A New King | Chapter 1
SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t started the Broken Crown series and/or finished Sound of Madness, turn back now or forever hold your peace! There be spoilers ahead.
Chapter One
Margaret
London, England, Present Day
Like a tattered doll with threadbare seams, I’m seconds away from being torn in two.
Unfamiliar hands yank at my gown and strange fingers tangle in my hair, and no matter how many times I squeeze my eyes shut, praying, praying, praying for it all to end, the nightmare lives on. I’m starting to believe that it always will.
“Keep goin’, Your Majesty.”
I obey Gregory’s order without protest, dogging his every step as he uses his powerful frame to hurl people out of our way. But for every protestor that he wrenches from our path, there are more surge forward.
Their eyes snap with wild fury.
Their lips curve with snarling rage.
Dig deep, Little One. Then dig even deeper.
With sweat-dampened fingers, I tear the jeweled crown from my head and toss it into the crowd. Then frantically fumble with the diamond clasps at my shoulders and work myself free from the Robe of State. The heavy ermine-and-velvet cape goes taut for one harrowing second before it, too, disappears from sight.
If only shedding my skin was just as easy.
Refracted sunlight, glancing off Westminster’s many windows, momentarily blinds me. I look away, blinking furiously, and turn back in time to see Gregory’s balled fist collide with a man’s face. Blood spurts from the stranger’s nose. It stains my ivory gown and dots my face with sticky warmth, and my feet should be moving—I should be moving—but I stagger to a stop, frozen in place, blood gone ice-cold from panic.
Throwing the man aside, Gregory waves me forward impatiently. “Your Majesty.”
Dig deep.
Inhale.
Dig deep.
Exhale.
I can do this.
But no sooner have I lifted my foot that I’m roughly jerked backward. Shock carves me right down the middle, my lips parting on a hollow scream. The world is tilting, my body already listing. Wide-eyed, I watch my clawing hands scrabble for Gregory’s shirtsleeve as though they belong to someone else.
Catch me, catch me, catch—
Chaos swallows me whole instead.
Gunmetal explodes on my tongue, the slippery texture of blood coating my teeth as the clear blue sky disappears behind denim-clad legs. Someone steps on my shin. Heavy weight propels off my stomach, right over the bullet wound from Buckingham Palace, and I curl into myself with a pitiful moan.
Fuck.
I’ve spent thirty-three years doing everything in my power to survive another day. For Mum, who held me in her arms only once before fate ripped her away. For Evie, who was dead before her eighteenth birthday. For Dad, who taught me strength and perseverance, but whose blood I can still feel on my skin as I watched his towering frame teeter and fall at my feet, never to rise again.
Death has been my silent companion since birth.
I won’t be its next victim.
Drawing on my last reserve, I roll onto all fours with a groan. My gaze latches onto the long train of my dress, caught beneath hordes of passing feet, when a knee catches me in the shoulder and knocks me back down. Trapping my bottom lip beneath my teeth, I shift my weight and snatch fistfuls of my gown, pulling at the heavy fabric so that I can grab the knife tucked into the sheath above my ankle.
And then I hack away at the fabric keeping me pinned to the earth.
I don’t allow myself to think.
Don’t allow myself to cry.
The strokes of my knife are deadly, efficient.
There’s irony in a queen being brought to her knees by the people meant to worship the very ground she walks on. But even as I sever the last thread tying me to the muddied train, I feel nothing but the cold chill of reality settling in my bones. Even if I somehow manage to live today, I’ll die tomorrow.
And, in an effort to save him, I’ve now damned Damien to the same miserable fate.
A hand clamps down on my shoulder, twisting me around. I don’t fight the rotation. Dropping the torn fabric, I bring the blade up to defend myself, freezing only when I spy narrowed brown eyes set in a familiar craggy face.
Gregory.
“Let’s go,” he growls, yanking me upward.
With his hand locked around my wrist, we push through the thickening crowd. The wide breadth of his shoulders is a beacon that I follow blindly, twisting my body to snake through narrow gaps of space while the hem of my tattered gown bunches awkwardly between my knees.
“We’ll never make it to Priest!”
Gregory turns to look back at me, lips parting to reply—and then his big body abruptly pitches forward. I wind my arms around his waist to anchor his weight, and immediately feel his involuntary flinch, the way he tries to jerk away. Dread punctures my already uneven breathing when I pull my hand back.
