’t beg—I won’t beg—but you have to let me go, Godwin. Please.”
“Just because you can’t see,” I say quietly, “doesn’t mean you don’t already know too much.”
Without warning, she tears the bandages from her head and throws them to the ground at her feet. And those eyes—those striking violet eyes that I’ve never seen on anyone else—blink back at me.
I half expect her to lurch back in recognition.
Damien Godwin may exist within the shadows, but Damien Priest’s reputation is known far and wide. And no matter how many nights I spend stalking the internet to remove every trace of myself, new articles always emerge. I’d say that everyone wants a piece of me, but the truth is far darker. I’m the devil who proved that Westminster is nothing but a fragile glass house. One snip from my hand, and the whole farce of democracy will come crumbling down. The Mad Priest is the villain society loves to hate, and he always strikes terror into the hearts of innocents.
But if Rowena is terrified, she doesn’t show it.
Breathing heavily, she juts her chin forward. “Tell me what you see.”
At the barely concealed anguish in her voice, my chest compresses. Not pity. Not sympathy either. But the inexplicable heaviness lingers anyway, and I hear myself rasp, “Rowena . . . don’t.”
“Tell me,” she reiterates fiercely, “what you see.”
I see a woman on the verge of collapse.
I see a woman on the brink of madness.
I see the shattered shards of rage that tear at my soul—only I see them in her.
My hold on the chair turns so violent that I’m surprised the wood doesn’t splinter.
Walk away.
The words bleed from somewhere within. A threat, a command.
Self-preservation.
Wrenching my gaze from hers, I launch to my feet and immediately put distance between us that doesn’t do a damned thing to release the intangible hold of her violet eyes on mine. Of the unspoken knowledge that Rowena keeps secrets that could rival my own. Secrets, I think, that have nothing to do with the queen or her father, and everything to do with her. Broken, kindred souls.
I recognized her in an instant.
The skin across my back stretches as I clamp a hand over my shoulder, digging my fingers into the rigid muscles there that throb and ache and shriek for relief the tighter I cling. A memory of survival. A reminder that compassion has no place here in this room, in my heart.
I turn for the door. “We’ll continue this tomorrow.”
“You can’
t do it, can you?” When I don’t answer, Rowena attempts to stand and I glance back just in time to see her bad leg collapse. She lands on the floor in a tangle of limbs, her hands balled into fists that she plants on the ground. Knuckles white with tension, shoulders hunched forward and emphasizing the bare slope of her neck. A broken laugh falls from her lips. “You can’t even look me in the eye and tell me what you see.”
Doing so would inflict unnecessary pain.
Her long hair is gone, shaved down to her skull—a job I did myself when Matthews determined that the fire had burned the soft flesh of her head. Her skin, from her collarbone to the slope of her right shoulder and the upper half of her face, already puckers with blisters. And her eyes . . . unique though the color is—well, it’s obvious that she’s staring into a void.
Even now, she focuses on a spot to my left, clearly confident that that’s where I stand.
The difference between her reality and mine is in the space of a single meter.
I watch her silently, her hands chained together as she shifts onto her knees. And then, with her mouth pressing flat, she crumples to the side and thrusts out her right leg, like she can’t bear to put weight on it.
“Godwin, did you . . .” She cocks her head to the side. “Did you leave?”
The monster in me wants to keep her locked away in the dark. To let her realize, slowly, that she’s weak and defenseless and completely at my mercy.
I want to make her beg.
But those aren’t the words that crawl from my chest and emerge gruffly: “I’m here.”
“Then aren’t you going to answer my—”
“I see a woman with secrets,” I tell her, keeping my voice low, “a woman who almost took those secrets with her to the grave.” I step backward, toward the door. “But what you don’t see is a man who’s honor bound to tear each of those secrets from your soul. So, I’ll be back for you tomorrow, Rowena, and when I do, there won’t be any more games.”
“You’re leaving?” Something that looks like panic flickers across her face. “Godwin, think this through. I’m not—I’m not a traitor. Whatever you think that I know, I promise you that I don’t.”
Except that she does. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”