by Luis, Maria
Not thinking will land her in the same predicament as her father: dead.
Maybe recklessness is a family trait, passed down through the generations. I can see it. King John was a tyrannical bastard who never thought five steps ahead, let alone one. He single-handedly turned this country back four hundred years. Keeping parliament in place has been nothing more than a case of smoke and mirrors—everyone is all too aware of who’s running this country, and it’s not the politicians who continue to fill the seats of Westminster.
With a father like that . . . Well, no wonder his own daughter thought showing up to a fucking anti-loyalist pub would be a grand idea.
Long live the queen.
Shoving the key into the rusty lock, I turn the knob and push the door open. Immediately, my gaze darts to the tiny kitchenette, where my older brother stands, shirtless, as he pops open a can of beans. “Ready to turn in for the day already?” Guy drawls sharply, barely sparing me a glance.
Barely sparing the queen a glance.
I shut the door behind her, turning over the lock. “We’ve company.”
“You know how I feel about people.”
“Then dust off your manners. I’m sure the cobwebs could do with a breather.”
Guy’s blue eyes finally lift. They land on me, then zero in on Queen Margaret to my left. He says nothing, not at first. But his eyes narrow and his body visibly tenses and then he’s dropping the can onto the counter and sauntering toward us.
Toward the queen.
“Guy,” I growl, my tone thick with warning. My brother has no boundaries. Not with me or Damien, not with the other Holyrood agents—others like us who’ve been recruited to serve the Crown. And sure as hell not with the hundreds of people who we’ve schemed and lied to and stolen precious information from over the years. Information that was never meant to reach the pinnacle of Britain’s power.
Expression stony, my brother ignores me as though I don’t exist.
He reaches out, his fingers grasping the queen’s wig, and tears it straight from her head.
“Mr. Priest,” she hisses, her own fingers jotting upward, as though to make a grab for the fake hair, despite being a second too late.
With casual dismissiveness, Guy tosses the wig to the side, where it slides across the floor and catches under the leg of the coffee table. Only then does he offer a dramatic dip of his head, playing the part of ever-dutiful servant.
For fuck’s sake.
The queen’s blond hair is in disarray, locks strewn this way and that and sticking up like prey confronted by something bigger, meaner. “That—that was unacceptable. If my father—”
“Your father’s dead, Princess.”
Princess. As if she didn’t watch her father be brutally shot down in front of her—and an entire rally—just two months ago. The blood that spattered her face and clothing in the aftermath has been stitched into every highlight reel on the telly ever since. I look at her now, eyeing her expression critically, and wonder how many times she’s tried to eviscerate the memory.
Hundreds, I imagine.
More, probably.
And now my brother, ass that he’s been since birth, is throwing sludge in the already gaping wound.
I elbow him to the side. “What Guy means to say is that you shouldn’t be here, Your Majesty.” I shoot a pointed, fucking-behave-yourself look in my brother’s direction. Nothing in his expression gives me any reason to believe that we’re on the same page. Blowing out a frustrated breath, I give him my back. “It’s too dangerous. You ought to have gone through the usual channels. We put Clarke with you for a reason.”
Queen Margaret flinches, and I nearly start a mental countdown for the inevitable hysterics. “I needed to come here myself,” she says, her voice nothing stronger than a break in the wind. “Your father . . . I remember that he used to visit St. James’s whenever there was something troublesome to discuss.”
It’s my turn to withhold a flinch.
I step back, putting distance between myself and the queen before I do something regrettable. Like remind her that it’s my family that’s been sacrificed time and again for the sake of hers.
Sacrificed, splintered, and forever altered.
“Those days are over.” I move to the sink, then pour myself a glass of water from the faucet. I don’t drink it, but it’s best to focus on something else when I speak, otherwise the words might stop coming. Just as they did when the blessed king branded me. Habit has me wanting to lift my fingers to the raised flesh behind my ear. Self-control, however, wins out. As always. “We run a pub widely known for its political leanings. What do you think would happen if someone caught us at St. James’s? Hell, if someone catches you here?”
