by Maria Luis
Needing to occupy my hands, I straighten the thin sheet that’s been pulled up to his waist. “He needed the bounty off his head. It went . . .” Stiffening my jaw against emotion, I expel the awful truth: “We had a solid plan, and it went wrong, so horribly fucking wrong.”
“You care about him.”
There’s no judgment in her voice, nor even the slightest hint of disdain, just a naked curiosity that speaks volumes—not that I can blame her. After a lifetime of watching me avoid the opposite sex at all costs, her curiosity is well-warranted.
Falling in love with the most hated man in England was never the plan.
“I’d chase him to the ends of the earth,” I admit, finally raising my gaze to meets hers. See me, I ache to whisper, see him. “He’s human, Mags. He’s good and honest, like you. He’s dangerous and complex, like me. He’s flesh and blood—a man, not a god—and this bounty—”
“He’s dying.”
Plucking the antidote from my pocket to set it down on Sara’s desk, I growl, “He’s alive.”
“I mean that he’s dying because of me.”
When I only stare at her, she roughly pushes her hair back behind one ear. “A coward accepts fidelity from all and offers none in return. A coward,” she grits out, “allows her allies to fall, one by one, while she retreats to watch it all unravel at her feet. I am a queen, Rowan, and my word is law, but Damien and his brothers knew better than to come to me, or their king, to ask that we pardon him.”
“What are you—”
“I would have said no.” Holding my gaze, she repeats the words that snatch all the oxygen from the room: “I would have said no because, until a month ago, the Priests were faceless people whose lives catered to ensuring that mine continued. All these months and they said nothing about Damien. This morning, I found out about the imprisoned anti-loyalists from Hamish, after they’d already been returned to their families. I’m the queen, and it’ll be over my dead body before I let Holyrood shoulder all the responsibility when I could make a difference with a snap of my fingers.”
It’s a pretty speech, but it doesn’t change one, single fact: “You were wrong to assume that I would ever side with my father over you, that I would toss aside our friendship for a man who brutalized me.”
She fists the metal bed railing, as if needing the support to remain standing. “Sorry isn’t enough,” she breathes, visibly swallowing. “It’s not enough to atone for how I didn’t confide in you about Holyrood and it’s definitely not enough for the way that I didn’t trust you when I absolutely should have. And that . . . those decisions will haunt me, Rowan, and I’ve no right to ask for your forgiveness.”
Before I can respond, the door swings open in a rush, nearly bouncing off the wall as Sara and Dr. Matthews rush inside. Almost in unison, they send a startled glance to Margaret before charging forward like stampeding bulls to shoulder me out of the way.
Picking up the bottle that Hastings sold to me, Dr. Matthews holds it against the light. “Is this it? Saxon said that—”
“There’s enough for two doses,” I cut in, “in case one isn’t enough. The man that I . . . He said that when Damien wakes, he might—” Despise me. Unable to form the words out loud, without taking a dagger to my own heart, I manage a weak smile. “You’ll need to monitor him. The side-effects of the antidote might prove worse than the poison itself.”
“I’ve known him since birth, Miss Carrigan—there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him.”
“Is this yours?”
Turning at the sound of Sara’s voice, I see her holding up the silver chain that Margaret brought with her. “No,” I say with a shake of my head, “it’s—”
“I overheard Saxon mention that it’s Damien’s,” Mags tells me, backing up to the door. “He left it in Oxford, and I thought . . . Well, I thought, maybe, it might be a good luck charm.” She tilts her chin toward the bed, indicating that she means Damien. “Something familiar to have nearby.”
“Margaret—”
“I hope you’ll have the chance to chase him to the ends of the earth, Rowan,” she tells me, her blue eyes bright with grief, “today, tomorrow, forevermore. You deserve nothing less than a man who would sacrifice all of himself so that you can keep all of you.”
48
Damien
Pain stalks me through the darkness.
