Road To Fire (Broken Crown Trilogy #1) - Maria Luis Page 0,12
the cabinets before she can get a read on me. “We’ll see how it goes, yeah? I’d say that I’m more than equipped to handle a few plates.” To prove my point, I grab three from the shelf and make an exaggerated show of setting them neatly on the table after elbowing Josie’s bag to the floor. Lifting a brow, I brush my hands together in a job-well-done gesture and look to my sister. “What d’you say? Should I ask for a raise already?”
My poor attempt at humor barely earns me a smile before Josie rolls her eyes and returns to the curry. Her red hair, a shade that looks like gold bathed in sunlight, sweeps forward to hide her face. “You shouldn’t even be working at a pub,” she mutters, her shoulders hunched as she stirs vigorously, “you had a job. Your dream job. And then you quit.”
Except that I didn’t quit. My position was “terminated.”
While protesters disappeared without a trace and the king grew more irrational, I sought to rip back the velvet curtains and show my fellow Brits that the concept of a constitutional monarchy was dead in the water, if it had existed at all in the last twenty-five years since Princess Evangeline’s death. I took the job with the news network to destabilize the status quo. Get dirty. Get real. Make a difference.
And the network? So much evidence dumped in their laps and all they’d wanted was for me to piss off.
“The pay was stagnant,” I tell Josie, lying, once again, for the sake of keeping our family united. A team of three, for now, for always. I don’t want them to worry. Better they think that I looked at our finances—meager though they are—and determined that leaving the station wouldn’t further ruin us.
Josie’s stirring pauses. “Because working at The Bell & Hand will make you more?”
“It’ll be fine, I promise.”
She turns the hob off, her slim shoulders straightening as she slides the steaming pot onto the back burner. “Well, it’d be even more than fine if I took a gap year like Amanda and Bea.”
I smother a groan. “Jos, we’ve talked about this. You’re going to uni, just like I did, just like Peter is doing now.”
“Who says I even want to go?”
“Life isn’t always about doing what you want.” If it were, then I’d be in America, working some posh publicist job and reminding celebrities to wipe their arses before they walked the red carpet. But here I am—in London, in this hovel of a flat, having the same bloody argument with my sister that we’ve hashed out a million times over. “Go to uni. Get a good job.”
“Like you? Do you suppose your degree from Bristol will get you that raise at the pub?”
Grinding my teeth to the point of pain, I mutter, “When I went to uni, this blasted country hadn’t gone straight to hell yet.” Ripping open one of the cabinets, I grab three glasses off the shelf. “The little things that made life worth living are gone. They don’t exist. Which means, if you want any sort of life at all then you can forget about the gap year. We’re lucky the universities are still open.”
Because she’s sixteen and thinking short-term, my sister spins around, frustration etched into her delicate features. “You say no to everything! I can’t even—” She breaks off, drawing in a sharp inhalation. “Maybe if you stopped pushing us for the things that you think we want, then we wouldn’t feel the need to go behind your back. It’s not like we don’t know what happened.”
It’s not like we don’t know what happened.
My stomach freefalls and it’s a miracle I don’t drop the glasses on the floor. Sticking them on the table, I immediately grip the edge for stability. My legs feel weak. My head feels like it’s been shoved inside a water tank and I’m dreadfully low on oxygen.
How could they know? How could they know? About the king. About what I did. About the fury that lit my veins when I pulled the trigger.
Fury and resentment and a keen self-awareness that I was altering my life course forever.
I don’t regret it. Maybe that makes me cold-blooded. Maybe that means I’ve abandoned all morality—morality that I’ve always clung to during the hardest times of my life. Maybe that makes me as vile as King John.
Someone murdered Princess Evangeline and someone else murdered my parents and I murdered the king in return.