Chapter 27
Arthur
The road was dark, and I kept driving too fast. I touched my lip with the back of my hand and came away with blood.
Of course he’d split my lip. The bandage on my right forearm had soaked through, my knuckles were swelling, and my pants had torn one of the half-dozen times he put me on the driveway. And my ribs were screaming.
Beside me, Gwen gripped the edge of her seat with one hand and the handle above the door with the other. Her breathing was frantic and shallow—she’d start hyperventilating if it kept going.
Deal with that when you’re safe.
She hadn’t said a word since I’d snapped at her. What did she expect? It was time for a little chat? I was going to spill everything about that fucktard Rick Younge? And then we’d talk about how I’d fucking kissed her and fucking ruined everything?
I clenched the steering wheel and took a turn without slowing, making her gasp.
If I hadn’t walked out of that kitchen like a fucking coward, she wouldn’t have been standing in the driveway, and Rick wouldn’t have found us.
Or maybe he would have. How many men did they have in other villages like this one?
And why did he have to be the one in mine?
He said he had a team. They must have spread out from the GPS tracker’s last location.
I’d hidden the plates before we went inside, but the Land Rover was big and would have stood out in any tiny village in this part of France.
He might have spotted the car on a pass through the neighborhood whether she’d been outside or not.
Fuck.
Headlights appeared in the mirror. Far back. Matching my speed.
I took the next left without signaling. Counted to five. The headlights reappeared behind us.
“Hold on.” I took another turn, killed our headlights, and slowed. Searching. After a week of dreary skies, there wasn’t a cloud left. Just my fucking luck, the moon was bright enough to glint off my fucking vehicle.
Off to the right, an old farmstead sagged behind its rusted outbuildings. Gravel popped under the tires as I eased to a stop behind one of the buildings and cut the engine.
Gwen’s hand found the dashboard, and every cell of my body told me to take hold of that hand and promise I’d get her to safety—at least, every cell that wasn’t yelling at me to seek immediate medical attention.
Headlights swept down the road and vanished.
I waited.
One minute.
Two.
Nothing else came.
I rolled down my window and listened. No vehicles on the road. No footsteps on the gravel.
“Was someone—” Gwen began, but I put up a finger to silence her.
More minutes passed, while my heart pumped so hard I practically heard it.
I started the engine, pulled onto the road with my lights off, and drove a mile in the opposite direction before cutting south onto a different route.
Mirror clear. No one behind us.
Gwen’s breathing had hitched during the turns, but she hadn’t made a sound. She was probably crying. Again. Because I’d stopped, assuming we’d be safe. Assuming no one would have followed us after the archive.
There was a tracker on the car, you fucking idiot!
I couldn’t deal with any of that right now. We needed somewhere to stop. “I need you to call someone for me.”
“Okay.” Her voice was so small, but at least it was there.
I handed my phone to her. “My passcode is 7-7-2-9-6-8.”
She hesitated, her fingers hovering over the screen. What now?
I glanced at her, unable to see her face while the vehicle’s lights were cut. Seeing her won’t tell you what’s going through her head anyway, Penn. “What?”
She said, “7-7-2-9-6-8.”
My passcode. My phone. Every contact, every message, every piece of operational data Round Table Security had.
I’d handed it to a woman I’d known for six days.
If Merlin were here, he would have crucified me for the security breach.
Too fucking late now. “I need you to call Merlin. He’s listed under John Ambrose. ”
“Not Lance?” she asked.
“Merlin.”
Lance would want to talk about it. He’d ask if Gwen was okay, and I couldn’t handle lying to him or sharing the story at eighty miles an hour with blood drying on my face. Merlin, on the other hand, would focus on getting the fucking job done.
Gwen found him and dialed. She put it on speaker and held the phone up for me.
“You’re up late. What’s going on?” That was what I needed. Straight to business.
“I need a place to stay. Off the books. Something no one will find.”
“Define no one.”
“Has Lance briefed you on what happened at the archive in Champagne?”
“He did. A forged document, three men in the parking lot, and you having him fly out of Malta on a whim.”
“Rick Younge’s involved.”
“Fuck,” he muttered. “You sure?”
“He just beat the shit out of me.” I adjusted my grip on the wheel. “He said he wants the sword and Gwen’s research, so it’s definitely related.”
“Give me fifteen minutes, and I’ll have a location for you.”
“And I need someone to dig into whatever the fuck Rick’s been up to for the past five years. Morganna’s been ghosting me, so I need another reliable resource.”
“I’ll take care of it. Give me your coordinates.”
“Gwen, send it via encrypted message. Now.”
Her breath hitched. “I’m not sure how to—”
“Third page, top left app. It’s obvious once you find it.”
She kept nodding as she swiped through my phone.
“Arthur.” Merlin’s voice softened. “Slow down.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You’re running hot. It’s in every word out of your mouth. Slow down and be strategic.”
“I am being fucking—” I stopped. Breathed hard through my nose. Because he was right. Of course he was fucking right. I wasn’t being strategic. I was driving through rural France at midnight with my headlights off and no actual plan.
“There it is,” Merlin said. “Stay in that pause.”
I exhaled through my teeth.
“Coordinates received. Thank you, Gwen, you did a great job.” A keyboard clicked on his end. “I’ll call back with a location. Fifteen minutes. And Arthur, don’t forget Rick’s a jealous prick whose ego always got in the way. Don’t let him in your head.”
He hung up before I could inform him he was over-fucking-simplifying things.
I drove. The road narrowed, and I turned the lights back on to pick up speed. Hedgerows closed in on both sides.
Gwen set my phone back on the console and returned her hands to the seat edge and the door handle. Her breathing had slowed a little. Not much.
‘Rick’s a jealous prick whose ego always got in the way.’
