insane urge to snatch them back. Focus, Rowan. Focus. “It’s possible . . . Well, I guess it’s possible that the king may have recruited someone else after me, and actually filled them in on Holyrood’s existence.”
“Rowena.”
“But even that doesn’t make any sense, because if they were hired by King John, then they wouldn’t chance hurting Margaret—or, obviously, shooting her. Which clearly is what happened. Shite. I have no idea—”
“Rowena,” Damien grunts, “I need you to move.”
My chin snaps back. “What?”
His fingers slide around my wrist, circling gently, before easing my hand away from his face. “You saw what you needed to, and now I need you to step back.”
“Did I . . .” Feeling awkward, I reach up to tuck my hair behind my ear, only to remember that it’s gone. My fingers graze peach-fuzz instead. “Did I offend you?” When Damien curses under his breath, I hastily add, “I should have asked first. I’m not”—a self-conscious laugh scratches at my throat—“clearly, if there’s an etiquette to this, I haven’t discovered it yet. I’m sorry.” Despising the burn of embarrassment flooding my body, I shove my hands into the front pockets of my trousers and shuffle backward. One step, two. Please don’t let me fall into the rubbish bin. “It’s an adjustment, like Dr. Matthews said, and I just wanted to understand what you were feel—”
“Don’t apologize.”
“I think I should. It was rude.”
“Fine. Apology accepted if you let me stay.”
“Stay—” Startled, my mouth drops open. “Sorry. You want to stay here?”
“That’s what I said.”
He sounds determined, and I . . . “Damien, in case—oh, I don’t know—you failed to miss this small nugget of information: there are currently sixteen people downstairs who would love nothing more than to rip your spleen out from your spine. One of whom shoved you from a bloody roof!”
“It’ll make for interesting dinner conversation.”
“You’re absolutely mad.”
“Nothing I haven’t heard before.”
“They’ll kill you.”
“They won’t,” he replies smoothly, “because you won’t let them.”
“Even I have my limitations. They hate you.”
“To be fair, all of England hates me.”
“Damien,” I try again, feeling the most ridiculous urge to grab him by the shoulders and shake some common sense into him, “logic says that leaving you in a house full of people who’ve spent the last month believing your family is the root of all their problems is not—and I repeat, is not—a brilliant idea. You leave this room and you’re a dead man walking. I promise you that.”
The darkness explodes with a burst of movement—footsteps approaching, closer and closer, only for them to stop just out of reach. The fine hairs on my nape stand tall. He’s behind me. Biting down on my bottom lip, I touch my chin to my right shoulder and peer back. Dr. Matthews said that my vision should return—that the cortical blindness will heal on its own—but soon isn’t fast enough when I’m already eight days in.
My bedroom is a landscape of the unknown and, in the center of it all, the man I understand least of all. A ghost, I once thought, when I searched for him all over London and came up empty-handed, time and time again. But never would the moniker have fit as well as it does now.
Like a shade come to haunt me from the Underworld, I feel Damien. The change in the air, rife with tension and anticipation. His gaze on the back of my shorn head, assessing and intense. The way he holds himself completely still, wholly content to see me freeze like prey caught in the gunman’s scope.
And then he steps forward.
His back to my chest, his mouth at my ear: “I come as your prisoner. Cuff my wrists, if you want. Make me the villain of your nightmares. But let me stay.”
My heart pounds so loud, so furiously, that I hear almost nothing beyond the roar of blood in my temples. “Why are you doing this?” I turn my head, feeling the fabric of his shirt soft against my cheek. “Why not leave while you still can?”
“Because there’s only one person I can think of who might connect the fires at Buckingham Palace and The Bell & Hand. To test my theory . . . I’ll need resources that aren’t my own.”
What resources could I possibly have that he doesn’t?
With fortitude and determination, I’ve pulled this ramshackle organization together on my own. Members recruited from all walks of life and wages paid from my own pocket. The king offered me nothing. Maybe he’d expected