by Maria Luis
“Damien,” he hisses.
Debris coats my fingers and the taste of ash sits on my tongue. Planting one bent elbow in front of the other, I use my forearms and the toes of my boots to propel me over broken slats of wood. Rewind the clock nine days, before Buckingham Palace went up in flames, and Commercial Street would have been heavy with pedestrian traffic, even past midnight. But beyond the discharge of gunfire, there’s only stillness. It’s only us, only them, while the rest of Whitechapel locks their doors and prays for daybreak.
Bang!
I jerk my head up to see Saxon on his back, a pistol clamped between his hands. He fires from the darkness, the devil cloaked in shadow.
I don’t wait to see if his aim is true.
Belly-crawling the remaining distance, I tear open the duffel Saxon brought me. With my head lowered, I shove a hand inside and rummage around, pushing aside fresh clothes to find—
“Reunited at last,” I mutter, grasping the rifle and hoisting the stock against my chest as I roll swiftly onto my back. My fingers move fluidly over the weapon that I designed a few years back. Lifting it, I stare down the scope, find my mark, and—crack!
The man goes down.
Sweat beads on my temple, a sweep of red encroaching on my central vision. Not again. Not again. Familiar panic claws at my chest and I breathe hard through my nose. Ash rises from the destruction. It hangs like death in the air, drying my throat and stinging my eyes.
Relying on muscle memory, I aim, fire.
Another falls.
Under the cacophony, I hear someone yell “throw it!” and my gaze flickers over the shadows, trying to locate the source.
Something hard lands on my right, less than an arm’s length away.
I twist my head, the rifle still cradled to my chest, and spot the tear gas grenade, its safety pin already removed.
Fucking hell.
“Out!” I bark at Saxon. “Move, move, move.”
Grabbing the duffel bag, I hook the strap over my shoulder and launch to my feet. I run, bent at the waist, to keep low and to the shadows, then grasp Saxon by the arm and pull him along behind me. We zigzag through the ruins of The Bell & Hand and slip out into the night through one of the bare window frames.
In unison, we turn left down Fournier where Christ Church Spitalfields stands sentry to the chaos.
A round sings past my left ear, and I bite back a curse. “Take Wilkes,” I tell Saxon. “I’ll head for Brick.”
“Sod off,” comes his grunt, a second before he shoves me down Wilkes Street. The moonlit sky reveals crooked pavement and boarded up windows. Without exchanging a word, we make the first left, ducking into a narrow alley lined with cobblestones and cast-iron streetlamps.
It’s as good a place as any.
The duffel bag squishes behind me as I press my back against the brick.
“I should punch you all over again,” Saxon growls, settling in beside me. With his shoulders leveraged against the building, he swaps out the magazine clip of his pistol with perfunctory proficiency. “You knew you were being tailed.”
“I suspected it,” I mutter, fixing my gaze on the corner of Wilkes and Puma Court, “and now I know for sure. Thanks for the gear, by the way.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Does this mean that hug time is over?”
The barrel of a SA80 edges past the corner wall, and I lift my rifle and aim. A scream rips through the air, followed by another threat from Saxon: “There won’t be enough of you left to even show the queen when I’m done.” He pauses, then grits, “Christ, you’re bleeding.”
“It grazed me.”
“No, you’re bleeding.”
I twist my wrist so I can peer down at the back of my right arm. Sure enough, the sleeve of my jumper is hanging from my elbow to swing in the breeze. The skin is torn, too. There’s nothing but blood oozing from the wound, smeared across my elbow, nothing but the reoccurring nightmare of a very different day when I was immobile on the pavement, unable to scream, unable to shake myself free.
Paralyzed. Frozen.
A man who deserved better than to die with a sack pulled over his head, just a stone’s throw away from where his brother waited for him.
I hear the duffel bag hit the cobblestones as it slides from my wounded arm.
Hear Saxon shout my name, ordering me back to his side.
And then I hear nothing at all as I turn the corner onto Wilkes and walk straight into the line of fire.
No mercy.
