by Maria Luis
Two men dead, and all because I said yes.
I touch the mirror and feel thick paper under my fingertips instead. A humorless smile flits across my face. “You’re a right bastard, Hugh,” I mutter under my breath. Because only Ian’s younger brother would ever think that he’s being helpful by taping a mirror into obscurity for the woman with cortical blindness.
The paper crinkles as I pull the wardrobe open. Dropping my fingers to the drawstring of my joggers, I freeze when I catch the squeak of the mattress’ coil springs behind me.
Not again.
With a resigned sigh, my head falls forward. Once was funny. Twice, annoying. A year later, I’d give just about anything to nail him in the bollocks.
“Don’t be such a wanker, Hugh.” I snag a fresh shirt from one of the hangers, not caring which one it is, or if it even matches, and yank it down over my head. Scars or not, sports bra or not, my body is not up for public consumption. Not anymore. “For once in your life, will you just act your bloody—”
A lock turns over with an audible snick.
My mouth turns drier than sandpaper.
Definitely not Hugh.
Slowly, I angle my head toward the bedroom door, listening for the sinister sound of footsteps padding over the rug or the soft, raspy breath of an intruder taking cover in the shadows.
There’s nothing.
No one.
I know you’re there.
Lifting onto my toes, I reach into the wardrobe and skate a hand over the top shelf, patting around, searching, and—
No.
My pulse skips, ears ring. No, no, no.
Whipping around, I shove backward and curse when the wardrobe echoes with a hollow thud. “Who’s there?” My eyes search the room fruitlessly. When the only response is more silence, I retreat again, wishing the wardrobe could swallow me whole. “Tell me who you are. Do you hear me? Tell me who you—”
The hammer of a pistol cocks back.
Icy terror grips my lungs.
I’m going to die by the same revolver that I keep stowed away, and if that isn’t irony at its finest, I don’t know what is. The gun was a gift to myself the minute I walked away from Father for good. No more men breathing down my neck. No more hands grabbing where they oughtn’t be touching. I’d shoot them first.
There’s no chance of shooting anyone now.
No chance of screaming for help, either. The walls are thick oak, all the bedrooms between mine and Hugh’s empty. The rooms of the dead—they never made it back from The Octagon—which means that no aid is coming.
Do not beg. Do not cry.
“Who sent you?” My nails scrape the wardrobe. “Was it my father?”
My imagination paints shadows across the room, revealing a lithe form angling toward me with a predatory, unhurried stride. A man dressed in all black, his face obscured. I hear the tread of footsteps, the grate of a calloused palm skating over something equally rough. Bristles, maybe. Trousers. Something that remains entirely elusive, no matter how I narrow my eyes and wish I could peel back the layers of darkness. More irony. My world is a shroud even as the bedroom light unveils all.
I have seconds.
Long enough to envision a future I’ll never live, never know. Short enough to feel a burst of regret that after thirty-three years, it’s all come down to an assassin whose face I’ll never see.
Anonymity has never been so overrated.
“Do it,” I hear myself bite off, cool, confident. A façade I’ll wear like a second skin until my very last breath. “You want me dead? Then go ahead. Shoot me.”
Unseen hands grip my wrists and a hard thigh wedges between my legs.
I arch my back and a whimper rises in my throat and before I can even think to struggle, lips graze my cheek, warm breath heats my skin, and the voice of the devil himself husks in my ear, “No, I don’t think I’ll make it that easy for you.”
18
Rowena
His name escapes on a ragged breath across my lips.
“Oh, Rowena,” he purrs, his voice low, mocking, “don’t sound so shocked.” The shadow of his scruff scrapes past my cheek, but I barely have time to register the sensation before he clamps a strong hand around my wrists and boldly pins them to the wardrobe above my head. “And here I thought you’d be happy to be reunited.”
Oh, God.
I’ve been submerged in a nightmare, the kind that clings like seaweed, dragging you down, down, down, until the pocket of sunlight kissing the water’s surface turns a murky gray and disappears altogether.
