Chapter 38
Arthur
My father’s phone number sat on the screen under my thumb.
When I’d needed Pendragon resources in Prague, I’d called their switchboard like any other company requesting help.
The direct line was for Christmas mornings and the obligatory birthday call.
In my whole life, I’d never once used it to ask him for anything.
Calling this number for help meant asking Gerald Penn, not Pendragon Security.
Lance pulled out of the spot in front of Hopkins’s office. “Where am I going?”
“East.”
“East is a compass heading, not a destination.”
“It’s all I’ve got for now.”
The fog had stopped at the coast, but the clouds inland were dense, as though the promised rainstorm might come tonight instead of tomorrow. Was Gwen still on the water? Or was she inside the walls of the mysterious estate?
“We don’t have time for this,” said Lance.
“For what?”
“For your existential crisis.” He took a left turn onto the main road through the little hamlet. “I’ve tried to keep my mouth shut, and I know you want to build this company honestly, but asking for his help doesn’t turn you into his minion.”
It turned me into the man in the Crécy Defense Review article. The nepo baby. The man who couldn’t get anything done on his own. Who’d walked out of that cave and let them take Gwen.
“I owe you my fucking life, Arthur, and I’d go up against Rick with you in a heartbeat. But we need backup, and the men I’d normally turn to are all in the States. Call him.”
“I know.” I pressed the number before I talked myself out of it. It would probably go to voicemail anyway.
But my father answered. “Arthur, I’m glad you called.”
“You are?”
“I have a response to the Crécy Defense Review piece on my desk. You hadn’t responded yet, so I had my team draft a press release. We’ll be issuing it in the morning before—”
Fucking hell. “No.”
“Pardon me?”
“I’ve got it covered, Dad.” Except I didn’t, did I? I was calling with my tail between my legs. “Lance is drafting the response.”
“Lance is? Really?”
Three words and a full performance review wrapped up inside them.
My father had always liked Lance. He was the sport-scholarship kid who dragged me out of the library and taught me how to work a room.
Even at fourteen, Lance had been a charmer.
My father considered Lance to be a positive influence on me, which was why Lance got every invitation to spend time with us on holidays. Because Lance was useful.
But Gerald Penn had never once spoken about Lance Collins as if he owned a working brain.
Beside me, Lance changed lanes with one hand on the wheel, unaware he was being graded.
“He’s running communications for my firm,” I said. “Your team can touch base with him, but I don’t want your company issuing statements about mine. And that’s not why I called.”
“I gathered.”
“My client’s been taken.” My throat ran dry. I’d been talking to my team about this, and I’d been fine—emotional, but fine. But saying it to my father? It stopped being a situation I was managing and became a fact in the world. My woman. My failure. Gone.
He let the silence drag for at least five seconds before he said the word I’d been dreading: “Again?”
Move past it. She’s worth more than your pride. “Yes. This afternoon. We were at Merlin’s Cave in Tintagel, and they snuck in on a RIB. I need resources.”
“Why were you at Merlin’s Cave?” Trust my father to zero in on the most interesting detail, but not the one I needed him to focus on.
“That’s not relevant right now.”
“You called the contracts line when your client was taken in Prague,” he said. “You were emphatic about the arrangement, as I recall.”
“This isn’t Prague.”
“Clearly. Unless I’ll have to arrange your release from police custody in a second country tonight?”
I wanted to throw the phone out the window.
Yell at him through it. Shake it so hard he felt my hands around him.
But my temper tantrum wouldn’t save Gwen.
“We were there with a historian. She was authenticating a medieval sword the FBI seized a couple of weeks ago. Someone wants it back, and they took her. The man running the op to grab her was Rick Younge—”
“He was on Legacy, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah. He and four other men snuck into the cave while she was doing her research. We suspect they’re working out of an estate on the North Cornwall coast.” Suspect? More like I hoped she was there. Hoped she wasn’t at the bottom of the Celtic Sea.
“How did he get the jump on you?”
“Ethan’s working with them.”
“Fowley?” The name drew the first hint of emotion from him. If my father valued anything beyond money and power, it was loyalty. He demanded it. And this news would rock him. “You have proof, I assume?”
Proof, no. A string of coincidences too long to be random.
“We were staying at the cottage, and I’d called him to open the place up before we arrived.
The men who took her have been circling us ever since, and seemed to know where we’d be before we got there.
I’m fairly certain he’s been feeding them intel all along. ”
“I’ll send someone to speak with him.”
“He’s evidence, not a target.”
“He’s both. If you won’t leave the PR to me, leave Ethan to me.” My father’s voice didn’t rise. It cooled, which was worse. “But Ethan isn’t why you called, is he?”
