Sound of Madness A Dark Royal Romance - Maria Luis Page 0,43
into my veins, and I force myself to hold his gaze. “Whatever the queen needs, you take that with you. Do you hear me?”
Adam’s apple bobbing, he steps backward. “For the Crown.”
My chin jerks in a clipped nod.
For the Crown.
I watch for only a second as he tears out of the intel room, and then I look to Guy. Though his hand is still clamped around Paul’s throat, his blue eyes are zeroed in on my face. Wide. Panicked. We’re locked and loaded in what’s about to become a battlefield, and it’s obvious that he’s stuck in the past, not seeing me as I am now but as I was behind Christ Church Spitalfields.
Immobile.
On the cusp of death.
My blood coating the pavement a dark, glistening red.
I hold his stare. “Go.”
His head jerks, once, in rebuttal. “Fuck protocol.”
“Go.”
“Priest—”
At Paul’s pathetic gurgling, Guy flings the older man to the side. Paul’s body hits the floor with a crack of his elbow against stone, but still, my brother’s attention remains pinned on me. He advances one step. “There’s nothing in this room that we don’t have elsewhere.”
“You know we can’t risk it.”
“Jesus.” He cuts his gaze away, long enough to see Jude dragging Paul from the intel room. Shoulders hunching, Guy reaches for the pistol holstered at his waistband, only to stop halfway. His hand curls into a tight fist at his side. “Didn’t you hear what I said? Fuck protocol, Damien. I won’t let you stay.”
Beyond the open door, the Palace shudders under the impact of another grenade. In the century that Holyrood has held Ightham Mote, no one has ever identified our location. We’ve played up the stories of being an insane asylum. We’ve bolstered the fears of the locals, keeping them far away from the estate with electrical fences and traps set out in the surrounding forest to discourage trespassers. The ancient walls of the medieval manor, sturdy as they are, won’t withstand much more.
We have only minutes.
“Everything we have is in this room.” With the stroke of a few fingers, I could rain hell down across all of England. Explosives would be the least of our countrymen’s worries. That magnitude of power, especially in the wrong hands . . . “No one can get in here, brother. No one.”
Something desperate flares in Guy’s face, and I anticipate his attempt to stronghold me into submission a second before he launches forward.
Ducking under his outstretched arm, I grab his dominant hand and fold it behind his back. My knee drives into the soft flesh of his right leg. His weight crumples and a grunt bursts from his mouth, and then he teeters forward, his lean frame grappling for control.
I don’t let him have it.
With a hard elbow to his lower spine, I force him out in the hall. Regret burns in my lungs as I snag the doorknob at the same time that his head snaps up, those blue eyes of his making me feel as though I’ve peered into a mirror.
They reflect fear.
All-consuming despair.
Guy lurches to his feet, my name an anguished shout on his lips, and I give him the smallest slice of hope I can offer before I slam the door in his face: “Don’t bury me before I’m gone.”
15
Damien
The siren blares incessantly as I turn for the shadowed wall to the right of the desk.
Dark paneling stretches from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. A quick glance gives nothing away, but I know this room inside and out. It’s been my haven when I had none, and my refuge when I was desperate to escape. There isn’t a scratch I don’t know or an uneven stone that I haven’t marked a thousand times over. And so, with efficient ease, I dig the heels of my hands into the right notch and feel the wall give way under the pressure.
Dropping to my haunches, I begin piling up equipment on the threshold of the safe.
The armored vest, which I draw over my head. The myriad of weapons, which I dump into my kit, sealing off its Velcroed pockets with a practiced flex of my fingers. The small wooden box, which sits inconspicuously in the corner.
Let it go.
Except that I’m already reaching forward to knock off the flimsy lid and fist the silver chain from its bed of plush velvet. The metal glints under the overhead lighting as I thrust Mum’s necklace into the front pocket of my vest. Clamping a hand around the sniper rifle resting behind the box,