Prologue
Saxon
London, 1995
The king despised me.
He didn’t need to say so out loud. Didn’t need to breathe a single word whenever Pa brought me to the palace for one of their talks. But I knew.
They always argued and I always sat in the corner, my knobby knees clamped together and my fingers digging into my thighs. Beneath my shoes, a plush, red carpet stretched on forever, winding along narrow hallways and cutting down wide, centuries-old stairwells, before rolling all the way out to the front entrance of St. James’s Palace.
Pa and me never entered through the front.
“We’re special, m’boy,” Pa told me time and again, his hand rooted to my shoulder as he steered me down the alley that skirted Marlborough Road and led to our “special entrance.”
But we weren’t special. We were trouble.
“I told you not to bring him again,” the king hissed, no doubt thinking I couldn’t hear him. I heard it all, each word slamming into me like a round from the pistol Pa tucked into his trousers at the base of his spine. He didn’t think I noticed, but we all did.
Me, my older brother, Guy, and my younger brother, Damien.
The only one who noticed nothing was Mum, but she was sick. Always sick. Just as Pa was always trouble.
“He minds his own business, Your Royal Highness. He’s eight, the same age as Princess Margaret.” Pa looked over at me, his green eyes, a shade so eerily similar to my own, darkening with sympathy. “He has no friends. No one but his brothers and me and his mum, and I was thinking, maybe, that when you summoned me, my Saxon could play with your daugh—”
The king’s fist struck the table with a thunderous crack! that detonated like an explosion in my ears. “You forget yourself, Henry,” King John seethed with enough heat to singe my skin to ash, even as far away as I sat from them now. “You forget your place.”
Pa’s shoulders stiffened. “Forgive me, sir, but I’ve forgotten nothing. I took the oath, the same oath as my father and his father before him.”
“An oath which you failed to uphold!”
The king shoved away from the table, launching to his feet as he stalked the room like a caged animal. The doors were locked tight, the walls—Guy once whispered to me—were soundproof. If the king killed us, no one would hear our screams. Guy told me that, too.
So, me and Pa scurried into this secret room like vagrants, always fearful that someone might uncover us, spot us.
We were trouble.
The king said so.
Mum said so, whenever the sickness eased, and her skin wasn’t so very yellow.
My knees knocked together, and I fixated on the subtle sound.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
“Tell me, Henry,” the king snapped, “you’re worried about your blasted son not having any friends? My oldest daughter—my heir—is dead. Shot during a charity event after your family took an oath to protect us.”
Tap.
“Sir—”
Tap.
“Two months, Godwin. You promised me two months ago that you’d uncover who assassinated Evangeline. Two months.”
Tap.
Tap.
It took me a moment to realize that the tapping no longer belonged to my knocking knees but to the sound of King John’s shoes storming over the old wood floors. Toward me. He was coming toward me.
Fear clogged my throat.
Trouble. We Godwins were always trouble.
The king’s hand circled my bicep and hauled me from the chair. My shoes scraped the floor even as my fingers grappled at the king’s shirtsleeve. But he was big whereas I was small, the crown of my head barely hitting his diaphragm when I stood on my tiptoes.
Let me go. Let me go. Let me go!
The words lodged in my throat, threatening to suffocate me.
“John—sir,” Pa said, his cheeks red. He fiddled with the back of his shirt and I knew he was toying with that pistol. Trouble. Trouble. Trouble. “I understand your frustration,” he went on, his jaw locking tight, every word clipped and precise. “You have every right to be upset. But I’ve done everything to find Princess Evangeline’s killer. I’ve hunted down suspects. I’ve employed every possible source to suss out the damned bastard. Paul, the other men and I, we’re all working on this.”
“You’re not working hard enough.”
Before the stone fireplace, the king forcibly thrust me into a chair. The unexpected jolt made me bite down on my tongue, and I felt the pop of a blood vessel bursting in my mouth.
I wanted to cry out. I wanted to beg Pa to pick me up and take me from this place.
The king hated me.
A flash of steel caught my eye as I tried to spring from the chair to safety. An unforgiving hand yanked me back, and then there was no missing the high sheen of the king’s gem-stoned rings that twinkled on his fingers. Yellow topaz like Saturn. Red ruby like Mercury. Blue sapphire like Earth.
