Road To Fire (Broken Crown Trilogy #1) - Maria Luis Page 0,81

It’s who I am.

And still, I’ve sat in this damn room for close to an hour. Deliberating. Seesawing. Battling indecision with resolution, as though I can simply snap my fingers and cut the strings binding me to Holyrood and the queen.

The part of me wanting to lay the blame somewhere puts it at Isla’s feet. She came to me tonight. Every one of my senses attuned to her entering my bedroom. The quickness of her breath. The way she begged me to step out of the shadows and reveal myself, all while knowing that I wouldn’t.

The broken, ruthless part of my dead heart hummed in satisfaction when I stole her from the light to lure her into the darkness.

Which I did, my gaze fixed on the pajama bottoms she wore and the matching top, which was made out of the thinnest material I’ve ever felt beneath my fingertips.

How easy it would have been to strip it from her. A sharp tug on the shoulder strap would have snapped the seam, allowing me to twine it between my fingers like a lead I could control. I would have pinched the material between my fingers, listening for her husky gasp, before dragging it down. Down past the swell of her breast. Down past the hard bud of one dusky pink nipple. Down so far until the other strap broke free, too, exposing all of her to me. My lips on her flesh, my tongue driving her into a frenzy.

And if I’d done that—if I’d backed her up to my bed with the sole purpose of working my cock deep inside her—then there’d be no indecision.

Fucking Isla again would be infinitely more satisfying than betraying her trust.

“Christ.”

With a frustrated growl, I press my thumbs into my eye sockets.

A few strokes of the keyboard, that’s it. One search of Holyrood’s database and I’ll walk away—

“Knowing that she’s lied.”

Because that’s what it comes down to, doesn’t it.

Tonight, she eased the brakes on the fortress built around her. She let me scale her walls, one brick at a time, until we stood on equal ground, her gentle fingers caressing every one of my scars and my mind visualizing exactly what it is that she sees when she slips into bed at night and succumbs to slumber. And now I’ll be taking a sledgehammer to those bricks, smashing them all down at once, and stealing information that she hasn’t given me freely.

Information that she might never give me.

Without allowing myself any more time to hesitate, I turn on my heel. Plant a hand down on the desk and, with teeth gritted, reboot the computer.

Trouble, trouble, trouble.

The word thrums in my veins, turning ice to fire.

I’m aware of the darkness cloaking the room, the incessant drumming of my thumb on the keyboard as I load the browser and type in a name.

The page reloads.

An image pops up in the top right corner of the screen.

And then the air turns thin, practically nonexistent, as I feel my stomach plummet with the truth staring back at me in the form of a dark-haired man stationed behind a desk, much like the one I’m using, with university students gathered before him.

Ian Coney has brown eyes, not blue.

Which means the death haunting Isla at night doesn’t belong to the loyalist professor who wanted me dead. No, that honor belongs to someone else.

Someone with blue eyes.

Someone who stumbled back in shock after being murdered.

Someone whose identity Isla doesn’t want me to know.

27

Isla

“It’s been three days since Queen Mary University faced the most devastating domestic terrorist attack seen on a university campus in this century. The Metropolitan Police have not given up on the manhunt of prime suspect Saxon Priest, who authorities believe has fled—”

The telly turns black without warning, and I have only a second to prepare myself before I feel Saxon’s presence so acutely that I’m surprised the air around me doesn’t physically ripple with his arrival.

Though the tiny hairs on my arms do stand to attention like good little soldiers.

I shift on the sofa, tucking one leg under the other. Do my best to beat my battering heart into submission before seeking him out. “So, you’ve decided to emerge from your cave then? I feel honored.”

Saxon rounds the edge of the sofa, tossing the clicker onto the cushion beside me. “Is it a cave when I have fully operational electricity and running water at my disposal?”

Three days.

That’s how long Peter, Josie, and I have been stuck in this house. It hasn’t