Road To Fire (Broken Crown Trilogy #1) - Maria Luis Page 0,21

me.”

Saxon doesn’t give me the satisfaction of looking the least bit guilty. He twirls my purse between his fingers, murmuring, “Now pickpocketing I have experience with,” and promptly tosses the purse into the car. “It’ll go to your flat, with or without you.”

Without waiting for a response, he slips into the front seat and slams the door closed.

Self-righteousness wars with frustration as I turn to look at St. James’s Park. The likelihood of Peter already being back home is greater than the alternative. I know that. In my heart, I feel that he’s safe.

Wouldn’t I know—wouldn’t my soul know—if he were gone, just as I’d felt with Mum and Dad? I’ll never know the exact moment they died, but I’d felt their loss all the same. Like a candle being snuffed out while basking in the sun, I hadn’t needed their light, their guidance, but their absence struck me down anyway.

And the terror of losing them has yet to fade.

It stirs my paranoia.

It steals my sleep when I rise from bed at night to make sure Josie is beside me before checking on Peter in the other room.

I’m going crazy.

My palms are caked with dirt and gravel, but I drag my fingers through my hair anyway, in a pitiful effort to abate the anxiety.

Peter is okay.

He won’t be okay when I give him an earful at home, but—

Saxon honks the horn and the sound nearly has me flying to the ground for cover.

The entire night is clearly catching up to me.

With slow, measured steps, I round the car’s bonnet and eye the man in the driver’s seat. He sits like a panther in wait, his wrist resting nonchalantly on the steering wheel, but the passing of another vehicle, coming from the opposite direction, illuminates his face. What I see there doesn’t do anything to alleviate the heavy weight in my stomach.

Saxon Priest may have saved me tonight, but as I open the passenger’s side door, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m entering the killer’s lair.

I suppose that puts us on equal footing.

He guns the accelerator at the same time that I lock the seatbelt into place, my purse returned to my coat pocket. I force myself to draw in a steadying breath.

The ride is anything but pleasant.

Saxon drives like a madman, like a savage, winding us in and out of lanes. With his hood down and his sleeves rolled up, he looks less like a businessman and more like someone who has lived and breathed the streets of London for his entire life.

Not once does he ask me for my address.

We drive past Trafalgar Square and over Blackfriars Bridge, past the Custom House overlooking the Thames and then, soon after, the Jack the Ripper Museum, until finally he’s pulling in front of my flat on Alderney Road.

The hum of the engine descends into silence.

I let out a slow exhale that tightens my chest. “Well, this is it. I suppose I should thank you again for not kidnapping me—”

“Today, you told me that you had a proposition to make.”

My head snaps to the right, so that he’s all I see. And my heart . . . suddenly, the chill is rapidly thawing as hope eternal springs to life. “I . . . Yes, I did. I do.”

He’s stillness personified. No quirk of his lips. No drumming of his fingers on the steering wheel. Even when we tumbled into the grass earlier, his breathing never escalated from the exertion, and it doesn’t now, either. But he watches me—with that same, steady expression that he wore when he flipped me over onto my back, the one that suggested I was an inconvenience—and I find my knees clenching together as I wait him out.

What it would take to breathe fire into a man like Saxon Priest, I doubt the world will ever know.

“You won’t work at The Bell & Hand,” he says, his voice deep and arrogant, as though he knows my back is up against the wall and I have little in the way of options, “but I could use you.”

A shiver snakes down my spine and my dirt-encrusted fingers knit together in my lap. And a visual, the kind that’s best not to imagine while in the midst of company, slips to the forefront of my mind and won’t let go.

Big hands traveling up my naked back, pushing me down to my knees. A dark, sinister voice whispering in my ear just before my hair is wrapped in a possessive fist