Sound of Madness A Dark Royal Romance - Maria Luis Page 0,25

it’s a front to save her old man. Maybe it’s nothing more than a last-ditch effort to save herself. Either way, I’m no fool. She’s hiding something.

“Like I said, we have time to figure out if you’re telling the truth.”

“You can’t just keep me here.”

“Miss Carrigan—”

“Stop calling me that!” Her shoulders heave with fast, panicked breaths, and the sliver of exposed pale skin at the base of her throat turns a flushed pink. “I don’t beg—I won’t beg—but you have to let me go, Godwin. Please.”

“Just because you can’t see,” I say quietly, “doesn’t mean you don’t already know too much.”

Without warning, she tears the bandages from her head and throws them to the ground at her feet. And those eyes—those striking violet eyes that I’ve never seen on anyone else—blink back at me.

I half expect her to lurch back in recognition.

Damien Godwin may exist within the shadows, but Damien Priest’s reputation is known far and wide. And no matter how many nights I spend stalking the internet to remove every trace of myself, new articles always emerge. I’d say that everyone wants a piece of me, but the truth is far darker. I’m the devil who proved that Westminster is nothing but a fragile glass house. One snip from my hand, and the whole farce of democracy will come crumbling down. The Mad Priest is the villain society loves to hate, and he always strikes terror into the hearts of innocents.

But if Rowena is terrified, she doesn’t show it.

Breathing heavily, she juts her chin forward. “Tell me what you see.”

At the barely concealed anguish in her voice, my chest compresses. Not pity. Not sympathy either. But the inexplicable heaviness lingers anyway, and I hear myself rasp, “Rowena . . . don’t.”

“Tell me,” she reiterates fiercely, “what you see.”

I see a woman on the verge of collapse.

I see a woman on the brink of madness.

I see the shattered shards of rage that tear at my soul—only I see them in her.

My hold on the chair turns so violent that I’m surprised the wood doesn’t splinter.

Walk away.

The words bleed from somewhere within. A threat, a command.

Self-preservation.

Wrenching my gaze from hers, I launch to my feet and immediately put distance between us that doesn’t do a damned thing to release the intangible hold of her violet eyes on mine. Of the unspoken knowledge that Rowena keeps secrets that could rival my own. Secrets, I think, that have nothing to do with the queen or her father, and everything to do with her. Broken, kindred souls.

I recognized her in an instant.

The skin across my back stretches as I clamp a hand over my shoulder, digging my fingers into the rigid muscles there that throb and ache and shriek for relief the tighter I cling. A memory of survival. A reminder that compassion has no place here in this room, in my heart.

I turn for the door. “We’ll continue this tomorrow.”

“You can’t do it, can you?” When I don’t answer, Rowena attempts to stand and I glance back just in time to see her bad leg collapse. She lands on the floor in a tangle of limbs, her hands balled into fists that she plants on the ground. Knuckles white with tension, shoulders hunched forward and emphasizing the bare slope of her neck. A broken laugh falls from her lips. “You can’t even look me in the eye and tell me what you see.”

Doing so would inflict unnecessary pain.

Her long hair is gone, shaved down to her skull—a job I did myself when Matthews determined that the fire had burned the soft flesh of her head. Her skin, from her collarbone to the slope of her right shoulder and the upper half of her face, already puckers with blisters. And her eyes . . . unique though the color is—well, it’s obvious that she’s staring into a void.

Even now, she focuses on a spot to my left, clearly confident that that’s where I stand.

The difference between her reality and mine is in the space of a single meter.

I watch her silently, her hands chained together as she shifts onto her knees. And then, with her mouth pressing flat, she crumples to the side and thrusts out her right leg, like she can’t bear to put weight on it.

“Godwin, did you . . .” She cocks her head to the side. “Did you leave?”

The monster in me wants to keep her locked away in the dark. To let her realize, slowly, that she’s weak and