Muscles spasming, I dig in my heels as my back bows upward—but there’s no relief, no escape, and the nightmare continues on.
I run, and I’m caught.
I hide, and I’m found.
I pray for peace and stumble into only more agony.
Pressure clamps a vice-like grip around my throat. The weight of it, the fucking heat of it. I’m dead. No, I’m dying. Desperate, I seek freedom, hands grasping, body jackknifing. I scrape at flesh, at the unrelenting pressure suffocating me, and feel only more pain when the metallic scent of blood permeates the air, rife under my nose.
“Grafton, help me out over here.”
Fire scorches my veins, and I twist and twist and twist, digging trembling fingers into the ground to avoid being swallowed by the abyss—but the earth beneath me is quicksand. I’m sinking, drifting.
Gone.
Gone.
Gone.
“Fuck! His heart rate is spiking.”
Agony drags me down. Exhaustion slows my pulse to a crawl.
The nightmare traps me, drowns me, owning every piece of my soul until I’m gasping for air and clawing frantically at the heaviness leveraged against my throat. Then softness grazes my skin, and I cling to it with all that I am.
“I’m here and you are not alone.”
That voice.
That strength.
I reach for her, stretching my arms through the oppressive darkness to find her. Rowena! Rowena, love, stay with me. Only, the quicksand gives way and then I’m gone again—the pain, the fire, the hope, all of it.
Gone.
Gone.
Gone.
49
Damien
A monitor beeps somewhere to my left and IV tubes cross neatly over my body—and I feel it all, the cool plastic against my forearms and the distinct pressure of a nasal cannula. Greedily, I lift my head to scan the length of my body that’s been tucked beneath a thin, white sheet.
I wriggle my toes.
And the sheet moves.
I press my fingers flat.
And the soft pad beneath me depresses.
Hysterical laughter scrapes my raw throat as I clench and unfurl my stiff fingers, a rhythmic gesture that drags my knuckles against the textured sheet that’s warm from my skin. Warm, as if I’m not . . . as if I wasn’t—
Shot.
Paralyzed.
Dead.
With a surge of panic, I throw off the sheet to fumble with the hospital gown, yanking at the fabric to see if the poison—
The door slams open and then an all too familiar voice barks, “Don’t you bloody move, Godwin.”
With my body laid out flat, and facing a blank wall, there’s no opportunity to turn around and watch Matthews approach. But I hear his even footsteps against the tile floor, followed swiftly by two other sets, the first tread heavier, the second almost deathly silent.
Guy and Saxon.
They’re here, in this room.
This is not a dream.
Behind my ribcage, my heartbeat is a heavy drum that echoes wildly in my ears. I remember nothing after the Bascule Chambers. Only that I fell, and Rowena tried to pull me to safety. My last memory is clamoring for the sound of her voice while everything around me faded to a cold, damning emptiness.
I’m here and you are not alone.
She gave me those words, she kept her promise, and now—
“We’ve been through this before, haven’t we, lad?”
My gaze snaps away from the ceiling to Matthews’s face. He looks the same as he always has—white hair cropped short; forehead creased as he stares down at me wit
h clinical appraisal like I’m some medical experiment gone wrong—but it’s the stark relief in his dark eyes that breaks my composure.
I’m not dead.
Fucking hell, I’m not dead.
Emotion floods my veins and a tortured sound rises in my throat. This is a second chance. No, a goddamned third. Every day I feared would be my last. Every night, when all of Holyrood slept, I stalked the halls of the Palace, too terrified to close my eyes and accept defeat.
What if I never woke?
What if I died without ever having lived?
And now this.
I’m breathing when I should already be buried.
I’m staring at a man whose face I’ve always known, and it’s not pity staring back at me but an unholy sense of triumph that curls his mouth. Victory. When Guy and Saxon settle on my left, both leaning their respective weights on the bed, I meet their gazes, first green then blue, and choke back a hoarse noise.
Not a dream but reality.
I’m alive.
