I let that comment breathe for a moment, and then I looked at her.
“I am no fucking whore,” she said.
“Guin,” Corvin started and shook his head, telling her, in effect, to be silent.
At his use of her shortened name, something in me began to burn. Whether it was the dragon’s reaction or my own, I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. I came as close to her as I could and said nothing, just let the anger burn through me as I glared at her. In response, she spat in my face.
The silence afterward was absolute.
The warmth of her spit landed on my cheekbone, just below my eye, and tracked slowly downward.
I didn’t move, and I didn’t raise my hand, didn’t attempt to backhand her. I didn’t even step back. But Lance stepped reached out and gripped her by the shoulder, walking her away from me, as if he was afraid I’d cleave her in two. Part of me wanted to.
Instead, I stood exactly where I was while the spit traced a path down my face, and I let the whole room watch me stand there and not react. Then I raised two fingers and wiped it away.
OUR MATE BARES HER TEETH. AS SHE SHOULD!
I looked at her: at the way her chest was rising and falling in short, sharp movements that she was fighting to control, at the brightness behind her eyes that wasn’t only anger butsomething more. And I looked at the pulse in her throat that was hammering visibly.
She was terrified, and she was furious.
She was extraordinary.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
-LANCE-
I didn’t know what the fuck to do, so I grabbed her and pulled her back. Away from him.
Whatever was happening in this room at this moment, Arthur was on the verge of completely losing his wits. Maybe he already had.
Guinevere had just spat in his face. That had absolutely scared the fuck out of me because I was fairly sure he’d run her through with his blade at the mere impertinence of it. But he hadn’t. At least, he hadn’t yet.
She hadn’t made a sound. That was the part that crawled under my skin and stayed there. She just stood there, with no expression on her face. And those fucking eyes... they were steady as water before a storm. I couldn’t read what lived behind them.
I didn’t know if he was going to kill her.
I also didn’t know if he was going to do something else, something that could be worse in ways I wasn’t prepared to examine. Regardless, I just stood there like a man made of stone, knowing that if I attempted to stop him, then everything would change.
What was more, she was the enemy. And based on that fact alone, I shouldn’t have cared. So why the fuck did I care? And why was it taking every ounce of self-control to continue standing here like a statue?
That infuriated me more than any of it: more than her deception, more than Eldenvale, more than the fact that she and Corvin had been in the midst of a steamy embrace when we’d found them...
I dragged my gaze from her to my hand, which was wrapped around her upper arm. I dropped it as if the motion could dislodge the image burned behind my eyes: this tavern room, the way her arms were wrapped around him like they belonged to one another, like it was the most natural thing in the world, likeIwas the intruder.
I made the mistake of looking at Corvin.
He was watching Arthur the way a man watches a fire that’s about to jump the pit. He was still, focused, every muscle coiled. Before Agravaine and Tristan had taken hold of him, he’d put himself between her and the room. And I knew that stance, recognized it because I’d seen him fight. I knew every one of his instincts. Corvin didn’t telegraph. He simply arranged himself so that whatever happened next, he was already in the right place.
He would die for her.
I could see it plainly, the way you can see when a man’s already made a decision but he hasn’t spoken it aloud yet. The truth of it lived in the tight set of his jaw, in the stillness of his hands, in the way he hadn’t looked away from Arthur once.
Something went sideways in my chest.
I had no right to feel this way; I knew that. I cataloged the feeling with the same cold efficiency that I cataloged everything else:this is jealousy, it’s irrational, and it’s wrong. You shouldn’t care whether he cares for her. You shouldn’t care whether she cares for him. You shouldn’t care because she nolonger matters to you. You shouldn’t care because you fucking told her she was dead to you!But the feeling remained there anyway, sitting in my ribs like a splinter I couldn’t reach.
Corvin and I had been close once. Not as close as he and Arthur, perhaps, but close in the way men become when they’ve bled beside each other long enough. He’d been the only knight at Camelot I would have called a friend without reservation. Sharp mind, impossible to deceive, loyal in ways that made other men look inward and find themselves wanting. I’d trusted him the way I trusted very few people. In truth, there had been maybe three in my life, and he’d been one of them.
