by Maria Luis
The bridge of his nose finds the back of my ear. “Are you worried about me, Miss Carrigan?”
“No.” The lie leaves me on a forceful exhale. “No, that’s not it at all.”
“Is it guilt I wonder?” he husks, a bemused edge to his tone. “Or something else completely?”
I feel as powerless as I did when he held me in one hand and dangled me in the air. “Maybe you’re delusional,” I manage past a dry throat, “and maybe I don’t want to handle the cleanup after they inevitably kill you.”
“Oh, ye of little faith.”
“Careful, your ego is showing again.”
“Then agree to the terms.”
I lift my head. “What could you possibly say that’ll keep me from scrubbing your blood from my floors for the next week?”
The bite in my tone pulls a dark laugh from him. It twines around me like smoke, wrapping tighter, knitting closed, until I feel his hand slip out from under mine. One settles over my breastbone, like he seeks the rhythm of my heart, and the other . . .
The other cups my face.
A startled breath escapes me when his thumb grazes my bottom lip. “Damien . . .”
“If they hurt me, then I’ll touch you, and I won’t wait for an invitation.”
Oh, my God.
Like a jar that’s been unlatched, butterflies flutter to life in my belly. The rasp in his voice. The heat of his chest against my back. That damned thumb of his tracing back and forth, back and forth, over my mouth. The sensation is lulling. Hypnotic. He’s seducing me with nothing more than a promise, terms that bear a curse, and I fear . . . I fear that he can feel me swaying now, like a moth drawn toward a flame.
Drawn to him, inexplicably so.
“I need you, Rowena. Say yes.”
21
Damien
“’e’s what?”
The big bastard from the roof, Gregory, throws me a wild-eyed look from where two other blokes restrain him behind an antique sofa—as if they’ll actually be enough to keep him from hurtling the sofa and stampeding toward me. Doubtful. He elbows the shorter man in the gut, then growls, “Rowan, you’ve lost your bloody mind. ’e should be dead!”
No one in the drawing room speaks up to contradict him.
Beside me, Rowena only folds her hands primly behind her back. Like a queen confronted by rebellious peasants, she lifts her chin, visibly steels her spine, and announces, “Damien Priest is our prisoner. He stays.”
Two of the men exchange perplexed glances before the red-haired pulls out a chair from a dainty-as-hell table and collapses onto it. “Can you actually be classified as a prisoner if you’ve turned yourself in? Prisoners aren’t willing. It’s not the way it works.” Crossing his legs at the knee, he shifts his arms across his wiry chest. A man clearly content to debate the philosophies of hostage situations all night. “Who does that? No one, that’s who.” He meets my gaze. “Uri said you walked through the front door like you owned the place.”
Not exactly.
These men stormed the Palace tonight.
In their quest for revenge, they breached walls that have stood for centuries. Rare books torn from the shelves in the library, for no other purpose than that they could. Vintage stemware thrown to the ground in the dining room and medicine filched from the cabinets in Matthews’ operating room. I found his medical bag floating in the moat, its contents soaked. In every room, glass crunched under the soles of my heavy boots.
No corner of the Palace was left untouched.
Rowena’s motley crew of misfits may take orders from her, but that doesn’t lessen the deep-seated anger they clearly harbor toward me and my brothers. I don’t blame them. My brothers and I have spent a decade spreading rumors about the Priests to endear us to anti-loyalists everywhere. It was a price that we willingly paid, knowing that we learned more than we ever would have otherwise. But any chance that these people might trust us, let alone forgive us, was obliterated the minute Isla put her hands around Ian Coney’s throat and squeezed.
To them, I’m a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“Actually,” I drawl, making a point to hold the redhead’s stare, “I climbed the trellis.”
The trellis outside Rowena’s room, like I was the Romeo to her Juliet. No one saw me scaling the flimsy ladder—because for all their success at laying siege to the Palace, these people are not trained spies. Not like Holyrood.
Except, maybe, for one, and his jaw just came unhinged.
