CHAPTER EIGHT #2
He reached for the soap on the tray beside the tub. It was real soap, the mulled kind, expensive. He lathered it between his palms without ceremony and, shifting my hair aside, brought it to the back of my neck.
At the feel of his hands on me, I went rigid. Shock that he was touching me, bathing me, arose from somewhere, but I buried it beneath my own contempt for him.
“Your life is completely in my hands now. You’re my prisoner, which means every thought in your head... I own them. Every word you speak... I’ve already approved them. You’ll eat when I say, sleep when I say, and speak when I give you leave to do so.”
He gathered my hair, and reaching for a ceramic jug just beside me, he lifted it and poured the water over my hair slowly, letting it run down my back before he began lathering it up from roots to ends.
“Displease me, and I can have you executed, or I can simply leave you in that cell until you go mad. I can do whatever I fucking want with you because you’re mine; I own you.”
When he finished with my hair, his hands moved in slow circles across my shoulders. “You’ll contact Merlin when I tell you to do so, and you’ll smile while you do it. You’ll make him believe every fucking word you say.”
I didn’t say anything mainly because I didn’t possess the energy. After being alone, hungry, and freezing for days on end, all I could think about was the heat of the water and the feel of his fingers on my skin, even if I didn’t want to think about that last thing.
“You won’t deviate from what I tell you. Not in word and not in expression. You’ll perform exactly the role I’ve created for you, and I’ll decide whether you’ve earned the right to keep breathing.”
Then he was quiet. Just his hands working out days of filth with a thoroughness that might have felt like care in any other context. In this one, though, it felt like being polished, prepared. Like the silverware before a feast.
He took my left arm and began running the soap down it, the dirty water dripping onto the floor. His hands were enormous, careful, and methodical. He worked up to my shoulder, set that arm down, and took the other.
“Whatever loyalty you had to Merlin before you walked into my dungeon is now gone. It doesn’t exist. There’s only Camelot now.”
He pushed me forward and began washing my back, coaxing the soap from beneath my shoulder blades down to where the water enveloped the lowest reaches of my back.
“Stand.”
I did, and then I felt him sudsing my ass. After a second or so, he began working each of his hands down the backs of my legs. Even though he was touching my naked body, there was such rigidity to his movements that I could say with full certainty that he wasn’t in the least bit aroused.
“What is more: you’ll address me properly.” He moved around the tub until he was standing in front of me. “Put your leg on the lip of the tub.” I did as he instructed, and he began sudsing up one leg and then followed with the other.
“Sit,” he instructed when he’d finished washing me. “Every person in Camelot speaks to me with deference. Every knight, every lord, every servant who carries my chamber pot. You’ll be no different.”
The fire popped behind him, and I noticed how his eyes were that particular shade of blue that didn’t soften in the firelight the way most colors did. If anything, the warmth made them colder.
“I am the King of Camelot.” Each word landed separately, measured.
“Every soul within these walls exists in relation to me. Their safety, their continued heartbeat; all of it flows from this crown.”
He tapped his temple once, where the silver threaded through the dark gold. “That includes you. Especially you.”
Steam rose between us, and his hands were in my hair again, presumably for round two of the soap.
“I’m the most important man in your world now. The only man in your world.”
At that, my anger finally got the best of me, and in response, I turned my head to look at him over my shoulder. “Is it customary for the most important man in the world to bathe his prisoner?”
His hands stopped.
The silence was absolute, and I felt his stillness behind me like a held blade.
And then suddenly the bath tipped over in one motion.
The copper rim caught my shoulder on the way down, and then I was splayed on the stone floor with a wave of hot, soapy water spreading out around me in every direction.
My palms hit the floor hard; my knees hit even harder.
I stayed there for a moment on all fours, dripping, the breath knocked clean out of me before his boots stepped into my periphery.
“That,” Arthur said, his voice exactly the same temperature it had been before, “is what my displeasure looks like.”
I pushed my wet hair from my face and glared up at him. He just stood there with his hands loose at his sides, watching me kneel naked on the stone floor in front of him in a spreading puddle of bathwater like it was the most natural thing he’d witnessed all week.
“I suggest you don’t give me cause for another demonstration.”
