CHAPTER SIX
-MORGAN-
Caer Gwyll smelled like wet stone and old grievances.
I truly couldn’t stand the place, almost as much as I couldn’t stand Merlin.
If the Standing Stones had killed me on the way here, I might have counted it a mercy.
Death would have been preferable to sitting in this cold room watching a collection of the realm’s finest minds prepare to say absolutely nothing of consequence. At least death had dignity.
But the stones hadn’t taken me; Merlin had seen to that. He’d provided each of us with a small vial of his blood before we’d crossed, and the stones had let us pass like obedient hounds recognizing their master’s scent. A clever solution.
Within the room were seven people, two torches that were fighting a losing battle against the damp, and a table that had seen better centuries.
Merlin stood in one corner of the room, wearing that expression he always wore: the one that suggested he already knew how every sentence in the room would end. He was a smug bastard.
“Morgan, how nice of you to join us,” Vaelen said. It was his fault I was late, and I shot him a pointed look across the table. In response, his mouth twitched into a lopsided grin, which suited him because he was, if nothing else, the epitome of the word: rogue.
This morning, he’d spread me across the bed like a feast, his tongue working between my thighs until I trembled on the edge of losing all my composure.
But rather than allowing me over the brink of no return, he’d popped his head up and, with a grin, asked, “The weather’s been unusually warm for autumn, don’t you think?”
I’d gripped his hair, trying to guide him back, and, of course, he’d resumed his ministrations with gusto, circling my quim with his tongue in that way of his until my hips bucked against his mouth and certain release began to grip me.
“I heard the grain harvest was particularly good this year.”
Three times the bastard had brought me to the precipice, and three times he’d tortured me with idiotic conversations while my cunt throbbed with need.
After his final comment, which I believed had something to do with a donkey, I’d had enough.
I’d shoved him onto his back, climbed on top of his face, and ridden his tongue until I shattered while he groaned beneath me.
Then he’d flipped me over, shoved his cock (which had already orgasmed twice by this point) so deep inside me that I’d shredded his back with my fingernails, and he’d fucked me without ceremony until we both exploded in mutual bliss.
The memory heated my cheeks as I took my seat. I could still feel his release dripping out of me.
“Apologies for my tardiness,” I said to no one in particular, arranging my skirts as I took my seat at the head of the table, somewhere I was quite sure Merlin had just been sitting.
Now the old fool was standing in the corner of the room, busying himself with a series of floating charts of constellations, planetary orbits, or some other useless task.
“I was detained by rather... pressing matters.”
Vaelen’s light brown eyes darkened with satisfaction, the insufferable man.
It was then that I noticed the woman seated to Vaelen’s left. She was very pretty and she was younger than me: two things I didn’t approve of.
She was in her mid-twenties, had I to guess, with light brunette hair that fell in loose waves around her shoulders.
She had wide hazel-brown eyes with a dark brown inner ring, and those eyes were currently moving around the table with the quick intelligence of someone who missed very little and pretended to miss even less.
Tattoos wound up her right arm in dark patterns that disappeared beneath her sleeve.
She sat with the particular posture of someone who was comfortable in rooms like this, not because she’d been born to them, but because she’d decided to be.
She was also, I noted, looking directly at me with an expression that was equal parts curiosity and assessment and not a single part intimidation.
I found that immediately interesting.
“You’ve brought company,” I said to Vaelen, keeping my voice light.
His mouth curved. “Yes, this is Hailey Jewel Leavitt, my right hand.”
“I wasn’t aware your right hand had a name,” I said as I gave Hailey a polite smile and she returned it. In truth, I wasn’t aware that Vaelen had a right hand in the rebellion at all, one who wasn’t me, at any rate. And further, I hadn’t been aware that his “right hand” was as attractive as she was.
“She has several opinions as well,” Hailey said pleasantly, still looking at me with those bright, steady eyes. “Shall I share them, or are we saving that conversation for the part when everyone starts arguing?”
Carlisle made a sound at the same time that Corvin’s mouth moved in something that wasn’t quite a smile but was adjacent to one.
Vaelen said nothing, which told me everything I needed to know. As to his right hand, Hailey, I filed her away in the part of my mind I reserved for things that required further examination and returned my attention to the room and to the scoundrel who was currently grinning at me like a fool.