“The trellis,” Gregory enunciates slowly, glancing back toward the bloke he elbowed with an air of astonishment, “’e climbed the bloody trellis after I killed ’im.” His narrowed gaze swings back to me. “’ow many bleeding lives do you ’ave?”
A grim smile twists my lips. “Not nearly enough.”
“And you won’t be risking any more of them,” Rowena tells Gregory pointedly. “Understood?”
“’ow can you just forget what ’e’s done?”
“I forget nothing.”
Though issued quietly, Rowena’s voice is laced with steel. When she starts forward, I can’t help but skim my gaze down the length of her spine to where her fingers are still linked together, her knuckles white with tension. I watch as she ducks a quick look over her shoulder, her sightless gaze searching for me.
Whatever his motives were in approaching her, this is the woman King John chose to run a counter-op against Holyrood. The she-wolf. A queen without a crown. During those tense moments in her bedroom, when she’d sought to read my emotions, I saw what I hadn’t before: Rowena Carrigan may be the prime minister’s daughter, but she has more integrity in her soul than anyone I’ve ever met.
She owned her mistakes and humbled herself before me.
Had I told her to drop to her knees, she would have—without question.
And fuck, I wanted to. With her hand cupping my face, and her voice hoarse with sympathy for the loss of The Bell & Hand, I’d wanted her to beg for my forgiveness, for no other reason than to see those violet eyes of hers peering up at me as she kneels at my feet.
Blind. Ruined. Mine.
Her chin dips in a curt nod, like she’s reached some internal debate that I’ve not been privy to, before turning to address the room again. “I would never ask you to forget your loved ones. But Mr. Priest is one of us—he’s been one of us before an us even existed—which means that he stays, whether you like it or not, and he does so under my watch.”
“His brother murdered the king!”
At the outburst, I fix my gaze on a round-faced man seated near the curtained windows—as far away, I note, as he can get without stepping out of the room completely. When he catches me staring, color creeps up past the collar of his jumper.
“What?” he snaps, shifting his weight. “I’ve only said what everyone is thinking.” Instead of responding, I keep silent and let him run his mouth. Which he does with obnoxious ease: “We all know what Saxon Priest did at St. Paul’s. Hell, all of England knows!”
The irony being that of the three of us Godwins, Saxon has always been the least likely to betray the royal family. Until Isla, anyway, who did kill the king. Since I never plan to admit the truth, I only ask, “Did you ever meet John?”
A strangled noise emerges from the bloke’s mouth like he’s appalled at my using the king’s given name. Still, he responds exactly how I expected him to—he has that sullen, holier-than-thou look about him—and bounces up from the chair to straighten to his full height. Which is still a head shorter than I am.
“I saw him once,” he boasts, puffing out his chest, “up in Manchester.”
“And did you speak to him? Say hello? Do anything besides fawn over him from two blocks over while he ignored your existence?”
“Well, no.” The wanker shrinks backward. “But he’s the—”
“Then don’t waste your breath defending him.”
There’s a collective gasp from around the room, and I almost bark out a laugh. All those horrified expression
s . . . they’d know real horror if they ever learned the truth about their precious king. Murdering Pa, scarring Saxon when he’d only been a boy. At my side, my hand curls into a fist. No, a man like John doesn’t deserve reverence. He doesn’t even deserve the air we breathe.
If Isla hadn’t done him in, someone else would have soon enough.
And it may have been you to pull the trigger.
I grit my teeth. Flick my gaze from man to man, then to the only other woman besides Rowena. “For whatever it’s worth,” I edge out, forcing my hand to relax before anyone misinterprets the gesture as a threat, “Saxon didn’t assassinate the king. He might have thought about doing it a million times over, but it wasn’t him.”
“You say that like you know who did it.”
I glance over at the woman. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed. She sits on a bench before the grand piano, studying me like I’m the devil come out to play. “Do you?” she prods angrily. “Do you know who killed the king?”
“Does it really make a difference?”
