“Then why are your hands trembling?”
As if in doubt, Saxon splays his palms open and lifts them to chest-level. Even from where I stand, there’s no mistaking their visible tremor. Slowly, as though embarrassed by his body’s betrayal, he curls those lean fingers inward and clenches them into fists.
“You’re not a block of ice, Saxon, no matter how much you might wish that you were.” I keep my tone level, though it’s a struggle to sound unaffected. In the deepest part of my heart, I want to beg for him to open this door—not to escape, but so that I might wrap my arms around him and soothe his battered soul. Pitiful, absolutely pitiful. “It’s human to feel.”
“Until you, it was never a problem.”
“That’s not fair.” Frustration restricts my lungs, squeezing tight. “You can’t throw that accusation at my feet, like it’s my fault that you aren’t . . . that you aren’t some emotionless robot!”
“Bloody hell, Isla, I didn’t know what I was missing!” He storms toward my prison cage, not stopping until his hot breath mists the door, he stands so close. His eyes are turbulent, wild. “I drowned every bit of me that day. He held me down. Kept me fucking strapped to that chair while my father watched, utterly useless to save me.”
Heat, the sort that always foreshadows the arrival of something bad, warms my skin to a feverish pitch. “What did he do?”
“He branded me.”
“I-I don’t understand. How—where—?”
His fingers drift north to find the shell of his ear before tracing the sensitive flesh behind his lobe. Exactly where he flinched when I touched him, days ago.
My heart thunders as he husks, “There’s a certain level of fear that comes with pain, no matter the age. Broken bones. Torn ligaments. But there’s something to be said about when you realize, even at a young age, that power is the most frightening thing of all. The king’s power kept my father silent. The king’s power meant I would not have gotten away with fleeing, if I’d even had the chance. And then the king turned the power he wielded into a lesson by carving my Holyrood code into my skin.”
A horrified gasp escapes me before I can smother the sound.
“Pa was dead within months,” Saxon continues, without outward inflection, dropping his hand to his side. “We suspect on John’s order but we’ll never know for certain.”
“How could you”—I shake my head, trying to find the right words for a situation that is all so wrong—“how could you stay working for that man, knowing what he did to you? What he did to your father?”
“Because Paris showed me a different type of fear.” He runs his tongue along the ragged perimeter of his upper lip. “For our safety, we were exiled. Whether that was the actual truth or not mattered little. We had nothing. We were nothing. Begging for scraps, stealing whatever we could. It was brutal. Hopeless. Holyrood sent us money, but it never went as far as it should have, not with Mum sick and hospital bills eating every last quid we had—we didn’t exist, not on paper.”
Realization spreads through my veins like liquid truth. “So you wanted power. Returning to Holyrood gave you that.”
He holds my gaze, never once looking away. “I wanted a life where death sat around every corner.”
“Why?” I demand, flushed with confusion. “Why in the world would you want that for yourself?”
“It was the only time that I didn’t feel numb.”
Until you.
He doesn’t say the words out loud, but I hear them anyway. Stark and raw and real.
My lids fall shut.
There is so much to say and yet nothing can overrule one single, sobering fact: Saxon Priest did not choose me. No, he chose the life that he’s always known, the life that lets him cling to the shadows forever.
And those shadows, they’ll swallow me whole.
“If you hurt Peter or Josie . . .” I open my eyes, letting him read the threat raging within me. “I will murder you, even if I have to claw myself out of this hellhole first.”
His troubled green eyes search my face. “Won’t you beg?”
“Like Barker has for days?” I ask, never severing eye contact. “No, I won’t make that mistake.”
He clutches the back of his neck, frustration engraved in the movement. “Just—”
“I won’t make this easy for you.” Planting my hands on the cool glass, I hold my ground. Hold myself from breaking down, again. Don’t you dare shed a tear. “You made your choice, same as I did. Holyrood or me. Your family or me. I don’t blame you. I can’t even fault you. But I’ll be damned if I roll over and fit neatly into your plans. If I’m to die, then you’ll do it.”
“Fuck!”
The curse explodes from his mouth like cannon fire, startling me, but not more than the shocking way he violently pummels a fist into the wall beside the door. I can’t see his knuckles, nor the unlikely damage he’s wrought on the stone itself, but there’s no mistaking the emotion that shatters his expression.
Good.
I hope he feels exactly as I do: hopeless, ruined, broken.
Coolly, I tilt my chin toward the tray that he left abandoned on the floor. “And take that with you,” I tell him, stepping away from the door, “I’m not hungry.”
Fury winds its way down his powerful limbs as he glowers at me. “You need to eat.”
“I would prefer to starve.”
And then I turn my back on the man who I once thought would be my destiny. Or maybe he still is—after all, his will be the last face I see before I die.
36
Saxon
“You’ve a death wish coming here, you know that?”
“When doesn’t he?” Hamish snorts derisively as he shuts the office door behind us.
I slide a hard look toward the Scot, then another to Marcus Guthram, the Metropolitan’s police commissioner. The only child to a former Holyrood agent, Guthram shouldn’t know anything about our world—per organizational guidelines—but Guthram Sr. was never one to follow the rules. In a twist of fate, having the commissioner in our back pocket has been an ace that’s benefited us more times than not. When he’s not fucking us over, that is.
Without prompting, I drop a stack of banknotes onto his cluttered desk.
“There’s nothing I can do about what happened at Queen Mary.” Tone laden with exaggerated pity, the look he throws the green is greedy. Utterly famished. He clears his throat. “There were witnesses.”
Setting a duffel bag down by our feet, Hamish rolls one bulky shoulder.
I nudge it to the side with my boot. “They haven’t released the survivor’s name, which means either you’re withholding information or—”
“I wouldn’t,” Guthram interjects swiftly. His dark eyes dart to the money again, reminding me, as if I’ve forgotten, that Marcus Guthram recognizes only one currency: financial gluttony. “You know I wouldn’t do that.”
“But you have.” Leaning forward, I rest my knuckles on the desk, effectively blocking his only escape route. “And now,” I murmur, my voice eerily pleasant, “we have Damien on house arrest.”