Sound of Madness A Dark Royal Romance - Maria Luis Page 0,5

sedative before she realizes what she’s lost.”

Lost?

I lift my head from the thin pillow cushioning my cheek and open my eyes.

A blanket of night greets me. No shadows. No stream of sunlight pouring into the room. There’s nothing but the uneven hitch of my breathing and the faint beeping of a machine off to my right and the startling realization that something is very, very wrong.

My pulse skips.

“Hold her down.” Godwin.

My lungs shatter as I draw in great gulps of air.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Matthews. “She’s not read—”

“I can’t see.” Panic crawls under my skin as I pitch forward, evading grasping hands. My legs tangle with the sheets. Arms flail outward, reaching, reaching, reaching. But there’s nothing, no one, but the blanket of night that dredges terror from the depths of my soul. “I can’t see!”

“Miss Carrigan—”

A gentle hand finds my arm but not my flesh. There’s something there, something between me and the surgeon. Overwhelmed, I push away. Twist my body around until my knee accidentally slips from the table and I’m teetering into oblivion.

Darkness descends and gravity wins.

I fall, hurtling toward the unseen ground.

Calloused hands catch me, roughened fingers digging into the bare skin of my aching back. The razors—the glass. From Buckingham Palace and the shattered windows. Heat flares everywhere Godwin touches, and I grit my teeth to keep from screaming. They must have been removing the shards of glass from my skin, and the fire . . . the fire—

Those fingers move south, leaving a trail of agony in their wake, before clutching my waist.

My feet graze the floor for barely a second before I’m effortlessly lifted onto the table. Legs dangling over the edge; fingers finding the outside of my thighs. Like a child about to be scolded or, worse, like an invalid who can’t be expected to do anything on her own.

I can’t see.

Godwin hovers just out of reach, and even though he no longer touches me, I can feel the disdain physically vibrating from his body. It clenches like chains wrapped around my throat, suffocating the air from my lungs as I desperately try to gather my bearings. He expects me to crack, to shatter like ancient glass. And bloody hell, I want to do just that. I want to claw at my eyes and crawl out of my skin. I want to tear out of this room, only to fall to my knees and let the tears spill free.

I spent years dying under the thumb of my father, only to become this.

Imprisoned by my own body.

Fighting the urge to laugh hysterically, it takes all my strength to turn in the direction that I think Godwin stands and pull myself together. No weakness here, I want to hurl in his face, even as bleakness grips my heart. I will not break—not for you, not for anyone.

“The queen,” I rasp. “Is she—”

“Alive.” It’s Godwin who responds. There’s no audible relief in his voice, though my ears catch a certain lilt in his vowels that I can’t quite place. A hint of an accent buried so deep that it’s nearly undetectable. “She’s lucky.”

I swallow, roughly. “She was shot.”

“And came out of surgery quite well, all things considered,” Matthews says from my left. “It’s you we’ve had to worry about, Miss Carrigan.”

Me.

The glass entrenched in my back.

The fire that ravaged my skin.

The wooden beam that fell, seconds before I ushered Margaret from the palace, and took me down with it. I remember heaviness clamped across my middle, flames dancing so close that its fiery breath teased my hair and face, before I somehow managed to shove myself free.

Charred flesh. Bubbling blisters.

So much pain.

I peel my fingers away from my legs and whisper them across my stomach. The roughened texture of medical bandages greets me, proficiently wrapped and revealing nothing about what lays beneath.

But I know.

The same as I know that if I lift my hands to graze my face, I’ll find more of those same dressings tucked around my head, over my eyes.

Luck doesn’t come twice in a single lifetime, and I’ve already escaped once unscathed. To hope for a second chance . . . I curl my fingers into a tight fist and lower them to my lap. “Am I blind?”

Silence greets me, as if the two men have stopped to exchange a look.

Dr. Matthews, if he really is a surgeon, clearly thinks the same as Godwin—that I’ll break under the weight of the truth. But I’ve been broken enough times in my life to