by Maria Luis
“I choose you, Damien Godwin.” Her smile is slow and sweet and so fucking beautiful that I feel it like a fist clamping tight around my heart. “I choose you today,” she says, sitting up to help me ditch my trousers, “and I choose you tomorrow, and I choose you for all the days that come after.”
Her vow is all I need to settle myself between her legs, bring my mouth down on hers, and thrust deep inside her.
We groan together.
Letting my head hang over hers, I move my hips in a slow and easy rhythm that drives her chin north as a breathy whimper crosses her lips. “I wanted to live,” I rasp, fisting my hand above her head as I hold her gaze, “but never could I have predicted you.”
“Damien—”
“I wanted happiness and you drove away the darkness.”
With every forward drive, I angle my cock to glide against her clit. She cries out beneath me, her breasts brushing my bare chest, her lids fluttering shut at the sensation of me bare within her. Intent on fanning the flames that have turned her skin a rosy pink, I tilt my hips upward and thrust, hard.
Her nails claw ruthlessly down my spine.
Then she wraps a leg around my waist, securing me to her, and I fall even deeper.
I set the pace to the rhythm of her moans. With every rasped pant that leaves her, I grit my teeth and plunge forward like I’ll never have her again. And when she sinks her nails into my ass, her lips parting on my name, I slow it all down to a tortuous, sensual grind. I make her writhe beneath me and I make her cry out, and she is so fucking beautiful that it almost hurts to look at her. Only I do, letting my gaze mark the brightness in her gaze and the way she bites down on her lower lip to keep from screaming.
This woman owns me, heart and soul.
“Please,” she begs, bowing her back and raking her foot down the length of my left calf, “give me another wish.”
I shield her body with my own. “Tell me.”
Her violet eyes are soft and hopeful and so damned perceptive that I feel stripped down. “Never let me go,” she whispers, “please just never let me go.”
“Love is carnage.” The words are rasped against her lips but felt to the depth of my marrow. “Love is ruin. And I’m yours through the wreckage.”
She gasps, nails digging into my sides, and I feel her tighten around my cock.
As I promised, I don’t let go.
I hold her as she comes with a cry, and I drive in deep, head thrown back, as my own orgasm tears through me. I hold her as I draw her limp body over mine, the sunshine dancing across our naked skin. And I hold her as I bring my mouth to her ear and kiss the hollow of her throat.
Her fingers ease over Odin’s raven with soft reverence. Then, quietly, “I love you forevermore.”
I meet her gaze while I catch her wrist.
I give her a smile, one that’s true and pure, when I press a kiss to the center of her palm.
And then I roll myself back on top of her, forehead to forehead, heart to heart, and I give her all of my soul: “I love you without mercy, Rowena, and I’ll never let you go.”
52
Damien
“We strike the day after tomorrow.”
Stew spills over the side of my bowl when Guy drops into the chair opposite mine, his elbows landing hard on Holly Village’s kitchen table. Cursing under my breath, I grab a paper napkin and run it over my laptop keyboard. Shoving the computer out of the way, before my brother can do more damage, I scrape together the strength to force the words from my tongue: “Strike what the day after tomorrow?”
“Westminster.”
With the paper napkin still in hand, I jerk my gaze up to meet my brother’s. The look on his face tells me he isn’t taking the piss. Jesus. “You’ve lost your goddamned mind. Do you have any idea what they’ll do to me if I walk into the Commons?”
“String you up by your bollocks, no doubt.”
Shoulders tensing, I glance over to find Saxon hovering in the doorway. With his arms crossed over his chest, and his shoulder propped up against the frame, his hard gaze never wavers from Guy when he adds, gruffly, “I told him it was a shit idea but here we are, petit frére.”
Fucking hell.
Scrubbing my hands over my face, I blow out a heavy breath and shove the stew away. Beneath the table, my leg is a jittery mess that jumps and twitches with absolutely no provocation. Matthews did his best but I won’t be scaling roofs anytime soon. It’s been a week since I was gunned down in the Bascule Chambers and I’m lucky if I can jog up the stairs without breaking into a clammy sweat. Rowena’s taken to tagging along for my new nightly ritual, her lips my reward for every successful pass that I make up and down the old servant’s stairwell—but still.
