Sound of Madness A Dark Royal Romance - Maria Luis Page 0,19
ignoring my brother simmering behind me. “Do you trust your best mate? After all, she saved you last night.”
The muscles in her neck jump as she averts her eyes.
“Answer the question.” I step in her line of sight, refusing to be ignored. “Do. You. Trust. Her?”
Her chin dips with a hard swallow. “No,” she whispers, squeezing her eyelids shut. “I don’t trust her. I can’t trust her.”
“Why.”
“Because she knew.”
Guy steps beside me. “What did she know?”
That hand on her stomach turns white-knuckled. “Clarke learned that Edward Carrigan plans to see me removed as Queen.”
My brain latches onto the most obvious: “Parliament doesn’t have the ability to do that.” Not anymore, at least. Not after King John stripped them of that power five years ago. A decision that led to one of the most devastating riots this country has seen in centuries. “Your father saw to that.”
“They do,” she replies slowly, “if I’m removed on the grounds of being mentally unfit to rule.”
Fuck. And, because it seems like the only fitting thing to say, I thread my fingers through my hair and say it again, “Fuck.”
The queen gives a terse nod. “Rowan knew—there’s no way she didn’t—and she never said a word, not even in warning. And then the fire . . . What’s the likelihood of her wanting to spend the night in the same week Clarke learned that her father plans to see me deposed?”
You’re speaking treason, she’d said.
A snake, she called me.
All that holier-than-thou attitude and it turns out that Rowena Carrigan is nothing but a conniving little liar.
“I’ll take care of her.” Jaw cinching tight, I pass a hand over the side of my face and mentally turn the situation over in my head. “There’s no way we can risk pretending that you died in the fire, even while we neutralize the situation.”
“I agree.”
“Good.”
She sits up tall. “And I think that—”
“Guy stays.”
The queen stiffens at my tone. “Absolutely not. I refuse to—”
“We can handle only one war at a time,” I tell her. “Who do you choose? The bully you know or the devil you don’t?”
Warily, her blue eyes shift to my brother. “I don’t like you,” she breathes.
Guy drops to his haunches, one hand on the bed, the other poised on his knee. “The feeling is mutual, Princess. The feeling is entirely fucking mutual.”
8
Rowena
The cell is a perfect square.
Ten limping steps take me from one wall to the next. Thirteen when I veer off course and accidentally stumble over Alfie Barker’s outstretched legs—which happens more often than not. Unfortunately.
“Will you stop moving?” Barker snaps, yanking his foot out of the way. The near-silent thud that follows tells me he’s either banged his fists on the floor or his head against the stone wall. “Back and forth, back and forth, all bloody day. You’re driving me absolutely mad.”
“Tell me about your daughters again.” In my thin-soled slippers, I take another careful step. “Specifically, whether or not they know that their father is a complete arse.”
“I don’t give a damn if you can see or not, Carrigan. If you take one more fucking step, that doctor is going to come back and find you breathless.”
“Breathless?” With careful precision, I adopt a tone soaked with saccharine sweetness. “I think you’ve too much confidence in your masculine prowess, Alfie.”
The insult doesn’t go over his head.
A heartbeat of silence passes, and then, over the sound of rattling chains, Barker snarls, “I’m going to kill you.”
If he weren’t restrained, I’d probably be more worried.
But he is, and I’m not, and the way I see it, the sooner I push him to the brink of insanity, the sooner someone will be forced to take me from this blasted cell and put me somewhere that isn’t a prison hole. So long as Godwin thinks I’m hiding priceless information, I’m still valuable.
Valuable enough that he won’t let Barker kill me.
Not yet, at least.
“How do you think it would happen?”
A sharp breath precedes an even sharper, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“If you killed me, I mean.” The only sounds in the cell belong to my shuffling stride and the faint trickle of water that I swear comes from a nearby stream. Meanwhile, Barker’s silence, lengthy and resolute, proves what I knew all along. “The thing is, Alfie, I’m not sure you could do it.”
“I could,” he grits out. “You don’t know anything about me.”
I might not know Alfie Barker, the man sharing this cell, but I’ve known hundreds of men just like him.