She jerks back like I’ve delivered a physical blow. “Yes,” she hisses, “of course it does.”
“Then yes, we have a suspect in custody.” A small pause. “And no, it isn’t Saxon.”
“But your brother did kill my father at The Octagon. I saw the pictures Jack took from the upper gallery. I know what really happened there.”
Rowena’s shoulders visibly stiffen. Behind her back, her linked fingers separate into individual fists like she’s two seconds away from throwing hands and wrangling everyone into their separate corners.
I don’t let her step forward.
Touching my fingers to her shoulder, I bypass her on my way to the piano. “Dr. Sara Grafton, am I right?”
The woman visibly flinches. “How do you know my name?”
“Because I know every person who died that day.” Because I’ve spent hours trying to make a tangible connection between every person at The Octagon and Rowena and found none. Still haven’t found any. Although it’s becoming increasingly obvious, just by standing in this room, that Rowena cares less about recruiting people with tactical experience and more about giving these misfits a home.
I don’t allow myself the chance to look over at her.
“Because I know the first job that they ever had out of uni and their favorite take-away. Curry, for your dad, from a place over in Mayfair. I know that you lost your mother three years ago, Dr. Grafton, and that your father was all you had left.” I take another step, careful to keep my gaze trained on her face. “He was ex-military.”
“Army,” she says with a shaky nod that matches the way she shoves trembling fingers under her thighs, “he was in the Army.”
“Love is carnage,” I reply, and hear Rowena’s hushed intake of breath from behind me. “That’s the last thing the king ever said to me. Dramatic, I thought, but it’s true, isn’t it?” Dropping to my haunches, just beyond Sara Grafton’s reach, I prop my wrists on my bent knee. “Love is ruin—devastation wrapped in a pretty package—but what happened at The Octagon was carnage, plain and simple. My brother was saving the person that he . . . loves, and I think, if you let yourself, you can understand his motivation.” When her lips press flat, I add, quietly, “You can love your father, Dr. Grafton, but you can’t save the man when he’s already dead.”
“Trust me,” she snips, her gaze hyper-focused on my chest, “I’m well aware that he’s gone.”
Slowly, I extend my arm, palm to the ceiling. “Give me the knife, Doctor.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“The knife,” I repeat, firmly, never looking away from the hand that she slipped under her leg. “I’d hate to have you bleeding all over Miss Carrigan’s rug.”
It’s a thinly veiled threat.
The doctor swallows.
I flatten my palm, waiting.
Under the loose sleeve of her pullover, her wrist rotates like she’s debating making a move. One upward glance at my face, though, steals the fury from her gaze and leaves behind only weariness. She thrusts the knife out to me without ever making eye contact.
I make a point of tucking it, flat, against my forearm while I turn back for Rowena. Standing across the room, her violet eyes are wide, frantic, the color high in her cheeks.
She couldn’t hear me, I realize slowly.
And while everyone else, including Gregory, watched me take the knife from Dr. Grafton, Rowena didn’t.
Correction: she couldn’t.
Jesus.
She hasn’t complained, not once. Hasn’t asked anyone to make allowances for her, even though she’d absolutely be in the right to do so. I’m not sure any of my brothers-in-arms would be able to say the same if they were in her position. Hell, Jude would howl like a fucking banshee, and I’d be only too happy to knock him out and shut him up.
Fifteen pairs of eyes follow my path from the piano to Rowena’s side. I lower my head. Put my mouth next to ear, so that my words are for her alone: “Make them fall in line, or I will.”
At the command, Rowena’s chin jerks in my direction and her hand locks around my wrist. Her lips part on a near-silent hiss when she comes in contact with the cool metal. “Damien, are you . . . is that a knife?”
“Tell them.”
“Tell us what, Rowan?”
I turn my head toward the new voice entering the room and recognize him instantly. Brown hair. Lanky build. The man Ian Coney stood with in the photograph that I found. With their arms slung over each other’s shoulders, the similarities between them had seemed miniscule. Staring at him now, however, it’s more than obvious that they’re related—were related. Brothers.