“Boom,” Guy answers, his thumb cocking the safety of a fake finger pistol that he touches to his temple. Then, planting his hands flat on the counter, he juts his chin forward and stares the queen down. “We don’t exist to you, Princess. This”—he shuffles a finger between them—“shouldn’t be happening. We’ve spent years establishing this place, its reputation . . . our reputation.”
“Which is what?” she asks softly.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Guy leans in, wordlessly baiting her to do the same—the way I’ve seen him do countless times in the past, just before he snatches a man by the shirt collar and bashes his head against the closest flat surface. But instead of pulling that maneuver, the same one he taught me the summer I turned eleven, he only issues a slow, humorless smile. “We want to see you break.”
She flinches again.
Weak, so fucking weak.
If I weren’t so desperate to keep my country from crumbling, I’d tell the queen exactly what I think of her: she’s timid, as poor a fit for the throne as her deranged father was before her. He ruled as a dictator and, so far, she’s ruled like she’s terrified of her own shadow. We’d all be better off with her still prancing about in the Scottish countryside, doing whatever the hell she’s been doing for the last twenty-some years. With the monarchy disassembled—
No.
The condensation on the glass dampens my palm, turning it slick like the blood that coated my nape when King John carved a number into my flesh.
502.
The fifth generation of spies in my family to work alongside the Crown under the umbrella of Holyrood, an off-the-books agency that was originally named after the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. It’s where my great-great-grandfather was awarded a medal of valor after saving Prince Robert’s life during the Second Boer War.
Over a hundred years later, and here we are.
Guy is 501, Damien 503.
But only I have my life’s purpose branded into my skin like I’m nothing but cattle to be sold at auction.
Prove it to your son that the Crown must always come first.
A hard lesson to learn, but one that continues to hum in my veins like a poison with no antidote.
I force the words from my throat, refusing to succumb to silence: “Putting it bluntly, ma’am, our customers would love nothing more than to see you end up just like the king. Dead. Out of the way. A nonissue. Let your mind fill in the blanks, and then come up with something ten times worse.”
Her cornflower blue eyes widen, then narrow sharply. “I-If the two of you are done with the lectures, I came here today because I have something that can’t be passed through Clarke. There’s no time for that, and I thought . . .” Awkwardly, she fumbles with her handbag, her fingers visibly shaking, and it occurs to me, now, that while my brothers and I have spent our entire lives with the royal family at the epicenter of our respective universes, she hardly knows us.
She knows our names. She knows our history—at least as far back as Pa, I’m guessing—and I’m going to assume that she knows the basics about Holyrood: some of the other agents, our central location, even. But beyond that . . . us Godwins are veritable strangers to her.
Our hopes, our dreams, are nothing but a speck of dust on her gilded ra
dar.
With a hushed curse under her breath, she pulls out a mobile smeared with dirt. “I found this in the gardens while I was walking two mornings ago. The same morning that . . . that—”
I exchange a glance with Guy, who scrubs a hand over his mouth.
“They were caught,” he grits out, voice hard and unforgiving. “Clarke told you that we suspected something was off with them, and—”
“I didn’t listen!” The queen whirls around, her free hand clenching into a fist at her side. Her signet ring glistens under the light. Ruby red, a hand-me-down of her father’s that I well remember. “You can say it, Mr. Priest. Go on. I didn’t listen to your advice to not wander the grounds on my own until you could be sure of them. The only fool standing in this room is me.”
The phone is thrown on the counter where it careens into the wall.
“They were only teenagers, and I couldn’t”—she presses a hand to her mouth, her knuckles whitening with tension—“I couldn’t make myself truly believe that they’d been sent to kill me. That they weren’t anything more than stable hands. I should have listened. I should have listened.”
Soft.
