He nodded once, and that was the end of it. He stepped back into the corridor and pulled the door mostly closed, and I was alone again.
I sat on the bed, and the mattress—straw, linen, and something that smelled faintly of cedar—cushioned me. I pressed my palms flat against it and closed my eyes, feeling the sensation of it.
I could still feel the way Lance had torn my tunic from my shoulder down to the hemline when he’d ripped it in half.
Lance.
I didn’t know what to do with the information regarding what Lance had done to Galahad because of me. That was the honest truth of it. I’d turned it over in my mind a dozen times since they’d pulled him off Galahad, and I still couldn’t find an angle that made sense. Lance, who had told me I was dead to him... Lance, who had abruptly taken me away from Galahad’s custody and kissed me like he was drowning... Lance, who had just thrown himself at Galahad... Galahad, who was untouchable, who was the king’s instrument, who was the kind of man you didn’t put your hands on unless you were prepared for what came after.
And Lance had done it anyway.
I didn’t understand him. That was the part that sat wrong with me, the part that burrowed under my skin and wouldn’t settle. I was good at reading people. Merlin had spent three years making sure of that, drilling me on tells, habits, and the small betrayals that lived in the space between what a person said and what they meant. I could read a room. I could read a knight in full armor from across a training yard.
But Lance I couldn’t read. At all.
He blew hot, then cold, and then hot again, and each time I thought I had him mapped, he did something that erased the whole picture.You’re dead to me.Then his mouth on mine. Then Galahad’s blood on his knuckles.
What was I supposed to do with that?
The worst part was that there was still something in me that responded to him. It was something stupid that was lodged somewhere near my heart, the kind of feeling that didn’t care a lick for logic and reason.
When Lance had told me I meant nothing to him, I’d used that information, used it like a tool to cauterize whatever had started between us. Or, at least, I’d attempted to cauterize it. But then he’d kissed me, and the work had come undone, regardless of the fact that I’d punched him across the face at the time.
And now this.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes until I saw the dark bloom of pressure behind my lids. The emptiness was still there, just as it always had been. And the emptiness had Lance’s shape and his name.
I pulled my hands down.
Outside the window, the courtyard was smearing itself in mottled colors, even as the sun was starting to rise over the mountains in the distance. Someone was crossing the courtyard with a lantern, and the light bent and warped through the old glass until it looked like something burning underwater.
Lance was a question I didn’t have the answer to, and that was all I could say about that subject.
I heard the door open, but I didn’t get up. Arthur came in without ceremony, without so much as even a knock, because why would he knock? It was his castle, his room, his prisoner sitting on his bed. I noticed Gawain was no longer on duty, and one of the king’s guards I didn’t recognize closed the door behind the king.
Arthur stopped a few feet inside the door and looked at me. I stood up and then just looked at him. Neither of us said anything for long enough that I could hear the conversation the guards were having in the hall outside, as well as the faint creak of the building settling, and the distant clang of something metallic from the courtyard below.
“Did he succeed?” Arthur asked finally. His voice was flat.
“Did who succeed in what?”
He frowned. He knew I knew exactly what he was asking me, but he also knew I was going to make him work for the answers. “Did Galahad succeed in forcing himself on you?”
“No.”
He absorbed that. His expression didn’t change exactly, but something shifted behind it.
“But he tried?”
I frowned. “Isn’t that obvious by now?”
“I suppose it is.”
Then more silence. Neither of us moved; we just stood there staring at one another.
“How long has he been... abusing you?”
I shrugged, and the motion hurt. “From the moment you left me with him.”
