Chapter 28
Arthur
The GPS led us down a dirt road that ended at a building I would have missed in full daylight. No sign, no markings. Just a little concrete box tucked into a clump of trees, with one door and no windows facing the road. The driveway was barely visible, and the trees swallowed the car.
One of Merlin’s friends had recommended it, which meant it was either an active or a retired CIA location, and I didn’t want to know what had happened in it before tonight.
Gwen was asleep, her head lolling to the side against the headrest. I shifted the car into park and switched off the engine.
My ribs throbbed with every breath. The bandage on my forearm was soaked through. My knuckles were split, the cuts and scrapes attempting to heal, but they broke open each time I clenched the wheel. At least my lip wasn’t bleeding anymore.
I should have gone straight inside. Swept the building, confirmed it was clean, and brought her in. That was protocol. Instead, I sat in the dark and breathed. Breathed and fought the instinct to watch her sleep for the second night in a row.
You could carry her in?
Yeah, that would be quite the move. First you kiss her without her permission—let alone her interest—and then you carry her across the threshold into a safe house where people had been hiding out for years. How fucking romantic.
Do your job, idiot.
I touched her arm. “Gwen.”
She stirred.
“We’re here.”
Her eyes opened slowly, and she stretched as she yawned. She blinked at the windshield, then at me. The confusion gradually gave way to recognition. “Where are we?”
“Somewhere safe.”
She yawned again and shook her head to clear it. “Actually safe?”
“Actually safe, yes.”
We got out of the car and collected our meager belongings from the back seat.
The door had a hidden keypad, and I used the code Merlin had texted me.
Inside, it was exactly what I’d expected: one room with a rough wooden table, two chairs, and a narrow bed.
Concrete walls, a single fluorescent overhead, and a bathroom.
But it had power, plumbing, electric heat, and a shelf stocked with canned goods.
I did the sweep in thirty seconds—main room, bathroom, shelf, one window in the rear wall. I used the thermostat by the bathroom to turn on the heat. The unit clicked and hummed.
Gwen set the sword case and her messenger bag by the door and stood in the middle of the room, hugging herself. The stark white light washed her out, emphasizing the dark circles under her bloodshot eyes.
She went into the bathroom, but didn’t close the door. She rummaged through the cabinets under the sink, so when she returned with a first-aid kit, I wasn’t surprised. Nor was I surprised when she pointed at the table and said, “Sit.”
If she’d felt obliged to kiss me after the fight in Champagne, surely the feeling would be stronger after the fight with Rick.
Although, given how soundly he’d beaten me, the feeling underneath it all would more likely be pity.
Either way, I wasn’t about to give her any indication that was what I wanted.
I mean, of course, I wanted to kiss her again, but not as an obligation. I’d known men who would have pulled that card—hell, her Lionel sounded like the kind of man who’d do that. I wouldn’t put it past him to have said it to her outright.
But I was not that kind of man. No matter how much my body kept nudging me forward, my brain was mostly in control.
I reached for the kit. “I can handle it. You get some sleep.”
She pulled one chair out and sat, then nudged the other with her foot. “Sit. Down.”
Let her. She needs to stay busy.
I sat.
Without a word, she opened the kit to take inventory. It was twice the size of the one at the rental house, which figured.
I eased my jacket off, tossed it onto the table, and rolled my sleeve up for her.
“This one’s got butterfly strips. That’ll help.” She peeled the old bandage off my forearm and started cleaning the wound. The antiseptic was stronger than the wipes she’d used before, and it burned deep into the torn edges.
This was supposed to be an easy job. Low risk. One hotel break-in that might have been related to her case, but probably wasn’t, and one idling car.
How the fuck had I wound up at an off-the-books shelter with a woman whose lips I couldn’t stop looking at? Whose every tear made me want to hold her?
I needed a buffer. I needed Lance.
At least he was safe in Geneva.
