And it didn’t come five months later, when Pa was found dead on the side of Marlborough Road, just yards from St. James’s Palace, his stomach coated red with blood.
Saxon
London, Present Day
The queen enters my pub like she expects to be ambushed.
Not that I’d expect anything less from a woman wanted dethroned by half the country.
Her silver-blond hair is hidden beneath the confines of a black wig that’s seen better days. Wide-eyed, her gaze flicks from left to right, right to left; no doubt she’s panicking that someone might see through her shoddy costume to the woman wearing it.
It’s been twenty-five years since I saw her last, outside of television appearances and snapshots of her in the papers. Only, back then, she wasn’t Queen. Not yet. Just a young princess—a princess who was never allowed to play with the spy’s sons, no matter that the Godwin family has been integral to the Crown’s survival for over a century.
Tossing the damp rag on the bar’s oak counter, I drag my equally damp palms over my trousers. Swiftly, I count every patron seated at the bar, then those camped out in the booths, knowing that every person in here would gladly see her dead before they ever bend the knee.
The queen catches my eye and a relieved smile hitches the corner of her mouth.
Relief should be the last thing she’s feeling. The bloody woman has entered the proverbial lion’s den—and she’s done so alone. No bodyguard tailing her shadow. No weapon of any sort that I can see, and I’ve disarmed enough people in my life to know when someone is carrying, civilian or not.
What the hell is she doing?
Under my breath, I curse her stupidity for coming here. No, her goddamn naivety. Wig or not, if my customers sniff her out, we’ll have a riot on our hands.
They want her dead. They want the monarchy dismantled.
And long before I was born, my family was tasked with keeping the Crown exactly where it’s been since the eleventh century: at the top of the social pecking order.
Hands on my thighs, I duck under the bar. Tell my barman, Jack, to hold down the fort while I take a piss, and then head for the stairs that lead from the pub up to Guy’s flat. Straining my ears, I wait for the telltale sound of a female’s lighter footsteps before I start taking them two at a time.
The first rung whines under Queen Margaret, and there’s no mistaking the hushed, “Oh, do shut up,” that she whispers to God-knows-what.
Sharply, I glance over my shoulder, only to—
Christ.
Is she trying to get herself offed? And me right along with her?
As though primping before a mirror, she readjusts the chin-length wig with a sharp pull. A strand of blond escapes to frame her face like a white flag of surrender, shouting, It’s me! Your Royal-fucking-Majesty! The wig alone is shit, but the fact that she’s messing with it is doing her no favors. Even now, her fingers nervously pat the back, unaware of that piece of telltale blond.
Her only saving grace is the fact that she doesn’t waste time. She scurries up the steps, chin tucked down, like that alone will ward off any curiosity. It won’t. She walks like a royal. Moves like a royal. And, when she utters my name, it’s safe to say that she speaks like a royal too. Posh. Proper. My very antithesis.
“Mr. Godwin, I wasn’t sure if you’d recognize me.”
I’d have to be an idiot not to recognize the most powerful person in the commonwealth. But she’d have to be an idiot to use the surname that the Crown itself scrubbed from every public document after Pa was murdered—and do so in my own pub, no less.
“Priest,” I correct gruffly, my eyes locked on Guy’s front door. I haven’t answered to anything else in over twenty years. The Godwins died right along with my father. Died, and never resurfaced.
“Oh, yes. I—” Rustling echoes behind me, like she’s checking the stairwell for any potential lurkers. “Mr. Priest. I do apologize. I wasn’t thinking.”
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.”