SHE IS OUR MATE! YOU DISRESPECT HER! OUR TREASURE!
I ignored the fucking thing.
DO NOT—
Ignored it still.
The absolute helplessness of the beast thrilled me in a way I hadn’t anticipated. All that ancient power, all that terrible hunger it carried for her, and it wastrapped. Caged behind my ribs while I did exactly as I pleased.
“Disrespect?” I laughed. “Would you like to see true disrespect?”
It was only when I saw the confused expressions on Agravaine and Tristan’s faces that I realized I’d spoken aloud. I shook my head and laughed my words off.
YOU WILL NOT HARM HER! The dragon howled.
I let it howl.
Corvin’s eyes had gone dark. He was looking at her cheek, which was glowing red with the imprint of my hand.
I tilted her face back toward me with two fingers beneath her chin.
“Again,” I said softly. “Who was it that fucked you?”
Corvin moved.
He got half a step before Agravaine and Tristan had to restrain him, and the sound he made couldn’t be described in words. It was something guttural, something that came from the part of a man that lives below the throat, in the place where the things he actually cared about were kept.
I looked at him and laughed. “What you wouldn’t do for your shadows now, eh?”
“You sound like a king unhinged, Arthur,” he spat the words at me. “Why the fuck do you care who fucked her?”
I felt my eyes narrow. “I will tell you why I care.” Then I breathed in deeply. “I care merely because it’s a mystery I haven’t solved. Do I care about the actual act itself, the slaying of her maidenhead? No,” I lied, and the dragon bucked within me. “I care about the fact that I have demanded an answer repeatedly. Yet, every time I do, I don’t fucking get one.”
“And you will never get one,” she said.
I turned my anger back to her, but she didn’t wince away from me. Instead, she held her ground, and those violet eyes burned inside her face just as they always did whenever she looked at me.
“Just answer him,” Corvin said to her. “Tell him the truth.” He was now pulling against the two men holding him, not frantically but with the kind of steady, purposeful strain of a man who wasn’t panicking but who was planning, who was simply waiting for the grip to loosen by one degree.
“No,” she insisted. “I will not.”
Lance hadn’t moved. His sword was still in his hand, half-raised. He’d been holding it like that since I’d hit her, the blade angled up, and he was very quiet. It was the quiet that comes just before a man either acts or doesn’t. I hoped he’d make the right decision.
I returned my eyes to Corvin.
“Well, it appears our prisoner is not in the mood to speak. But perhaps there are other ways we can encourage her?”
His jaw was locked as I walked a slow half-circle around her, keeping her in my periphery, watching him watch her without letting himself watch her. It was a remarkable exercise in self-denial. I was almost impressed.
“She’s a whore, Corvin.” I said the words conversationally. There was no heat in them, no theater. Just the flat delivery of a stated fact. “She’s Merlin’s daughter, and she arrived inmykingdom wearing a man’s face, with the sole intention of guttingeverything I’ve spent years building.” I paused, allowing the words to sit. “She deserves considerably worse than this.”
His jaw worked.
“She deserves—”
“—she deserves what I decide she fucking deserves.” I stopped walking and looked at him directly. “You forfeited your vote on this matter when you chose the other side.”
Silence.
