Road To Fire (Broken Crown Trilogy #1) - Maria Luis Page 0,92

smile against my lips.

An honest-to-God smile.

I don’t know whether to kiss her harder, just to erase it from existence, or smile back because, for the first time in my life, my chest feels light. Airy. Like I’m actually living instead of simply existing from one mission to the next, always ready for the anvil to drop and trouble, ever present, to sink its claws into my flesh.

Wrenching my mouth away, I press my forehead to hers. Words bubble up, too many of them, all at once. Words of affection and words of frustration, for not being able to sort my emotions properly and pluck out the good ones, the words another man might have no difficulty saying. Any man who isn’t me. Scarred. Broken. Cold.

“If I have a heart at all,” I husk out, feeling my face heat, “it’s only because you’ve put it there.”

Her fingers on my face flex. And then they smooth down, down even more, until her palm is on my chest, resting against the organ that has no business beating for her, a woman opposite me in this war.

“Sometimes we only amount to what we’ve always been destined to become,” she whispers, and the words are familiar, so familiar that I strain my memory to remember who said them, but then she kills the effort completely by leaning forward to kiss my chest. My heart. Christ. She holds still, as though soaking me in, and then pulls back long enough to murmur, “You could steal every piece of me, Saxon Priest, and it still wouldn’t change a thing.”

My breath catches, even as my stomach drops at the negative implication. It shouldn’t matter. I’ve known what I am for years, and I’ve never once cared. Never once tried to do better. And still . . . “No?”

She nods, then lifts onto her toes to kiss me. Soft, a promise of more. Against my lips, she breathes, “You’ve had a heart all along. If I’ve done anything, it’s just to show you that it’s okay to melt every once and a while and be you.”

Fuck.

I’m trembling. Shaking. Whatever the hell word you want to use because it’s all the same in the end. I open my mouth, wanting to say something—anything to express the range of foreign emotions sweeping through me—only for banging to start on the door. Loud, insistent.

And then, “Isla! Isla!”

Blue eyes dart up to my face. “Peter. I don’t . . .” She fists my shirt, dropping her forehead to my chest. “I’m sorry.”

I tuck one finger under her chin, lifting. When our eyes meet, I touch my mouth to her temple. “Don’t apologize for wanting to look out for him.”

“I distinctly recall you telling me that he was old enough to handle himself.”

There’s a teasing edge to her voice, so I return the favor tenfold. “I did, and I distinctly recall you telling me that I’m a coldhearted ass.”

“Not so much in those exact words.”

I grin, crooked but genuine. “We can argue about it later. But don’t forget that we really do need to discuss what happened at your flat. We can’t put it off, not for any longer than we already have.”

Except, when Isla opens the door to let her brother inside, the look on his face tells me that trouble has risen its ugly head yet again. A fact he confirms a second later when he rushes for the television and turns it on. The screen shimmers, pixels recalibrating as he switches channels, and then a newscaster’s voice fills the room, each word more damning than the last:

“After receiving a tip from an anonymous source this morning, police have discovered the long-time reverend of Christ Church Spitalfields, William Bootham, dead in a Stepney flat this afternoon. The flat belongs to twenty-nine-year-old Isla Quinn.”

31

Isla

My legs collapse beneath me, and it’s only thanks to Saxon that I don’t go crashing to the floor.

His muscular arm wraps around my waist, drawing me into his side. “Breathe,” comes his gravel-pitched command in my ear, his nose rustling my hair as his palm slips under the fabric of my shirt to rest on my stomach. Across the room, my brother studies us with narrowed eyes. “Isla, breathe for me.”

Dramatics aside, I don’t think I’ll ever breathe again.

With my attention locked on the BREAKING NEWS notice scrawled across the telly in blood-red font, I watch in horror as uniformed medics wheel a stretcher, carrying what can only be Father Bootham’s body, down the narrow walkway leading from my