CHAPTER EIGHT
-GUIN-
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.
“I won’t be long.”
I felt my eyes narrow of their own volition. “You’re disgusting and I’d rather die than suck your cock.”
Kay chuckled, and the sound was low and satisfied, like I’d confirmed something he’d already known. He pushed away from the bars and dropped his hand from himself.
Then the sound of boots on stone interrupted the moment, and a guard appeared at the corridor’s end, a torch in hand, and his face carefully blank in the way of men trained to see nothing. I’d never been happier to see one of Arthur’s guards.
The man’s eyes moved briefly, uncomfortably, from Kay to me, then back to Kay again. “The prisoner is expected by the king.”
“Well,” Kay started. “Don’t keep the king waiting.”
He stepped aside, and when the guard unlocked my cell door, I walked past Kay without another word, close enough to smell the wine on his breath as I followed the guard toward the stairs.
“Think about what I said, Guinevere,” Kay called out behind me.
But I didn’t think about it because I couldn’t think about it.
Because it was that off-putting. Instead, I focused on the fact that one of the guards’ hands was on my arm the whole way up the stairs.
He wasn’t gripping me exactly; it was more like a reminder that I didn’t belong to myself any longer.
Regardless, stone walls soon gave way to plastered ones, and then to tapestried ones, and then we stopped in front of a door that was wide enough to drive a cart through.
The guard knocked twice.
“Enter.”
It was Arthur’s voice.
The guard swung the door open, and we walked inside. The first thing that struck me was that the room smelled like beeswax, cedar, and something underneath both: the king. I opted to breathe through my mouth.
The fire burned high in the grate, fat logs crackling and spitting amber light across everything it touched: walls, floor, and ceiling.
Pretty soon, the whole room took on that particular jaundiced gold that made healthy skin look sallow and shadows appear deeper than they were.
The heat pressed against my face, and after the cold stone of the dungeon, it should have felt like relief. It didn’t.
Arthur stood by the window with his back to me, and his back appeared so broad, his shoulders even broader, heavier, like he wore the weight of the world on them. His hair was a dark wheat at the nape of his neck, and the last light of the afternoon caught the silver at his temples.
A copper bathtub sat behind him, steam rising off the surface in lazy curls that drifted toward the ceiling.
Someone had scattered dried herbs in the water.
I could smell lavender and something sharper underneath, rosemary maybe.
The room smelled like the kind of bath I hadn’t had in months, the kind of bath I would have killed for if it hadn’t been located in the king’s bedchamber.
“Leave us,” Arthur said to the guard. The man simply nodded and turned around, leaving me standing there. Arthur motioned me further inside, then closed and locked the door behind us.
When he turned to face me, his eyes moved from my face downward, slow and deliberate. Not lecherous, exactly, but more like assessment. He looked at me the way a man looks at a horse he’s deciding whether or not to purchase.
“Strip.”
One word with no inflection, like he was telling a servant to stoke the fire.
My jaw tightened. “Planning on parading me naked in front of every male member of the court again?”
He gave me a look. “If I wanted to, yes. But no, I don’t want to.”
“Then what do you want?”
“You to keep your fucking mouth shut.”
Every nerve in my body pulled taut, but I started unlacing the prisoner’s tunic mainly because I couldn’t wait to get it off.
The thing was three sizes too large and smelled like the man who’d worn it before me.
Once I’d shed the tunic, I stepped out of the rough-spun braies and left everything in a pile on the stone floor.
“Get in.” He motioned to the bath.
I didn’t argue. Instead, I stepped into the bath, lowered myself into the water, and let the heat swallow me to the chin. The water was so hot it turned my skin immediately pink, but I didn’t flinch because the heat was beyond heavenly.
The fire crackled. Then the sound of his footsteps interrupted as he came toward me.
He crouched at the side of the tub, beside me, and close enough that his sleeve almost touched the water’s surface.
His eyes moved over my face with the same careful attention he probably gave to the study of maps.
Then his gaze moved to my breasts and my nipples, which met the line of the water.
I hate you, I thought. I hate this room. And I hate the way this water feels so good. But mostly I just hate you.
“Look at me.”
I didn’t. “Look at yourself.”
“Guinevere, I can make life very difficult for you.”
“Says the man who ordered a hot bath to be drawn for me.”
“Only because I knew you’d stink to high hell, and that was the last offense I wanted to deal with.”
The steam lifted around me, and I figured he had to have a point there. I’d been stuck inside that dungeon for days, and I had to have stunk. Well, let him fucking deal with it, the bastard. I stared at the far wall and said nothing.
Arthur leaned closer: close enough that from my peripheral vision, I could see the dragon tattoo where his collar fell open. The black ink curled along the base of his throat, disappearing beneath the fabric.
“You’ll listen carefully,” he said. “Because I’ll only explain this once.”