Long Live The King Anthology: Fifteen Steamy Contemporary Royal Romances

by Vivian Wood

  “I thought the cops couldn’t protect me.”

  “They can’t. But I can.”

  For half a second—sweet relief. I want his protection, even if it means my ruin.

  Except that isn’t what he’s offering. Isn’t what he’s demanding.

  Realization crashes down on me. He’s going to send me far away, into the arctic where my ice can set in. I should be grateful for that, but I can’t. The whole world will see me as broken, after what happened to me. God, even I agree. He’s the only person in the world who could have seen me as whole.

  “Because I’m tainted now,” I say, my voice wavery.

  “Because you’re mine. I told you it would happen. This changed the timetable. Changed the methods. But it could not change that one fact.”

  It’s impossible to argue with that when he’s braced above me, when the musk and man scent of him surrounds me, when the same sheets that rubbed over his naked body now embrace me.

  “There are marks,” I say.

  On my body. My soul. He gouged me deep enough that I haven’t stopped reeling for hours, for days. I will still feel him in years, if I live that long. On my deathbed there will be Jonathan Scott’s teeth marks aching on my skin. With my final breath I’ll remember how it felt to drown.

  Damon nods, his expression grave. “Let me see.”

  They’re in the secret places in my body, the ones I’m too young to show him.

  He doesn’t wait for me to obey. Instead he grasps the hem of the extra-large T-shirt, yanking it up until cool air flashes over my stomach. The back of his hand touches my pale skin—an accidental touch, fleeting. I suck in a breath, whether from humiliation or something else I don’t know. I’m wearing the panties Avery gave me, white with little pink flowers on them.

  The edge of the panties is scalloped, little ruffles over my skin.

  And underneath, mottled brown and dark red marks that spread over my ribs.

  A hiss of something like pain escapes Damon. He stares with a kind of reluctant fascination, unable to look away from the contrast of white fabric on dark bruises.

  “You fought him,” Damon says, his eyes meeting mine.

  There isn’t a question in his voice.

  Don’t fight them. It only makes it worse. I understand now why Jessica told me that. It makes everything harder. Sharper. Darker. I never wanted to fight, the same way I never wanted to drown. It happened, my body reacting to its environment, animal instinct beating out reason.

  The question flickers at the edges of my mind. “Maybe that’s when I lost myself. When I really broke. When I lost the numbers in my head.”

  For the first time since he came into the room he looks surprised. “You didn’t lose the numbers, Penny. No one can take them away from you.”

  Then maybe I gave them up voluntarily. Maybe that’s the price I had to pay to survive.

  My mind has been blessedly quiet ever since I woke in Damon’s arms. It’s kept me safe from feeling the horror, the pain, but it’s also blocked out the numbers.

  Damon reaches to his back pocket. I tense, sure that he’s going to pull out something terrible. A knife, like he had as the wild boy. A rope. I don’t know where my mind conjures all of these ideas, except that my thoughts all follow a train of violence. He’s never hurt me, but he seems too enamored of the bruises to really trust.

  In his hand is only a pen, something smooth and cylindrical, no doubt expensive.

  He pulls the cap off with his straight white teeth, revealing the shining silver point beneath.

  With only a veiled glance at me, he lowers his hand to a bare patch of skin on my left side. There’s no bruise here. It somehow escaped the struggle. The pen has been against his body, kept in his pocket, but it still feels cool when it touches my skin.

  I try to make out what he could be writing based on feel, but there’s a dull throb of pain all over and a numbness from the medication. Noise that drowns out the feeling of his fountain pen.

  He pulls down the T-shirt before I can see what he’s written. Then he straightens, his knee still pressed between mine, only eight hundred thread count sheets and fine wool slacks between us.

  “Go with Avery. Be a good girl for her. She’ll take care of you.”

  The word until pulses in the air, asking and asking until I can finally voice the question. “Until when?”

  “Until I kill my father, of course.”

  He’s all the way to the door before I ask the question that’s been haunting me since I swirled underneath that pool, since I saw exactly what his father had done to make him able to hold his breath so long. “Why haven’t you already?”

  He stands in front of the dark walnut door, facing away from me. His body locked into position like a statue. His voice almost separate from him, an unknown force in the room.

  “That’s what he wants. To turn me into a killer. To make me like him.”

  Finally I understand that though he’s been abused and harmed and corrupted in infinite ways, there was one piece of him left untouched. One part of the wild boy that remained. And he was going to burn that part with iron, to brand it until only blackness remained, because of what happened to me.

  My breath is trapped, held captive by the grief I feel for that small part.

  I worried he didn’t exist anymore, but he did. He’s standing five feet away from me.

  “Wait,” I tell him. “Don’t do this. You don’t have to—”

  “I do,” he says softly, not turning to me again. That part is over.

  Then he walks out the door, leaving me staring at the place where he stood.

  The room is bathed in shadows, more dark than light. I step out of bed to the soft carpet, feeling it thick beneath my toes. I cross to the bathroom, blinking at the over-bright light. I face the wide mirror and lift my T-shirt by its hem.

  I read what he’s written backwards. A proof.