Not today, not tomorrow.
Not until the day I die.
28
Rowena
One staggering step takes me away from the loo, and then yet another and another, until I’m running clear across my bedroom. My feet are bare, my naked flesh damp from a late night shower. It doesn’t stop me from throwing open the heavy drapes, heedless to wandering eyes down in the garden, and shoving my nose against the chilled glass.
Light cuts through the darkness.
A car winding through the dense sycamore trees that bracket Swain’s Lane.
I follow the glowing head lamps without blinking, terrified that if I do, it’ll prove to be only a mirage. A bout of wishful thinking after days of quashing every seed of hope within me. The car disappears a moment later, around the bend toward Highgate Cemetery, but it’s enough.
Enough for me to face the cavern-like darkness of my bedroom and make a break for it.
I dive for the desk and put greedy fingers to the lamp string. One tug and warm, yellow light splices across the wood. I stare at the varying shades of oak, my heart racing fast, fast, faster, before I’m rushing to each nightstand, and the switch by the door, and, finally, to the loo, where it all started with a feather-like shadow darting across my vision when I reached for the bath towel.
A shadow when I was already encased in total darkness.
I want to laugh.
Instead, with my arms locked across my middle, and water droplets dripping from my body to the rug, I slowly turn around. Please, please, please be real. My shoulders curl inward and a sob aches to burst free and this time, I don’t do a single thing to stem the tears that burn the backs of my eyes.
Light pervades the room, revealing everything I’ve seen for years but never thought to see again. The rocking chair in the far-left corner, where my grandmother used to hold me as a child. Behind the sleigh bed, a mural of Ben Bhraggie overlooking the tiny coastal town of Golspie, its blue-oiled bluffs sharp and distinct against a cloudy afternoon sky. The yellow-striped blanket that rests over the footboard, its hand-stitched threads looking worn with age and love.
A birthday gift from Mum the year before she died.
Choking back a sob, I reach for something solid to support my unsteady frame—and graze wood.
The wardrobe.
I step toward it, toward the mirror that Hugh covered, only to slam to a halt when an unexpected shadow flies from my periphery to the center of my vision. It hovers there, a black mark layered over the wardrobe’s filigreed wood.
No.
No, no, no!
Shoving down panic, I close my eyes gingerly. Don’t you dare think the worst. Dr. Matthews said that the woman . . . the woman who fell—hadn’t she seen dark streaks when her eyesight returned? Floaters, Matthews called them. An improvement, some might say, over seeing nothing at all.
A floater, if that’s what this is, will not be the end of me.
“Broken, but never defeated,” I whisper to the empty room.
Damien told me to harness the darkness, to own it with all my heart, and I do that now. My eyes remain closed as I trace the hills and valleys of the ornate wood before coming to the thick sheet of paper which covers the mirror.
I tear it free.
Opening my eyes, I first spy my feet. The black mark now rests atop the big toe of my right foot. Another joins as a slightly oblong shape that remains on my right peripheral, followed swiftly by a third that dances acro
ss the rug as I bring my gaze upward.
Disappointment is the thief of joy, and I smother it into nonexistence.
I step close to the mirror.
Brace my hands on the glass.
And see.
The slope of my calves, which are leanly muscled from hours spent walking Highgate Cemetery. The unmarred flesh of my inner thighs and the width of my hips, both soft and curved. And here we are, the beginning of the end. Pulse quickening, I look to my belly and stifle a small gasp. The skin there is textured from the fire, the blisters having formed thin layers of pink that crisscross atop one another. Not daring to tread any closer, I touch a finger to my waist.
My vision shimmers.
I don’t allow myself the luxury of turning away.
Instead, I absorb the yellow bruising over my sternum, from the fallen beam, as well as the constellation of nearly translucent burns that burst across my collarbone. With a deep breath that barely expands my chest, I look up, up, up, and feel my heartrate spike.
The woman staring back is not me.
And yet, somehow, she is more me than I’ve ever been.