“The last time I walked into Westminster, I ended up with a bounty on my head.” I grit my teeth. “Eight months, brother. Almost eight fucking months of house arrest and I’m no better off now than I was then. So, if I don’t seem enthusiastic about tossing my ass into the ring for round number two then—”
“We didn’t have the leverage eight months ago that we do now.”
“Leverage?” I jab a finger toward the abandoned laptop. “I’ve just spent the last ten bloody hours backtracking through Marcus-fucking-Guthram’s entire online blueprint. The whole goddamn city is searching for London’s favorite police commissioner and you—”
“The bodies are gone,” he counters, his voice low and curt, “and the place has been scrubbed. No Guthrams. No Coney. No Barker. Even if the Met is somehow tipped off to check the Bascule Chambers, they’ll have no reason to pin it back on us.”
I shake my head. “I’m the king of suicide missions, but this is . . .”
“Genius.”
Genius is spending weeks at my desk, corroborating on different reports and determining the right angle to dismantling a person before they even know that they’re being hunted. This is just madness. “We all know that I want Carrigan’s head on a goddamned platter,” I mutter, resting my weight on my fists as I push up from the table, “but I won’t have anyone else dead because of me. Enough is enough.”
Samuel’s body was retrieved from the chambers and laid to rest at Highgate Cemetery two nights past. He had no family that Rowena or I could find—no one but the people in this house—but that doesn’t make his death any easier to swallow. He didn’t deserve what Hugh Coney did to him, and the same goes for Alfie Barker, who may have tried to kill the queen but his two little girls . . .
I squeeze my eyes shut.
They do not deserve to grow up fatherless because I made their old man a pawn in my quest for freedom. The guilt of that decision . . . the ramifications of making that judgment call will haunt me. And my conscience—once unburdened by all things even remotely emotional—can’t handle the possibility of another person dying just to see my wrists unshackled.
It’s a line that I won’t cross. Not again.
I’m halfway to the door when Guy’s cool baritone hits my back: “There are six-hundred-and-fifty seats in the Commons, and at least three-hundred are known anti-loyalists.”
The soles of my boots grow bloody roots as I slam to a stop.
Slowly, I look back at him—only to find him unmoved from the table. “You want . . .” Mouth dry, I reach a hand for my trousers’ pocket. Remember belatedly that my last pack of cigarettes went down in a blazing flame of glory along with the rest of me beneath Tower Bridge. “You want to stage a coup?”
Hands pressing flat on the table, Guy straightens to his full height. “You’re not wrong—taking out Edward Carrigan is a suicide mission that’ll get us all killed.”
“Then what are you—”
“We need him ruined. Publicly. Politically.” Exhaustion paints shadows under my brother’s eyes and tension brackets his mouth, but his movements are smooth and precise as he rounds the head of the table. “What do you think those three-hundred anti-loyalists are going to do when they realize that their PM has been snatching their friends
and family off the street?”
Awareness prickles my skin. “The patients from Broadmoor . . . they’re your leverage?”
“Caren Fitz said he’d speak.”
My gaze goes to Saxon, who’s yet to move a muscle from his post at the door. “You already spoke with him?”
With a small, decisive dip of his head, Saxon passes a palm over his jaw. “We took an oath to protect the Crown, but we can’t just . . . Christ, we spent ten years serving anti-loyalists at the pub. And The Bell & Hand may be gone but we know—we know that only a tiny fraction of those people ever made a move on the king. Most of them woke up and got pissed and went back to their homes. Carrigan doesn’t deserve to walk free after what he’s done to them.”
I narrow my eyes on him. “You think Isla’s parents might still be out there?”
“No.” His scarred knuckles whiten where he grips his elbows. “No, her parents are dead. Long buried.”