This can’t be happening. This can’t be real.
“I didn’t think . . .” Stretching onto my toes, I swallow a gasp when the blade of his nose nudges my jaw. “I thought you were—”
“Dead? No. Men like me never stay dead for long.”
The gritty words are whispered against the shell of my ear, and this time, there’s no smothering the startled whimper that begs for release. Everywhere I am, he is too. His muscular leg thrust between mine, his calloused hand clasping my wrists against the glossy grain of wood, his soft lips drifting south to claim the hollow of my throat.
I’m surrounded, contained.
This is not the man who cradled my hand and let me trace the bold lines of his face.
No, this is the man who handcuffed me without remorse.
The man who caged me within his arms and danced his fingers across my throat.
This is the Mad Priest, the man who destroyed Parliament, and any chance of escaping his wrath disappeared the second Gregory took it upon himself to shove him from the Palace’s roof.
He’s going to kill me.
Desperation floods my veins and I squirm in his hold, hips churning futilely against the muscled plane of his thigh. “Damien, what happened tonight . . . what happened to you, I mean, it’s not what you think.”
He shifts closer, presses into me harder, chest to stomach, thigh to core. Not even a sliver of space remains between us, and air comes thin and reedy through my nose when he snarls, “You have no fucking idea what I was thinking then, what I’m thinking right this second. If you did, you’d run and you’d never look back.”
“Is that a suggestion?”
“It’s a promise that you could try, and I’ll always find you. Catch you.” A merciless chuckle reverberates deep in his chest, and I feel its twin echo in mine. A shattering bleakness howling its fury. “I’ll haunt you from the bloody grave, Rowena. You’ll pray for safety and only ever find me.”
“The big, bad wolf.”
“No one would ever mistake me for a saint.”
Every pull of oxygen into my lungs carries with it the scent of cloves from his skin. It scrambles all conscious thought, leaving me scattered and aching for something I don’t dare name. Grasping the last threads of my sanity, I flex my fingers and roll my wrists within their constraints of human flesh. “Is that why you’re here?” I demand. “To give me a head start before you hunt me to the ends of the earth?”
“Oh, you won’t make it that far.” His lips hover over my pulse like he enjoys me trembling under his touch. A man pleased by fear. Submission. “You won’t even make it out of this room.”
The pit in my stomach freefalls.
His mouth curves against the slope of my neck, a smile that feels like the beginning of the end. “Poor Rowena Carrigan,” he rasps, his voice seductively dark, “blind, alone. Defeated. You spun such a pretty tale—an estranged father, a heartbreaking past. And like a fool, I fell for every bloody trick in the book.”
“Damien—”
“Ask me what I thought of in those last few seconds.”
His thumb presses down on my inner wrist, immobilizing me against the wardrobe, his body the nails that anchor me in place. He wants to crucify me, to bring me to my knees with intimidation and power.
“No.”
It takes me a second to realize that I’ve spoken out loud, the single word ringing with absolute authority, even t
hough it would be so much easier to submit to the fear spiraling through my veins. But I’m already one step closer to the end, and so I twist my head and hiss the rejection again, “No.”
He goes eerily still.
“Blind. Alone. Defeated.” A harsh laugh rattles my chest. “You’re the villain I don’t ever want to meet on a dark, quiet street, you said, the monster in my dreams. But Damien”—my lips brush his ear—“you never stopped to realize that I’m the devil in yours.”
His fingers go taut around my wrists.
And then the mouth of the revolver touches my temple.
Chilled.
Firm.
Deadly.
I don’t allow my legs to buckle, not even to sway.
It’s fight or flight, and I’ll bury myself twice over before I ever break again. Not even for the man I thought was dead, whose life I willingly mourned for the span of a heartbeat. A lit candle. A hushed prayer. All in all, a serious lapse in judgment that I’ll carry with me to the grave.
