The dungeon smelled worse by the fifth day, as if it were hiding something rotten, like a wound that wouldn’t close.
By this point, I’d stopped noticing the cold. That was either adaptation or despair; I hadn’t decided which. I also hadn’t decided why Arthur was still keeping me here when I’d agreed to become his spy. Perhaps spies remained in the dungeon? I didn’t know.
All I did know was that the stone wall was pressing against my spine. I’d been sitting against it long enough that the cold had stopped being cold, and now I just felt nothing.
Lance’s voice kept coming back to haunt me.
You are dead to me.
I turned the words over and over again, as if I were hoping they’d somehow change. But there wasn’t anything other than what I’d seen and what I’d heard. Lance had said the words without heat, which was worse than if he’d shouted them at me. Rage held the heat of emotion, of caring, but the flat register in which he’d spoken held nothing but indifference. And indifference was so much worse than hate or anger.
From the moment he’d arrived in front of my cell, I’d watched his face, hunting for something: maybe a crack or a flicker... some residue of the man who’d—
But no. There had been nothing. Just the deliberate blankness of someone who had decided what I was to him, and in deciding, he’d slammed the door shut to anything else.
I pressed the back of my skull against the wall, and the cold radiated up through my tailbone and into my ribs. After Lance had left, I’d thought I might cry. I’d been preparing for it, the way you might brace yourself for a large wave. But the wave never came. There was just the stone, the dark, the shadows, and a hollow within me that had no particular feeling attached to it.
I’d wished I could cry; anything to release this feeling within me, but there was nothing.
The footsteps that came down the corridor grabbed me from losing myself in my thoughts. The first thought I had was that they weren’t the guard’s. They were too deliberate, too slow; they were the footsteps of someone who wanted me to hear them coming.
A second or so later, the last man I ever wanted to see emerged. Kay stopped outside my cell and looked at me the way a man looks at an insect he’s considering whether to crush.
“Well.” The word stretched in his mouth like taffy. “How the tables turn.”
I stayed where I was, back against the far wall, arms loose at my sides. “Did you want something, or did you just come to gloat?”
“Can’t a man do both?” He clasped his hands behind his back, and the torchlight caught the gray threading through his short red hair, his receding hairline, as well as the permanent sneer carved into his ugly face.
“Why are you here, Kay?”
“To look at you.” His eyes moved over me slowly, clinically, the way he assessed everything as though he were finding a fault line. “At whose mercy are you now, I wonder.”
“Arthur’s,” I answered. “Not yours.”
Something flickered in his expression then, something that looked a lot like amusement at my stupidity. “Now would be a very good time to count your allies at Camelot, girl.”
“I don’t have any allies.”
“No.” He tilted his head. “You don’t.” He let that sit for a moment, allowing me to feel the full weight of it. “But if you play your cards right, I could become one.”
“You?”
“Me.”
I looked at him, looked at that long and wide nose, that thin mouth, and the permanent curl of contempt that always turned it downwards. “What does that mean?”
“It means that I’m stronger and more powerful than you think. It means I have allies in this castle, allies with influence. It means I can make the days ahead easier for you, or considerably harder.” He gave me a small shrug, like it was nothing, like my life was a minor inconvenience he could rearrange at his leisure. “The choice is yours.”
I hated that he had a point, that I didn’t have any allies in this fucking place. I hated that truth the way you hate a splinter because it’s small, persistent, and humiliating.
“And what would you want in return for this friendship you propose?” I asked, even though I didn’t look forward to his response. “I am hardly in a place to offer you anything of value.”
“Oh, you have plenty of value, but first things first, a show of good faith.” His eyes moved to the bars between us as he reached down and adjusted himself. “Come to the bars, get down on your knees, and open your mouth. I’ll show you your value.”
I went very still.
“Here?” The word came out because I was that shocked by his own depravity.
