Chapter 37
Arthur
“Looks empty.” Lance tried the front door. Locked. He cupped his hands to the window and peered inside. “No alarm system, either.”
“I don’t know if that makes me happy or sad.” I tightened my jacket sleeve and rammed my elbow through the small glass panel beside the handle. It was louder than I’d intended, but brief. I reached through, turned the deadbolt, and we were in.
Breaking the window didn’t upset me. It was a thing. Money could replace it. A hundred dollars or so, and the problem was over with.
If Theo Hopkins had been in his office, I would have offered him money—for Gwen’s release or her location. The price didn’t matter. It was just fucking money. If he’d said no, I would have threatened him. Fear was a currency I understood almost as well as cash.
I had millions upon millions to offer before I had to stop and count.
The human body, however? It had over two hundred bones. That meant I had over two hundred threats to offer before I needed to mention soft tissue.
Was I happy or sad he wasn’t there?
No fucking clue.
The office hadn’t changed since my visit with Gwen, but everything in it had taken on a different meaning.
The crammed bookshelves were no longer a sign of an academic’s curious mind—they were a sign of the places where he might have hidden his lies.
The journals stacked on the windowsill became rebuttals to keep people away from Tintagel.
The display cases with their little gold and silver pieces were nothing more than curated symbols to misdirect people searching for his secrets.
I pulled the blinds on the street-facing window while Lance cleared the back room and bathroom.
Lance returned with Merlin on his phone’s screen and turned it toward me. “We’re inside Hopkins’s office.”
“Marj?” Merlin said.
“Don’t call me that,” Morganna said faintly in the background.
My phone immediately began buzzing with a video call, and I accepted. “Thanks for helping out.”
“Like I had a choice. John,” she drawled, using Merlin’s real name, the same way he’d used hers, “arrived at my apartment yesterday and gave me an ultimatum about helping you. He said I was dicking you around and followed up with a cute little comment about my head being in my ass.”
I grimaced at Lance, who was holding back a laugh. That hadn’t been what I’d expected Merlin to do.
She continued, “I thought it was overkill until he told me about Rick Younge. I can’t believe that asshole showed his face, let alone took your girlfriend.”
She’s not my girlfriend. Although if Merlin had called her that, it was clear everyone knew what she meant to me. So much for the secret. “I appreciate it.”
“Don’t appreciate it yet. Did Hopkins leave his computer behind?”
“His desktop’s here.” I aimed my phone’s camera at the desk and hit the power button.
Lance had angled his phone at the filing cabinet, so Merlin could see what he was pulling. He opened the first drawer and spread files on a side table. He muttered, “Maps, photos, notes. His handwriting’s shit.”
“While it boots up,” Morganna said, “check for a password. Under the mouse pad or the keyboard, maybe in a drawer.”
I flipped the mouse pad. Nothing. Lifted the keyboard.
Nothing. The top-right drawer contained pens, a magnifying glass, and loose USB drives.
The second had reprints and a half-eaten pack of digestive biscuits.
The bottom drawer had a sticky note pressed to the inside panel.
He’d made the password hard to guess and easy to find.
I typed in the string and the desktop loaded. “I’m in.”
Morganna walked me through giving her remote access—a website, a code she read to me, a confirmation prompt. The cursor began moving on its own. “Got it. I’ll work this end. You two work the room.”
“How did they know we’d be at the cave?” I asked, as though someone would have the answer.
Lance didn’t look up from the files. “That’s what’s been eating at me.”
“We didn’t spot anyone following us. We came across the Channel, drove the back way in.”
“Let’s start closer to the beginning.” Lance pulled a folder and set it aside. “How did the car that followed us from the airport know we’d be there? When we first arrived from the States.”
Our first night in England. We’d landed at the little airstrip, loaded Gwen and the sword into the car, and a dark sedan had been behind us within twenty minutes. “We filed flight information. If they knew we were on the jet, they could have identified the airstrip.”
“And they knew about the archive in Champagne because—”
“That was Hopkins.” I watched the cursor move around Hopkins’s screen. “He’s the one who sent Gwen there. Told her the French archives might have the earliest references to the inscription.”
“So if Hopkins is involved in all of this,” Lance said, pausing with his hand on the next drawer, “is it a coincidence he was at St. Catherine’s Church when we visited?”
Shit. I’d thought his being there was convenient. But it wasn’t. It was too convenient. “How did he know we’d be there?”
Lance looked at me over his shoulder.
I stared at the bookshelves. A lifetime of scholarship, and all of it had been cover. But for what? “I didn’t tell anyone we were going to the church.”
“No one?” said Lance. “Didn’t you say you—”
“Oh, fuck me.” I would have thrown the computer if Morganna wasn’t using it. “Ethan. I emailed him before we went, asking for details about it.”
You told him everything.
“Ethan,” Lance said. “Who was also at the house earlier today and saw our plans to go to the cave?”
“And Ethan, who I called in advance to open the cottage. So he knew we were coming to Cornwall in the first place.”
“So he alerted whoever followed us from the airport?”
I put both hands on the edge of the desk and pressed down. My knuckles ached, and the cut down my arm threatened to split open.
Ethan Fowley. The man who’d told me to be careful at Tintagel, as though he gave a shit about my safety, had been telling the people who took Gwen where to find us. He’d been working for my father for over thirty years. He’d been there every time we visited. He’d known me my entire life.
It fit too well.
“Could he really be involved?” I said it out loud because I needed to hear how stupid it sounded.
Except it didn’t sound stupid. It sounded like the only possible explanation.