“It’s all coming together now, isn’t it?” With my shoulders squared off, I ignore the muzzle getting firmly acquainted with my forehead. Do your worst, Damien Priest. “A supposed insane asylum. A secret estate hidden away from the world. How was anyone to know Holyrood existed when you and your brothers clearly took such care to keep it off the grid? It must have hit you, right before Gregory threw you over, that Margaret was never my target.”
“Then who.”
A demand, not a question. And I’m not so disillusioned to think that he’s actually clueless. No, he craves the confirmation off my lips, and hell, I want to give it to him. For Ian. For Sara’s father and Frederick and Victor and Russ and Gregg. For every single person in this blasted country who’s met their end at the hands of the Priests, supposed guardians of the Crown and yet deceivers to all.
“You,” I whisper, angling my chin upward, wishing I could capture his gaze. “Every hour of every day, it was you.”
A noise rumbles deep within his chest, but I press onward toward the realm of no return. Reckless, in a way that I never am. Brave, the way I’ve only ever been in my dreams. A woman who knows her fate and reaches for it with wide open arms.
Finally, my soul sings, finally.
“The irony,” I say, “is that I hunted you, searched for you, and I almost walked away without ever knowing the truth. But you just couldn’t resist, could you? Pride goeth before the fall. You wanted the upper hand—no one escapes the Mad Priest, you vowed—and then you gave yourself away, just like that.”
The air thickens.
The revolver never pulls away.
I feel every breath that Damien draws into his lungs, the rhythmic expansion of his chest touching mine on each inhalation. In, out. In, out. If I were to ask to see his face, to read his expression with my fingers, there’d be no softness waiting for me. Not a single hint of mercy. Firm lips, furrowed brows. Harsh. Furious. I want to tear at his shirt, to fist the material and tell him to explode, to let me feel his rage and match it against my own.
But he only stands there, his arms a cage with no escape, his breath a ragged melody of death and retribution.
“Don’t you have something to say?” Something dark and twisted and desperate gathers in my stomach. “You hid in here with something prove, to kill me the same way Gregory tried to kill you. And here you are doing nothing.” When the revolver remains perfectly steady, and the seconds tick by, one after another, I let out a choked laugh. “You may be the villain, Damien Priest, but somewhere, deep down, you’re just begging to be the hero.”
He pulls the trigger.
I hear the lever catch with a dull click, feel the sob of relief that rises like grace in my throat. Finally, finally. My eyes slam shut. Only—
“Boom,” comes his gruff whisper.
Slowly, as if waking from a dream, muted awareness prickles over my blistered skin. Metal clatters onto the rug at our feet before skidding onto the hardwood floor. The gun, I think, being discarded like yesterday’s rubbish.
Empty. The gun was empty.
Oh, my God.
Panic wells and I twist my body, heedless of strained ribs and jagged cuts. I need that head start. He can catch me wherever he wants, in Australia, in Egypt, for all I care, but not here, not now.
Except that there’s no escape.
Damien towers over me, his legs pressing into mine, his free hand finding the empty spot beside my head. The wardrobe shudders, the paper Hugh taped to the mirror crinkling, as if they, too, know that the man before me is a force to be reckoned with.
Strong fingers grasp my chin then tilt my head back.
“I’m going to say this only once,” he growls, his thumb sweeping over the tiny indent beneath my lower lip, “and I want you to hear me loud and clear. Nod that you understand.”
I obey, every part of my body strung tight with adrenaline.
“Good girl.” He lowers his head and presses his cheek to mine. As one, we breathe. The shadow of him beside me, the blistering heat of his skin on mine—it powers through my limbs like firelight. “Own the darkness or it’ll own you. Revel in it. Consume it and bend it to your will. But never, ever let it drown you.”
19
Damien
The length of her body jerks against mine.
Not from pain—not the physical kind, at least.
“Why are you telling me this?” Her breath is hot against my ear, unsteady. “Why even bother when we’re not . . .” She swallows, hard. “One of my men tried to kill you tonight and you just had your chance to even the score—why not take it?”