Hedgerows flew past the window, and a few raindrops hit the windshield. Where were we driving? Was Lance taking us to the cottage? That would have been safe ground. Unless Ethan set up a trap for us. Why hadn’t I thought about that, either?
Because you only figured out his involvement ten minutes ago.
I caught Lance’s eye. He didn’t give me the playful smile or the jealous scowl he’d been switching between for the past week. He just nodded. I didn’t have to explain my plan—he always had my back.
“I need men who’ll break British law tonight and won’t blink afterward. Men you trust absolutely. And I need them beside me within the hour.”
My father was silent for a breath. When he spoke, his voice had warmed by a degree, which for my father was a bonfire. “My boy. You’re finally coming into your own.”
Coming into my own?
The fuck?
He’d sat through the announcement that I’d graduated first in class at Annapolis while answering emails from the third row.
When I earned my trident, his assistant mailed a fountain pen with a card he hadn’t bothered to sign.
When I joined Pendragon after leaving the Navy, all I got was a ‘Good.’ None of those counted to him. They were expectations.
But a phone call asking for the family’s men and the family’s reach—that counted.
“This isn’t me coming into anything,” I said, rather than hang up. “My client’s gone, and you have what I need. That’s the whole call.”
“As you like.” Leather creaked on his end of the line. It sounded like the chair in his Miami office. “This client. She matters to you.”
“She’s my client.”
“Mm.” He didn’t press it, which was a data point in itself. He’d figured me out. “Send me the address where you need the team.”
“Hold on.” I pulled the phone from my ear and texted him the coordinates Morganna had secured.
“Interesting,” he mused.
I stared out the window at a sliver of sunlight fighting its way through the clouds overhead. My father held all the cards right now, and he wouldn’t volunteer more than Interesting until I asked. It was always a transaction. “What’s interesting?”
“Twelve years ago, the owner wanted a safe room put in under the main hall,” my father said. “He wanted the work kept quiet, and a client put us in touch. I had one of our logistics teams install a prefab for them.”
What? “You’ve been there?”
Lance glanced over, and I rolled my eyes at him.
“I can send the survey drawings, the approach, the utility runs, and the build sheet on the door.”
The entire world blurred—the car, the English countryside, the sliver of sun punching through the clouds. We had intel, but we also had a safe-room door to get through. We’d have to go in hotter than I’d expected, but we wouldn’t be doing it blind.
“I can’t guarantee they haven’t added security since then, of course.” Papers moved on his end of the line. He was mobilizing too. “I can count on your discretion?”
I let out a long breath, the first one I remembered taking since running to the car at Tintagel.
My whole life, the Penn name had hung over my head like the sword of Damocles—I was born into power and wealth that could easily destroy me like it had destroyed my parents.
My father would have denied it had caused him any harm, but he would have been fooling himself.
I’d followed the path he’d set for me, but taken the hardest route, trying to outrun the inevitable suspicion I’d been handed everything.
That had been nothing but pride.
And now it wasn’t my pride I was trying to protect. It was Gwen.
The truth was, I’d put the metaphorical sword there myself.
I’d been the one who felt guilty for everything I’d been given.
And I was the one who could take the fucking thing down.
Using these resources didn’t make me my father.
I wasn’t using them for a marriage that photographed well, another car, another house, or a son who was little more than my succession plan.
I was spending the resources on the woman who’d told me I actually understood love.
Love. That’s what I was deploying these resources for.
“Of course you can count on my discretion, Dad.”
“Where are you staging?”
“We’ll be ten minutes out from the estate. I’ll text you. Send me the drawings, and have the men bring extra kit for Lance and me.”
“Both are in progress.” A keyboard clicked somewhere in that enormous office I’d spent my childhood being summoned to. “The men I’m sending don’t exist on my payroll if this goes loud. Spend them accordingly.”
“Understood.”
“And Arthur?” He hesitated, and he was not a man who hesitated. “Get her back first. Decide what she is to you after.”
It was the nearest thing to fatherly advice he’d offered me in a decade. What was I supposed to do with that? “Thanks, Dad.”
I ended the call.
“Well?” Lance said.
“Turns out, the estate has a safe room under the main hall.” On my phone, I explored the local maps for five minutes before choosing where to muster. I sent the location to my father and the GPS in our car. “He’s sending schematics and an off-the-books team.”
Lance nodded thoughtfully. “Tristan will be disappointed.”
“By what?”
“That we’re not the off-the-books team.” He turned a grin on me and laughed.
I smacked him, unable to hold my own laugh back.
He flexed his hands on the wheel, and the joke dropped out of his voice. “We’ll get her back, Arthur.”
I had no doubt. Rick Younge and his thugs were not keeping my woman.