Sound of Madness A Dark Royal Romance - Maria Luis Page 0,71

altar. Hardness digging into my pelvis, my arms flailing for purchase. I strike something solid, and iron grates against marble, a shrill shriek in the otherwise silent chapel. Damien’s palm goes to the base of my spine, holding me still, and then he leans over to—

The candles.

Oh, fuck. The candles.

“Damien.” Trapped between earthen hardness and human steel, I squirm to no avail. Desperation brings my foot down on top of his, anything to stop him from realizing that—

“The wick is still warm.”

Saliva pools in my mouth. “Someone must have come down here.” I came down here. While Damien sought out Holly Village to kill me, I sat in this chapel and lit a candle for him. Ridiculous. Pathetic. Feeling the hounds of hell on my heels, I blurt, “Gregory is religious.”

The incriminating silence stretches on, and on, until, “Religious?” Without waiting for an answer, the firm hand at the small of my back slips under my robe and scorches my skin. “What made him come down here tonight? What prayers”—the pitch of Damien’s timbre roughens—“do you think he whispered when he thought no one could hear him?”

“Forgiveness.” Tasting the truth through the lens of a lie, I run my tongue over the back of my teeth. “Gregory wanted forgiveness.”

A small pause. “For?”

On a rasp, I answer, “For killing you.”

The iron candle rack clatters to the marble, abandoned.

The hand under my robe slips back out, taking with it my sanity, then begins its upward ascent. It skims my waist and follows every curve. It avoids each wound and cut as though the landscape of my body is one that’s already been intimately learned. Except that Damien wouldn’t . . . he couldn’t—

Oh, my God.

He knows.

He knows because he’s already seen me.

Naked.

Vulnerable.

At his mercy.

A sound rises in my throat, and my hands ball into fists on the marble, and then the softest pair of lips known to mankind are on my pulse, right below my jawline. Testing me, stripping away every layer of armor before I even have the chance to don another. “Don’t tell me that you’re nervous now,” comes that silken voice, the mocking words resonating against my skin like a venerable prayer.

A throwback to that day in the cell when he found me locked away with Alfie Barker. When he cuffed my wrists and started us down a road that has no other destination but perdition. “I’m not nervous,” I whisper back, succumbing to the memory, to the rapid beat of my heart pumping loud enough to wake the dead. “You don’t make me nervous.”

“Your pulse would argue otherwise, Miss Carrigan.”

I feel him smile. Predatory, victorious. Wicked. And then the hand that had paused now edges north, past my shoulder, to collar the back of my neck. A whimper catches in my throat, and I strain backward with my spine arched, fingers stretching across the altar.

I breathe his name.

He drapes his chest over my back, so that I’m tucked beneath him completely, the outside world narrowed down to only this room, only this altar, only our flushed bodies. I’m bound, not by metal or pain, but by brawny muscles and the scent of cloves and the knowledge that whatever comes next, I want it. Deep down, in a place known to no one but me, I crave this.

“Do you know what I think, Rowena?” Damien husks, his thumb caressing my throat. When I give a tiny shake of my head, a dark chuckle reverberates against my back. “I think you lit the candle. I bet you kneeled real pretty for me. So solemn, so very somber. Did you pray for my forgiveness?”

Fire sparks in my veins. “I wished you entry to Hell.”

His hand flexes on the back of my neck like he’s not sure whether to laugh at my impertinence or fold me over his lap and take a palm to my arse. Instead, he yanks all the oxygen from the room with a gravel-pitched drawl that leaves me wrecked: “No, it wouldn’t be like you to want forgiveness. Not then, when you thought you were doing the right thing. Not even now.”

I swallow, hard. “Damien, I—”

“You mourned for me.”

23

Rowena

My chest heaves with a harsh breath. “I don’t. I didn’t. You and I, we’re nothing more than—”

“You mourned,” Damien growls in my ear, “for what I could never give you if I was dead. And what you wanted most is me.” His fingers slip from my nape to gently clasp my throat. With nothing more than that tangible hold