Because it’d be like putting a gun to my own head.
The darkness always bleeds devastation. It pollutes every thought and sabotages every moment of clarity until clawing your way out feels like an insurmountable task. Killing Rowena lost appeal the moment she egged me on, her violet eyes glittering with a desperation I’ve only ever seen once before. She craved the abyss, wanted the fate she saw for herself, and it’s unfortunate for her that I won’t ever be that man.
I couldn’t kill her, can’t kill her.
Fucking hell.
Forcing my hands off her warm skin, I turn on my heel. Prowl deeper into the room, noting the drawn curtains over the windows and the perfectly made-up sleigh bed. Beside it, on the nightstand, is a well-worn copy of England’s Grandest Homes: Architecture & Design.
Aware that Rowena is still waiting for an answer, I tell her, “I said that I wouldn’t make it easy for you.”
Smart as she is, she doesn’t miss a beat: “Torture is pulling the trigger when the gun isn’t loaded. It’s knowing that you have a piece of me that I can’t ever get back.”
When she inhales sharply, I cut a quick glance over my shoulder just in time to see her sink to the ground like her legs can’t support her weight for another second. Exhaustion presses purple thumbprints under her eyes. “Damien, just tell me why you didn’t kill me. Please.”
My fingers find a dogeared page. Cracking open the book, I glance down to see the Palace staring back at me from the depths of a black-and-white photograph. There’s no sign of the drawbridge we installed a few years ago or the moat that was re-dug in the early 1930s. The next page reveals a blueprint of Ightham Mote’s original foundation, back when the property was built with King Henry VIII in mind. Rowena knew where to look, knew where to find us and flush us out like bees from a hive.
I should grab the revolver and finish off what I started.
Instead I hear myself confess, “Because I’ve stood in your shoes too many times to count. I’ve worn the soles down to the threads and kept on walking.”
“And does it . . .” She clears her throat. “Does the darkness ever fade?”
“No.”
Her fingers dig into the outside of her bent knee. “I wish it would. I wish—”
“You harness it,” I tell her, “then weaponize it until it’s an asset, not a curse.”
A wry smile tugs
her mouth to one side, only to slip away, like she hasn’t yet mustered the strength to wrangle her emotions. “The Mad Priest at his finest. You’re impossible to beat.”
“But you’ve tried.”
Her violet stare remains clear, unburdened. “More times than you’ll ever know.”
For a second, I can’t help but wonder if Edward Carrigan had nothing to do with the attempt on my life. Had Rowena set her sights on me, even then? Trailed along after me on Fournier Street, all while making sure to hug the shadows so that I never anticipated her attack?
I study her face, looking for a sign, confirmation—and find nothing.
Whatever her sins, I don’t think my almost death behind Christ Church Spitalfields is one of them. She’d boast about nearly taking me out, if that were the case. Rowena Carrigan isn’t exactly shy.
“They won’t let you leave Holly Village alive, you know,” she says now, clearly distrustful of my prolonged silence. “If I scream—”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Because you’re worried that they’ll find you here?”
“Because I’ll kill them all the second that they come through that door.”
A hiss escapes past her clenched teeth. “Was that your grand plan, then? You came here to slaughter us?”
“I came here for you.”
Her chin snaps back, suspicion weaving a thread through every line of her body. “You came to kill me, you mean.”
Yes.
But while taking her out might satisfy the vengeful corner of my soul, it won’t give me what I need most: answers. Whatever reason she and her . . . cult have for targeting Holyrood, it’s either fundamentally rooted in insanity or a fragment of some warped reality that’ll do us no good in leaving unmanaged. Tonight, The Bell & Hand went up in flames and the Palace met a fate not much better. At the end of the day, getting information trumps all plans I have for her father. The prime minister can wait a little while longer.
And, fact is, you can’t kill her.
The bullets from her revolver sit like iron weights in the front pocket of my trousers, removed from their chambers before she ever entered the room.
