“Absolutely, fucking mental,” grunts Hamish, shaking his head. “It must run in the family. Not a sane one in the whole lot of ye.”
Nostrils flaring, I ignore him too. “No one pays Isla a visit but me.”
The lot of them all exchange wary glances, but it’s Guy who speaks up. “You have two choices here: death or imprisonment. She’s a traitor.”
Is she? Or was her assassination of the king only a symptom of the debilitating anger stirred deep within her after her parents were murdered? She turned to fire and I turned to ice, and it’s that ice that’s been my constant companion for twenty-five years. I conned her into that prison cell like the coldhearted bastard I’ve always been. And she . . . She was all too easy to manipulate with her trusting gaze and the eager way with which she’d followed me, as though willing to bend to my every whim.
Am I to call you boss, now? she asked me, days ago.
If only I’d known then what I know now—that I’ve always been trouble, a true Godwin, and that whatever heart I do own has been wired, over decades’ worth of subjugation, to spurn every ounce of warmth that comes my way.
I captured a warrior and dragged her into the darkest pits of hell.
“No one,” I repeat softly, with a hard edge that will not be defied, “but me.”
35
Isla
I’ve been encased in darkness for an eternity.
“Hours,” I whisper to myself, staring up at the ceiling from where I’m sprawled out on the cold slate floor. “It’s only been hours.” I think.
More likely than not it’s been less than a day.
Without artificial light, without even a single window, there’s no sense of up or down. I could be splayed out on my stomach, my nose grazing the dusty floor, and I wouldn’t know the difference.
I know that I stopped screaming Saxon’s name after my voice went hoarse.
I know that Alfie Barker could hear every one of my pitiful cries because he shouted for me to shut the hell up right around the time hopelessness became a suffocating shroud and I sank to the ground.
My shins and kneecaps are bruised from posturing before that door, as though if I begged, however silently, that help might come.
That I might be saved.
It’s only taken hours inside this miserable cell for me to recognize the truth: Saxon Priest tricked me, manipulated me, and then he left me to die.
Bastard.
Rolling onto my side, I push onto all fours and crawl toward the shared wall between my cell and Alfie Barker’s. To keep my healing wound clean, I drag my sleeve down over my palm and offer up a silent plea that I won’t contract an infection. The crown of my head bumps the wall first, and I twist immediately, planting my arse on the floor and my back against the stone.
At this point, I have nothing left to lose.
“Alfie.” A small pause. “Alfie, I know you can hear me.”
“Sod off,” comes his aggravated reply.
Admittedly, I’m desperate enough not to care that he’s being a complete wanker. If I find myself locked in this prison for more days yet, I’ll be ten times worse than he’ll ever be. “How long have you been here?”
“Didn’t I tell you to piss off?”
“It’s a courtesy I’ll allow since you look like absolute hell.”
“How gallant of you to say so.”
Ignoring the residual ache in my stiff legs, I drape my wrists over my bent knees. Peer out into the pure blackness that envelops the cell. “Have you been fed? Watered?”
Nary a pause before his sarcastic retort filters in through what I suspect are the ceiling ducts: “If I were a plant, I would be a cactus on its last leg. I piss in one corner, shit in another. Any other pertinent details you want to know before I go back to wishing I were dead?”
“Yes. Why are you really here?”
I tilt my head, listening for any sort of response from my fellow inmate. A tiny sliver of me—the indestructible sliver that always seeks out the good in people—believes that this is somehow a test, that Peter and Josie will be waiting for me with open arms as soon as I’m set free.
The rest of me prays that my siblings are simply alive.
Don’t go there. Don’t you dare think that way.
“Alfie?” I try again.
Then, finally, “I had orders to kill the queen.”
My back goes ramrod straight. “Orders? Orders from whom?”
I can practically see him shaking his head when he admits, “I don’t know and, truthfully, I didn’t care. My wife is dead—last year’s riot on Easter—and I just . . . I just—”
Sobs fill my cell, wrecked and tormented, and I turn onto my knees and place one hand against the roughened stone wall. “Alfie.” More sobs, this set louder and tinged with sorrow. “Alfie, you mustn’t cry. Do you hear me? If you want to—”
“If I want to what?” he expels on an unmistakable water-logged exhale. “Survive? I’m lucky that I’m alive! And you know who’ll suffer if I do die? My two little girls. They’ll be the ones to suffer, not me.”
The same fate will meet Peter and Josie, I know that all too well. But I hope . . . Well, I hope that the two of them are stronger together. Where are they now? I’ve asked myself that question no less than twenty times since being trapped in this cell and, like every other instance, I suppress the bad, lurking thoughts and place them in a mental box with an impenetrable lock.
First I need to escape.
Then I can go about saving them.
“Whoever you had orders from,” I say, my brain working overtime as I run through the beginnings of a hazy plan, “would they realize you’ve gone missing?”
“Are you asking if they’ll save me? Or if they’ll save you, considering that you shot the king?”
“The two aren’t mutually exclusive.” I swallow, tightly. “We must help each other, Alfie. However we can.”
I expect Barker to issue another derisive rejection. But even as I strain my ears, listening for the increasingly familiar timbre of his nasally voice, there’s no further activity from his side of the wall. Dammit, Barker. Another moment of silence passes, and then yet another, until concern slams into me. There’s nothing in this cell that could inflict self-harm—I’ve checked what feels like every nook and cranny for a weapon I might use to escape—but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t found another, more sinister, method to get the job done.
Like bashing his head on the wall and ending his misery.
Oh, God.
Still on my knees, I bang a closed fist against the stone. “Alfie, think rationally. Do you hear me? Whatever you’re feeling, it’ll get better. It must get better. We’ve spent our lives fighting for this and you cannot give up now.”
“He hasn’t.”
At the familiar, dark-pitched voice, I swing my gaze toward where the door is vaguely located—only to spot Saxon standing there. As it was when we first entered the hallway, the two-sided glass is crystal clear, quite literally, which means that even if I didn’t want to see his blasted face ever again, I’m not given the luxury.