Chapter 14
Arthur
Lance drove down the main road, passing rows of houses until the town gave way to countryside. Gwen sat behind him, her laptop bag on the seat beside her and the sword case secured in the trunk.
I had my phone out and a text half-composed to the flight crew, but the words on the screen weren’t forming because my brain was still in that office.
Gwen had been staring out the side window since we left. All the excitement she’d had this morning was gone.
Hopkins had been thorough. He hadn’t been rude or dismissive, just articulate and gentle in the way senior academics were when they were dismantling someone’s work.
He hadn’t raised his voice or been unkind.
He’d simply offered alternative explanations, each more reasonable than the last, and made Gwen fold her own conclusions into a neat pile and set them aside.
Last night, she’d hedged. She’d asked my opinion as though it was important, because she still didn’t quite trust her own judgment. She’d lit up the fucking library when she laid out her theory.
I’d told her to trust her gut, and then had to stand guard in Hopkins’s office and watch her light go out.
“So,” Lance said, glancing in the rearview mirror. “How’d it go?”
Gwen shifted behind us. “He was helpful.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning he thinks the inscription is a Victorian addition.” She kept her voice level, the same tone she’d used after Hopkins had pulled the first book off his shelves.
“He doesn’t rule out an earlier origin, so he gave me some leads to follow.
He emailed me some details about an archive in Malta with historical references for the church, and some other stuff. ”
“Other stuff?”
“Yeah.” She continued staring out the window. No matter how flatly she said everything, the listless gaze told me she was upset. “Glastonbury and Champagne.”
Lance’s eyes flicked to her in the rearview mirror before bulging in my direction. He wanted me to fix this.
But I was already working on it.
Going to Malta would require the jet. Glastonbury was two hours by car, maybe less. And without the jet, we’d have to get to Champagne on a commercial flight—difficult with the sword—or take one of the many ferries between England and France, followed by a long drive.
I finished the text to our flight crew and fired it off.
Arthur: Prep the jet for Malta. I’ll send more details within the hour.
“So we’ve got options?” Lance said, no doubt to fill the silence as much as anything.
“No,” said Gwen. “I can’t take the sword—”
“I’ve got a plan.” I wasn’t about to let her quit just because her first theory had some pushback. I pulled up a map on my phone and searched for our three locations. “Glastonbury’s close. We drive there first. If it doesn’t give us answers, we continue to the Troyes archive in Champagne.”
I felt Gwen’s gaze on me, but I didn’t pause long enough for her to argue.
“Malta’s the outlier.” I typed in destinations and calculated routes.
Two hours to Glastonbury. Two hours back to Plymouth and the night ferry to Roscoff.
Another eight hours from there. “Lance, you take Malta. Fly out this afternoon, check the archive, and see if the inscription shows up in the Templar inventories.”
“Malta?” he said with a frown. “What about you?”
“I’ll stay with Gwen and the sword.”
Lance took a turn. His fingers adjusted on the wheel, but he kept his eyes on the road. “I think I should stay with her. It’s your jet.”
“It’s my father’s jet,” I practically snapped at him, as though the ownership mattered.
“The sword’s under our joint legal custody from the FBI, so it doesn’t travel without Gwen and one of us.
If anything happens to the sword while it’s in our care, the liability falls on Round Table, which means it falls on me.
I’m staying with the assets. Both of them. ”
Every word of it was operationally sound.
My father would have approved of the risk management, but the rest? I could hear his voice: ‘And the cost, Arthur? A private jet to Malta, gas and lodging across southern England and France, two operators deployed full-time on a project with no paying client? Where’s the return on this investment?’
I put the phone in my lap and looked out at the red and gold autumn hedgerows, gray sky, and the narrow Cornish road.
My father had never once questioned spending when the asset was a painting or a statue.
Pendragon had written checks for security deployments that lasted months, for objects that sat behind glass and didn’t breathe.
But those deployments had contracts. Invoices. Revenue lines his board could read.
Instead, I’d signed on to protect the sword while it was outside of Caine-Ferraro’s vault.
For zero dollars. The offer had been made when we expected her to stay in Michigan.
But I’d flown us to England, and now I was traveling farther, without waiting for her to ask, because I knew she wouldn’t.
She’d assume it was too much and go home without the details she needed.
