Sound of Madness A Dark Royal Romance - Maria Luis Page 0,2

that I’ll need to haul Margaret down. She may be a queen, but she’s as mortal as I am.

We won’t leave Buckingham Palace alive, that I know deep in my soul.

But twenty years after Margaret saved me from my childhood home going up in flames, I finally repay my debt. I carry her, I stumble with her, and as we face down a wall of fire that reminds me of the nightmares that plague me, even now, I curse her too.

She and I both know that I would have rather died in that stairwell.

2

Damien

“Where do you think you’re going?”

My stride slows, then stops altogether.

Seven months. Seven fucking months of hearing that voice ask me the same damn question, over and over and over again. My fingers itch to pummel his face, to rip out his tongue. Rendering him mute really shouldn’t spark as much joy as it does.

Then again, my mum always said that I was born with war in my blood.

She wasn’t wrong.

Turning away from the Palace’s front door, I raise my gaze until I spot Jude Calvin on the upper gallery of the great hall.

“Didn’t hear me the first time?” he asks, leaning casually against the centuries-old bannister. He drops his elbows to the dark, glossy wood. “I said, where the bloody hell do you think you’re going?”

The weight of the holstered gun at my lower back is pure temptation.

I could have Jude swinging from that bannister in seconds. Chest oozing blood, eyes forever sightless. He wouldn’t stand a chance and I wouldn’t mind the clean-up. Hell, I’d welcome it.

Sweet, fucking temptation.

I angle my chin, keeping him in my direct line of sight. “You ever get tired of hearing the sound of your own voice?”

“Do you ever get tired of trying to run?”

Running would imply that I’m scared—and that couldn’t be further from the truth. I stay because it keeps Holyrood unnoticed, the way it’s been for over a century. The way it’ll stay long after I’m dead, when my ashes are scattered over the ruins of Holyrood Abbey in Edinburgh like all who’ve come before me.

In the interim, I remain a traitor to the queen.

The man who infiltrated Parliament. The snake slithering within Britain’s midst.

If I weren’t on the verge of losing the last threads of my sanity—of becoming the wild beast the world thinks me to be—I might feel honored by all the attention. Flattered, even.

Or maybe you feel that way because you’ve already descended into madness.

“Nothing to say?” Jude drawls, smirking. “The Priest brother most likely to share his opinion—silenced. Never thought that I’d see the day.”

My lips spread in a thinly provoking smile. “Nothing to say when I don’t see anything worth commenting on.”

Jude doesn’t miss the insult.

The smirk evaporates as he jabs a finger in my direction. “You better not be thinking about going to London or I’ll—”

“We’ve been over this, Calvin. I don’t answer to you.”

“According to your brother, you do. And Guy told me not to let you leave the Palace—dead queen or not.”

My nostrils flare.

As a spy for the Crown, Jude should have been first in line to rescue Queen Margaret from Buckingham Palace. Instead he’d hovered by my side while Guy rattled off assignments, inspecting his nails before murmuring, “Looks like yet another day will pass before you get to play the hero again. How does it feel being universally despised?”

Like I’ve waited my entire life to fulfill a destiny my mother predicted from birth.

Fucking prick.

“Instead of worrying about me, you should have gone to London.”

Jude raises a brow. “Matthews is here, too. So is Paul.”

“Matthews is a surgeon,” I growl tightly, “and he needs to prep the OR. As for Paul—”

“The thing about keeping an eye on you, Priest,” he cuts in with mock gravity, pushing away from the railing to move toward the spiral staircase, “is that it’s a two-person job. You rarely do what you’re told.”

Like a dog, I’m expected to piss, shit, and sleep where directed.

I may stay out of obligation but I don’t do it eagerly. In Guy’s attempt to save me, he’s only managed to trade one prison cell for another. My bars are the Palace’s sixteenth-century walls; my chains a metaphorical collar that no one—especially not my oldest brother—intends to remove any time soon.

I’ve become the king of the damned.

“We both know how this works,” Jude murmurs, stepping down from the stairwell. “I tell you to heel, you sit. I tell you to run, and you bloody sprint. And if I tell