She pressed the first strip across the wound, pulling the edges of the skin together with careful fingers. Strip by strip, methodical and focused. Just as steady as before, but faster now. She was too familiar with this wound already.
My phone buzzed on the table. I glanced at the screen. “It’s Merlin.”
I tilted it up to unlock it while Gwen worked. “Hi, Merlin. You’re on speaker.”
“How’s the palace?”
“Charming,” I said. “What do you have?”
“Sounds like Rick’s been busy since he left Pendragon in 2023.
He’s connected to something, but I don’t have the full picture yet.
I talked to a few people who confirmed he’s done a lot of international travel, primarily in the UK and Western Europe.
Some of the flights were first class, but he flew several charters, too. ”
I stared at my arm as Gwen applied two more butterflies. “So there’s money behind whatever it is.”
“That’s my read. I’m going to get Morganna’s head out of her ass and set her loose on this. She’s the only one with the access to trace this properly.”
“She went dark two days ago.”
“I know, but she was chasing a journalist before that. When she hears Rick’s involved, it’ll change things.
” Merlin had pulled her onto the Legacy team in Afghanistan the minute the Agency let him, even though she was less than a year out of college.
He’d been right to choose her, and she’d been his go-to for most human intel.
“In the meantime, stay put. Get some sleep. You sound like shit.”
“Thanks, asshole.”
“I mean it. Sleep. Both of you.”
The call ended, and Gwen added a fourth butterfly to my arm. “He was CIA, right?”
“How did you—”
“The article.” She ripped off pieces of tape for the gauze. “So if he arranged for us to stay here…”
She didn’t have to finish the question—the ask was obvious. She wanted to know what kind of place Merlin had sent us to. Why it was so bare, but I was confident we were safe here.
“It’s somewhere people can disappear for a while,” I said.
“Or they get disappeared to?”
“No.” There weren’t any dark splotches on the floor or walls to indicate it had been used that way, although bleach did wonders for concrete. “Merlin wouldn’t send us to a black site.”
She glanced up at the institutional light overhead. “Kinda seems like it.”
“It’s low maintenance.”
She hummed, not really agreeing, and taped the edges of the gauze. “I was thinking… on the drive…”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She held the tape down like she’d done at the rental. “I thought reviewing everything might give me a hint of what to focus on.”
“Did it help?”
“I don’t think so.” Gwen took my right hand in hers to examine the swollen knuckles. She frowned at the damage and started cleaning them with a fresh wipe. “But I think I’ve figured it out.”
“About Dr. Hopkins?”
“About where this leads.” She dabbed at the damaged skin across my middle knuckle.
“He sent us to three places. Glastonbury told us Novae Avallonis was a real term. Malta confirmed the church inscription dates to the fourteenth century or earlier. Champagne gave us a forged document that claimed the sword’s inscription was an eighteenth-century collector’s whimsy. ”
“Which means?”
“If I’d believed the forged document, we would have left Champagne thinking there’s nothing special about Novae Avallonis, and that the sword is nothing more than a collector’s item.
But when I rejected it, they sent three men after the sword, and then Rick came after us.
He said flat out he needed the sword and my research.
They wouldn’t do all of that unless Novae Avallonis is very important, and the sword is more than a trinket.
It’s the key, precisely like the inscription says. ”
She picked up another wipe and continued cleaning my hands. Her voice had changed. Still quiet, but far steadier. The hedging was gone. The qualifiers were gone.
“By trying to make it seem unimportant,” she said, “they proved the opposite. The sword and the church are linked, and that means… I don’t know what it means.”
The thinking time might not have improved her mood, but it was certainly productive.
“But add in what I found about Dr. Hopkins. It dawned on me right before I fell asleep. The rebuttals weren’t about all of the West Country. They were all about Tintagel. He’s been steering people away from a specific place, and I was simply the most recent one.”
