Chapter 4
Arthur
Gwen’s black dress didn’t cling. It skimmed. It moved over her body the way a well-cut outfit should. It ordered the room to look at her, but in a whisper, rather than a shout.
She’d had her hair in a ponytail at Ferraro’s today, but that had been practical, workday hair. Tonight, her messy bun, portrait neckline, and bold necklace had highlighted the full line of her neck and her collarbones.
Memories of the evening flashed through my mind. Of how her eyes lit up when we talked about the sword. Her surprise when I translated the Latin from its inscription. How she’d asked about the wine after it arrived. And how I hadn’t wanted to say good night to her when we left.
But the best memory was the noise she’d made when she bit into her dessert.
A quiet, involuntary sound that had nothing to do with the world around her and everything to do with imported chocolate.
I’d filed her noise away somewhere I shouldn’t have, and was probably going to borrow it later tonight.
Fuck me.
I adjusted my grip on the steering wheel.
On the upside, this was a temporary job. She’d flown in from New York, so the distraction was time-bound. Unless I picked up a contract in New York and ran into her. Accidentally. It would definitely be accidental.
Main Street ran through Brenton’s midtown, which at this hour meant closed storefronts, a few lit windows above the shops, and nobody on the sidewalks. It was any other Wednesday night in October, in a small Michigan town.
Lance scrolled through apps on his phone in the passenger seat, quiet since we’d left the restaurant. Good dinner. Good wine. Good company. The kind of evening that didn’t need a debrief, an after-action report, or any paperwork.
His phone buzzed. “Huh.”
“What?”
“Morganna.” He sat up straighter, reading instead of numbing himself. “She sent me a link with one word. ‘Thoughts?’”
“Thoughts about what?”
“Give me a second.” He tapped the link and read the headline aloud. “‘Round Table Security: Camelot or Mercenary Outfit? Inside the Pendragon Connection.’”
A cold, hard rock settled in my stomach.
“Sounds like a gossip blog,” Lance said, still scanning. “The byline says ‘Staff Reporter.’”
His phone buzzed again. “It’s her. Want me to put her on speaker?”
“Do it.” I hit the pairing button for the SUV’s system, and Lance connected.
Marjorie “Morganna” Vale’s voice filled the cabin. “Did you read it?”
“I’m reading it now,” Lance said. “It looks like clickbait.”
“It’s Crécy Defense Review, Lance.”
“Fuck.” He shook his head. “Not sure how I missed that part.”
Crécy Defense Review wasn’t a blog or a gossip site. It covered the private military and security industry and had reliable sourcing that got contracts pulled on the regular. Their readership was exactly the sort of people who hired companies like ours, and they didn’t run unvetted opinion pieces.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“In summary: Round Table Security is a subsidiary of Pendragon Security in all but name,” Morganna said. “They lay out your funding, operational underwriting, and the author was pretty keen on the jet. They reference the Prague operation and allege Pendragon paid off the authorities.”
Prague.
We’d barely been up and running when Prague happened.
Everything before that had been startup noise, including our job for Tristan’s girlfriend.
We didn’t have people in Czechia with the right clearance for protection work, so we’d brought in Pendragon’s local operators.
What was supposed to be a straightforward authentication escort had turned into a shitshow.
“I thought Prague was contained,” Lance said.
I’d thought so, too. But the police had shown up, and I’d been detained. My father had called people—not paid them—and the charges had disappeared within hours. Unless he had paid them and hadn’t told me.
“The article also questions your credentials, Arthur,” Morganna continued. “It doesn’t say you’re unqualified, but it frames your trajectory as a series of doors opened by your father.”
“Fucking hell.” I could call Pendragon’s crisis communications team.
They had a department full of experienced, connected staffers who knew the right editors and journalists.
I held back a sigh. That would prove I needed my father’s help for this, too.
I pulled into an empty parking space on Main. “Send it to me.”
“Here you go,” said Lance.
I grabbed my phone as his text came through, and began reading the hit piece.
It read differently than it sounded. Morganna had been clinical.
The journalist was persuasive. Each paragraph fed the next, footnoted, patient, impossible to wave off.
The Pendragon funding wasn’t presented as a scandal—it was presented as a fact.
Then the journalist spent three thousand careful words asking what that fact meant.
All of it was fucking real, including the jet, the money, and Prague. There wasn’t a single lie in the piece, but it had been arranged deliberately to cut deep.
But why? The level of detail about my background sat wrong.
Why pull my Academy class year, my SEAL class number, and the exact Pendragon division I’d been assigned to?
Plenty of this information was available on the open internet, but not all of it.
Someone must have talked. Someone who knew me, or who’d been close enough to share what they knew.
“I’m up to speed.” I pulled back onto Main, faster than I should have. “None of it’s incorrect.”
Lance’s phone buzzed. “Merlin’s calling.”
“Probably about this,” I said. “Patch him in.”
There was a click through the speakers, and Lance said, “I’ve got you on with Arthur, Morganna, and me.”
“Good,” Merlin said. “I assume we’re all reading the article?”