  A simple proof, from the trigonometry book. I shouldn’t even remember it. He definitely shouldn’t. Unless he looked up the book later. Unless he read it again and again. But why would he do that?

  The answer filters into my mind like sunlight through dust motes, caught and held before shining again. Of course the numbers haven’t left me. There they are, as clear to me as the sun.

  Damon must not have doubted that.

  As I stare at the scrawled ink on my skin, my doubt fades away. It’s replaced by the confidence that let me challenge Damon Scott to a poker game. The confidence that’s let me survive the west side all these years.

  And now Damon has gone to kill his own father. To become the monster he’s fought his whole life. Will he ever stop saving me? If he becomes a murderer, he might. If he kills Jonathan Scott, he’ll lose his last shred of humanity. I have to protect him the way he protected me.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Somehow I went for years without seeing Damon Scott.

  He hovered low in my mind, the same quiet and insistent worry that I have knowing children in the city are hungry, knowing animals are in pain. He wasn’t my waking thought, my nighttime prayer. He didn’t take up every moment.

  The next five days may as well be eternity. I stay locked up with Avery in Gabriel’s home, which may as well be a castle for how heavily guarded it is. It’s hard for me to eat, to sleep, because I know that Damon Scott is on the verge of something horrible.

  Avery takes very good care of me, like he thought she would. She doesn’t question my worry or my lack of appetite, thinking I’m still recovering from the trauma.

  My body heals more every day.

  There’s something I want more than my strength, than my pale skin in its former smoothness. Only the guilty can understand this. I want redemption. There’s an emotional debt more pressing than money.

  It was one thing to give Damon up when I was a child, alone in the trailer.

  Another when I’m almost a grown woman.

  I need to get out of this place, but I can’t do it alone, no
t with trained guards patrolling the perimeter. I watch them out the window when Avery thinks I’m mostly comatose, but that doesn’t reveal any answers. They seem to vary up their schedules, as if they know someone might try to enter.

  As if they know someone might try to escape.

  Avery doesn’t mean me any harm, that much I believe. But she’s as much a prisoner here as I am. Neither of us can leave. She’s the only one with any access to the outside world—a cell phone that she carries with her almost everywhere.

  I know she texts her friend from college, because she tells me about some of them.

  Other times her brow furrows, worry tinting her hazel eyes. She doesn’t tell me what she texts when she gets like this. I don’t know what she’s afraid of, but it’s something.

  She looks up from her phone, her gaze beseeching.

  “Come for a walk with me,” she says.

  It’s something we’ve done before. Walks around the mansion. Through the garden. There’s even a maze made out of hedges. I swear, the things rich people think of to get rid of their money. It’s like they don’t know what to do with it all.

  But I don’t know why she’s whispering. Who does she think will hear her?

  The line of her throat moves as she swallows. “I want to find out where the voices are coming from,” she says, her voice shaky. “Will you help me?”

  A shiver runs through me. What voices? I haven’t said much. Only Damon seems to thaw me enough to speak, but I know this is important. Important because I can help her, maybe. The way she’s been helping me.

  Important because I can help Damon, who’s out with Gabriel in the bowels of the city, searching through rundown tenements and alleys for a modern-day dragon.

  Smart people don’t always have perspective.

  It had been a declaration. Does he love me? As a woman or as a child?

  I’m not sure he knows, not sure it matters what name we put on it. It was the most unassuming gift he could have given me, one without any expectation that it would be returned. Thinking that I’m too young or maybe just too innocent to give it back.

  Except I’m not the only smart person without perspective.

  He knows I need him, but the truth is he needs me, too.

  Avery leans close, something close to panic in her eyes. “You don’t hear them, do you?”

  I’m afraid she might come apart if I tell her the truth. The house is painfully silent. It hurts me, that’s how silent it is. The lack of sound a physical presence, as if the world has become muted.

  We’re underwater here.

  I’m desperate to find a way to her phone. The words to confide my plan on the tip of my tongue. I don’t think she’ll want to go along with me—her faith in Gabriel is too complete.

  Aid comes from one of the least likely places. One of the guards appears in the doorframe. “Someone’s at the gate,” he says, making it clear he’d rather turn them away.

  Some old friend of Avery’s has come to visit her. More than a friend, if I read her hesitation right.

  It would be an entertaining power play to watch—the guard who could probably bench press three hundred pounds and the young woman with her quiet control. And it’s the perfect cover for me to slip her phone beneath the pillow. My hand moves maybe two inches. Neither of them notice.

  “I’ll stand outside the room,” the guard says, deference winning. “With the door open.”

  Avery’s voice is kind, gracious in her victory. “Thank you.”

  It takes forever for the guest to be searched for weapons. So long I’m afraid that Avery will look for her phone. I can’t let her notice that it’s under the pillow. She wouldn’t suspect me of anything, mostly because she thinks I’m half brain dead. But it would ruin my chance.

  I have to distract her. “Who is he?”

  “An old boyfriend,” she says, her cheeks turning pink.

  “Oh.” Gabriel won’t be happy about that when he finds out.

  Her eyes look lighter when she’s curious. “Do you… do you have one? A boyfriend?”

