Chapter 12
Arthur
The monitoring app showed green across the board. No motion alerts, no perimeter breaches, nothing but empty gravel and dark hedgerows on every camera feed.
I set my phone on the arm of the sofa and let my head tip back. The sitting room was warm from the fire Lance had started earlier, and my body was making a solid case for closing my eyes for thirty seconds.
Three days and two nights. Between work, the hotel break-in, and being up until all hours last night, I’d barely slept since I met Dr. Gwen Lyons.
Maybe five hours total? She was upstairs in the library, where she’d been since we returned from the church.
Lance was on duty, somewhere in the house, nominally alert but probably as exhausted as I was.
My eyelids dropped, and I saw my hand on the chair at the church. Felt the small of her back under my palm. Heard the tiny gasp when I gripped her waist to hold her up.
Don’t go there. Open your eyes.
I picked up my phone and scrolled through the camera feeds one by one. North approach. South approach. The lane. The garden wall.
Green.
Green.
Green.
My phone buzzed with an incoming call from Merlin.
Thank fuck. “Tell me something good.”
“Dr. Theodore Hopkins,” he said without a hello. “Sixty-one. British citizen. PhD from University College London, specializing in early medieval decorative metalwork.”
“Published?”
“His most-cited work was a fibulae analysis conducted at the British Museum in 2019. Additional papers in the Journal of Early Medieval Archaeology and Anglo-Saxon Studies. Guest lectured at Exeter and Bristol last year.”
“So what’s he doing wandering around St. Catherine’s Church on a random Friday morning?”
“He set himself up as a consultant in Bodmin about eight years ago. Pays his taxes. No criminal record, no financial irregularities, no outstanding warrants.” Merlin paused.
“He’s basically a country academic who likes old metal and doesn’t bother anyone.
His most exciting activity in the last year, outside of work, was attending a talk in New York on Anglo-Saxon belt fittings. ”
I stretched my neck. Hopkins was precisely what Gwen had said he was—a credentialed scholar in a related discipline who happened to be at the same church at the same time. Cornwall was full of medieval sites. A metalwork specialist visiting an old church wasn’t suspicious. “So he checks out.”
“He does. But I’ve got more, and you’ll want Lance for this.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “Give me a few to find him.”
I put the phone on mute and forced myself off the sofa.
Lance was in the kitchen, hunched over his laptop at the island with a cup of tea that had probably gone cold an hour ago. “You look like shit.”
“Fuck off,” I said, not quite holding back a laugh. “Merlin’s on the line. He’s got an update.”
Lance turned his laptop toward me. On the screen was a draft press release with the RTS logo at the top.
I might have been dragging my feet on finishing the office renovations, but the second I’d agreed to the ridiculous company name, Lance already had branding proposals from three design firms ready for me. He’d approved the logo and ordered pens in under a week.
“I want to get this out tonight. I’m also planning a social media campaign on the sword project. It’ll show people what we actually do isn’t mercenary work.”
I skimmed the first two paragraphs. It was sharp—no jargon, no defensiveness.
Lance had an eye for this kind of thing, the PR side of the business I’d rather chew glass than handle.
But the timing was wrong. “Hold off on putting anything out about the sword until we’re done.
We want to show them success, not a work in progress. ”
“The in-progress angle has value. People want to see progress, Arthur. It humanizes us.”
“It also tells anyone watching exactly what we’re doing and where we are.”
He frowned and closed the laptop. “True. But when this wraps up, I want us to go all out. Photos, client testimonial, the works.”
“Deal.” I took the stool next to him, put the phone on the island, and tapped the speaker button. “Go ahead, Merlin.”
“Right. So, separate issue. Oscar Buchanan called the office this afternoon.”
We’d updated the security for his family estate in Connecticut. It wasn’t our biggest contract, but it was our most profitable one. His name carried weight in the circles where RTS needed to grow, if we were going to continue doing those kinds of installation configurations.
“He’s read the article,” Merlin said. “His exact words were ‘just making sure everything’s solid.’ He asked if there were any personnel changes he should be aware of.”
“Personnel changes?” What did that mean? “Does he think we’re actively hiring the mercenaries the article talked about?”
“I don’t know, but it’s the second inquiry in two days,” Merlin said. “It’s not a crisis, and it’s not a pattern yet, but it’s fast.”
Lance’s jaw tightened. “What about Morganna’s journalist lead?”
“Making progress, but she doesn’t have a name. Whoever wrote it went through multiple layers of anonymization. She’s peeling them back, but it’s slow.”
“She’s normally faster than this,” Lance said.
“She’s also splitting her time and focus with White Spring.” Merlin delivered the news as though it were a minor inconvenience, but we all knew this was important. “We’re not getting her best hours.”
He was right. Morganna was brilliant, and she’d been doing us favors for months, but favors weren’t a staffing model.
If she wasn’t going to commit to Round Table, I needed to find an intelligence specialist who would—someone whose top priority was us, not whatever White Spring had them running during business hours.
The exposé lead mattered too much to be someone’s side project.
But pushing Morganna meant risking losing her entirely. She’d come when she was ready, or she wouldn’t. And right now, she was the best we had.
“Tell her to keep at it,” I said. “I’ll call Buchanan back tonight.”
“That’s all I’ve got.”
“Thanks, Merlin.”