Scraping my tongue along the roof of my mouth, I ask, “How?”
Only, the word starts and stalls on my tongue.
“What’s wrong with him?” Saxon growls, turning his hard gaze on Matthews. “You gave him the antidote. Two bloody doses, at that. He should be—”
“Like I said, we’ve been through this before”—solemn dark eyes remain fixed on my face—“haven’t we, lad?”
Oh, I’ve been here before.
Voiceless. Powerless. Weak.
My body a traitor that obeyed me not at all, no matter how hard I tried to bend it to my will. Last time, it took nearly five days for mobility to return and a week for my vocal cords to produce any sound at all. My limbs are responsive this time, at least, but I’ll be lucky if I—
Antidote.
He said antidote.
With no care for the IVs still attached to the back of my hand, I lock my fingers tight around Saxon’s forearm and wait only long enough for his gaze to return to me. Antidote? I demand soundlessly.
His dark brows knit together. “We should probably hold off on all that until Matthews can clear you for—”
“She wouldn’t let you die.”
Dragging in a sharp breath, I look to my oldest brother.
His fists move from the bed to the metal railing, which he grips so hard that veins visibly throb in his forearms. Shoulders rounded, mouth flat, he meets my stare. “I saw what you did in the Bascule Chambers. You were reckless going after her,” he utters, his voice low, “and you had to know that you were damned from the start.”
No, I’ve been damned since birth.
Chained.
Collared.
Saxon once told me that if I had to ask why he gave up everything for Isla Quinn then I wouldn’t understand. She made him human, he’d said. She made him want. And he was right—I hadn’t understood how he could allow anyone to come between him and Holyrood.
I understand now.
I would stand between her and the world, my body a shield wielded for her alone, because Rowena Carrigan is the only woman who’s ever brought me to my knees. I look at her and see traces of my soul. I look at her and see hope. Her courage is the fuel in my blood, her strength the steel in my bones. I came to Holly Village to kill her and lay here now as a man broken and shattered—but, in the end, a better man.
In her arms, I finally found mercy.
Guy is wrong. Saving Rowena—the phoenix who rose from the ashes, the she-wolf who sits on a throne all of her own, the woman who begged me to live—wasn’t reckless.
It was instinct forged by fire and a sacrifice born from love.
I would do it again, brother, I mouth, shaping the words carefully with a closed fist thumping twice against my heart. For her, I would do it all again.
Though his nostrils flare, he doesn’t have the chance to say anything else because Matthews flings back the thin sheet with a gruff, “To answer your question, Godwin, it was your Miss Carrigan who found the antidote.” He slips one hand under my right calf, where I was shot, and I fight back a hiss as he angles my leg upward to bend the knee. “I’ll admit to having my doubts but she’s cunning, that one. Resourceful. You could do much worse.”
Coming from Dr. Nathaniel Matthews, that’s high praise.
“You’ll live, thanks to her,” he goes on, poking and prodding at me like I’m a slab of salted meat being prepped for a meal. “It did take four days for the CL-152 to dilute completely from your system but she did it, Godwin. Bloody hell, she fucking did it. Even called me out for losing faith in you. Rightly so, I’d say. And from what I understand, she gave—”
“Don’t,” Saxon hisses.
Startled by my brother’s vehemence, I look from him to Matthews to Guy, then back again. Don’t what?
“He’ll find out,” grunts the doctor, barely lifting his eyes from his task. “You don’t think one of the blokes in this house won’t tell him eventually? Even the queen—”
Broken or not, I tear the nasal cannula free, ignoring the pinch of discomfort, and leverage myself up on the hospital bed. Matthews orders me to lay back down but I’m already gripping Saxon by the shirt.
His green eyes flare.
Four days has stripped almost all the pain from my body, and I’m sure a healthy dose of morphine has ensured that I’ll feel absolutely nothing for a few hours yet. But Matthews was right—I’ve been through this before. I’ve died and survived, came crashing down to hit rock bottom and crawled my way through each and every muddied trench, prepared to fight until the end.