My love for outer space felt like a very bad thing when faced with the sovereign king’s wrath.
The tip of the blade pricked the sensitive flesh behind my right ear, and only then did I beg, plead, pray. “Papa,” I whimpered on a sharp, battered exhale, “help. Papa, help!”
He stepped forward. In his hand he brandished a pistol, and it was aimed at the king.
Trouble. Trouble. Trouble.
“Sir,” Pa ground out, his voice quivering with an unfamiliar strain of fear, “you’ve had a long day. A damn long two months. But my boy Saxon? He’s done nothing wrong. We’ll keep searching. I won’t rest until we find who killed the princess. I swear it on my life.”
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see anything, but for the red sea sweeping over my vision and distorting everything.
Red like the carpet under my feet.
Red like the color of the king’s ring.
Red like the whites of my father’s eyes when he met my gaze and I saw his terror.
“Put the pistol down, Henry,” the king snapped. “Put the pistol down or I’ll teach you the taste of true grief.”
The weapon clattered to a chair as Pa surged past it. “John, fuck, listen to me—”
The blade pressed down on my skin, and a howl climbed my throat.
“Your loyalty,” the king said, “swear it on your son’s life. We’ve had your family’s fealty for years. Prove it now, Godwin. Prove it to your son that the Crown must always come first.”
Pa’s red-rimmed eyes locked with mine, and I saw the apology forming in his expression before the words ever entered the space between us. “Saxon, m’boy,” he whispered, “keep looking at me. Don’t look away.”
The king leaned down to utter raggedly in my ear, “Never forget, Saxon, where your loyalty belongs. With the king. With the Crown. An oath that’s spanned generations between our two families. Don’t break like your father and this moment will never be repeated.”
Pain, sharp and insistent, scored the flesh behind my ear. It sank in its claws, twisting and dragging, and the red sea consumed me, swallowing my thrashing feet and flexing fingers and my mouth that parted for a scream that never came.
It didn’t come then, in that secret room of the palace that existed to no one but us. It didn’t come that night, when Pa sat me down in our small, ancient flat in Whitechapel, his arms wrapped around me as he rocked my body back and forth, apologies coating his tongue and sounding so very faraway beyond the roaring in my ears.
And it didn’t come five months later, when Pa was found dead on the side of Marlborough Road, just yards from St. James’s Palace, his stomach coated red with blood.
Chapter One
Saxon
London, Present Day
The queen enters my pub like she expects to be ambushed.
Not that I’d expect anything less from a woman wanted dethroned by half the country.
Her silver-blond hair is hidden beneath the confines of a black wig that’s seen better days. Wide-eyed, her gaze flicks from left to right, right to left; no doubt she’s panicking that someone might see through her shoddy costume to the woman wearing it.
It’s been twenty-five years since I saw her last, outside of television appearances and snapshots of her in the papers. Only, back then, she wasn’t Queen. Not yet. Just a young princess—a princess who was never allowed to play with the spy’s sons, no matter that the Godwin family has been integral to the Crown’s survival for over a century.
Tossing the damp rag on the bar’s oak counter, I drag my equally damp palms over my trousers. Swiftly, I count every patron seated at the bar, then those camped out in the booths, knowing that every person in here would gladly see her dead before they ever bend the knee.
The queen catches my eye and a relieved smile hitches the corner of her mouth.
Relief should be the last thing she’s feeling. The bloody woman has entered the proverbial lion’s den—and she’s done so alone. No bodyguard tailing her shadow. No weapon of any sort that I can see, and I’ve disarmed enough people in my life to know when someone is carrying, civilian or not.
What the hell is she doing?
Under my breath, I curse her stupidity for coming here. No, her goddamn naivety. Wig or not, if my customers sniff her out, we’ll have a riot on our hands.
They want her dead. They want the monarchy dismantled.
And long before I was born, my family was tasked with keeping the Crown exactly where it’s been since the eleventh century: at the top of the social pecking order.
Hands on my thighs, I duck under the bar. Tell my barman, Jack, to hold down the fort while I take a piss, and then head for the stairs that lead from the pub up to Guy’s flat. Straining my ears, I wait for the telltale sound of a female’s lighter footsteps before I start taking them two at a time.
