Sound of Madness A Dark Royal Romance - Maria Luis Page 0,160

But I feel their slight tremor and I hear his grim resolution, and the flutter of butterflies in my stomach falls eerily still. “For so many y-years, it lived right here”—he brings our clasped hands to his chest, where his heart beats a rapid tattoo beneath my palm—“and I thrived on it, bled for it. The anger. The pain. Until I learned that it was safer to hate than it ever was to love.”

“Damien, were you . . .” My fingers grasp his shirt, holding on, and his hand follows to curl around mine, a shield even when all the world remains locked outside the chapel’s thick walls. “Did someone—”

“No boy should endure what I did. No person should love as blindly, as wholly as I did, and be fed only hurt.”

A boy.

He’d only been a boy.

Just as I’d once only been a girl.

“Your mum?” I manage hoarsely. At his curt nod, something inside me splinters. I feel the crack, hear the intangible snap, and register the break within me. A single tear falls, and Damien curses under his breath.

“Don’t cry, love.” He sinks his weight into the altar, the necklace going to the marble slab so that he can catch the teardrop’s descent with the back of his forefinger. “Jesus. Please don’t c-cry for me. I’m not worth—”

I kiss him.

With one hand balanced on his chest, and the other sinking into his damp hair, I drag his head down close and kiss him with all the heartache and the love within me. He groans deep in his throat. Tentatively, as though unsure if his legs will support him, he presses one hand to the space between my shoulder blades and wraps the other around my waist. I’m tugged against him, our bodies flush, our mouths fused.

We are kindred souls bound by fate.

And I want . . . I want—

“There was a girl,” I gasp, pulling away, “a long time ago, who felt both hope and disappointment. The hope soared with every promise made to her while the weight of disappointment brought her to her knees. But she rose again, and again, with hope always staggering to the forefront because one day, those promises would come true. One day, all the pain and misery she carried would be nothing but a long-forgotten memory.”

“Rowena—”

My thumb grazes his bristled jaw, and the caress silences him. “Disappointment is a gift with no return label. It sits on your doorstep, day after day, waiting to be acknowledged. And when the girl stopped long enough to see the ruin of her life, she drowned. It broke her, Damien. The . . . past broke me. But I’ve never known defeat—never felt true hopelessness—until I held you in my arms and begged you to live, and you did not wake.” The memory of him down on his knees is a plague, just as grief is a curse, and emotion cleaves my chest in two. “To me . . . to me, you are worth everything.”

Damien jerks against me, his entire body tensing as he hooks a finger under my chin. Blue eyes sweep over my face, missing nothing. With a low, pained noise, he kisses my cheek and then the corner of my mouth. His lips glisten with my tears as he drops his face into the crook of my neck. “I’m here,” he husks, pressing another whisper-soft kiss to my skin, “I’m here, love, and you are not alone.”

Those words.

Those same, gut-wrenching words that I’ve whispered to him, over and over again, since returning from the Bascule Chambers. “You heard me,” I breathe, feeling unsteady on my feet. “Dr. Matthews wasn’t sure if you would, but I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t leave you to the silence.”

His slow inhale is ragged in my ear.

Vulnerable.

“Hate has always been my c-closest companion.” When I peer up at him, it’s to see that his lips are twisted in self-derision. “I’ve done things, Rowena . . . I’ve d-done things that will put horror in your heart when all I want is for you to always look at me the way you are right now.”

My mouth turns dry. “And how is that?”

“Like I’m a man worth loving.”

“Damien—”

“I’m owned by Death,” he says, smoothing his hands up my sides until he’s cradling the base of my skull in his palms with his lips hovering over mine, “and I did away with the key to hell a long time ago. But you . . . it wasn’t until y-you that