CHAPTER TWELVE #2
“I believe I owe you something,” I said. “And not only for attempting to flee with my prisoner... no, for much more than that. This is something I’ve owed you for a while now, and it’s been a long time coming.”
With that, I cocked my arm back and released it across Corvin’s face.
I put my full weight behind the blow, and the crack of it filled the low-ceilinged room.
His head snapped sideways, and the two knights holding him, Agravaine and Tristan, staggered with the force of it.
Corvin didn’t go down, but I’d known he wouldn’t.
He’d taken harder and in worse places with worse odds.
He straightened slowly, turned his head back to me, and a thin line of blood ran from the corner of his mouth.
He looked at me and turned the other cheek, a smile spreading across his mouth. It was a smile that said he hadn’t been bested. And it was a smile that stoked the fires of my temper.
Behind me, she made a sound. It was almost a gasp, cut off before it fully started, like she’d bitten down on it, like she hadn’t meant to make it at all.
I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t. Not yet.
Instead, I watched Corvin’s face and noticed he was now looking past me, past my shoulder. He was looking at her, and his expression did something I hadn’t expected. Something opened up in it, something unguarded and immediate and so plainly legible, I could have read it from across a battlefield.
He was in love with her.
At that thought, the dragon detonated.
Heat came up from my gut into my throat, behind my eyes, and I felt the tattoo move, that slow awful ripple across my chest that meant the thing was furious. Furious with a possessive rage so absolute it had no edges, just a roaring center...
Mine! It screamed. She is mine!
The ugliness of the thought landed in my own ears like a stranger’s voice, and it was all I could do to force the beast back down again.
I had to breathe in deeply for a count of three and then exhale as I clenched my eyes shut tight and put everything I had into slamming the door shut against the creature’s ire.
Because the alternative... no, there was no alternative.
I took a breath. Then another.
When I turned around, she was still pressed against the wall where I’d left her. Her eyes moved from Corvin to me, and the calculation in them had returned, sharp and steady, but underneath it, there was something else. Something that had cracked open when I’d hit him.
If he loved her, she loved him just as much.
And that infuriated the dragon. It probably would have infuriated me too, if I’d allowed myself to feel anything. As it was, I was too busy convincing myself that their love for one another was a good thing because I could use their feelings against them.
I looked back at Corvin, at the blood that had reached his chin.
“You left.”
The words came out wrong. They were too stripped down.
I’d meant them to come out as an accusation, as a charge, something I could prosecute, but they didn’t.
They came out like something that had been sitting in the back of a drawer for years and had fallen out when I wasn’t braced for it. “You chose Merlin.”
Corvin held my gaze.
“Arthur—”
“—we built Camelot together.” My voice dropped on the last word, the fracture small and complete, and I heard Lance shift his weight behind me. “We bled for it together. We built everything we said we would, and then you—”
I stopped.
The room was very quiet.
Corvin said my name again, but his voice was softer this time. It was the tone he used when we were both young, and I was convinced of my own invincibility, and he was the only one willing to tell me I was wrong.
“I know,” he said. That was all. I know.
It was worse than any argument he could have made. I turned away from him because there was nothing else to do in that moment, and I pressed my tongue against the back of my teeth, waiting for the dragon to say something so I’d have something to be angry at.
But the dragon was also quiet. Even the beast, it seemed, understood there were wounds fire couldn’t touch.
“Arthur... If I go with you willingly, if I return to Camelot, will you release Corvin?”
I turned to look at her and immediately noticed her eyes.
The violet had gone dark, her pupils blown wide.
Suddenly feeling the need to be close to her, to touch her, but not understanding why, I took the steps that separated us until I was right in her face.
She’d bested me in the Great Hall, and she’d bested me by escaping my dungeon. She wouldn’t best me again.
“What you say,” I told her in a quiet, deliberate tone, every word placed with care, “means nothing to me. You are my prisoner. You exist in this conversation only because I haven’t yet decided what to do with you. But you don’t negotiate, and you don’t make requests.”
I held her angry gaze. “But you will fucking refer to me with the respect I’m due.”
I took a deep breath and tried to calm the shaking that had overcome my whole body.
“I am your fucking king, so if you call me by my given name once more, I will slice your pretty little head clean off your pretty little shoulders.”
She held still, but her eyes narrowed with her own anger. We both just stood there, each of us looking at the other with eyes blazing. I noticed how she breathed through her nose in slow, measured pulls, like she was counting them.