The truth of it was that very few men had ever held my interest long enough to matter.
Centuries had a way of making humanity predictable: their desires, their cruelties, their small, desperate ambitions all cycling through the same tired patterns.
I’d outlived kings and watched empires dissolve into footnotes.
Love, lust, and companionship? I’d burned through all of them and come out the other side untouched.
Then Vaelen happened.
I couldn’t entirely explain it. Perhaps it was our separations, and more pointedly, the long silences between us where I convinced myself we were finished.
Months would pass at a time. Once, a whole year passed.
During those times, I’d feel nothing more than a passing interest in noting it had been quite a while since I’d seen or thought of him.
Then he’d appear at the edge of my vision like smoke from a doused fire, and everything I’d so carefully constructed would develop inconvenient cracks.
The worst part was that I didn’t mind.
His games were the only ones that still surprised me. He moved through the world sideways, never where I expected him to be, and never quite readable. Perhaps it was that exact quality, the genuine impossibility of predicting him, that made something ancient in my chest feel temporarily new again.
I smoothed my sleeves and directed my attention to the map that was spread across the table.
Time to pay attention, Morgan.
Carlisle had his palms laid flat on the table, his iron-gray hair falling loose around his jaw. He had the stillness of a man who’d stopped bothering to raise his voice because he’d discovered quiet was more frightening.
“Two days.” His fingers pressed into the wood like he was marking a grave. “We had a window, and we had people in position.” Then he looked at me. “And then you told Vaelen to wait.”
“No, I told Vaelen to hold.” I pulled off my gloves one finger at a time. “There is a distinction.”
Merlin looked over at me then and appeared surprised to see me occupying his seat. Well, really, he shouldn’t have been surprised because where else would I sit? In the center of the table with Carlisle on one side and whoever that haggard-looking woman was on the other?
Please.
Carlisle reminded me he was still glaring at me. “The distinction is that we lost the window.”
Corvin, the only other man in the room worth looking at, stood at the far end of the table, arms crossed, jaw tight.
He hadn’t looked at me since I’d walked in.
That meant he was furious; Corvin only went quiet when the anger had nowhere left to go.
I did notice with some interest that his shadows were busily pulling all the candle light from the corners of the room.
“We’re wasting time,” he said, to the room rather than to me.
Vaelen faced Corvin and shook his head. “We go in blind, and we won’t come back out again.”
“The only reason we’d go in blind is because your woman made us wait.” Carlisle’s hawk eyes cut to me.
“She’s not my woman,” Vaelen said with a smirk in my direction, meaning he knew exactly how Carlisle’s comment would land.
“She,” I started, spearing everyone in the room with an expression that dared them to ever refer to me in such a way again, “is no one’s woman.”
“Agreed,” Hailey said, raising her hand briefly as though seconding a motion at a very dangerous town council. “On behalf of women everywhere, fucking agreed.”
Carlisle then looked at the old mage, who hadn’t moved from his position beside the cold hearth.
His planetary charts were still revolving around his head like he was the sun and they were caught in his pull.
His hands were folded, and his expression held the specific quality of a man who was watching children argue over a broken toy he’d already decided to take away.
Then Corvin spoke, and the temperature in the room changed.
“All of you seem to forget the fact that Guin is sitting in that dungeon, and gods only know how much time she has left.”
He stood with his shoulder against the far wall, arms now loose at his sides, amber eyes moving between faces like he was accounting for each of them.
“Every hour she sits in that cell is another hour we lose. We aren’t discussing this any longer. We’re deciding.”
Carlisle’s thin mouth curved. Not a smile exactly. Recognition.
“Finally,” he said.
Merlin said nothing, which was interesting considering he was Guinevere’s father and, thus, had the most to lose.
I set my gloves on the table and looked at all of them and felt the faint, familiar pleasure of watching men mistake their emotions for strategy.
They always did.
“We need to act now,” Corvin said, slapping his hands together as if that was the end of it.
“Corvin should go first.”
Every eye in the room swung to me.
I let them wait a moment because I’d earned it. Then I leaned forward and pressed two fingers to the map, directly over Camelot’s eastern wall.
“Corvin goes in here. But not without my support.”
“I don’t require anyone’s support.”