“You saw it?” Lance asked.
“Morganna sent it. I’ve read it twice. It’s well-written, which is irritating.”
Irritating was an appropriate word for it.
“I thought your father was paying with private money?”
“So did I.” I’d planned to distance myself from Pendragon, because the truth was, I had received special treatment because of my father. It pissed me off every time I found out about it, particularly because I normally found out after he’d pulled whatever strings he wanted to.
“The Prague details are specific enough to sting but vague enough to be legally safe. The nepotism framing is editorial, not reporting.” Merlin’s tone sharpened. “The real question is who benefits from this right now.”
A traffic light turned red, and I stopped. A few raindrops hit the windshield, and my wipers automatically reacted. “What do you mean by right now?”
“Timing, Arthur,” said Merlin. “RTS has been active for six months.”
Six months on paper. Two of those as a functioning company. The rest had been filing incorporation documents and arguing about the office floor plan.
“Nobody wrote about us during any of that,” Merlin continued. “Now someone publishes a deep dive in Crécy under a staff byline? That’s intentional.”
What would Gwen think?
Why in god’s name would she visit a defense industry website?
And why do you care?
“It doesn’t matter why they published it,” Lance said. “The fact is they did. We need to get ahead of this. Statement to clients, preemptive outreach, maybe a response piece.”
“That’s step two,” Merlin said. “Step one is figuring out who the staff reporter actually is.”
“Already on it,” Morganna said.
The light turned green, and the rain picked up as I drove through. “Morganna, do your thing. But go deep. Whoever wrote this had access to information that isn’t public. I want the author and the source.”
“Noted.” She was the best human intelligence specialist I’d ever worked with. Unfortunately, she was still working for White Spring Security. She’d join us at Round Table eventually—as soon as I conceded to her long list of salary and perk demands.
I made a left onto Birch, where the storefronts gave way to houses with porch lights on. “In the meantime, we need talking points for clients. Sam and Antonio just had us to dinner. If this gets traction, we need to be the ones they hear from first.”
“Lead with Tristan’s case,” Lance said. “The krater repatriation was a big deal, Sam was involved, and the bad guys are in jail. Pendragon didn’t have anything to do with that mess. It was us, doing the work.”
I nodded as I slowed for a woman looking to cross the street in the dark. “Agreed. Plus, it sounds like Tristan’s mother is a friend of Sam’s, so that will help strengthen our relationship with Caine-Ferraro’s. And Sam’s role with the FBI is another positive for us.”
“What about Prague?” Merlin asked.
I stared through the windshield. Our principal had gotten out safely, her Fabergé egg had been delivered, and the bad actors were in custody. But the cleanup had required my father’s people and my father’s influence, and that was the part the article demanded its readers remember.
“Prague is harder,” I said. “Don’t lead with it. If someone asks, we were two months old and supplemented with Pendragon’s local contractors due to safety licensing requirements. Don’t mention firearms; stick with ‘safety licensing.’”
“And your father’s calls to the police?” Merlin asked.
“I didn’t ask him to make those calls.”
“You didn’t have to.” He dropped out of strategy mode. “But the article doesn’t care about what you asked for. It cares about what happened.”
Per usual, Merlin was right.
“Okay,” I said. “Morganna, journalist identity by morning. Merlin, talking points and monitoring brief. Lance, client outreach draft. I’ll review before anything goes out.”
“Copy,” Morganna said.
“On it,” said Merlin. “And Arthur? Get some sleep. You sound like your father.”
The call disconnected before I could respond, which was definitely intentional.
Lance laughed and nudged me. “He’s not wrong.”
“Don’t start.”
“I’m just saying, you do that thing where you start giving orders in bullet points.”
“That’s called leadership.”
“That’s called your dad.” Lance knew my family better than the rest of them.
He and I had been inseparable since we were fourteen and roommates in boarding school.
The nepo baby and the scholarship kid—Lance had been my brother in all but blood ever since then.
After I learned what was waiting for him at home and realized my father was easier to deal with when Lance was in the room, he’d joined me for almost every long weekend and holiday until we finished BUD/S.
And he knew comparing me to my father wasn’t a compliment.
I drove. What else was there to do?
Lance went back to his phone, probably drafting his PR notice, given how fast his thumbs were moving across the screen. It no doubt contained far more colorful language than the final version would.
But honestly? We had used Pendragon operators.
My father had made calls. The jet did have his name on the registration.
Every clean win we’d had, every case where we’d done the job on our own merits, could be reframed as something that only existed because he put us in a position to exist in the first place.
Pendragon’s crisis communications team was good. They’d handled far worse. They’d have a counter-narrative drafted before lunch and placed in the right outlets before the end of the week.
But the article had said RTS couldn’t function without Pendragon. And my first fucking response to reading it had been to call my father’s team.
If I made that call, the article was right.
If I didn’t, I was handicapping my own company out of pride.
I could hear my father’s voice, full of confidence, the way it always sounded when he was explaining something he considered obvious: ‘If our money can’t make things easier, what have I been working for? ’
What, indeed, Dad?