The armor of black hair is gone, leaving behind a face that’s both foreign and familiar. Shiny blisters kiss my forehead and the right side of my jaw, turning my porcelain skin a muted peach, as if the fire from Buckingham Palace still burns furiously beneath my flesh. Exhaustion is a curse that’s turned me gaunt, pressing fine lines to either side of my mouth. And my eyes, a deep, effervescent blue that Mum always called violet, give entry to my soul—there, I see the most foreign feature of all: unmasked hope.
A woman brimming with life.
A tear escapes, and as I watch it descend in the mirror, I feel its charted course over my cheek. The floaters follow, clinging to my vision, a reminder that the darkness has been my closest friend for years, and that it’ll swallow me whole if I slow down long enough for it to catch me.
The sound of a car door closing snaps my attention to the window.
Damien.
His name is a rhythmless beat inside my veins as I throw open the wardrobe and grab clothes off the hangers. A black shirt that I draw down over my head, a pair of joggers that I tie off at the waist with a lopsided bow. Trainers forgotten, socks dismissed, I hurry into the empty corridor. My heart pounds with a burst of awareness—I can see, I can see—and then I’m tearing down the hall and flying down the stairs that I’ve taken a thousand times over the years.
But with every blink, floaters scatter across my vision like billiard balls springing toward waiting pockets. Nausea weakens my legs. An aching throb pulses to life in my temple. Slowing down, I press a hand to the wall outside of the drawing room and slam my eyes shut.
It’s not weakness.
It’s not even pain.
It’s complete and utter disorientation.
Another adjustment to make, that’s all. Just another step toward recovery.
I need to find Damien.
I need to see him.
Masculine voices lead me to the entrance hall where a blockade of shoulders cuts off all access points. Beyond them, I hear Hugh arguing and Gregory making one of his unintentional sly jokes and then, there: “I’m not here for you.”
My left elbow lands in Samuel’s gut and my right nudges Uri aside. Both men stare down at me with wide-eyed expressions but I shove my way through the horde of bodies without ever stopping.
“You have some real nerve showing up here,” Hugh snaps. “Not even your brother is—ow! Bloody hell, Rowan, that hurt.”
I intended it to.
Another step, then a semi-circle spin that angles me in front of Gregory, and there, standing in front of me is—
“Miss Carrigan,” greets Saxon Priest, “tell your guard dog to stand down or he’s about to find himself without fingers.”
Not Damien.
A quick glance over the entrance hall reveals that he isn’t here at all.
As if the blisters on my skin have turned to sieves, the giddy anticipation that carried me down two flights of stairs seeps away. I feel my shoulders fall and my pulse slow to a crawl, and it’s a miracle that I manage, “Welcome to my home, Mr. Priest.” I pause, running my eyes over the discoloration on his jumper—and do my best to ignore the trio of dark floaters that tag along for the ride. “From the ash on your shirt, I’m going to guess this isn’t a social call.”
His gaze—a strange, brilliant green—narrows. A rare display of surprise, I think. Did he really expect me to throw him out onto his arse? If he’s found us here, that means Damien showed him the way or at least pointed him in the right direction.
Saxon Priest is not my enemy.
“You’re not blind,” he says, the words coming low and curious.
I raise a brow. “And you’re more observant than I ever gave you credit for.”
His mouth twitches from a straight line into something that barely qualifies for a smile. Then, with a hard glance at the men behind me, he confirms, “I’m here for Benji Lotts.”
“But not Alfie Barker?”
“He’s the trade-off. We’ll get Benji but you’ll keep Barker.”
Hugh shoves himself forward, nearly knocking Samuel out of the way. “You can’t just take either one of them,” he growls. With his shoulders pressed back, he jams a finger into Saxon’s chest. “We stole them from you—the both of them. And if you aren’t careful, Priest, you’re about to find yourself locked away too.”
I fully expect Saxon—the man who murdered so many of us without remorse—to break Hugh’s fingers, as promised. But he only stands there, like a brick wall that breathes, and lowers his inscrutable green eyes to Coney’s face. A beat passes. Hugh balls his hands into fists at his side.
