Sound of Madness: A Dark Royal Romance Read online

  Sound of Madness

  Broken Crown, Book 2

  Maria Luis

  Alkmini Books, LLC

  He is my ruin.

  My complete and utter devastation.

  Loyalty or death.

  I make my choice in a palace of flames, and wake to total darkness . . .

  And at his mercy.

  Calloused hands bring hell to my door and his velvet voice spews only poison.

  “A traitor to the queen,” he calls me, and though I don’t know his name, it’s clear that he’s no Prince Charming.

  Monster.

  Villain.

  A man who demands that I take it all—and submit.

  But no one will ever mistake me for a damsel in distress.

  He wants me on my knees, but it won’t be me who breaks.

  Only, falling for the most hated man in England was not the plan.

  If war is hell, then love is carnage, and the blood that’s spilled belongs to us both.

  Sound of Madness (Broken Crown, Book 2)

  Maria Luis

  Copyright © 2020 by Alkmini Books, LLC

  It is illegal to distribute or resale this copy in any form.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Photographer: Wander Book Club Photography

  Cover Model: Zach B.

  Cover Designer: Najla Qamber, Najla Qamber Designs

  Editing: Kathy Bosman, Indie Editing Chick

  Proofreading: Horus Proofreading

  Created with Vellum

  To those who live in the dark,

  I see you.

  And to Liane,

  Knowing you was a gift.

  Good job, honey.

  Playlist

  “Born Alone Die Alone” — Madalen Duke

  “That’s Just Life’ — Memphis May Fire

  “Popular Monster” — Falling In Reverse

  “Go To War” — Nothing More

  “Vultures” — Asking Alexandria

  “Blackheart” — Thomas Bergersen (Two Steps From Hell)

  “Lady of the Dawn” — Peter Gundry

  “Firestorm” — Audiomachine

  “Dark Rider” — Audiomachine

  “Till Death Do Us Part” — Audiomachine

  “Between Good and Evil” — Audiomachine

  “See What I’ve Become” — Zack Hemsey

  “Light of the Seven” — Ramin Djawadi

  “Destiny of the Chosen” — Immediate

  “Lívstræðrir” — John Lunn & Eiør

  Contents

  1. Rowena

  2. Damien

  3. Rowena

  4. Damien

  5. Damien

  6. Rowena

  7. Damien

  8. Rowena

  9. Damien

  10. Rowena

  11. Damien

  12. Damien

  13. Rowena

  14. Damien

  15. Damien

  16. Rowena

  17. Rowena

  18. Rowena

  19. Damien

  20. Rowena

  21. Damien

  22. Rowena

  23. Rowena

  24. Damien

  25. Rowena

  26. Damien

  27. Damien

  28. Rowena

  29. Damien

  30. Damien

  31. Rowena

  32. Damien

  33. Rowena

  34. Rowena

  35. Damien

  36. Damien

  37. Rowena

  38. Damien

  39. Rowena

  40. Damien

  41. Damien

  42. Rowena

  43. Rowena

  44. Rowena

  45. Rowena

  46. Rowena

  47. Rowena

  48. Damien

  49. Damien

  50. Rowena

  51. Damien

  52. Damien

  53. Rowena

  54. Rowena

  55. Rowena

  56. Damien

  What To Read Next

  Sworn Teaser

  Dear Fabulous Reader

  Also By Maria Luis

  About the Author

  Rowena

  London, England

  Flames nip at my heels and smoke incinerates my lungs.

  I should flee.

  Should run as far away as my feet can carry me—but I’m a fool. A loyal fool who values a twenty-year-old friendship over my own life, no matter the fact that Buckingham Palace is on fire.

  “Margaret!”

  I barely manage five steps down the corridor when the window to my left shatters. Shatters and splinters, shards of glass exploding, and I hurl myself to the ground, arms shielding my head, back rounded to take the brunt of the pain should it come.

  And it does.

  Like wrathful raindrops of hell that shred my flesh.

  A cry wrenches from my throat, and my vision shimmers with unshed tears. It would be so easy to remain as I am. To become one of the dead, like the scores of others who won’t escape the palace tonight.

  But I’m . . . I’m—

  Crawling.

  Crawling on my hands and knees, crawling through a sea of broken glass, crawling toward the queen. My best friend. The only person I call family.

  Get up, Rowan. Get up!

  I grit my teeth and push to my feet.

  It hurts to breathe, hurts even more to move, and still I sprint toward Margaret’s rooms. Up the narrow stairwell, where dark, billowing smoke twines like vine around my legs. Down the next corridor, where I pass empty room after empty room, the doors swung open, the occupants having already fled. No one returned for Margaret.

  No one except for me.