  I’ve been so deep underwater that I haven’t even thought about him.

  Guilt whispers through me. Brennan would have worried about me. The first night, the second. It’s been five days. Does he think I’m dead? Daddy must think so, when I left with Jonathan Scott and didn’t come back. I don’t feel as bad about that, since he’s the reason I’m in this mess.

  Encased in ice, I could spare myself that acidic mixture of worry and shame. Now it comes rushing back like bile, promising that every step on land would hurt. I could transform into a human again, but I would pay the price in pain. There’s too much blood in the water to emerge unscathed.

  When the security guard takes Avery away, I don’t waste any time.

  The number comes from memory. My fingers don’t tremble as I dial the number. That’s the only nod to confidence. Inside I’m a mess of fear and dread and worst of all hope.

  “Hello?” The hoarse word tells a long story of the past five days.

  “Daddy, it’s me.”

  The pause that follows hangs heavy overhead. Storm clouds. North winds. “Is it—how are—oh God, Penny. I didn’t know if you were—”

  He can’t seem to finish a sentence. The worst part is that I can’t finish it for him, not with the knot in my throat. Not with the tangle in my mind, where familial love crosses accusation, a biological short-circuit.

  “I’m alive,” I manage to say.

  “Where are you? Can you come home?”

  Home. The word pings around inside me, unable to land anywhere. In the apartment with weak locks and cracks in every window? The lumpy armchair where Daddy sits each night? The Rubik’s Cube. That had been home for a little girl desperate to find herself.

  “Did you bring the money to Damon Scott?”

  A terrible pause. “I looked for him, Penny. I swear I did. He went underground. Everyone said he couldn’t be found when he didn’t want to be.”

  “And then you spent it.” There’s no anger in my voice, not anymore.

  Only resignation.

  “No,” he says, urgent and sincere. “I tried to find Jonathan Scott then, to give the money back to him. To tell him the deal was off. To find you. But he was gone, too.”

  Uncertainty wraps itself around me, warm and almost… comforting. Maybe ten thousand dollars doesn’t matter in the large scheme of things, but it feels like I earned that money. It feels like it matters. “Where’s the money now?”

  “It’s here. God, I’ve been so afraid that someone would know. That sounds crazy. It’s not like I could ever hold onto a dollar longer than an hour. But I just… I’ve been sitting here, keeping it, thinking you were dead.”

  His voice breaks, but it doesn’t sound like the end. It sounds like a continuation.

  This is where we’ve always been. I can’t walk away from the only family I have, from a person who actually cares about me. When Damon braced his body above me in his bed I had felt like a woman, grown and even sexual.

  Now as I cling the phone I’m painfully aware that I’m fifteen, that my bed has pink sheets. That I’m only a girl who dreams about having her mama back.

  That I want nothing more than a daddy who loves me.

  Who am I to dream I could save Damon Scott?

  Who am I to dream at all?

  He finds me on the balcony, a wide marble-floored space with a carved stone balcony. From here I can see the expansive grounds—a lush garden and elaborate hedge maze. Rolling green hills and woods beyond. A view that carefully hides security cameras and armed patrols, an electric fence hidden in the tree line. Such deadly beauty.

  I feel him before I see him, that prickling awareness that can only be Damon Scott. I’m sitting on an ornate metal chair, carving of Olympic gods cradling me with surprising comfort.

  Footsteps come close and then stop. It must be my imagination that senses his heat. He’s still a few feet away at least. How can he heat me up li
ke no one else?

  “Avery says you aren’t eating,” he says finally.

  She worries about me, which is sweet. I don’t really know what to do with that. I’ve had friends before, like Jessica. Even Brennan, but there’s always a careful distance. Growing up in the west side, we all know not to get too close.

  “I’m eating enough.”

  “She says there are nightmares.”

  “Aren’t there?” I ask softly. “For you?”

  That finally brings him around in front of me. It’s a shock to see him in daylight, maybe for the first time. The sunlight makes his black hair gleam. His eyes look almost luminous out here, but calming, the contrast to the sun a relief.

  “I’ve had nightmares,” he says, his voice distant.

  Unemotional, even though I know that’s a lie. No one experiences what we have and comes out unscathed. Avery talked to me about seeing a counselor, asked if I wanted one, but I can’t imagine what acceptance would look like.

  Oh, that black pool with green tiles? Sure, I had a rough time almost drowning. I’m over it now. Anyone who says that is lying, so what’s the point?

  He looks cold and removed, like he has somehow achieved the impossible.

  It makes me want to tear him down.

  “Tell me,” I demand.

  For a moment I think he’s going to refuse. He’s going to keep that wall between us, thin now but crucial. Whatever we were before this—friends, potential lovers. Enemies. We’ve shared something now. We’re both survivors.

  Then he sits down, the softest sound of his breath releasing. And in that sound I hear the wall come down. I feel it, erased from existence—if only for this moment. It makes every nerve ending tingle along my arms, my stomach. He’s been nearer to me than two feet away, but never as truly close as this.

  “It started when I was five,” he says, breaking my heart in that one emotionless statement. “I’m not sure what happened before then. Nothing good, I’m sure. But I remember the training that started at five.”