Sound of Madness A Dark Royal Romance - Maria Luis Page 0,96

The forced smile on my face wilts then disappears altogether. “No, I’ve never been so lucky.”

The hardness in his eyes softens. “It wasn’t a choice between them or her,” he rumbles, putting his hands on his hips, “it was a choice between Holyrood or the woman who loves me—and that wasn’t a choice at all.”

“But you’re here, aren’t you?” I gesture toward the door. “You’re here while Isla isn’t, so have you really chosen at all?”

“Damien asked me. And I couldn’t tell him—”

A heavy thud hitting the floor to my left has me twisting at the waist, and when I see the . . . the body there, I wish that I hadn’t looked at all.

Mangled.

Bloodied.

Ruined.

The unfamiliar man remains curled in a ball where he fell, his dark hair matted to his dirt-streaked forehead. His clothes are disheveled, his bruised wrists shackled. And his fingernails . . . all but two have been ripped clean from their beds. I don’t know why that, more than anything else, disturbs me most. Feeling weak in the knees, I press the back of my hand to my mouth to keep the bile down.

“Christ,” whispers Saxon.

And then I hear footsteps coming up the stairs. Heavy, commanding. Deadly. A tread I recognize almost as well as my own. It’s not how I envisioned this moment unfolding. Not with his brother standing an arm’s width away or with the battered figure of a stranger, half-alive, in the fetal position at my feet.

There’s no chance to run.

The toe of a dirtied black boot appears first.

It pauses on the landing, the sole pressing flat against the rung, as if its owner recognizes the scent of fear—unease—that’s rife in the air, and then the boot flattens. Pushes forward, carrying with it the man himself.

I don’t allow myself to raise my gaze and no one says a word.

He stops before me, and the distinction between my bare feet and those boots is staggering. One freshly showered, the other caked with dried blood. I kneeled before them just this morning. Was bound before them just last night. Dark denim trousers pull my eyes up past long legs and rock-hard thighs. At his sides, his calloused hands flex and unfurl.

There’s no hiding the blood.

No pretending that he wasn’t the cause of the stranger’s suffering.

And so I continue my upward trajectory, hearing my heart in my ears, feeling the sweat in my palms.

I take in the black, armored vest that clings to an impossibly broad chest and the wide shoulders that look as if they’ve been carved from the Highland’s most formidable crags. The right sleeve of his pullover is missing, exposing a thickly muscled arm and a deep gash that spills blood over a canvas of inked skin.

A shattered breath spills over my lips.

More tattoos peek out past his tattered collar, leading up to a tan throat and a hard jawline dusted with dark stubble. A jaw that I’ve touched, cupped, and which is now dirtied with blood. His or the stranger’s? I don’t dare ask. Not yet. Not until I’m done. Those impossibly soft lips are firm, pressed flat under my slow, thorough perusal. Flared nostrils, a crooked, once-broken nose. High cheekbones that ought to belong to a model on a catwalk, somewhere else in the world, but not here, not on this man who’s been kissed by Death.

And then I arrive at my final destination.

The windows to the soul.

Eyes that are nothing like the teal waters of Cornwall but belong to the deepest, hottest blue of a flickering flame. I feel their warmth, even now. The rage that burns beneath his tattooed skin, the darkness that clings to him as it always has to me. Every chaotic, merciless desire lives in that distinct shade, forever tumultuous, forever vengeful, and I feel their narrowing like he’s physically traced a finger down the length of my spine.

My chest expands with a sharp breath. A beat later, his inflates just the same.

We’re tethered, bound.

For better or worse.

“You see me,” he rasps.

His face is smeared with blood, his body tense like he’s prepared to chase me should I run, but I never avert my gaze from his. The blue enflames me, the chaos there consumes me, and I only whisper one thing: “I see you, Damien. I see all of you.”

29

Damien

Violet eyes stalk my every move.

She watches as I haul a furious Benji out of Holly Village’s makeshift prison.

She watches as I replace him with the sole survivor from tonight’s attack on The Bell