CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
-GUIN-
The guards didn’t argue when I told them to take me to the king’s bedchamber.
That was the suspicious part. I’d braced for resistance, for the flat refusal of men who’d spent their careers learning to say no to everyone who wasn’t Arthur.
Instead, the taller one, the one who was broad across the shoulders with a nose that had been broken at least twice, exchanged a look with the other, and something passed between them that I couldn’t read.
Then he’d turned and walked, and I followed before either of them changed his mind.
The corridor to Arthur’s chambers felt long even though it was right next to mine.
Even so, it took forty steps to get there.
And the stone floors were cold, the torch brackets spaced far enough apart that the light between them pooled into shadow.
My feet were bare. I hadn’t stopped to find shoes.
That was how badly I needed to do this; I was walking cold flagstones at half past midnight in my sleeping shift, trailing two King’s Guards like I had every right in the world to be here.
I told myself I was persuasive. I told myself I’d made a compelling argument.
The truth was simpler: they no doubt thought the king was fucking me and he wouldn’t be pleased if the prisoner wasn’t delivered to his bedchamber. Whatever they thought didn’t matter. All that did matter was getting the chance to talk to Arthur and, hopefully, to change his mind.
I hadn’t been able to sleep. I’d lain in the dark with the image of Lance’s face going through every iteration of the scene in the training yard until the ceiling felt like it was pressing down on me.
Lance, who had walked up to Arthur and told him the truth when he didn’t have to, when it had cost him everything.
Lance who was now in the dungeon because of it.
The guard knocked twice on Arthur’s door, then stepped aside. There was a pause that lasted just long enough to be a decision. Then the door opened.
Arthur looked at me. He was still dressed in the outfit he’d been wearing earlier: the proof was in the blood which was spattered all over his tunic: Lance’s blood.
The shirt was unlaced at the throat and his hair was sticking out in all directions, which was the only thing that suggested sleep had been attempted but abandoned.
His eyes caught the torchlight from the corridor, and even from the doorway I could see the faint red smoldering in them.
A thin thread of smoke curled from his next exhale and vanished.
He said nothing. He just turned and walked back into the room.
I took that for what it was: the only invitation I was going to get. So, I stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind me.
The room was warm. A fire burned low in the grate, more coals than flame really, and the light it threw was amber and unsteady.
The chamber was large but spare in the way that powerful men’s rooms sometimes are: no clutter, no softness, just furniture that was heavy, dark, and built to last.
There was a writing table with papers weighted at the corners and a chair he’d clearly been sitting in. A candle burned down to a stub.
He stood near the window with his back to me, one hand braced against the stone frame.
I didn’t ease into the conversation because with Arthur and me there was no room for ease.
“Lance shouldn’t be in the dungeon,” I said.
The line of Arthur’s shoulders didn’t shift and he didn’t say anything so I continued.
“He told you the truth. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? The truth.” I came further into the room, far enough that I wasn’t shouting across it. “You have it. What you’re doing now isn’t justice. It’s punishment for something that offended you personally, and you know the difference.”
He turned then. Slowly. The firelight caught the side of his face and threw the rest into shadow. He was scowling at me but he was still beautiful. Always beautiful, this tyrant of a king.
“You’re defending him,” he said. Flat. Almost curious.
“I’m telling you what’s true.”
“From inside my bedchamber.” Something moved behind his eyes. The red deepened, just slightly, a pulse of it. “In the middle of the night and you’re dressed in your bedclothes which are thin enough that I can see the color of your nipples.”
I swallowed hard. “I admit, I didn’t give any attention to the way I’m dressed.”
Then I cleared my throat and returned to the topic at hand.
“Lancelot is your best knight. Everyone in this kingdom knows it, and everyone in every kingdom bordering yours knows it. Throwing him in the dungeon over something that happened before I was ever your prisoner—” I let that word land the way it deserved to “—doesn’t make you look like a man who
commands loyalty. It makes you look like a man who punishes it.”
The silence afterward had weight.
Then he moved.
Not fast and not with anger or not with anger that I could see.
He moved like he’d just made the decision to do exactly that.
He crossed the room in deliberate strides and stopped close enough that I had to hold myself very still, had to force myself not to step back.
I could feel the heat coming off him: his temperature was too high, evidence of the dragon under his skin.
