Sound of Madness A Dark Royal Romance - Maria Luis Page 0,79

mouth is parched. “Can you please open the curtains? It’s probably silly, considering everything, but I—”

“I have you, Rowena.”

Pushing up from the mattress, I cross the room and sling the drapes wide. The sun scatters within, flooding the bedroom with natural light. When I turn back around, it’s only to find her unmoved on the bed.

“Do you believe in karma?” she asks quietly, her fingers tightly knotted around her bent knees. “No . . . no, karma isn’t the right word.”

I approach her on silent feet. “What’s the right word, then?”

She pauses, her violet eyes downcast. “Penance. The word I’m looking for is penance.”

Mum’s necklace burns a hole in my pocket.

“When I was younger, I had nightmares.” Blearily, she glances up when the mattress dips at her side. I keep my space, giving her a wide berth. I’m here, I want to tell her, and the unspoken encouragement seems to register because she gives me a shaky nod. “Darkness always lurked on the horizon. It made me fearful. And so I would run—in my sleep, I would run.”

I feel my brows lower. “Sleepwalking, you mean?”

“All night long,” she allows, her thumbs crisscrossing anxiously over each other. “Once, when I was seven or eight, I managed to get lost in Regent’s Park. We lived nearby, just a block away, and I slipped out into the garden. Mum cried when the Met found me, but my father only put his hand on my arm and marched me back home without a word. After that, he . . . he had me lock my bedroom door.”

A hard swallow sticks in my throat as I drop my elbows to my thighs. “You locked yourself inside.”

“I was my own jailer,” she answers, her naturally husky voice lowering to a pained whisper. “A few years later, stuck in that ever-perpetual nightmare haze, I dreamt of creeping down the stairs like I did as a child. Only, I woke to find myself twisting the knob. No matter how hard I tried, the door wouldn’t open.”

I’m half-aware of my hands balling into tight fists on my thighs even as I latch onto her words and run them through my memory bank. “At the Palace, you told me that your door was bolted shut on the night that your house caught fire.”

The right corner of Rowena’s mouth turns up. Nothing in her expression exudes joy. “Before that night, the darkness always chased me in my dreams. Since then—and especially after I met with the king—I dream of only fire.”

With one elbow still planted on my knee, I shove my fingers through my hair. “What kind of man leaves his wife and daughter to die while he saves himself?”

“It used to make me feel better to believe that he planned to come back. That, when he looked up at my window, maybe he didn’t actually see me standing beyond the glass.”

The fucking bastard.

Although Rowena can’t see me, I bow my head to hide the rage bleeding to the surface. “But he saw you,” I edge out.

“Oh, he saw me. And then . . .” With a roll of one shoulder, she lifts her face up to the ceiling. “Once in a while I’d think that maybe he and Mum had a row. Maybe they argued and it was so godawful that by the time the fire started, he didn’t even stop to think that I was still in the house. He needed to get out and I was just . . . forgotten.”

Dispensable, she called herself yesterday.

I despise the word.

It crawls under my skin and spreads to my lungs.

You’ve been very, very bad, Damien.

Mum’s favorite thing to tell me whenever she felt that I acted out of line. Oh, she played the victimized saint around my brothers. Always weeping, always fragile. They catered to her every whim—helping her to the loo when her legs felt weak or pouring her water when she couldn’t reach the jug on the nightstand by her bed.

Then they would leave and it would be only us.

And she would show me no mercy.

“I keep wondering,” Rowena says, dropping her chin to one knee, “if it’s penance that’s brought me here.” When I start to speak, she holds up a hand. “The king tricked me. I don’t want to believe it but I can read the writing on the wall. All those people downstairs . . . I took them from their lives to help with a cause that was nothing but a lie. Sara blames your