My last breath has come and gone, a horrible twist of fate for all that would see me dead. And it’s with life trapped in my lungs that I scrape the bowels of my soul for the strength to rasp, “Don’t . . . hide it from me.”
Something fractures in my brother’s expression. “Don’t hide?” Saxon echoes, almost inaudibly. “Damien, you’ve told me nothing for months.”
Death suffers no prejudice.
It doesn’t understand love or hope, greed or evil. No, it comes for us all, and when it does, there’s no stopping the inevitable—but I tried. Whenever Matthews set down another bottle of pills before me, his dark eyes revealing not even the tiniest sliver of pity; whenever I reasoned with Guy, and failed, that I could hunt down Carrigan without dying or ending up imprisoned. Surviving became a mission that I undertook alone.
We are Godwins, and we’re born to serve the Crown.
Our own wants and needs are hidden under a wash of conspiracy and murder. Pa died for not solving Princess Evangeline’s assassination and we were exiled to Paris for no other reason than that we stood in the way of a man’s ambition. And even after we returned to England, already hardened by life, there was no joy to be found. Every Godwin has put the success of Holyrood first.
Until Saxon chose Isla.
Clutching the fabric of his shirt, I give him a small shake. “It was—” My dry throat closes and panic drives a fist through my chest. Easy, Godwin. Take it slow and take it easy. I try again. “You were m-my . . . my—”
A clipboard appears between me and Saxon, and I turn to see that it’s Guy holding it out for me. His expression remains inscrutable, that familiar mask of his already lowered into place.
“Write it down,” he grunts.
Taking the clipboard, I balance it against my thigh. Fumbling for the pen that Guy tucked under the metal trapping, my hand trembles as the ball tip touches the paper. I grit my teeth. Regrip the pen. Then allow the ink to bleed life across the page in a shaky scrawl that proves that while the poison might be gone from my body, its aftereffects are currently here to stay.
With little fanfare, I shove the clipboard at Saxon.
His gaze falls.
A beat passes and then yet another, and then his shoulders rise while his Adam’s apple bobs down the length of his throat. “You’re not . . . Christ, Damien, you’re not—”
His eyes squeeze shut, and he scrubs his hand over his scarred m
outh. Saxon has always been the one person who I’ve never been able to predict, or read, but as he stands before me now, I watch him visibly crack.
The clipboard clatters against the bed’s metal railing a second before he clasps the back of my neck to reel me in. We’re forehead to forehead, the way Pa once did to us as children. And like Pa, Saxon’s eyes glimmer an unholy green as he keeps me locked against him. “You’re not responsible for the pain I’ve felt,” he says roughly, “and it’s not on you to protect me from suffering any more than I already have. We’re brothers, Damien. Your pain is my own.”
IVs tangle with my forearm as I lift my left hand to clamp it down on his nape. Only, as I stare at him, with our foreheads still pressed together, I think of him not as he is now but as he was after the butcher took the knife to his face.
I cried when I saw him.
Not out of fear but from an unparalleled rage that I couldn’t control. Someone had hurt him, and I was powerless to do anything but watch shame and misery flicker over his young face. Saxon spent years covering his mouth whenever we stepped out in public—and I spent those same years slipping through the darkness to pummel anyone who dared look at him the wrong way.
The day he was scarred was the first time that I felt hate bloom in my heart for someone who wasn’t Mum, and instead of ripping out the emotion by the roots, I nourished it. Thrived on it. The boy genius with a heart of gold who was always destined to become the Mad Priest.
“Je t’aime, frére.”
The same words that I whispered to him after the butcher’s attack, and by the way his eyes widen, I know he recognizes their significance. When one bleeds, the other endures the same agony. Holyrood may have hardened us, but for the first time in years, Saxon wears his emotions on his sleeve. Squeezing the back of my neck, he rasps, “I love you, too, little brother.”