It’s the cost of public relations. Remember that, Penn. This is a PR job, and Lance recommended it.
Lance sighed. “What do I do if you find the answer in Glastonbury?”
“Enjoy Malta while the crew rests.”
He almost laughed. “Sounds like the first easy assignment you’ve ever given me.”
I nudged his shoulder. “Don’t get used to it.”
A text arrived from our jet’s captain, advising me the flight plan was filed and the crew was on their way.
Good. Things were coming together quickly.
“Arthur,” Gwen said slowly. “You’re investing a lot of resources for a story that may turn out to be pub folklore.”
I turned in my seat to face her. “Caine-Ferraro’s hired you to authenticate the sword, and you have three credible academic leads. Our contract with them is to protect the sword. That means we go where you need to go to follow your leads.”
She met my gaze for a breath before I had to turn around. When she continued, her voice was even quieter. “You don’t have to do all of this.”
Yes, I do. “You’re the job.”
The job? Really?
“Oh,” Gwen said. “Right. Of course.”
My chest tightened at the doubt in her tone.
Lance’s eyes cut sideways at me without his head turning. I recognized that look. It was his way of informing me I was being a prick.
I woke my phone screen, finding no notifications.
I’d spent ten minutes reorganizing the operation around her investigation.
Rerouted a jet. Split my team. Committed days of my time and thousands of dollars of company money because a retired metalwork specialist in Bodmin had made her doubt herself.
I was not being a prick.
“What he means,” drawled Lance, as though I had no idea how to talk to a woman, “is we need to see it through to the end. We’re also both signed on for your protection while you authenticate the sword, so until you’re done, we’ll keep going.”
“Thanks, Lance,” she said.
Lance. Not Arthur. Lance.
Because there was planning to do. Because safety and security came first, and comfort came second.
So I moved on to the logistics. “When we get to the cottage, everyone pack up. We’ll all leave together and drop Lance off at the airfield. I’ll update the team while you—”
“It’s oh-dark-thirty at home,” said Lance. “I’ll brief them from the jet while I’ve got dead time.”
That also made operational sense.
“And I’ll call Morganna while I’m at it, in case she’s made any progress on the journalist.”
“That works.” I nodded and checked my phone again. For what? I wasn’t sure. “We’ll drive straight to Glastonbury from the airfield.”
Lance raised an eyebrow, which was obviously aimed at me. “Are you booking a hotel?”
“It depends.” That was something I could do with my phone. I unlocked it and began looking for somewhere to stay in the Glastonbury area. “If we need more meetings than we can fit in today, then yes. If we find everything we need, we can head back to the cottage. Otherwise, we can catch a ferry.”
The hedgerows thinned as we came down the hill toward the turn for the cottage lane, and the sunshine broke through the clouds long enough to reflect off the wet road.
Behind me, Gwen unzipped her laptop bag. The sound was loud in the quiet car. “Dr. Hopkins sent me the contact information for Glastonbury, and the number of someone from the Troyes archive.”
“Forward that to me?”
“Sure.”
I should have spoken up earlier. When Dr. Hopkins had started explaining away the inscription as little more than gossip, I should have said what I had last night in the library doorway—that she should trust her gut.
But it wasn’t my field, and it certainly wasn’t my place. Standing silently by the door was my job. What would my father have said? Probably something like, ‘There’s no ROI in sentiment.’
Except I didn’t care about the return on investment.
I cared about doing work that made me proud to say it was mine.
Most of the men under my command had taken pride in Task Force Legacy.
That was why I’d selected them—plus our two CIA contacts—to join me when I founded my company.
Because I planned on building a company I would be proud of, not just a company to make money.
Protecting an academic while she authenticated a potentially significant artifact was exactly the kind of work I wanted to be known for. Protecting the homes of people like Oscar Buchanan had an excellent ROI, but it didn’t nourish my soul.
And his home definitely didn’t have a pair of hazel eyes that I needed to see light up again.
Where did that come from?
Lance turned into the lane, gravel crunching under the tires. He parked in front of the cottage. “I’ll be ready in twenty minutes.”
Gwen stowed her phone in her bag. “I’ll compile the research files for Malta, so you have everything you need.”
“Appreciate it.”
They were both being professional, organized, and completely normal. But me? I was moving on autopilot, unable to forget the look in her fucking eyes after I told her she was nothing more than a job.