The dragon pressed forward, clearly unhappy with the way I was treating her, but I pushed it back down again.
“You might think your quarrel is with her,” Corvin said from behind me.
“But we’re both very aware it’s with me.”
His voice was measured and unhurried. It was the voice of a man who’d decided how this conversation would go before I’d kicked the door in.
“Whatever you think she’s done, whatever Merlin sent her to do, I vouched for her. So take it out on me, Arthur. That’s where it belongs.”
I turned around and studied his face as I breathed in deeply, forcing down the sudden urge to run him through with Caliburn. Doing so might alleviate my anger for the moment, but it would be reckless and foolish. Corvin alive was worth so much more than Corvin dead.
“Everyone who isn’t holding Corvin, leave us,” I said, not bothering to look behind me to ensure my demands were being followed. Lance didn’t budge, but I hadn’t expected him to.
The door pulled shut behind the others as they filed out, and the room shrank until it was just the six of us. Corvin stood where I’d left him, blood still dribbling from his mouth, landing on his chin. His hands were open at his sides.
She went to him then, and I didn’t stop her. It was Agravaine who took a step back, tugging Corvin with him, and Tristan was forced to follow. I bypassed the white-haired bitch and stopped in front of Corvin, close enough that I could smell her on him.
END HIM! HE WEARS THE SCENT OF OUR MATE!
“The best thing I could do,” I said, keeping my voice low and conversational, “is kill her. Not only for the trouble she’s caused me but for the trouble she’s caused all of us.”
Nothing moved in Corvin’s face. But Lance shifted his weight from one leg to the other and breathed in deeply. Agravaine nodded his agreement, while Tristan just studied my face, as if to ascertain whether or not I was serious.
“I should run her through with my blade and end this before it goes any further than it already has.” I glanced at her briefly, to those narrowed eyes, then returned my gaze to Corvin.
“Arthur,” he said softly.
I shook my head. “Look at what she’s done. There’s nothing but a trail of wreckage behind her, and she hasn’t even broken a sweat. She’s a plague, Corvin. A disease with a beautiful face.”
He said nothing.
“I should do us all the fucking favor by ending her.”
“No,” he said.
The word landed flat and final.
Behind me, I heard the whisper of metal: a hand testing the grip of a scabbard. Not drawing, just touching. The way a man does when he hasn’t made a decision yet, but his body has already started making it for him.
Lance.
I didn’t turn around to look at him. Instead, I tilted my head at Corvin.
“We all know what the problem is, even if we don’t want to admit it.”
I exhaled through my nose. “If she didn’t look the way she does, she’d be cold in the ground by now. I’d have had her throat cut in the dungeon and thought nothing more of it.”
I glanced back at her again, longer this time.
She stood there, just watching me. And she was very still, but the expression on her face wasn’t so still.
Her eyes were blazing, and her lips were tight.
It was as if she was daring me to end her.
“Pity she is so fucking beautiful. And every man who sets eyes on her immediately wants to—”
I stopped speaking, smiled, and turned back to Corvin.
“That’s how she does it. That’s the whole mechanism. She takes what lives in us already: the desire, the need... our male weaknesses... and she turns it back against us. Uses it like a key.”
Corvin’s jaw was tight.
“Tell me.” I kept my voice easy, almost curious. “Have you fucked her?”
IF HE HAS TASTED OUR TREASURE, WE SHALL BURN HIM IN DRAGON FIRE!
A muscle jumped beneath his cheekbone, but he said nothing, just continued to glare at me.
So I hit him again. This time, my fist caught him below the ribs, short and precise, driving the air from his lungs in one sudden expulsion.
He bent forward, one sharp hitch of movement, and the two knights had to steady him.
He took three seconds to get his breath back, and when he straightened, the look he gave me had finally changed.
The careful neutrality was gone, and in its place was absolute hatred.
Good. I preferred honest anger to diplomacy.
“Answer the fucking question.”
“No,” he said.
The word came out rough because he was still recovering from the blow to his gut, and as well he should; I hadn’t gone easy on him.
“No,” I repeated, nodding slowly. “No, you haven’t fucked her.” I stepped back, giving him a little room. Then I looked at her, at the way she was standing there, just glaring at me. I let the silence stretch until it had some weight to it, then I looked at Corvin once more. “But you want to.”