Road To Fire (Broken Crown Trilogy #1) - Maria Luis Page 0,24

or you fight against a tidal wave that you won’t survive.”

“And you?” he asks, so softly I nearly miss the question.

“What about me?”

Damien tips his head back, his gaze locked on my face. Unbidden, a memory from our youth pushes its way to the surface—the first time my younger brother spotted my scarred mouth. It was worse, then, bloody and horrifying, before the doctor did what he could. And since we were poor and ensconced in Paris, like criminals, the doctor we could afford couldn’t do much at all. At the sight of me, Damien burst into tears. He was young then, maybe eight to my ten, but was unable to smother his emotions and beat them into submission.

The boy genius with a heart of gold.

These days, he’s changing. Turning into someone I hardly recognize. Bitterness and anger bleed from him. Although I’ll never admit it out loud, keeping him here is starting to feel necessary to protect him from himself.

I lied to Isla tonight—if I knew my brothers needed me, I would give my own life for them. And I would do it, with no consideration of my own.

“What about me?” I prompt again.

He runs his palm over the back of his skull, ripping the cap off his head and tossing it on the desk. “Would you fight the tidal wave? If it meant freedom and peace of mind, would you do it?”

“No.”

“No?” he demands, never once tearing his gaze away from my face. “Just no? That’s it? You wouldn’t even try—”

The sound of fists pummeling a door jerks my head up, and cuts Damien off.

“Looks like the bastard finally drank his tea,” my brother mutters, turning back to the computer. His fingers fly across the keyboard and, seconds later, a projector lowers from the ceiling in the interrogation room. Against the opposite wall, a video that Damien—not Jude—captured earlier today begins to play.

Barker’s little girls running in the park, blond ponytails swinging as they hop from the swings to the seesaw to the sandpit. They look innocent, happy . . . free.

I move to the one-sided mirror, hands in the front pockets of my trousers, and watch the reel of emotions unravel across Barker’s face. The elation at seeing his daughters, followed swiftly by the shattering realization that we not only know exactly who he is, but have access to those he cares about most. Fury combats horror as he stumbles backward, his hands clapped over his mouth, the blood on his nose now dried and flaking.

“Tell me what you want!” he shouts, spinning on his heel as though he can find us hiding in the crevices of the empty room. “Tell me what you fuckin’ want!”

I press a finger to the intercom button to the left of the mirror. And then I give him the last ultimatum he’ll ever hear: “The names of your co-conspirators, Mr. Barker. All of them.”

I don’t need to bring up the obvious: no cooperation and his daughters will suffer the consequences. He knows what the exchange is, what it’s worth, and when he crashes to his knees on the floor, helpless in his grief, the montage of his daughters still playing out on the wall, I sift through my soul to find remorse.

The inner self-loathing of what I’ve become versus the boy I once was.

I find nothing.

Wordlessly, I turn to leave the room, only to find myself pausing at Damien’s side. “I used to think that I’d survive if only I could manage to ride the crest of the wave,” I tell him, my voice low. “Save the Crown, protect the status quo, do my job. But it doesn’t work like that—you know it just as well as I do. Holyrood is like quicksand, where one bad deed leads to sinking deeper, until everything that once made you you is destroyed.”

Damien remains silent, and I wrench the words from what’s left of my beating heart to drop them at his feet, humbling and raw. “I fought the wave, brother. I fought it and I lost.”

I don’t wait for his response.

Instead, I slip from the room and grab a pair of brass knuckles from the box outside the interrogation room.

Life in Holyrood—in this chaotic world that’s swallowed us all—is easier when you’ve accepted fate. Death comes for everyone.

It’s only a matter of how soon.

10

Isla

Twenty-four hours after my first meeting with Saxon Priest, déjà vu hits me like a boulder upside the head as I cross Fournier Street toward The Bell & Hand. The