He’s hiding something.
But when it comes to his relationship with Isla Quinn, it seems better to fake ignorance and carry on than pry for information. Whatever secrets my brother carries about Isla’s parents, nothing they’ve done can be worse than killing the king. And Isla already unlocked that particular lifetime achievement award.
Ignoring the thudding pulse of my thigh, I turn back to Guy with a grimace. “You tell the world that the prime minister imprisoned innocent people and the world will come for blood. Chaos. Revolution. It’ll be a plaster you can’t ever stick back on, and we’ll be locked and loaded in the middle of it all.”
He doesn’t answer, not right away.
Instead, his fingers skim over my open laptop. The expression on his face is inscrutable but the way his throat works tells me that whatever his thoughts are, they’re lodged somewhere in the past. Paris, maybe. The tiny old flat in Whitechapel where we were born and raised. Pa’s murder.
“There are three things we know,” he finally says, using one finger to shut the laptop with a near-silent click, “and three things that we don’t. We know that Carrigan was waiting for you at Westminster and we know that he’s responsible for the death of Rowena’s mum, along with what happened at Broadmoor with the anti-loyalists.”
My throat is dry when I ask, “And the things we don’t know?”
“His connection to Ian Coney. The bargain he offered Robert Guthram. And the hand he played on the night of the fire at Buckingham Palace.” Guy leans against the table, one booted foot hiking up to rest on my abandoned chair. “But the first three are enough to nail his ass to the—”
“Four,” I cut in.
Saxon’s hard voice comes from behind: “For which side?”
“Clarke.” The name falls from me strangled and raw, even as I hold Guy’s gaze. “He told the queen that Carrigan plans to see her dethroned on the grounds of her being mentally unfit to rule, remember?”
Blue eyes study me with laser-focused intensity. Then, “And you said that I’m the one who’s lost my bloody mind. Half of Parliament wants her dead. Or did you forget that part?”
“And the other half wants her anointed like some god who can do no wrong.” I let out a soft, dark laugh. “You want chaos and revolution, brother? Then long live the fucking queen.”
53
Rowena
“You want Margaret to speak to the MPs?”
Damien sits on the edge of our bed. His shirt is gone, exposing his still-bruised clavicle and all the ridged muscles that ripple under the raven and the skull. With his hands propped behind him and his dark hair falling messily over his forehead, he appears more like a sullen pagan god come to collect the sacrifices owed to him than a mere mortal who was only just resurrected from the dead. Especially as I sit on the floor between his spread legs, my hands moving carefully over the stiff muscles of his thigh.
Lips peeling back with a hiss when I hit a tender spot, he sits up to smooth a calloused hand over the crown of my head. Then, voice low and hoarse, he answers, “We’re running out of options if we want . . .”
I tilt my head back to meet his gaze. “If we want what?”
“Your father in chains.”
It’s been years since I’ve thought of Edward Carrigan without tasting dread on the tip of my tongue. Maybe I would have felt a pang of remorse before Silas Hanover told me the truth about Mum and the fire in Golspie. Maybe, even a month ago, I would have made a scrambled, last-ditch effort to change Damien’s mind and save the man who brought me into this world.
But Father made his bed a long time ago, and with it, he buried all my love for him.
“Chains?” I ask. “You don’t want him dead?”
“Always.” A thread of surprise winds through me when he continues roughly, “I want him dead for me but mostly I want him dead for you.”
“Damien—”
“He chipped away at your fucking soul, Rowena.” His fingers find my chin, his thumb gently brushing over my lips. “He stripped you of hope. Happiness. Your goddamned life. He hurt you, and for that I’d kill him a thousand times over.”
Emotion lodges like a boulder in my throat.
This man . . . Shifting onto my knees, I frame Damien’s face and pull him down for a kiss. It’s soft, a communion of love. His palms find my nape, and a throaty groan escapes him when he touches his forehead to mine. “He deserves no better than death for what he’s done.”
I lick my lips. “But?”
