“Come in,” I said, because I’d been expecting it.
The door opened, and Lance entered. “You wished to see me, Arthur?”
I nodded and pointed to the chair at the far side of the room, beside the fire in the hearth. He said nothing more but nodded and then made his way to the chair. Lance was a big man, and the chair seemed entirely too small for him, but he sat in it regardless. Neither of us said anything for a while. How long? I wasn’t certain.
I briefly debated telling him about this newest revelation but decided against it because Lance had never known about The Fox at all, and having to explain the whole backstory now was something I didn’t want to be bothered with. What was more, the nature of this meeting wasn’t a social visit.
The fire snapped and sent sparks skittering across the stone. I watched them die and then poured a glass of wine for Lance, which he accepted but then didn’t touch. Neither had I touched mine.
I’d called him here for a reason, and as such, I’d rehearsed the words three times over while Mordred droned on about border supply chains in the war council. I knew exactly what I meant to say.You pulled your sword on me. In front of my men.In front of knights who measure their own courage against yours.I’d planned to be cold about it, clinical and detached, the way I handled every breach of loyalty. Name the wound, salt it, then close it.
Lance sat with his elbows braced on his knees, staring at the floor between his boots. The scar on his temple caught the firelight. He hadn’t shaved. That alone told me something: Lance, who kept his armor immaculate and his jaw usually shaven, sat there looking like a man who’d forgotten what day it was.
I opened my mouth. Then closed it.
Lance raised his head. His dark gray eyes found me across the fire.
“I imagine there was a reason you called me here.”
“Yes.”
The silence stretched. I should have said it then.You drew on your king.Five words. An accusation he couldn’t counter because every man in that tavern room had seen it. Instead, I reached for my wine and drank the whole fucking thing in one long swallow, setting the goblet back down again as I poured myself another.
“Then what did you call me here for?”
I looked at him. “Something that seemed important over the last couple of days but somehow doesn’t any longer.” Because the topic of my two prisoners wouldn’t leave my fucking mind.
Another silence, this one long enough that I took in the tapestries that lined the walls in deep crimson and gold, depicting victories I could recite from memory but no longer felt. A table of polished walnut sat in the center of the room, scattered with maps and correspondence that had gone unread for the better part of the evening.
With one hand braced against the stone wall, I stood watching the torches in the courtyard below burn themselvesdown to nothing. The night was now cold and still. Even the wind had abandoned Camelot. The silence in the room now had a weight to it, and it was a weight I could feel on my shoulders.
“The nerve of that fucking woman.”
Lance didn’t respond. I took a deep breath and a deeper swig of wine and pressed my thumb against the edge of the windowsill until the stone bit into my flesh.
I’d tried to do to her what I always did when something needed breaking. I’d stripped her of her dignity. Or, at least, I’d tried to. And multiple times: when I’d stripped her naked in the Great Hall, when I’d thought I was forcing Corvin on her... I’d orchestrated both, just to show her I could, to show her that I held all the cards. I’d thought to make a lesson of her, or at least, I’d tried to.
My thoughts returned to the scene in the Great Hall when she’d stood there as naked as the day she was born. I’d put her on display in the fullest, most humiliating sense, reduced her to nothing but a vulnerable woman in a room full of men. I’d attempted to cut away any dignity she might possess so that I’d own her completely. Such things had worked on men twice her size, on lords who’d crossed me. I’d watched such lords weep in the hall, but never had I done to them something so wholly dehumanizing as what I’d done to her.
Yet, she hadn’t broken. She hadn’t even wept. A chill hadn’t even crossed her skin. Instead, she’d walked the length of that aisle like it was a throne room she owned, her head up, her eyes forward. That fucking chin tilted at an angle that made grown knights step back and out of her way with the expression of intimidation ontheirfaces,their fucking faces!
And then she’d lied to me while I’d questioned her. I turned from the window as I remembered the moment Corvin had entered her, the sounds she’d made, the expression on her face, the fact that my cock had never felt harder. Even though I’dthought I was in control, the opposite was true. She’d wanted him to fuck her, and I’d allowed it to happen, thinking I was holding the strings. But where Guinevere was concerned, I was beginning to realize I never held the strings.
“I should have slit her throat in the Great Hall when I’d had the chance.”
Lance finally looked up at me. “Why didn’t you?”
I sighed and shook my head, emptying the rest of my wine into my mouth. “I don’t know.”
I crossed to the table and poured another glass of wine, needing something else to focus on.
Our mate languishes in the dark while you stand idle and sip your wine.
The dragon’s voice pressed through my skull like a burning coal held against the inside of my temple. It was slow, deliberate, and felt like something burning my mind from the inside out.
“Then the plan is to keep them both as your prisoners, Corvin and...the woman?”
I looked at him because I was struck by the way he wouldn’t say her name. But his expression was impossible to read the way it was sometimes, when he didn’t want to reveal the fact that he had emotions just like the rest of us.
