Sound of Madness A Dark Royal Romance - Maria Luis Page 0,143

It was a choice I made to keep him alive because I couldn’t—” Cutting off with a low curse, his throat bobs with a convulsive swallow. “I would rather him hate me for all eternity, for chaining him to a prison, than lose him for good. He was safe. At the Palace, away from Carrigan and the rest of the world, he was safe, and then you—”

“Destroyed it,” I manage on a shuttered exhale. “I destroyed him.”

In following the king’s orders, I may not have harmed Damien, but I damned him all the same—but only after he was already sentenced to death by my father.

I’m sorry.

Oh, God, I’m so sorry.

I clamp my hand over my mouth but the world still hears my scream.

Dr. Matthews averts his gaze and Sara presses her lips together, like she wants to offer comfort but is terrified to step too close when I’m liable to explode. The mask Guy wears like a second skin is gone, torn away like a tattered page from a book, and all that’s left is exhaustion and grief. His back collides with the closest wall and he slips down until his arse is on the ground and his hands cling to his bent knees.

“I’ll admit that this isn’t my field of expertise,” Sara starts awkwardly, “but assuming that he’s been on medication all this time then maybe we can—”

“I’ve had him on daily doses of Atropine,” Dr. Matthews interjects. “It’s not . . . The short of it is, it’s not at all what he needs but it’s the best I could manage given the circumstances. When he was stabbed behind Christ Church Spitalfields, the tip of the blade drove halfway through the dermis layer of skin. The poison immediately affected the surrounding tissue. Nerve-endings shot; the muscles irreparably damaged. We . . .” He throws a brief, miserable glance toward Damien. “We tried everything but nothing I did could flush the poison entirely from his system.”

“Another doctor could have—”

“How?” demands Guy, his head tipping back against the wall. “When all of Britain wants his head on a stake, how exactly were we going to bring him anywhere for a second opinion? On any given day, Holyrood is a logistical nightmare but when you’re the most wanted man in England, it’s—”

“A cage,” I finish hoarsely.

Damien wanted his freedom, and I’d thought . . . God, I thought it had to do with the bounty. But that was only the first act in his plan to step into the sunshine—he wanted to live like only a dying man can.

He understood the darkness because he’d spent his days lost to it.

He refused to kill me because he’d already tasted the promise of death.

And he inked his skin with Odin’s ravens, Huginn and Muninn, who attended to the hanged and the slain, because he saw himself in the abyss with no chance of crawling his way back to the realm of the living.

Sara peels back Damien’s shirt. “His veins are black.”

“The first time, the Atropine helped to stop the poison from spreading past here.” With his mouth pressed flat, Matthews gently taps Damien’s right shoulder. “It wasn’t a permanent solution, by any means, and it was only a matter of time before it stopped working entirely. But this . . .” He shakes his head, his gaze downcast. “If his veins are black then the poison is already in his bloodstream, and I still can’t tell you what the toxin is. I thought botulinum, maybe, but the symptoms . . . they don’t align.”

“Tetradotoxin, do you think?” asks Sara, her brows furrowing.

Matthews lifts his head. “Whatever it is, I’ve never seen anything like it. The Atropine won’t save him from this—it was barely managing when we only had to worry about muscular atrophy in his shoulder.”

“Then how—”

“Induce him.”

Three pairs of eyes swing in my direction.

On weak legs, I move toward Damien on the exam table. Curling my fingers around his, I suck in a harsh breath when I feel how stiff the digits are against my own. Within the shadowed cavern of the Bascule Chambers, it was difficult to spot the small details but now I see the black, spider-like veins that crawl from the exit wound in his upper left clavicle to spread across his chest. If I were to cut away his trouser legs, I’m sure that I would find similar markings around his thigh and calf. And while he might not be able to sense me here beside him, I