Pulling her fingers away from my wrist, Rowena greets, “Hugh. Good of you to finally join us.”
Hugh.
The same name she uttered in her bedroom before I spoke and gave myself away. How often does Hugh Coney make a habit of waiting for her, alone, that he’s where her mind went first?
“I was seeing to our guests.” His dark eyes slick down over Rowena’s hourglass figure, deliberately pausing at her breasts and hips. Possession bleeds from his gaze before disappearing altogether when he turns on me. “So, the Mad Priest has graced us with his presence.”
Jaw cinched tight, I merely stare at him.
Hugh steps further into the room with all the flair of the pope emerging from the Vatican. He presses a hand to Dr. Grafton’s shoulder and pauses beside the redhead to exchange a quick word. Then, sweeping into the center of the drawing room, he folds his hands behind his back and smiles thinly. “Did Rowan mention that we have Alfie Barker?” he asks. “Grabbed him from the cell myself. Never met a bloke so happy to see me.”
I just bet he was.
Alfie Barker would be happy to see King John’s ghost if it meant being released from his cell, and he’s an anti-loyalist through and through.
“You’re welcome to him.”
Hugh’s mouth tightens at the corners. “And we have another one of yours—Benjamin Lotts. Locked him in the room with Barker just to see how that might play out.”
Benji, who took great joy in beating Saxon in the woods for choosing Isla Quinn over Holyrood. If Hugh hopes to break me, then he’ll have to try a little harder. There are only a few people in this world that I would sell my soul to save and Benjamin Lotts isn’t one of them.
I smile, slowly. “You can have him too.”
Hugh’s expression shutters like curtains that have been snapped closed. “I should put you in that room,” he snarls.
“I’ll have to pass.”
“Pass? Priest, you don’t have the luxury of passing. You’re our—”
“He’s not a proper prisoner,” the redhead grumbles from the sofa, eying my unbound hands speculatively. “This doesn’t follow any sort of protocol. In case anyone was wondering, of course.”
“Shut up, Samuel,” Hugh snaps before fixing me with a scowl. “Listen here, if I tell you that you need to stay
with—”
“Rowena offered me the room beside hers. Can you blame her?” My smile grows wider, crueler. Vicious. “A man with a reputation like mine needs to be leashed.”
“Leashed?” A crease puckers the center of Hugh’s forehead seconds before the glint in his gaze turns ruthless. “You deserve to be put down! I should finish what Gregory started,” he bites off, storming toward me. “Do you hear me, Priest?”
Obviously knowing when he’s not wanted, Gregory says nothing.
I deliberately slip my hands into the front pockets of my trousers. Then move forward, so that I’m shoulder to shoulder with the man who clearly wants me dead. Because of what Isla did to Ian? Or because the thought of me sleeping in a room beside Rowena’s is a thorn in his ass? Probably both.
“You have two choices, Hugh,” I murmur, “and neither of them end with you killing me. Personally, I recommend that you simmer down.”
“You don’t get to waltz in here and make demands, Priest. You are bottom of the barrel.”
When he aggressively knocks my arm with his, I make a point to roll my shoulder. “Careful, now,” I utter softly, meeting his glittering stare. “I’m more than willing to leave the past behind us. You want Barker and Benji? Keep them, mate. They’re yours. No one is standing in your way.”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.” Turmoil is a razor-edge that hardens his features. “Your blasted brother and that bitch killed Ian, and I’ll never get him—”
Hugh hasn’t even finished his sentence before his fist comes flying.
Dodging the blow, I spot Gregory break his human restraints to lunge for Rowena, his big body creating a barrier around her from the altercation. She claws at his arms, demanding that he let her go, before being spun away. Someone screams—the doctor, I think—and then a chair is soaring across the drawing room. Could be aimed at Hugh. Probably at me, though.
Fuck it.
Like it’s nothing but a feather caught in a cross breeze, I snatch the chair’s leg out of thin air and swing with all my might.
Crack!