Water soaked through the gaps in the stone beneath my palms, cold now, finding every crack. My shoulder throbbed where the copper had caught it, and the anger within me was now an all-out incendiary.
But I said nothing. Because there was nothing left to say.
He’d made his point, and we both knew it.
He walked over to a folded sheet of thick fabric that was lying on his bed, and reaching it, he threw it at me.
It hit the wet stone floor and immediately began absorbing the water before I could grab it and wrap it around myself.
“What does my king wish me to wear?” I asked, glaring as I turned to face him.
He’d settled himself into the high-backed chair nearest the fire, one booted foot crossed over the other on the velvet ottoman. He motioned me forward with two fingers.
“Drop it.”
I held his gaze. The linen was warm and still damp where I’d wrapped it around myself, but I wouldn’t let him see my hands shake. I let the linen wrap fall. It pooled at my feet in a soft heap. I stood there, I breathed, and I gave him nothing. My chin stayed level and my arms remained at my sides.
“Step forward.”
Three steps. I stopped when I was close enough to see the grain of the leather in his boots, close enough that when he exhaled, his breath moved against my hip.
He took his time in letting his eyes move over me, and there was no pretense of propriety. The dragon tattoo at his throat shifted when he swallowed.
“Your eyes tell me one thing: that glare you give me.” His voice had dropped, and it was now rougher than the clipped authority he usually wielded. “But your body.” He tilted his head, the ghost of a smile crossing his face. “Your body tells me something else entirely.”
“My body is cold because you upended my bath.”
“Mm.” He didn’t believe me.
“And in case you believe my body speaks a different message than my eyes, I can assure you that I hate you with all parts of myself equally.” I took a breath. “I hate you completely.”
“Is that so?”
Not a question. He leaned forward as he reached for me.
I didn’t move. I just remained standing there, even when his hand moved between my thighs with the unhurried confidence of a man who’d never been wrong about anything.
His fingers found the slick heat of me, and one finger rested at my opening, barely inside.
And he left it there. Left it still. Just pressing.
Just knowing.
Then he slowly, very slowly, moved his head upwards so his eyes could rest on mine. And his gaze was fixed, narrowed. He flexed that finger only once. The sound that tried to escape my throat died before it reached the air as my nails pressed into my palms.
His eyes never left my face.
“There it is.” Three words, almost pleasant.
His finger moved, just slightly pushing inside me, and my hips betrayed me with the smallest, most catastrophic shift forward.
And he recognized it immediately: enough that he withdrew his finger, and there was obvious wetness covering the end of it.
He held my gaze while he let the silence do its work.
Then he laughed, low and unhurried. The sound came from somewhere in his chest, and it was the worst sound I’d ever heard because it wasn’t cruel, and it wasn’t mocking.
No, it was simply amused, satisfied the way a man is satisfied when he finds exactly what he was looking for exactly where he said it would be.
“Predictable.” Another chuckle. “So fucking predictable.”
My face burned hotter than the fire, and my jaw locked down so hard my teeth ached.
He leaned back again, effortlessly resettling into the chair like this was tedious to him. Like I was tedious to him. He looked at me at the same moment that he brought his finger to his mouth and sucked off my essence, holding my gaze the entire time. His boots fell back onto the ottoman.
“In case no one ever told you, Guinevere,” he continued, “the body doesn’t lie.” His eyes tracked upward to my face, idle and so fucking blue. “Even when the mouth is very determined to.”
I stood there, naked, dripping, and wanting to set the entire room on fire. And he just watched me.
Then he turned to face the bed where clothing waited folded.
He motioned to the pile, and I immediately approached it, wanting nothing more than to hide myself from him.
When I picked the tunic up, I recognized it immediately.
It was Lioran’s; it was mine. Someone had washed it because it smelled of lye.
I dressed quickly. My fingers knew the laces by rote by now; I’d been Sir Lioran long enough that the armor of him settled around me like a second skin. Even here, even stripped of the disguise, putting Lioran’s clothes back on was like pulling rank on myself.
Arthur didn’t speak again until I was dressed. When I turned, he was standing in the center of the room, watching me with his arms crossed against his very broad chest.
A knock sounded at the door.
“That’s Mordred,” Arthur said. “With your first assignment.”
He looked at the door and called, “Enter.”