Sound of Madness A Dark Royal Romance - Maria Luis Page 0,58

vulnerability I thought long dead—and I slam my eyes shut out of pure habit. “Don’t go there,” I rasp. “Damien, don’t—”

“Do you know, John felt the same way. One mention of Evangeline’s name and you’d think I took a knife to his throat. He was scared, just like you. Only, England’s king was too busy with his head up his ass, thinking about his ghost of a daughter, to acknowledge that his heir might end up the same way.”

It feels like I’ve been put in a corner and taken to task with a ruler across my knuckles.

Worse, there’s also the irrefutable fact that Margaret has almost met the same fate as Princess Evangeline. Only eight days ago, she crawled herself into a stairwell to die, her fingers coated red with blood, her blue eyes dead with exhaustion.

I kept her alive that night.

I did it because, whether she trusts me or not, Margaret is the only family I have. Would she truly have wanted to go to the Palace if she distrusted the Priests and Holyrood? She’d begged me. Begged me like her life depended on it, and I’d done it, knowing full well that I could have brought her here to Holly Village in North London instead.

My lungs expand with a heavy breath.

If I dig deep and peel back the layers of my armor, I’m terrified that I’ll find the arrow that’s nicked my flesh from Damien’s bow. If he’s telling the truth . . . “The king said you ran,” I say, desperately. “He said that the guards couldn’t catch you.”

Damien snorts derisively. “I left the same way that I walked in—with a small bow to his royal majesty and a two-fingered salute the second that I was out of his sight. And there were no guards.”

Just as there weren’t any when he invited me for tea. “Did the king say anything to you before you left?” I ask.

“Only that love is, and will always be, carnage.”

I grimace. “That’s . . .”

“Morbid?” A low, gritty chuckle. “Call me a bastard for saying so, but the king is better off dead. His one redeeming quality was his love for his children. Anyone could see that he’d move heaven and earth to keep them safe. But losing Evangeline . . . Jesus, it stole something from him. His sanity, his sense of compassion. His humanity. All of it, gone. To him, I was the pest who threatened his only living daughter with the reminder of what had happened to his dead heir. And you, Rowena, you were . . .”

The arrow plunges deeper, spilling blood.

“What?” I whisper thickly. “I was what? Say it.”

His thumb slides from the center of my palm to hook itself between my fore and middle fingers, then continues, his palm coasting along skin not damaged by the fire, until we’re holding hands, mine sandwiched between his and the hard plane of his chest.

“You were alone, with just one tie to the world. And a man like John . . .” His hand squeezes mine. “He knew what would happen if you and I crossed paths. He knew what I am.”

“The monster,” I say, the word sounding utterly bleak now that it’s on my tongue. “If we’d met any other way, you would have killed me without a second thought. That’s what you’re trying to say.”

“The king chose you.”

He says it with barely concealed pity, and I struggle to find something noteworthy to tell him when everything in my soul is screaming. “I was dispensable.”

Then, gruffly, “The blind are loyal to a fault.”

Not my vision.

He means blinded by my friendship with Margaret and my hope to do something good. Something, anything, to reverse the misdeeds of my past. So much so that I willingly said yes to a king who didn’t care whether I lived or died, so long as I threw myself headfirst into protecting his daughter from the man who scared him with not weapons or fists but a dose of uncomfortable reality.

I’m a fool.

The splinter in my chest cracks wide open, a gaping, searing chasm that somehow feels more devastating than any other loss, any other sorrow.

Unable to breathe, I wrench away from Damien and catch my arms around my middle. Though not nearly as severe as a week ago, pain still erupts, and I almost laugh. Hysterically. My head thrown back; my arms spread wide. A request to be struck down that won’t ever be answered because this is me. In reality, I only