Blood.
So. Much. Blood.
“Gregory,” I manage thickly, darting my gaze to his, “how in—”
“We ’ave to go.”
“You’ve been stabbed!”
“We ’ave to go, Your Majesty—now.”
He drags me behind him, picking up the pace until we’re sprinting as if the hounds of hell are at our backs. The tight squeeze of my pumps pinches my toes, but I ignore the sting of discomfort as we zigzag through the masses, never stopping long enough for anyone to recognize my face.
I know the plan.
In the dead of night, without Holyrood breathing down my neck, I studied today’s mission as if it was the last thing I’d ever commit to memory. But there was no contingency plan for a riot breaking out on the steps of Westminster while I addressed the House of Commons; no plan for what might happen if I exposed my half-brother’s birthright with the hope that it would keep him from sitting behind bars for the rest of his life. And there was no planning for the loud, deafening bark of a gun.
Gregory goes sprawling to the pavement like a slab of stone.
“Run,” he grunts when I crash to my knees beside him. Stomach down, he turns his head toward me, his breathing coming hard and fast. “Bloody ’ell, Your Majesty, you need to run!”
“Not without you.”
His fingers catch mine, stopping me from tearing at his shirt to see where the bullet lodged in his flesh. “Please, you need to . . .” A spasm ripples through his formidable frame. “Please . . . please—”
I feel Death.
I feel his icy talons raking down my spine and his chilled breath on the back of my neck. Feel the predatory weight of his gaze like a bloodied vow scrawled across my flesh, the dark promise that I’ll never escape the inevitable. That I’ll never outrun him.
“Today is not the end.” Gritting my teeth, I shove Gregory with all my might. “Tomorrow may be, but not today.”
He rolls over with a curse.
Blood has darkened the fabric of his shirt to black. As my heart gives an unsteady lurch, a flash of muscle memory tugs my palms down to Gregory’s wound the way that I did for Dad outside St. Paul’s Cathedral. I was too late, then. Too late to do anything but watch his mouth move with soundless words, the gurgling blood in his throat drowning out his familiar voice. Too late to do anything but scream my rage as Clarke wrapped an arm around my waist and hauled me to safety.
The king died alone.
I won’t let Gregory suffer the same fate.
Sucking in a fortifying breath, I dig my heels into the pavement, wrap my hands around Gregory’s wrists, and pull.
A shadow falls over his paling face.
It’s instinct that turns me around to shield Gregory, a need to protect the fragility of life that has me awkwardly palming the knife that I’ve carried with me ever since the night of the fire. Pulse racing out of control, I position myself to take the fall for us both.
Dig deep, Little One.
I hear my father’s voice, feel the weight of his never-ending support, and lift my gaze past long legs clad in military-style trousers to a broad chest decked out in a black armored vest. Warm metal touches my forehead, and the horrifying realization claws forward that I’m being held at gunpoint.
The hand holding the pistol never wavers as I pull in shattered breath after shattered breath. I think of Evie raking her fingers through my hair the night before she was murdered. I think of Rowan at Dunrobin Castle, of the pull in my gut that told me she would be the only sister I’d ever know after Evangeline. And I think of Dad, of the hundreds of letters he penned me over the years, all of them worn frail from the fraught slashes of his pen across the page.
I surround myself with their love while fear stiffens my spine.
Behind me, Gregory lets out a ragged moan. I touch my hand to his in comfort. For one last brush of human contact before I die.
Then, with my chin held high, I meet my killer’s gaze. Navy-blue eyes stare down at me, the depth of them as frigid, as calculating, as the very first day we met. I should be surprised. Furious. But some long-buried, twisted corner of my soul acknowledges that we’ve been hurtling toward this moment for years now. Those eyes have judged me, haunted me, just as his screams have chased me in my very worst nightmares.
If I weren’t on the verge of panic, I’d laugh.
Because the man who once vowed to give his life for mine is a savior no more. He’s my executioner, a harbinger of Death.
The king of Holyrood himself.
The hollow click of the gun’s safety hits my ears like cannon fire, and then the devil himself lowers to his haunches, trails the pistol down to the underside of my chin like a death dealer’s kiss, and leans forward to read me my Last Rites:
“Hello, princess.”
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