  A quick glance to my left reveals fire licking at the windows. Those flames flicker, climbing higher and higher, until the night sky disappears behind a terrorizing swarm of orange and red and yellow. One wrong step, one wrong move, and the last memory I’ll have is the scent of burning flesh.

  I cut around the next corner—and grind to a halt.

  A hard body sits slumped outside Margaret’s door, legs splayed crookedly, head drooped forward. I know him instantly. That mop of messy blond hair. Those familiar military-style trousers.

  “Clarke?” His name is a strangled sound on my tongue. “Clarke!”

  Demolishing the distance between us, I collapse to my knees beside him. Grab him fiercely by the shoulders and shake. Blood thrums in my temple and my chest cleaves in two when his hand drops from his thigh to the floor.

  Palm up. Fingers loosely curled.

  Utterly and completely lifeless.

  “No. Clarke, no.”

  With trembling hands, I grasp his face, lifting gently, and meet unblinking hazel eyes.

  Horror slithers through my veins, slow and lethal, until the suffocating sweat drenching my skin becomes only ice. Ice that splinters, ice that cracks, because it’s not the bodyguard’s blank stare that snares my attention, but the ring-sized hole marking the center of his forehead.

  Nausea swirls as I stagger backward and land unceremoniously on my arse. Look away! But there’s no wrenching my gaze away from the blood trickling into one blond brow and smearing the bent bridge of his nose.

  Buckingham Palace is caught up in an inferno and someone murdered him. And Margaret—

  “Oh, God.”

  Someone knew only Clarke stood in the way o
f reaching Margaret, and if a man like Clarke can fall . . . I don’t stand a chance.

  I’m defenseless. Weaponless.

  He isn’t.

  Reluctantly, my gaze sweeps over Clarke’s limp frame. Just do it. Remorse burns in my lungs as I inch up his shirt and snag the pistol from the holster at his hip. The gun that I’ve never seen him without, in all the time that I’ve known him.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whisper raggedly, hastily tucking his shirt back down before reaching for his hand. Head bowed, I fold one atop the other over his stomach. He didn’t deserve this.

  No one deserves this.

  Fighting back despair, I cut my stare to the floor, only to spy blood staining the rug, leading opposite the way I had come.

  Either Clarke managed to wound his attacker or . . .

  Don’t go there. Don’t you dare go there.

  With Clarke’s pistol clamped between my hands, I follow that trail of red down the hall, around the next corner, until, finally, I stop before a darkened stairwell.

  My finger finds the trigger.

  The sole of my shoe hits the first rung, and I grimace when the wood whines beneath me.

  I glance down, over the smooth bannister, and debate how long I have until the flames reach this floor. Even now, I can hear windows shattering. Crack! Crack! Crack! Each one louder, closer, until the implosions match the frenetic stutter of my heartbeat.

  One step down, then another.

  “Margaret?”

  Then, so faint I nearly miss it: “Rowan . . . I-I’m here!”

  My feet move of their own accord, the gun steady in my grip. And then I see her, the woman who’s always felt more like a sister than a friend—and my worst fear is confirmed.

  “You’ve been shot,” I breathe.

  Half-slouched on the stair rung above her, with her hands pressed to her bloodied abdomen, Margaret offers a weak laugh. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Clarke—”

  “That I know,” she whispers, jerking her face away before I can see emotion ripple across her features. But I know her too well—just as she knows me—and her grief is palpable. Absolute. “I know.”

  I’m so sorry.

  The words beg to be free, but now isn’t the time to give them life. Instead, I dart forward and snake my arm under hers. Despite the heat enveloping the palace, her skin is frigid. I swallow tightly. “We need to get you to a hospital.”

  “No.” She plants a feeble hand on the curved wall. “The palace . . . take me to the palace.”

  “Mags,” I mutter, biting back a pained hiss when she loops an arm around my back and catches the particles of glass still lodged in my skin, “if we stay, we’ll be dead. Now please just—”

  She slides out of my grasp, her body pitching forward.

  “—Margaret!”

  My fingers grasp the back of her shirt, but it’s not enough to defy gravity.

  We tumble forward together.

  Elbows crashing against stone, knees dragging and rolling over my shoulder. Clarke’s handgun slips from my grip, clattering somewhere out of sight. And then my head bashes against the wall, and I roll once more, landing on my back with a thud that drives the air from my lungs.

  Fuck me, everything hurts.

  Arching my spine to relieve the stinging pressure, I claw onto all fours and get no farther than my elbows and shins. My forehead greets the wooden stair rung as I drag in deep gulps of air. The grain of the wood is slick with something that smells suspiciously like blood. No doubt my own.

  Focus. I need to focus.

  “Mags?” On trembling limbs, I drag myself over to the balustrade and peer down the stairwell. “Mags!”