“But I’d rather spend the next fifty years dancing with you in the sunshine than being locked away in the shadows.” With a barely-there caress, he kisses my forehead. “If we back him into a corner, then we have a chance to finally move forward without needing to look over our shoulders all the time.”
“And Margaret is the key?”
He leans back with a pained grunt, his eyes briefly slamming shut as he presses the heel of his hand into his wounded thigh. Sympathy spears me as I watch him push to his feet and take a hesitant step toward the wardrobe. When he pauses halfway, his features twisting with fatigue and unease, I give him the same reassurance that he gave me just days ago: “Every scar you bear is a battle fought and won.”
“Jesus, it hurts,” I hear him breathe, just before he swings his gaze back to meet mine. Vulnerable. Humbled. This is the side of the Mad Priest shown to no one but me, and I treasure him all the more for allowing me the chance to scale his fortressed walls and guard the gates to his heart. “When I’m finally free,” he adds, his jaw cinched tight, “I’m going to take you far away from all of this. No more pain. No more wondering when the other shoe will drop. We deserve more than a life spent waiting to die, and we’ll get nothing less than that in this goddamn city.”
London has been my home for more than twenty years. I’ve inhaled its darkness and expelled none of its light, latching onto tiny moments of happiness that came my way as if they were all I’d ever be allowed. And I would leave it all behind—today, tomorrow, the moment he asked it of me—if I thought we’d get far enough before someone inevitably spotted Damien and turned him in to the authorities.
“I’d rather dance in the pits of hell with you than go back to a life without you in it.” Using the bed as leverage to stand, I offer him a soft smile over my shoulder. “I love you, you know.”
Monster.
Villain.
The god who dons the crown of a hero for me alone.
On swift steps that I know will take their toll on him later, Damien catches me around the waist and crushes his mouth down over mine. He devours me, owns me. When my head falls back, he follows without missing a beat, nipping my bottom lip before claiming my mouth with a possessive sweep of his tongue. A moan vibrates in my chest. I hold onto him, clutching his muscled arms. Then I lift onto my toes to battle his dominance with a will of my own. Strong fingers press into my flesh like he’s physically torn between tossing me down on the mattress and throwing me over one shoulder to steal me away from London for good.
In the end, he tears his mouth a
way with a strangled grunt, his flame-blue eyes glittering with primitive hunger and something . . . sweet, tender. He is both the warrior who murdered all to find me at Broadmoor Hospital and the man who begged me to touch him when he thought that he’d never feel me again.
“I love you without mercy, Rowena Carrigan,” he growls, lifting each finger from my skin with purposeful intent before stepping back, “and I want nothing more than to bury myself inside you and forget the world exists. Right now, though—”
“We need Margaret.”
His nod is sharp. “Bring me to her.”
We find Mags in the greenhouse.
With dirt dusting her knees and an assemblage of potted flowers scattered around her, she looks like nothing like a queen and every bit the girl that I met at Dunrobin Castle years ago. Spotting us, she strips off her gloves and throws them down beside her. “I asked Gregory for one orchid and I’m pretty sure he cleared out every nursery in London.”
That’s Gregory, all right—always going above and beyond.
As if remembering all too well when Gregory shoved him from the Palace’s roof, Damien brushes his hand over the small of my back. “I didn’t realize that you garden, Your Majesty.”
Margaret sits back on her heels and balances her hands on her upper thighs. “I kill things, Priest. Everything I touch, everything I’ve ever loved, will inevitably die by my hand.”
Like Clarke.
Empathy is a vice-like grip around my heart, and Damien must sense the tension radiating from me because the hand on my lower spine smooths up and down over the scars from Buckingham Palace. There’s no pain, not anymore, and I find sanctuary in the caress.
“And the orchids?” he asks the queen.
“Sometimes I like to pretend that I’m not a curse to all living things.”
Bloody hell. “Mags, you’re not—”
She cuts me off with a small jerk of her chin. Then, to Damien, she says, “I’m assuming you’re here because you want help swaying over the MPs.”