Merlin was wrong. Rick was a prick, yes. But he was also a better fighter than me, at least tonight. He’d found my injured arm in the first thirty seconds and torn me apart. And when he’d had his forearm across my throat and his face an inch from mine?
I hadn’t taken him down.
Gwen had.
‘First Uther. Now your girlfriend.’
The words sat heavy in my chest, and no amount of driving was going to shake them loose.
Gwen had hit him with a stone planter because I was losing. She’d stepped in and saved me, because I was doing a job I wasn’t prepared for. A job I wasn’t good enough for. I shouldn’t have sent Lance to Malta. Shouldn’t have split the team.
I’d made so many bad decisions.
Including kissing her. And walking the fuck out. Rick hadn’t needed to find us. I’d handed Gwen to him on a fucking platter.
“Who is he?” Gwen’s words were slow. She hadn’t forgotten the question—she’d been waiting for the right moment to try again.
I stared at the road.
When I’d joined the Pendragon contingent for Task Force Legacy, Rick Younge had already been overseas for two years.
He’d run operations in three countries. He knew every protocol, every asset, every pressure point in the region.
The other operators respected him because he’d earned everything by being better than everyone around him.
But my father put me in charge. Not because I’d earned it. Not because I was ready.
Because I was Arthur fucking Penn.
I’d tried to fix it with him. Joint planning sessions where I’d defer to Rick’s expertise. Offered him lead positions when his judgment mattered. I took every opportunity to show the job should have been his.
He’d said that just because I had table scraps to toss at him didn’t mean I belonged at the head of the table.
He wasn’t wrong.
I checked the rearview mirror. It was clear.
But I still had no idea where I was going.
“Arthur?”
I ran my tongue over my lower lip to wipe away some of the dried blood. I didn’t owe her any explanation, but the words came anyway. “You remember on the ferry, when I told you about my father assigning me the command in Afghanistan?”
“I do.”
“Rick was one of the men who should have been given that role. The one who didn’t pretend he agreed with my father’s choice.”
“He got in a lucky shot.”
“No, he was better than me.” You shouldn’t have sent Lance to Malta. “He was better than me back then, and he was better than me tonight.”
“He knew about your arm.”
“He figured it out fast.”
“He targeted it. On purpose.”
“That’s what a real fighter does.” I flexed my right hand on the wheel, and my knuckles protested. “He finds the weakness, and he uses it.”
‘First Uther. Now your girlfriend.’
He’d found my weaknesses before. This was the first time he’d needed his fists to do it.
A year into Task Force Legacy, I quit trying to buy him and planned an op without him. A survey team needed protection at a burial mound south of Balkh, and I built it with the team I trusted. The route, the timings, the overwatch. I didn’t ask Rick for so much as a map.
Hours before we arrived, insurgents had set up a position on a ridge above the site. We eliminated the threat within minutes of them opening fire, but Galahad took a round in his shoulder. It was a graze compared to Prague, and they shipped him home to heal—which pissed him off more than the wound.
He didn’t ask how a spotter got onto the ridge without anyone flagging it.
I did, but I didn’t get any answers. Until three weeks later, when I found a report hidden in a stack of routine summaries with the truth: one of Rick’s sources had warned him about it. Four fucking hours before we arrived.
When I confronted him, he complained about comm techs. Said he hadn’t heard the intel until we were back. When I pressed, he said, ‘Get off my ass, Penn. You wanted the op yours. It was yours. Every part of it.’
I didn’t have proof he’d lied. Reports moved slowly every day. I took it to my father, and he let me get through maybe half a sentence before he told me to deal with my team like a Penn. How the fuck was I supposed to deal with a team member who’d risk one of us because his ego was bruised?
Rick wasn’t just a prick. He was a dangerous prick.
So I had him rotated out to a different province before Galahad got back. Before I had to look a man who’d become my friend in the eye and assure him he was safe under my command.
“What about Uther?” she asked. “Was he another one of your Pendragon team?”
The road opened up, the high beams revealing farmers’ fields on either side, then a road sign. We were on a rural highway, nearing Vichy. Where was I even going?
“It’s a code name,” I said. “Some of the guys from Pendragon use it for my father. He hates it. Thinks it’s condescending, as though the Arthurian legend is all anyone sees when they look at him.”
As though that’s not exactly what he built.
He’d named his only child Arthur. He’d named his company Pendragon.
He’d let the press run with the parallels, laughed at the King Arthur jokes at industry events, and turned that myth into his whole brand.
He purchased the cottage in Cornwall, the area linked to the original Arthurian stories, named it after the sword in the stone, and had the audacity to act wounded when people called him by King Arthur’s father’s name.
But Rick hadn’t used the name to mock my father. He’d used it to unbalance me. Because he was right. My father would have handled tonight differently. He would have bought the problem off, or buried Rick under a dozen operators.
My father also wouldn’t have put his own body between a woman and a threat. Not unless it served the brand. Not unless someone was watching.
I’d put my body between Gwen and Rick because I couldn’t stand the thought of him touching her. And Rick had almost gotten through me regardless.
Almost.
My phone buzzed on the console.
Gwen picked it up and answered. “Hi, Merlin.”
“Hi, Gwen,” he said, as though he’d expected her voice instead of mine. “I’ve got a place. Sending coordinates now. It’s about fifty minutes from your current position.”
“Copy,” I said.
“Get there, get inside, and get some sleep. I’ll have more for you in the morning.”
“Thanks, brother.” I nodded to Gwen, who ended the call. Another fifty minutes? Fuck, I was tired and sore. “Catch a nap, if you can.”
“I’ll try.” She turned on the seat heater and settled back, closing her eyes. She was safe for now. For now.
And I could finally breathe.