Road To Fire (Broken Crown Trilogy #1) - Maria Luis Page 0,11

whisky hits the glass with a splash, and as I bring it to my lips, I watch Isla Quinn storm out the front door in a flurry of strawberry-blond waves and tailored black clothes.

I lost my soul in a secret room in St. James’s Palace. No, a little voice says in my head, it was destroyed. Destroyed by a king who used a child to keep a grown man in place. I never got it back, not then, not when Pa was discovered dead on Marlborough Road, not when Jayme Paul, my father’s second, shepherded my brothers and my mum and I out of the country and into Paris, where we lived with next to nothing for years.

But sometimes . . . sometimes I still find it in myself to do the right thing, the noble thing.

It would have been all too easy to use Isla’s anger to my advantage.

Even easier to use her as prey to lure in all the bastards on the hunt for Queen Margaret. A pretty girl like Isla? They’d all come running, each and every last one of them.

A visual of glittering blue eyes storms my brain.

Some of us gave up our souls long ago, but others . . . Isla—not everyone is a lost cause. Not everyone is lost, permanently.

“To the heroes,” I mutter, tossing back the rest of the Lagavulin like it’s nothing more than a gin and tonic, and welcoming the fiery burn as I swallow, “and to the villains.”

And to me.

A man lost to duty.

To the Crown.

And to the death of every soul who’s tried to change the direction of fate.

God save the queen.

4

Isla

“Well?” my younger sister demands as soon as the front door to our flat closes behind her. “What’s the verdict?”

Absolutely pitiful.

Five hours after Saxon Priest shut me down, I force the brittleness from my expression just as Josie cuts the corner into our kitchenette and drops her ratty school bag onto the table. With a sniff of the heavily scented air, she leans around me to check out the curry I’m whipping together. All it takes is one look at the bubbling sauce for her to bump me out of the way and take over stirring.

Her blue eyes slide toward me with impatience. “Are you going to spill or what?”

For as long as I live, I’ll never forget a nine-year-old Josie leaping from the treehouse Dad built for her and Peter, back in York. She’d jumped because Peter had pulled the same daredevil stunt, first, only to fracture his ankle, snap his tibia, and be relegated to crutches for months on end. He’d moaned about the pain all night and groaned about his limited mobility all day. That is, until Josie followed suit, flying from the treehouse with all the reckless abandon of a baby bird tumbling from its nest.

Amidst her crying, I’d demanded to know why she’d been so insane as to risk her own neck. Her only answer was that Peter had looked so dejected, always propped up on his crutches and hobbling from room to room. She’d wanted him to know that she understood his need to fly.

Josie at nearly seventeen is no better than her at nine with her hot-pink leg cast and gap-toothed smile. She still sees too much, senses far more than she should, and has the annoyingly persistent habit of pushing until I crack.

“Great news!” I squeeze her arm in a gesture that I hope she’ll interpret as genuine excitement. The frown that immediately mars her face suggests otherwise. Bollocks. Hastily, I add, “They requested a second interview.”

Liar.

I am. Have been for years now.

I tell myself that I have no choice if I want to keep Josie and Peter safe, but sometimes I wonder who I’m fooling. Myself? The memory of my dead parents, who I’ve already failed countless times in the last five years?

The familiar sting of regret sits like a brick in my stomach.

One day soon, Peter will move out of our small Stepney Green flat, and my sister will follow not long after, and I can’t even think about it all without my pulse erratically skipping a beat. But it doesn’t matter how deep fear burrows under my skin when I think about us not being under the same roof every night. And it doesn’t matter that the last time we were separated, Mum and Dad died. To go through that again . . .

Stop. You have to stop.

“Isla?”

At Josie’s concerned prompting, I swallow, thickly, and turn toward