Saxon simply sidesteps him, as easily he would to a toddler having a tantrum. “Show me the way, would you, Miss Carrigan?”
A hysterical laugh bubbles to life inside my chest, and it’s all I can do to tell Hugh to back off as I brush past him and lead Saxon Priest toward the main flight of stairs.
Will there ever be a day when Damien and his brothers don’t catch me off guard? Guy let me go free from the Palace when he absolutely shouldn’t have. Saxon didn’t break Hugh’s fingers just now when he deserved it. And Damien . . .
“Is your brother all right?”
The question escapes before I can snatch it back, and Saxon’s dark head jerks in my direction. Layered over his right eye is a floater, and I give a subtle shake of my head, hoping to send it scattering. When the mark barely moves, I beat back a sigh and grasp gratitude with both hands.
I’m alive. I’m breathing. I can see.
If Saxon Priest thinks anything of the random tic, he doesn’t say so. Instead, he merely lifts his gaze to the stairwell and takes the steps two at a time. “Would you care if I said he’s not?”
Yes.
God help me, but I do.
“He said that he had things to take care of,” I murmur, after nearly missing the next rung when a shadow streaks past my vision, “and I’m going to guess, based on the ash on your shirt, that one of those errands had him meeting you at The Bell & Hand. He sent you to grab Lotts, didn’t he?”
“You’re perceptive.”
“I try to read between the lines and it helps when the lines are visible.”
Coming to the loft’s landing, I motion for Saxon to step behind me, so that I can access the locked door. As a child, my grandmother kept this space as a play area for me, the same as she’d had it for Mum. I’m not sure she would approve of its use today. Two men shut away, one of whom who tried to kill the queen. Meanwhile, the man whose girlfriend—wife? I’m not even sure—did kill the king stands at my back.
No, I don’t think my grandmother would approve at all.
When I reach out to input the security code, something compels me to look back at Damien’s older brother. His eyes are hard like emeralds and the scar in his upper lip lends him a perpetual snarl that should have me recoiling. But I’
ve never been one to cower from trouble, and I’m pretty sure that I can give Saxon Priest a run for his money on the scarred front.
Society dictates beauty, but what society never acknowledges is that the most beautiful amongst us are often the ugliest within.
He was dead, Damien told me, in his heart, in his goddamned soul.
Staring at Saxon now, I can see how that might have been true. And probably still is true, in many ways. Here goes nothing. Lifting my chin, I make a point to hold his gaze. “I’m aware that you didn’t kill the king.”
A muscle in his jaw flickers.
“And,” I continue, picking my words carefully, “I’m aware that Isla Quinn is the one who actually pulled the trig—”
My back hits the wall with jarring force.
“You won’t get within a fucking mile of her, do you hear me?” Saxon thrusts his face close to mine, his forearm locking across my breastbone. “I’ll rip your heart out first.”
Thud-thud. Thud-thud. Thud-thud.
Madness.
Damien was wrong.
Isla Quinn may have made this man whole, but she hasn’t made him human. Not completely. And I’m glad for it. Because Saxon Priest is still the man who slaughtered mine at The Octagon and I’m still the woman who led an attack on the Palace, all with the intention of ending the Priest brothers for good. The day we become friends will probably be the day the world ends.
“I want to apologize,” I tell him, my arms hanging loosely at my sides, “for what I’ve done.”
His feral expression shutters.
Having second thoughts about snapping my neck?
Biting back the caustic remark, I push onward. “Your brother said that it’s insincere to apologize for something you once believed in. I agree with the logic, with him, but I’m going to apologize anyway—for any fear you faced, for the hurt I caused. But, mostly, I’m sorry that it’s because of me that you were forced to choose between Isla and your brothers.”
Stilted silence envelops the landing, and I’m distinctively aware that though I hear air rushing past my lips, Saxon appears unmoved. His breathing, his coloring, are as if we’ve been discussing nothing more controversial than the weather. The man has all the emotional dexterity of an iceberg.