Road To Fire (Broken Crown Trilogy #1) - Maria Luis Page 0,1
me.
A flash of steel caught my eye as I tried to spring from the chair to safety. An unforgiving hand yanked me back, and then there was no missing the high sheen of the king’s gem-stoned rings that twinkled on his fingers. Yellow topaz like Saturn. Red ruby like Mercury. Blue sapphire like Earth.
My love for outer space felt like a very bad thing when faced with the sovereign king’s wrath.
The tip of the blade pricked the sensitive flesh behind my right ear, and only then did I beg, plead, pray. “Papa,” I whimpered on a sharp, battered exhale, “help. Papa, help!”
He stepped forward. In his hand he brandished a pistol, and it was aimed at the king.
Trouble. Trouble. Trouble.
“Sir,” Pa ground out, his voice quivering with an unfamiliar strain of fear, “you’ve had a long day. A damn long two months. But my boy Saxon? He’s done nothing wrong. We’ll keep searching. I won’t rest until we find who killed the princess. I swear it on my life.”
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see anything, but for the red sea sweeping over my vision and distorting everything.
Red like the carpet under my feet.
Red like the color of the king’s ring.
Red like the whites of my father’s eyes when he met my gaze and I saw his terror.
“Put the pistol down, Henry,” the king snapped. “Put the pistol down or I’ll teach you the taste of true grief.”
The weapon clattered to a chair as Pa surged past it. “John, fuck, listen to me—”
The blade pressed down on my skin, and a howl climbed my throat.
“Your loyalty,” the king said, “swear it on your son’s life. We’ve had your family’s fealty for years. Prove it now, Godwin. Prove it to your son that the Crown must always come first.”
Pa’s red-rimmed eyes locked with mine, and I saw the apology forming in his expression before the words ever entered the space between us. “Saxon, m’boy,” he whispered, “keep looking at me. Don’t look away.”
The king leaned down to utter raggedly in my ear, “Never forget, Saxon, where your loyalty belongs. With the king. With the Crown. An oath that’s spanned generations between our two families. Don’t break like your father and this moment will never be repeated.”
Pain, sharp and insistent, scored the flesh behind my ear. It sank in its claws, twisting and dragging, and the red sea consumed me, swallowing my thrashing feet and flexing fingers and my mouth that parted for a scream that never came.
It didn’t come then, in that secret room of the palace that existed to no one but us. It didn’t come that night, when Pa sat me down in our small, ancient flat in Whitechapel, his arms wrapped around me as he rocked my body back and forth, apologies coating his tongue and sounding so very faraway beyond the roaring in my ears.
And it didn’t come five months later, when Pa was found dead on the side of Marlborough Road, just yards from St. James’s Palace, his stomach coated red with blood.
Saxon
London, Present Day
The queen enters my pub like she expects to be ambushed.
Not that I’d expect anything less from a woman wanted dethroned by half the country.
Her silver-blond hair is hidden beneath the confines of a black wig that’s seen better days. Wide-eyed, her gaze flicks from left to right, right to left; no doubt she’s panicking that someone might see through her shoddy costume to the woman wearing it.
It’s been twenty-five years since I saw her last, outside of television appearances and snapshots of her in the papers. Only, back then, she wasn’t Queen. Not yet. Just a young princess—a princess who was never allowed to play with the spy’s sons, no matter that the Godwin family has been integral to the Crown’s survival for over a century.
Tossing the damp rag on the bar’s oak counter, I drag my equally damp palms over my trousers. Swiftly, I count every patron seated at the bar, then those camped out in the booths, knowing that every person in here would gladly see her dead before they ever bend the knee.
The queen catches my eye and a relieved smile hitches the corner of her mouth.
Relief should be the last thing she’s feeling. The bloody woman has entered the proverbial lion’s den—and she’s done so alone. No bodyguard tailing her shadow. No weapon of any sort that I can see, and I’ve disarmed enough people in my life to know when someone is carrying, civilian or not.