The first rung whines under Queen Margaret, and there’s no mistaking the hushed, “Oh, do shut up,” that she whispers to God-knows-what.
Sharply, I glance over my shoulder, only to—
Christ.
Is she trying to get herself offed? And me right along with her?
As though primping before a mirror, she readjusts the chin-length wig with a sharp pull. A strand of blond escapes to frame her face like a white flag of surrender, shouting, It’s me! Your Royal-fucking-Majesty! The wig alone is shit, but the fact that she’s messing with it is doing her no favors. Even now, her fingers nervously pat the back, unaware of that piece of telltale blond.
Her only saving grace is the fact that she doesn’t waste time. She scurries up the steps, chin tucked down, like that alone will ward off any curiosity. It won’t. She walks like a royal. Moves like a royal. And, when she utters my name, it’s safe to say that she speaks like a royal too. Posh. Proper. My very antithesis.
“Mr. Godwin, I wasn’t sure if you’d recognize me.”
I’d have to be an idiot not to recognize the most powerful person in the commonwealth. But she’d have to be an idiot to use the surname that the Crown itself scrubbed from every public document after Pa was murdered—and do so in my own pub, no less.
“Priest,” I correct gruffly, my eyes locked on Guy’s front door. I haven’t answered to anything else in over twenty years. The Godwins died right along with my father. Died, and never resurfaced.
“Oh, yes. I—” Rustling echoes behind me, like she’s checking the stairwell for any potential lurkers. “Mr. Priest. I do apologize. I wasn’t thinking.”
Not thinking will land her in the same predicament as her father: dead.
Maybe recklessness is a family trait, passed down through the generations. I can see it. King John was a tyrannical bastard who never thought five steps ahead, let alone one. He single-handedly turned this country back four hundred years. Keeping parliament in place has been nothing more than a case of smoke and mirrors—everyone is all too aware of who’s running this country, and it’s not the politicians who continue to fill the seats of Westminster.
With a father like that . . . Well, no wonder his own daughter thought showing up to a fucking anti-loyalist pub would be a grand idea.
Long live the queen.
Shoving the key into the rusty lock, I turn the knob and push the door open. Immediately, my gaze darts to the tiny kitchenette, where my older brother stands, shirtless, as he pops open a can of beans. “Ready to turn in for the day already?” Guy drawls sharply, barely sparing me a glance.
Barely sparing the queen a glance.
I shut the door behind her, turning over the lock. “We’ve company.”
“You know how I feel about people.”
“Then dust off your manners. I’m sure the cobwebs could do with a breather.”
Guy’s blue eyes finally lift. They land on me, then zero in on Queen Margaret to my left. He says nothing, not at first. But his eyes narrow and his body visibly tenses and then he’s dropping the can onto the counter and sauntering toward us.
Toward the queen.
“Guy,” I growl, my tone thick with warning. My brother has no boundaries. Not with me or Damien, not with the other Holyrood agents—others like us who’ve been recruited to serve the Crown. And sure as hell not with the hundreds of people who we’ve schemed and lied to and stolen precious information from over the years. Information that was never meant to reach the pinnacle of Britain’s power.
Expression stony, my brother ignores me as though I don’t exist.
He reaches out, his fingers grasping the queen’s wig, and tears it straight from her head.
“Mr. Priest,” she hisses, her own fingers jotting upward, as though to make a grab for the fake hair, despite being a second too late.
With casual dismissiveness, Guy tosses the wig to the side, where it slides across the floor and catches under the leg of the coffee table. Only then does he offer a dramatic dip of his head, playing the part of ever-dutiful servant.
For fuck’s sake.
The queen’s blond hair is in disarray, locks strewn this way and that and sticking up like prey confronted by something bigger, meaner. “That—that was unacceptable. If my father—”
“Your father’s dead, Princess.”
Princess. As if she didn’t watch her father be brutally shot down in front of her—and an entire rally—just two months ago. The blood that spattered her face and clothing in the aftermath has been stitched into every highlight reel on the telly ever since. I look at her now, eyeing her expression critically, and wonder how many times she’s tried to eviscerate the memory.
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