Tintagel was the legendary site of King Arthur’s conception, and it was a stone’s throw from my father’s cottage. Because, of course, it was. We’d visited the ruins of the castle several times, despite my father’s insistence he wasn’t obsessed with the stories.
“Porta Novae Avallonis on the church. Clavis Novae Avallonis on the sword.” She paused in cleaning my knuckles and met my eyes. “And an expert working so hard to prove there’s no link between them because I was already too close to the town he chases every researcher away from.”
This was not the woman who’d folded in Hopkins’s office when he’d dismissed her reading of the inscription.
Not the woman who’d left Fergus’s shop because his sister had made a crack about her neckline.
This was the woman I’d promised myself I’d fight for, and sworn I’d get her a win so big no one would ever question her.
“Whatever Theo Hopkins, Rick Younge, and whoever they work for are trying to hide, it’s at Tintagel. That’s where we need to go.”
“It’s too dangerous,” I blurted. So much for giving her the win.
“I understand, but—”
“I don’t think you do. We’ve been attacked twice. You heard what Merlin said—Rick is connected to an operation with money behind it. If what they’re protecting is at Tintagel, we’d be walking into their hands.”
“We can’t run forever.” She took my left hand, more forcefully than necessary, and checked the knuckles. “Rick knows you, he worked with you, and he knows what I look like. They’ll find us eventually. At least in Tintagel, we’d be going for a reason.”
“Tintagel would be the one place they’ll be most prepared for us.”
“Or it’s the one place where we find out what this whole thing is about.
” She dabbed another wipe across the skin, and I flinched.
“Arthur, I didn’t fly to England to hide in a bunker.
I wanted to go to Cornwall to do my job, but I found out there was more to the item I was authenticating. This is the sort of discovery to—”
“This is about your safety, not your job.”
“All right. I’ll go back to plan A and do it myself.”
That was the most foolish, ridiculous, bone-headed—
She picked up a fresh wipe and leaned toward my face. “Hold still.”
I did as she asked while she cleaned the dried blood from my lip.
But her fingers were close to my mouth, her face inches from mine.
A vision of her lips closing around the spoon as she tried my sauce came over me.
Of my thumb on her chin, then in my mouth.
The way her lips had parted when my fingers slid against her cheek.
Get out of there.
I stood up so fast, the chair toppled over.
She sat back, the wipe hanging from her hand. “Arthur—”
“I’m fine.” I wasn’t fine. I paced all of ten feet to the far wall and pressed my palms to the concrete. “Gwen, I can’t let you go to Tintagel and stand by while—”
While what? While the people who’d sent Rick came after her? While the organization that had planted a forged document and a surveillance camera and three men in a parking lot focused all of their attention on the woman I—
“While you get hurt.” I turned around. “This isn’t about your job. I don’t give a shit about the job right now, and neither should you.”
She raised an eyebrow at me from the chair, not arguing. She just fucking sat there, as though staring at me would make me change my mind. She was supposed to argue, so I could be forceful and put my foot down.
So I didn’t have to tell her the truth. Tell her what scared me. Tell her what—
Fuck.
“I care too much about what happens to you.” I barked a stupid laugh. There. I’d said it.
I fucking cared.
My father would never say that. Not once, in my entire life, had he said he cared so much about another person that he was afraid for them. Not about my mother. Not about me. Not about anyone, unless it served a purpose.
I leaned against the wall and folded my arms, letting the cold from the concrete seep through my filthy shirt.
“So there’s the truth. I’ve been in fucking war zones, and the scariest thing in the world right now isn’t Rick or whoever’s paying him.
It’s the thought of you getting hurt because I brought you somewhere dangerous. ”
There it is, Penn. That’s the reason you sent Lance to Malta and wound up in this fucking situation: You care too much.
“And instead of doing my goddamn job of protecting you, I kissed you.”
She blinked a few times, her brows pulling in tight, as though she had no idea what I was talking about.
Why did I say that out loud? Rick must have hit me harder than I’d thought.