“Their surveillance went quiet near the cottage because Ethan took over. Or hell, he might have been the one in the fucking car that night, because he would have had an excuse if we caught him.”
Lance didn’t say a word. He didn’t need to.
I needed to tell my father.
“Arthur?” Morganna said from the phone on the desk. “I’ve got an AI helping me comb through his email archive. There’s a pattern—dozens of references over the last two decades to an estate. Most are vague, but two messages include an address on the North Cornwall coast. I’ll text it to you.”
When the coordinates arrived, I clicked through to a map.
In the satellite view, an isolated clifftop property sat at the end of a single road winding through farmland.
I switched to the street-level view, which stopped just outside the estate’s stone wall and iron gates.
Behind them was a large, ancient building with as many windows as my family’s cottage.
“Lance.” I held the phone toward him. “Did you see anything like this in the files?”
He pointed his own phone at it, and Merlin said, “It’s in there. About halfway through the papers we went through.”
I helped Lance dig through the mess he’d made on the side table. Folders, loose papers, photographs. After several minutes of sorting, we found a glossy five-by-seven. A group of people standing in front of a building. We both aimed our cameras at it for Merlin and Morganna.
Same building. Same stone wall.
Lance held his phone closer, zooming in on the video feed as he moved across the faces. He paused on a figure in the front row. Smiling. At ease. “Hopkins.”
He moved his phone to the right. Stopped. “Shit.”
I zoomed my own camera on the area he was looking at, so Morganna could see what was going on. The figure at the edge of the group was thin, with long gray hair and a scowling face.
Fuck.
“This is Arthur’s cottage caretaker,” Lance said. “That’s a confirmed connection.”
“Copy,” Merlin said through the speaker.
I switched my phone back to the map and requested directions from our current location. “It’s a forty-minute drive. That’s where she is.”
“That’s our best lead, you mean,” Lance corrected.
But I knew. The address, Hopkins’s emails, and Ethan in a photo with the people who’d taken Gwen. “We need to go. Now.”
“You remember Galahad in Prague?” said Merlin over the phone. “Take the advice you gave him: You need a plan.”
“I know, but I can come up with one while we’re driving.”
“All right, boys, if you’re going to start talking tactics, I’m signing off this call to focus.
I’ll keep running through Hopkins’s computer and let you know if I find anything else.
And I didn’t forget about your reporter.
I found a few things yesterday that I’ll follow up on tomorrow.
” How much was she actually doing for White Spring, if she had so much on her plate with us?
“Thanks, Morganna,” I said, trying to sound more like myself.
“I’ll be in touch.” She clicked off.
“Do you want to brainstorm?” asked Merlin.
“Not yet. I’m not sure…” Of anything.
“Call me when you’re ready.” Merlin hung up, leaving me with Lance.
Lance started putting the files back into the cabinet, as though hiding our break-in mattered. He closed a drawer, opened the next, and replaced folders. Without turning around, he said, “I need to confess something.”
I leaned against the desk and ran my hands over my face. How many men would they have? There were two of us and not enough time to fly the guys in from the States. Even if we still had the little drone, it was for monitoring, not backup. I had to get her back. But how? “Go ahead.”
“I didn’t sleep with Gwen.”
Whatever I’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. I dragged my hands down my face. “What?”
“When we were together. We went on dates. Dinners, movies. I liked her.” He closed the drawer and moved to the next, keeping his back to me. “But I didn’t sleep with her.”
“Why not?”
“Because I thought she was special, and the no-strings discussion didn’t feel right.” He closed the last drawer and turned around. “Plus, I had a feeling someone had treated her badly, and I didn’t want to be the next guy who hurt her.”
I stared at him. Sleeping with women was one of Lance’s things.
Mostly one-, two-, or three-night stands, but he never committed to them, and he never pretended he wanted more.
At least, that’s how his stories had always gone.
I’d stopped trying to track their names around the time we turned twenty-three.
“Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I just grew a second head.” He crossed to the desk, flicked the monitor off, and put the sticky note with Hopkins’s password back in the drawer. “I’m capable of restraint.”
“Since when?”
“Since a woman I found interesting wanted to spend time hanging out with me.” He shrugged, like none of it made sense. “And it turned out I liked it, too.”
“Maybe you were losing your touch?”
“Hardly.” He gave me his signature lopsided grin and gestured to his body. “I mean, who doesn’t want all of this?”
I let out a small laugh and closed my eyes. The thing in my chest wasn’t going away. It kept growing and demanding my attention. I couldn’t defeat it, couldn’t redirect it, couldn’t run from it.
So stop running.
“I can’t explain it. When she’s around, there’s this—” I put my fist against my chest. “It won’t stop.”
Lance nodded slowly and let out a heavy sigh. “That’s love, you idiot.”
“Not likely. I’ve only known her for what? A week and a bit?”
“Your parents just celebrated their thirty-ninth anniversary.” He leaned on the desk next to me. “Do you honestly think time has anything to do with love?”
For thirty-nine years, my parents had performed for cameras, clients, and colleagues. Thirty-nine years of handshakes, dinner parties, and choreographed closeness. I’d spent my adult life using their marriage as an excuse to keep my guard up.
But Lance was right. If thirty-nine years didn’t mean love, what did it matter how long I’d known her?
“Let’s go get her,” Lance said, nudging my arm. “So you can figure that shit out with her, because I’ve exhausted my ability to provide relationship advice.”
I pushed off the desk. My knee protested. My ribs protested. Everything protested except the thing in my chest, which for the first time in a week wasn’t telling me to run. It was telling me to get my woman back. “I think I need to call my father.”