The call ended, and I fiddled with my phone on the island.
“What about Hopkins? Did Merlin have anything on him?”
“He’s the kind of academic Gwen said. I’m glad, considering how excited she was about his expertise.”
“Me, too.” He stood, but paused instead of leaving. Opened his mouth, then closed it, as though he were debating what to say next.
“I’m fine,” I said, simultaneously starting the conversation and ending it.
“I didn’t ask.”
“You were about to.”
He held the look for another second, and collected his laptop.
“I’m going back to the press release you won’t let me publish.
For the record, the in-progress content would help.
People see us working, and they stop asking questions about where the money came from or who we’re being hired to eliminate. ”
“Noted.”
“But ignored.”
“For now.”
He left, and I called Buchanan. It rang four times and went to voicemail.
“Oscar, it’s Arthur Penn. I understand you contacted our office.
I appreciate you reaching out, and I wanted to assure you personally that the team and the operation are exactly where they should be.
If you have any specific concerns, I’d welcome the conversation.
Please call me back at your convenience. ”
I hung up. Why the fuck was I doing this?
Buchanan had hired us because his attorney knew a guy who knew my father.
He hadn’t vetted my company and been impressed.
No, the recommendation had come through Pendragon channels.
And now the article was turning every client relationship into the same question that had run my life: Is Arthur there because he’s qualified, or because Gerald Penn’s name opened the door?
Two inquiries in two days. Neither one spelled doom for Round Table, but the ground was shifting under us, and we hadn’t been standing long enough to have strong roots.
I pocketed the phone and went to share the news with Gwen.
The library was on the second floor, taking up the front of the house. The door was ajar, letting warm light spill into the hallway.
I raised my fist to knock and stopped.
She wasn’t at the desk. She was cross-legged on the rug, with printouts arranged in a semicircle around her. The laptop sat open in front of her, and she was hunched over it, scrolling. Her back had to be screaming, but she was so absorbed in the screen she hadn’t noticed when I blocked the light.
My brain went back to the church tower and my hand on the chair.
Her hand in mine. The wobble, and my other hand leaving the chair back to hold her.
And the way she’d gone absolutely still.
I’d been so busy with a fucking fantasy of what her skin felt like under those clothes, the chair had been steadier than I had been.
‘Can you help me down?’ she’d had to ask.
Had to ask. Because I hadn’t been able to let go. She’d looked down at me with those hazel eyes, and I was a fucking statue with a pulse.
She’s a client.
Emotional connections are dangerous, Arthur.
This is work.
I knocked on the door and pushed it open.
She startled, head snapping up, and blinked rapidly while her brain came back from wherever it had been. “Hey.”
“Hopkins is clean.” I stayed in the doorway. Staying in the doorway was important. “No red flags. You can set up the meeting.”
“Thank you.” Her shoulders dropped, and she sat back from the laptop. “I’ll call him. He said he’d be free tomorrow.”
“You don’t need to thank me. It’s the process.”
But it wasn’t the process. The process was checking a box and seeing green across the board on my app. This seemed more like a gift she’d been praying for.
“I know.” She picked up her phone and checked the screen. “I’ve been searching all afternoon. Every database I have access to, every index of medieval Latin inscriptions, every digitized archive. Novae Avallonis doesn’t appear anywhere.”
“Nowhere?”
“Not once.” She waved vaguely at the pages in front of her.
“And that’s what I can’t figure out. St. Catherine’s is a fairly popular site.
It’s less than thirty miles from Tintagel, where King Arthur was conceived.
Scholars have been crawling over this part of Cornwall for hundreds of years studying every Arthurian connection.
How did nobody find this? How did nobody photograph that wall and publish a paper? ”
I didn’t have an answer. I hadn’t learned enough about medieval inscriptions to have one. But I saw what the question was doing to her. She was vibrating with the kind of energy I recognized from operators who’d found a lead they couldn’t verify and couldn’t let go.
“It might mean it’s genuinely new, or I need to take a different approach,” she said, almost to herself. “Or it might mean I’m wrong.”
“You don’t think you’re wrong.”
“The complete absence of references to Novae Avallonis feels…” She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know.”
“Intentional?”
She sighed. “That sounds like a conspiracy theory, doesn’t it?”
“What does your gut say?”
“That I’m right?” It shouldn’t have been a question, but it clearly was.
“Then I’d go with your gut.”
Something I couldn’t read flickered across her face. Doubt? She dropped her gaze to her laptop and worried her lower lip. Maybe she didn’t trust her gut?
I placed a palm against the outside wall to ensure I didn’t go in to comfort her. “When did you eat last?”
“What time is it?”
“About eight.”
“Huh.” She scrubbed her hands over her eyes. She’d been working for so long, and she must have been utterly exhausted. “I guess however long it’s been since we got back.”
“I was going to make some soup and sandwiches for Lance and me.” Honestly, I hadn’t thought about food until then. “Nothing fancy.”
“That sounds perfect. I’ll come down in a few minutes.”
“Take your time.” I pushed off the doorframe and walked back down the grand staircase, toward the kitchen. To where I was going to make soup and sandwiches I hadn’t been planning to make, for a woman I wasn’t supposed to be feeding, because she was a protectee.
Emotional connections are—
Shut up, Dad. She’s hungry.