  She’s facedown, her white-blond hair a near ash-brown in the dim light, her arms splayed wide.

  My heart lurches.

  We need to flee. We need to run. But when I finally reach her side and ease her onto her back, her face is devoid of color and her lips part on jagged, uneven breaths. Dazed blue eyes find mine.

  “The palace,” she whispers again.

  I choke back a wretched laugh. “We’re here!” I wave my arm at the empty stairwell, frustration sharpening my tone. “We’re already bloody here, and we’re going to die here if we don’t move. So please just let me—”

  “In Sevenoaks,” she utters on a battered breath, her fingers circling my wrist, “the Palace. Take me . . . take me to the home with the drawbridge and t-the moat.”

  A . . . moat?

  I tip my head back and stare at the ceiling, two stories above us. Hopelessness sits like a shroud upon on my shoulders. Margaret is delirious and in no shape to walk anywhere, and I’ll never leave her to suffer alone. Sisters, always, no matter our lack of shared blood. Which means . . . this is it.

  This is the end.

  I don’t know what it says about me that instead of blind panic, all I feel is the sting of relief.

  God knows my father won’t mourn the loss of me, and Mum—well, I suppose this is a rather fitting end.

  Like mother, like daughter.

  Both Carrigan women swept away in a blaze hot enough to smother our screams forever.

  “Holyrood.”

  “What?” Startled, my gaze snaps to Margaret’s ashen face. “You want to go to Edinburgh?”

  Offering a weak shake of her head, her blue eyes slide shut. “Not Scotland. Bring me to Holyrood,” she breathes, panic prompting the words from her faster, more urgently, “bring me to the Godw—”

  “We won’t make it.”

  “I saved you. I saved you—remember? S-Sevenoaks,” she repeats with a desperate squeeze of her fingers around my wrist, “the house with the . . . moat. Take me there.”

  My throat goes dry. “We’re going to die. You know that, right?”

  She answers, softly, “I know.”

  We both know.

  She’s bleeding out and I’m five steps away from losing consciousness, and still I shove myself to my feet and pull her up until she’s half-balanced against me. Debilitating pain erupts across my body, like sharp-edged knives dancing over the pearls of my spine.

  Stay strong. Do not fall.

  I glance over the bannister—at the two remaining flights of stairs that I’ll need to haul Margaret down. She may be a queen, but she’s as mortal as I am.

  We won’t leave Buckingham Palace alive, that I know deep in my soul.

  But twenty years after Margaret saved me from my childhood home going up in flames, I finally repay my debt. I carry her, I stumble with her, and as we face down a wall of fire that reminds me of the nightmares that plague me, even now, I curse her too.

  She and I both know that I would have rather died in that stairwell.

  2

  Damien

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  My stride slows, then stops altogether.

  Seven months. Seven fucking months of hearing that voice ask me the same damn question, over and over and over again. My fingers itch to pummel his face, to rip out his tongue. Rendering him mute really shouldn’t spark as much joy as it does.

  Then again, my mum always said that I was born with war in my blood.

  She wasn’t wrong.

  Turning away from the Palace’s front door, I raise my gaze until I spot Jude Calvin on the upper gallery of the great hall.

  “Didn’t hear me the first time?” he asks, leaning casually against the centuries-old bannister. He drops his elbows to the dark, glossy wood. “I said, where the bloody hell do you think you’re going?”

  The weight of the holstered gun at my lower back is pure temptation.

  I could have Jude swinging from that bannister in seconds. Chest oozing blood, eyes forever sightless. He wouldn’t stand a chance and I wouldn’t mind the clean-up. Hell, I’d welcome it.

  Sweet, fucking temptation.

  I angle my chin, keeping him in my direct line of sight. “You ever get tired of hearing the sound of your own voice?”

/>   “Do you ever get tired of trying to run?”

  Running would imply that I’m scared—and that couldn’t be further from the truth. I stay because it keeps Holyrood unnoticed, the way it’s been for over a century. The way it’ll stay long after I’m dead, when my ashes are scattered over the ruins of Holyrood Abbey in Edinburgh like all who’ve come before me.

  In the interim, I remain a traitor to the queen.

  The man who infiltrated Parliament. The snake slithering within Britain’s midst.

  If I weren’t on the verge of losing the last threads of my sanity—of becoming the wild beast the world thinks me to be—I might feel honored by all the attention. Flattered, even.

  Or maybe you feel that way because you’ve already descended into madness.

  “Nothing to say?” Jude drawls, smirking. “The Priest brother most likely to share his opinion—silenced. Never thought that I’d see the day.”

  My lips spread in a thinly provoking smile. “Nothing to say when I don’t see anything worth commenting on.”