The smoke in his breath was faint but real and his eyes at this distance were worse.
I could see that he wasn’t quite the man I’d come to argue with.
“The dragon is insisting that I fuck you right now.”
I didn’t step back. “Tell the dragon that now isn’t the time.” Because it wasn’t the time. We both knew that.
He chuckled at that. “You think there’s reasoning with the beast?”
“I think you’re avoiding the topic of Lance because you’re afraid.”
“Why would I be afraid of Lance? He’s the one in the dungeon, not me.”
“You’re afraid of what you’ve done to him and what you continue to do to him.”
“You think this is about wounded pride?” When he spoke again, his voice dropped. Quiet was more dangerous than shouting, with him. I’d learned that much.
“Isn’t it?”
“It’s about what he took.” Each word was separated from the next. “What he took, knowing it was mine.” He reached out then and took a lock of my hair between his thumb and index finger. Then he rubbed it as he looked down at it. “You were mine.”
I felt my jaw tighten. “I wasn’t yours,” I demanded.
“I’m still not yours adn I will never be yours. Lance was—” I stopped.
Reconsidered. “Lance made a mistake and he stood in front of you and admitted to that mistake. That’s more honesty than this court has seen in months, and you put him in the dungeon for it.”
Arthur dropped my hair as his gaze moved over my face the way it always did when he was looking for something to use. The red in his eyes had steadied and the smoke curled from his next exhale and drifted between us.
“You came here for him,” he said.
“I came here because I couldn’t sleep.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.”
Something shifted in his expression. It didn’t soften, nothing about him softened, but a quality of the anger changed.
It was still there, all of it, the heat and the affront and the thing he was working very hard to keep shaped into fury.
But underneath it something else pressed.
I could see him working at the fury the way a man works at a wound he knows he should leave alone.
His hand moved to my face. Not to hit me the way he had in the training yard. But he ran his fingers lightly against the slight bruise that covered my cheek where his hand had found it in anger earlier.
Neither of us moved.
“He took something from you that he had no right to take,” Arthur said, very quietly. “And you’re standing in my room defending him.”
“Yes,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I would have imagined it could. “Because that’s what you do for people who deserve it.”
The anger in his face did something complicated.
The red flared once, brief and bright, and then he shut his eyes for half a second.
When he opened them the color had pulled back, but the fury hadn’t.
It had just found a different shape. Something rawer, more honest, and significantly more dangerous.
“Do you love him?”
I swallowed hard. “Love is a complicated thing.”
“Do you love him?”
I swallowed even harder. “Yes.”
He didn’t move away.
Neither did I.
-ARTHUR-
At the admission that she loved him, a fire erupted inside me that I had a very hard time controlling.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I said.
She is ours. We must mate her, remove the scent of him from her body.
“You put him in the dungeon.” Her voice was steady. That was the thing about her that I couldn’t reconcile: she was afraid of me, I’d seen it, and yet she stood here, looking up at me and refusing to back down. “He told you the truth. He came to you himself, and you—”
“—I’m aware of what he did.”
“Then you’re aware that he—”
“—Guinevere.” Her name came out quiet, almost gentle. She stopped, and I could see the surprise registering in her gaze. “He not only fucked you, but he lied to my face for months about it. He sat at my table, looked me in the eye, and—”
“—he was protecting me.”
The words landed wrong, and something shifted in my chest. It wasn’t the dragon. No, this was something smaller and considerably more humiliating.
“Protecting you,” I repeated.
“Yes.”
I turned fully to face her. The fire was low behind me, and she was standing just inside the doorway with her chin up, her jaw set, and her hair still half-undone from wherever she’d been when she’d heard that Lance was in my dungeon. Her cheeks were high with color, and her eyes were furious.
She was beautiful. That was the problem. That had always been the fucking problem.
“You came here,” I said slowly, “at this hour, to advocate for the man who fucked you.”
“I came here because he didn’t deserve—”
“—stop talking about what he deserves.”
She stopped, and then she just watched me. I crossed the room in four steps, and she didn’t retreat, which was either courage or stupidity. With her, I’d never managed to tell the difference.
“You stand here in my chambers and defend him to me.” I kept my voice even; I was good at that because I’d had years of practice. “You want to tell me what Lance deserves.”
“Someone should.”