Saxon isn’t the devil in this situation.
No, that honor belongs only to me.
“Peter.” When he doesn’t so much as acknowledge my existence, I repeat, more urgently, “Peter, look at me.”
His blue eyes snap open, zeroing in on my frame. “I told you,” he says, the words escaping on an angry hiss, “I told you what would happen if you struck up with the bloody Priests and you didn’t listen!”
Behind him, a vein throbs in Saxon’s temple.
I defy his command and take another step in their direction, laser-focused on my brother. “You’re right, I didn’t listen. But it was my choice to make and I did what felt right.”
He barks out a humorless laugh. “How’s that worked out for you so far? You’ve killed a man and now another man—a priest, Isla, a fucking priest—is dead in our bloody flat. Who killed him, huh? You? Is all this talk just some elaborate ploy to play the victim card?”
My legs shake and my heart pounds feverishly fast and, still, I stand my ground, unwilling to break. “You know that I wouldn’t do that.”
“Wouldn’t you?” he snaps back, jutting his chin forward with rash teenage abandon. “After this last week, I don’t even know who you are. My sister isn’t irrational. My sister wouldn’t hurt anyone, let alone play God and take someone’s life. And my sister wouldn’t be fucking a goddamn Priest!”
Saxon’s grip on Peter visibly tightens, his features so frighteningly cold that I’m surprised my brother doesn’t immediately turn to ice. “You don’t know anything, lad. And if you speak to her like that one more time—”
“You’ll what?” Peter snaps, thrashing his arms but making no dent in Saxon’s ironclad hold. “You’ll fuck her again? We all heard. Me, Josie. The bloody queen probably heard.” Angry blue eyes land on my face. “You had it all, Isla. The job, the money. Maybe we weren’t rich but killing people? You talk about it like it’s nothing. I figured the self-defense thing was a lie—an exaggeration, maybe—but now I know that it isn’t true at all. Mum and Dad would be disappointed, you know that?” He spits at my feet. “You aren’t the girl they raised. You’re not even half of that girl.”
Air seesaws in my chest, clouding my vision until all I see is the boy who I held throughout the night when I showed up in York, no parents in tow. His distraught wails have haunted me ever since.
But now—right now—all I feel is rage boiling deep in my gut.
Rage at the world, yes, but rage at him, too.
You’re not even half of that girl.
When Saxon opens his mouth to speak, I throw up a hand to stop him.
All these years I’ve sheltered Peter and Josie, but, clearly, it’s time that I strip off the blinders. He wants the truth? Then he’ll have it.
The cold.
Bloody.
Truth.
I step forward, bringing my nose centimeters from his, knowing that Saxon will keep him restrained. “You don’t get to cast stones from your high horse, little brother,” I utter tightly, like a wound drawstring bound to spring free, “you don’t have that luxury. Not today, not tomorrow. For five years, all I’ve done is protect you.”
He snorts, this disbelieving, rude sound that ignites my temper.
I grip his chin, taller though he is, and force his gaze down on me. “You claim I’m not who you thought I was, and you’re right—I’ve had to become this woman. Mum and Dad were murdered, and I never saw it coming. Not once.” I feel Saxon’s hot stare on my face, but I ignore him, focusing only on Peter. “And I’ll be damned if the same happens to you or Josie.”
“What would really happen to us? Answer me that. What?”
“Do you know how many people have disappeared in the last five years?” I demand sharply. “Do you?” When Peter averts his gaze, silent, I hiss, “Seven hundred and ninety-three, not counting the hundreds, if not thousands, who were never reported as missing in the first place. And you know what all those people had in common? They had family or friends or acquaintances who spoke out against King John.”
“That has nothing to do with us.”
Still holding his chin, I thrust my face close to his. “Wrong. It has everything to do with us. Because Dad and Mum saw to it. Oh, they were just middle-aged folks who loved nothing more than to traipse around the country with their kids. That’s what they showed the world. That’s what they showed us.”
But it wasn’t the whole story.
A fact that I didn’t know until I was forced to sell our family home in York to pay off my parents’ debts. Debts they’d accrued by secretly donating swaths of money to anti-loyalist movements here in London. Sure, they came to visit me every other month because they loved me. I don’t doubt my importance to them. If anything, my moving to the City only bolstered their ability to have a firm hand in what was happening here to take a stand against King John.
They died in a revolt of their own orchestration.
The coded letters I discovered in the vault, in their bedroom, revealed all. Letters I then burned to protect my siblings and myself. If they’d fallen into the wrong hands . . . Well, we’d be in the same position that we are now.
Turns out the universe is an ironic bitch like that.
“They wanted the king dead,” I tell Peter evenly.
“Everyone wanted the king dead,” he seethes, “that’s no secret.”
I shake my head. “But they planned for it. And on the day that they—” I breathe harshly through my nose, fighting the well of tears that never fails to spring up when I think of them both. “On the day that they died, they staged that protest, Peter. King John was due to head into Westminster, to sign into law that parliament would be no more, and Mum and Dad, they were going to make a move. They organized it all.”
His eyes go round. “No. No, you’re lying. Mum and Dad, they wouldn’t—”
“They did.”
I’m so wound up that I nearly miss the tension seeping into the room. Saxon’s knuckles are white where they clutch Peter’s arms and I’m sure . . . God, I’m sure he feels betrayed that I haven’t told him any of this. He trusted me. He saved me. And I repaid him by keeping secrets, no matter that he would have understood them all.
I look to him now, begging him silently to not hold a grudge against me, and I try not to feel slayed by the startled expression on his face.
Bollocks. I can’t—I can’t deal with him right now. Peter. I need to concentrate on Peter.
I turn to my brother. “They died alongside more than a hundred other people. And the king walked away unscathed.”
A ragged sob wrenches itself from Peter’s throat.
Welcome to the truth, brother mine. The cold, ugly truth.
The truth that’s kept me up at night for five years. The truth that’s guided every decision that I’ve made in all that time. The truth, for better or worse, that’s led me here to this exact moment, prepared to tear the safety net I’ve cast over him in two.
Completely irreparable.
“You say that you don’t know me,” I say, steel lacing every word, “and you’re right. I walked alone for years, knowing every piece of information that they’d gathered and sharing it with no one. I watched it all unfold, Peter. The increased disappearances. The gradual number of Brits who found themselves locked up or, worse, dead—and all because they had the wherewithal to stand up to a man so inflated by power that he couldn’t see the storm he was brewing among his own people.