Not that he would.
“You sent Jude?” I ask slowly, running my gaze over his frame. “Or you went out on your own?”
Damien’s shoulders visibly tense. “I sent Jude, like I said.”
“You’ve fresh dirt caking your trainers.”
“Get your head out of your fucking ass, Saxon,” he hisses, spinning his chair around to face me. Blue eyes, a mirror image of Guy’s, stare me down. “I’m not Jude, not Hamish. You don’t get to run my life and bark out orders. I’m not some bloody animal and I won’t be confined to this goddamned place just because—”
“We’re not the one who’s wanted.”
“And whose fault is that?” His gaze, usually so clinically impersonal, burns with mirthless fury. “Not mine.”
“I know.”
“You say that like it’s been you stuck in this house for months on end. Except that luxury belongs to me.” He shoves a finger into his chest. “And, to make it worse, you won’t let me rip his fucking heart out.”
“You can’t kill the police commissioner. There’ll be questions.”
“As if that’s ever stopped us before.”
I don’t move away from the desk. Arms still crossed, I shoot a quick glance over to Barker, who’s yet to realize that the key for the handcuffs sits beneath the cup of tea we offered him. Intimidation is not always about brute strength. Sometimes it’s subtle, a game of deceit, the sinister process of removing a person’s options, one by one, without him realizing it at all.
The key may unlock the cuffs, but the door leading from the room is barred shut.
Blinding hope leads to crushing disappointment, which leads to further desperation.
I turn my attention back to my brother, picking my words with care. In all my life, they’ve never come easily. I go mute when I should speak, then speak out of turn when silence would be best. I suppose a therapist might place the blame squarely on what happened at St. James’s Palace, how my terror yielded to nothing but more violence and death and tragedy.
I blame the world we live in where words are meaningless.
People lie, people cheat—but not with them—my brothers.
Quietly, I say, “You’re seen as a terrorist. You can erase every article that pops up online about you, but it still won’t change the facts.”
Damien’s lips tighten. “I was doing my fucking job.”
“I know.”
On the desk, his hand clenches into a fist. “How long do we let the world see me as the Mad Priest, then? The man responsible for breeching parliament’s security. A year? Five? The rest of my goddamn life?”
In the other room, Barker’s head snaps up, as though he’s heard Damien’s escalating frustration. I bite out a curse beneath my breath.
“Keep your voice down,” I growl, pushing off the desk to head for the outlet on the wall. I dim the lights even further, until we’re nearly encased in darkness. Only when Barker’s returned to uselessly trying to pick the handcuff’s lock with his fingernail do I continue, “You don’t punch out at this job. There are no exit points.” Against my better judgment, I reach up to skim the branding behind my ear. The king destroyed the nerve endings when he scarred me, and although I’ve told my brothers that I can still feel the slightest touch, it’s yet another lie that I’ve given to keep up appearances. The skin there is numb, much like the rest of me. “This job takes, brother, and it rarely gives back. You either accept it for what it is, or you fight against a tidal wave that you won’t survive.”
“And you?” he asks, so softly I nearly miss the question.
“What about me?”
Damien tips his head back, his gaze locked on my face. Unbidden, a memory from our youth pushes its way to the surface—the first time my younger brother spotted my scarred mouth. It was worse, then, bloody and horrifying, before the doctor did what he could. And since we were poor and ensconced in Paris, like criminals, the doctor we could afford couldn’t do much at all. At the sight of me, Damien burst into tears. He was young then, maybe eight to my ten, but was unable to smother his emotions and beat them into submission.
The boy genius with a heart of gold.
These days, he’s changing. Turning into someone I hardly recognize. Bitterness and anger bleed from him. Although I’ll never admit it out loud, keeping him here is starting to feel necessary to protect him from himself.
I lied to Isla tonight—if I knew my brothers needed me, I would give my own life for them. And I would do it, with no consideration of my own.
“What about me?” I prompt again.
He runs his palm over the back of his skull, ripping the cap off his head and tossing it on the desk. “Would you fight the tidal wave? If it meant freedom and peace of mind, would you do it?”
“No.”
“No?” he demands, never once tearing his gaze away from my face. “Just no? That’s it? You wouldn’t even try—”
The sound of fists pummeling a door jerks my head up, and cuts Damien off.
“Looks like the bastard finally drank his tea,” my brother mutters, turning back to the computer. His fingers fly across the keyboard and, seconds later, a projector lowers from the ceiling in the interrogation room. Against the opposite wall, a video that Damien—not Jude—captured earlier today begins to play.
Barker’s little girls running in the park, blond ponytails swinging as they hop from the swings to the seesaw to the sandpit. They look innocent, happy . . . free.
I move to the one-sided mirror, hands in the front pockets of my trousers, and watch the reel of emotions unravel across Barker’s face. The elation at seeing his daughters, followed swiftly by the shattering realization that we not only know exactly who he is, but have access to those he cares about most. Fury combats horror as he stumbles backward, his hands clapped over his mouth, the blood on his nose now dried and flaking.
“Tell me what you want!” he shouts, spinning on his heel as though he can find us hiding in the crevices of the empty room. “Tell me what you fuckin’ want!”
I press a finger to the intercom button to the left of the mirror. And then I give him the last ultimatum he’ll ever hear: “The names of your co-conspirators, Mr. Barker. All of them.”
I don’t need to bring up the obvious: no cooperation and his daughters will suffer the consequences. He knows what the exchange is, what it’s worth, and when he crashes to his knees on the floor, helpless in his grief, the montage of his daughters still playing out on the wall, I sift through my soul to find remorse.
The inner self-loathing of what I’ve become versus the boy I once was.
I find nothing.
Wordlessly, I turn to leave the room, only to find myself pausing at Damien’s side. “I used to think that I’d survive if only I could manage to ride the crest of the wave,” I tell him, my voice low. “Save the Crown, protect the status quo, do my job. But it doesn’t work like that—you know it just as well as I do. Holyrood is like quicksand, where one bad deed leads to sinking deeper, until everything that once made you you is destroyed.”
Damien remains silent, and I wrench the words from what’s left of my beating heart to drop them at his feet, humbling and raw. “I fought the wave, brother. I fought it and I lost.”