Sound of Madness A Dark Royal Romance - Maria Luis Page 0,156

for Isla Quinn then I wouldn’t understand. She made him human, he’d said. She made him want. And he was right—I hadn’t understood how he could allow anyone to come between him and Holyrood.

I understand now.

I would stand between her and the world, my body a shield wielded for her alone, because Rowena Carrigan is the only woman who’s ever brought me to my knees. I look at her and see traces of my soul. I look at her and see hope. Her courage is the fuel in my blood, her strength the steel in my bones. I came to Holly Village to kill her and lay here now as a man broken and shattered—but, in the end, a better man.

In her arms, I finally found mercy.

Guy is wrong. Saving Rowena—the phoenix who rose from the ashes, the she-wolf who sits on a throne all of her own, the woman who begged me to live—wasn’t reckless.

It was instinct forged by fire and a sacrifice born from love.

I would do it again, brother, I mouth, shaping the words carefully with a closed fist thumping twice against my heart. For her, I would do it all again.

Though his nostrils flare, he doesn’t have the chance to say anything else because Matthews flings back the thin sheet with a gruff, “To answer your question, Godwin, it was your Miss Carrigan who found the antidote.” He slips one hand under my right calf, where I was shot, and I fight back a hiss as he angles my leg upward to bend the knee. “I’ll admit to having my doubts but she’s cunning, that one. Resourceful. You could do much worse.”

Coming from Dr. Nathaniel Matthews, that’s high praise.

“You’ll live, thanks to her,” he goes on, poking and prodding at me like I’m a slab of salted meat being prepped for a meal. “It did take four days for the CL-152 to dilute completely from your system but she did it, Godwin. Bloody hell, she fucking did it. Even called me out for losing faith in you. Rightly so, I’d say. And from what I understand, she gave—”

“Don’t,” Saxon hisses.

Startled by my brother’s vehemence, I look from him to Matthews to Guy, then back again. Don’t what?

“He’ll find out,” grunts the doctor, barely lifting his eyes from his task. “You don’t think one of the blokes in this house won’t tell him eventually? Even the queen—”

Broken or not, I tear the nasal cannula free, ignoring the pinch of discomfort, and leverage myself up on the hospital bed. Matthews orders me to lay back down but I’m already gripping Saxon by the shirt.

His green eyes flare.

Four days has stripped almost all the pain from my body, and I’m sure a healthy dose of morphine has ensured that I’ll feel absolutely nothing for a few hours yet. But Matthews was right—I’ve been through this before. I’ve died and survived, came crashing down to hit rock bottom and crawled my way through each and every muddied trench, prepared to fight until the end.

My last breath has come and gone, a horrible twist of fate for all that would see me dead. And it’s with life trapped in my lungs that I scrape the bowels of my soul for the strength to rasp, “Don’t . . . hide it from me.”

Something fractures in my brother’s expression. “Don’t hide?” Saxon echoes, almost inaudibly. “Damien, you’ve told me nothing for months.”

Death suffers no prejudice.

It doesn’t understand love or hope, greed or evil. No, it comes for us all, and when it does, there’s no stopping the inevitable—but I tried. Whenever Matthews set down another bottle of pills before me, his dark eyes revealing not even the tiniest sliver of pity; whenever I reasoned with Guy, and failed, that I could hunt down Carrigan without dying or ending up imprisoned. Surviving became a mission that I undertook alone.

We are Godwins, and we’re born to serve the Crown.

Our own wants and needs are hidden under a wash of conspiracy and murder. Pa died for not solving Princess Evangeline’s assassination and we were exiled to Paris for no other reason than that we stood in the way of a man’s ambition. And even after we returned to England, already hardened by life, there was no joy to be found. Every Godwin has put the success of Holyrood first.

Until Saxon chose Isla.

Clutching the fabric of his shirt, I give him a small shake. “It was—” My dry throat closes and panic drives a fist through my