It’s not that she’s weak, it’s that Queen Margaret doesn’t have the heart—the iron spine—to do what needs to be done in today’s tumultuous climate. After suffering the last twenty-five years under King John’s reign, parliament has become the equivalent of a brutal brawler’s match since her father’s assassination two months ago. And, equal to her rabid supporters are the millions who would see the crown stripped from her head and the jewels torn from her fingers.
“The king,” Guy says now, his stare locked on the queen’s face, “is to blame, not you. He ruled with fear after your sister was murdered. Anyone who opposed him went straight into a jail cell—assuming they didn’t disappear completely. You know this, ma’am. You see the polls. You see what’s blasted all over the news every night. Don’t tell me you don’t.”
She pauses, just for a moment, her fingers wringing together in front of her. “All of it, Mr. Priest.” A tick pulses to life in her jaw. “I see it all.”
My brother beats a fast-paced tempo on the counter with his thumb. “People don’t like the amount of power your family still wields, especially after everything that’s happened. With your father gone, they want the same of you. That’s no secret.”
Lifting her gaze to the ceiling, her throat works with a hard swallow. “Tell me what to do, then.”
“Go back to your palace.”
“The mobile—”
“We’ll take care of it,” I say. We’ll take care of the problem just like we’ve taken care of everything else: by leaning into the pub. It was a Holyrood decision for the so-called Priest brothers to open it ten years ago. It made sense. On paper, Guy, Damien, and I don’t exist. A perk, if you will, for being born into a family whose sole duty is to keep the royal family thriving for yet another generation. While the other Holyrood members once had lives, before their recruitment, this is all my brothers and I have ever known.
Survival.
Deception.
Responsibility.
The Bell & Hand is the culmination of all that—a haven for those with a rebellious streak who seek a Britain without the lords and the ladies and the pomp of the royal family.
Absently, I reach up to the scar that I keep hidden with my hair. The pads of my fingers trace the scarred flesh.
As much as I want to tell the queen to piss off—the same way I wanted to tell her father—I never will.
Loyalty to my brothers, both those bound by blood and not, keeps me locked in a prison, generations in the making. The world sees the Priests as traitors, the scum of the earth.
Loyalists see us that way, I remind myself as I turn my back on the queen and snatch the phone off the counter. To those loyal to the Crown we’re radical anti-loyalists, but to others . . . we’re bonafide heroes.
Even if it’s a façade composed of nothing but lies.
2
Isla
I’m fucked.
Or, better yet, I’m desperate.
Desperate for a life where I don’t count every quid in my purse, always worried that the lights might be turned off at the flat I share with my two younger siblings.
Five years ago, I was prepared to move to the States. A new fancy job beckoned me across the pond, and then there was Stephen, my fiancé, who, even though he didn’t quite make my heart race, was still the perfect foil to the life I’d created for myself.
Then the riots began. The streets of London lit with anger and hate, and my parents—two middle-aged folks from Yorkshire who’d been in town to visit—were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
They were dead before the sun kissed the horizon good morning.
I never made it to America. Never took the fancy job. Never went anywhere with Stephen after that.
Most days it feels like I’m twenty-nine going on eighty-nine.
I tip my head back, lifting my chin so I can scan the black-and-gold sign hanging above the pub’s diamond-paned front window. The Bell & Hand. The ampersand has been scraped to within an inch of its life, the black peeking through the faded gold paint. I trail my gaze south, over the glossy black door and the shiny brass knob—move to the right, where potted plants sit in window boxes. Despite the fact that it’s March, the flowers are in full bloom, the poppies bright pink and yellow—a direct contrast to the dour-looking bloke gazing out the window.
No finely tailored suits like I saw regularly at the network.
No fancy smart watches encircling thick wrists.
No red poppies pinned to their lapels, in silent support of the royal family.
