Sound of Madness A Dark Royal Romance - Maria Luis Page 0,63

thumb of his tracing back and forth, back and forth, over my mouth. The sensation is lulling. Hypnotic. He’s seducing me with nothing more than a promise, terms that bear a curse, and I fear . . . I fear that he can feel me swaying now, like a moth drawn toward a flame.

Drawn to him, inexplicably so.

“I need you, Rowena. Say yes.”

21

Damien

“’e’s what?”

The big bastard from the roof, Gregory, throws me a wild-eyed look from where two other blokes restrain him behind an antique sofa—as if they’ll actually be enough to keep him from hurtling the sofa and stampeding toward me. Doubtful. He elbows the shorter man in the gut, then growls, “Rowan, you’ve lost your bloody mind. ’e should be dead!”

No one in the drawing room speaks up to contradict him.

Beside me, Rowena only folds her hands primly behind her back. Like a queen confronted by rebellious peasants, she lifts her chin, visibly steels her spine, and announces, “Damien Priest is our prisoner. He stays.”

Two of the men exchange perplexed glances before the red-haired pulls out a chair from a dainty-as-hell table and collapses onto it. “Can you actually be classified as a prisoner if you’ve turned yourself in? Prisoners aren’t willing. It’s not the way it works.” Crossing his legs at the knee, he shifts his arms across his wiry chest. A man clearly content to debate the philosophies of hostage situations all night. “Who does that? No one, that’s who.” He meets my gaze. “Uri said you walked through the front door like you owned the place.”

Not exactly.

These men stormed the Palace tonight.

In their quest for revenge, they breached walls that have stood for centuries. Rare books torn from the shelves in the library, for no other purpose than that they could. Vintage stemware thrown to the ground in the dining room and medicine filched from the cabinets in Matthews’ operating room. I found his medical bag floating in the moat, its contents soaked. In every room, glass crunched under the soles of my heavy boots.

No corner of the Palace was left untouched.

Rowena’s motley crew of misfits may take orders from her, but that doesn’t lessen the deep-seated anger they clearly harbor toward me and my brothers. I don’t blame them. My brothers and I have spent a decade spreading rumors about the Priests to endear us to anti-loyalists everywhere. It was a price that we willingly paid, knowing that we learned more than we ever would have otherwise. But any chance that these people might trust us, let alone forgive us, was obliterated the minute Isla put her hands around Ian Coney’s throat and squeezed.

To them, I’m a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

“Actually,” I drawl, making a point to hold the redhead’s stare, “I climbed the trellis.”

The trellis outside Rowena’s room, like I was the Romeo to her Juliet. No one saw me scaling the flimsy ladder—because for all their success at laying siege to the Palace, these people are not trained spies. Not like Holyrood.

Except, maybe, for one, and his jaw just came unhinged.

“The trellis,” Gregory enunciates slowly, glancing back toward the bloke he elbowed with an air of astonishment, “’e climbed the bloody trellis after I killed ’im.” His narrowed gaze swings back to me. “’ow many bleeding lives do you ’ave?”

A grim smile twists my lips. “Not nearly enough.”

“And you won’t be risking any more of them,” Rowena tells Gregory pointedly. “Understood?”

“’ow can you just forget what ’e’s done?”

“I forget nothing.”

Though issued quietly, Rowena’s voice is laced with steel. When she starts forward, I can’t help but skim my gaze down the length of her spine to where her fingers are still linked together, her knuckles white with tension. I watch as she ducks a quick look over her shoulder, her sightless gaze searching for me.

Whatever his motives were in approaching her, this is the woman King John chose to run a counter-op against Holyrood. The she-wolf. A queen without a crown. During those tense moments in her bedroom, when she’d sought to read my emotions, I saw what I hadn’t before: Rowena Carrigan may be the prime minister’s daughter, but she has more integrity in her soul than anyone I’ve ever met.

She owned her mistakes and humbled herself before me.

Had I told her to drop to her knees, she would have—without question.

And fuck, I wanted to. With her hand cupping my face, and her voice hoarse with sympathy for the loss of The Bell & Hand, I’d wanted her to beg for