It’s for that reason specifically that I’ve come to apply for a position. Five years ago, before the Westminster Riots, I hadn’t heard of The Bell & Hand, not even in passing amongst friends. But now . . . well, now it seems like the perfect place to be, given our shared beliefs on the Crown.
The black door swings open and a dark-haired man steps out, a newspaper clasped to his chest as he draws a hat atop his head.
“Sorry,” he mutters, when he finds me loitering on the pub’s front stoop.
We sashay right, then left, and with an upturn of his lips, he finally steps around me. I keep the door open with the toe of my shoe.
I swallow past the lump in my throat. Straighten my shoulders with single-minded purpose. Duck inside, and then draw in a sharp breath at the scent of coffee and pub food and anti-loyalist blood. It’s a heady concoction, made only that much sweeter when I catch sight of croissants being delivered to a table.
Delicious.
I’ve always been a sucker for a good pastry.
With my folder tucked under my arm, I edge farther inside.
Online, I read that the Priest brothers own The Bell & Hand. Like the pub itself, the Priest surname wouldn’t have registered five years ago—but nowadays, it feels like I know everything that’s ever been reported on them . . . Not that there’s much.
Unfortunately.
I do know this: The brothers are notorious among anti-loyalist circles. Spoken of with complete reverence and only ever mentioned in passing, it’s like everyone is aware of their existence though no one dares dive any deeper. I didn’t stumble across any pictures of them online. No firsthand interviews, either.
Because people are terrified of the repercussions if caught dishing out that information?
It’s not the first time the unnerving thought has snuck up on me, and I quickly stamp down a spark of worry.
I’m in need of a job, and if I have the opportunity to take one that won’t shove “God Save the Queen” propaganda down my throat, then there’s simply no better fit.
“Looking for somethin’?” asks one of the servers in a thick, Cockney accent when he spots me hovering by the bar. His graying hair is thin at the crown and seems to have migrated to his bushy beard. “The boss ain’t in.”
From all acco
unts, all three Priest brothers manage The Bell & Hand. “I want to apply for a position.”
His shrewd, brown eyes drift down my body, taking leisurely time to stop at my breasts and hips before he sucks his teeth behind his bottom lip. “Sorry, no openings.”
Before the riot, before my chance for freedom was ripped away by circumstances out of my control, I worked as a celebrity publicist. I can read a schemer when I see one, and this man? He schemes with the best of them. I bet he wouldn’t know honesty if it crawled out of that unruly beard of his and waved ’ello.
Reaching for the closest chair, I drag it out, purposely allowing its spindle-wooden legs to scrape against the floor, then sit down without an invitation. I tip my face up, all the better to meet the bloke’s stare head-on. “I have time to wait.”
I don’t, actually, not with Josie and Peter in and out of school, but that’s not this man’s business. All he needs to know is that I won’t be moving until I speak to one of the Priest brothers. Lucky for him, I’m not picky. Any of them will do—I’m certainly not about to start playing favorites.
The server grumbles under his breath, but anything he might have said next is forgotten the moment a dark-haired woman comes flying out from the hallway beside the bar. She hustles between the tables, moving slow enough to not crash into anyone but fast enough that I notice the harried way she peers back over her shoulder, once, twice, before darting out the front door and disappearing out onto Fournier Street.
Curiosity seeps into my veins when I hear a rumbling voice bark, “Jack!”
The Cockney server whips around, torso twisting sharply. His back snaps straight, and mine does, too, at the sight of the man entering the pub.
Savage.
My nails scrape the table as the thought flares to life. He’s big, large in a way that most men can’t even compare. But it isn’t his intimidating frame that kicks my pulse into overdrive.
It’s his face.
I stare openly, unable to wrench my gaze away from the harsh line of his crooked nose or the angry, ragged scar that gravely distorts his upper lip. My knees squeeze together under the table, feet involuntarily pulling inward as though prepared to send me running. The response is completely instinctual. Fight or flight. He’s not a man to anger, that I already know. His cheekbones are high, and his lack of beard surprises me.
