CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE #2
But she didn’t say anything about it. Instead, she just walked beside me through the wrong corridor, past the wrong staircase, in the entirely wrong direction of Arthur’s solar, and kept her silence like she’d decided to see where this ended.
Her silence had edges. In truth, I’d had friendlier silences with men I was about to murder.
The courtyard with the rosebushes was empty. It was the same courtyard where we’d stolen a private moment when she was Lioran and I was Lance. It had been a time that was both more complicated and yet so much simpler than where we found ourselves now.
As I walked across the cracked flagstone in the northeast corner, I noticed the iron torch bracket that had never been properly repaired and tilted slightly left. I knew this courtyard. She knew this courtyard. We both knew what it was, but neither of us said so.
I stopped, and she stopped beside me. Then we just stood there, and nothing happened because I’d gotten this far on momentum, and now the momentum was gone.
Now I had nothing left but the actual situation: that I’d dragged a prisoner through the wrong half of the castle in the middle of the night to stand in a courtyard I associated with the specific memory of her being Lioran.
She turned and looked out at the same view we’d shared only weeks earlier. The silence was worse than if she’d asked what the hell we were doing here and why I’d lied to Galahad. Instead, she just waited, with her arms loose at her sides, and I could feel her patience like something with weight.
“I...” I started, but lost my nerve.
She looked up at me, and her eyes were the same color I’d seen every time I closed mine: that pure amethyst that no other living person possessed. I knew because I’d had three weeks of checking them against every woman’s eyes I’d been able to put between myself and the memory of Guinevere.
Diagnostic, I told myself. This is just about a test, remember? You are diagnosing a problem.
The problem was standing in front of me in the dark, looking at me like she already knew every cowardly thing I was about to do.
My mind said: think this through first.
But my body was already acting on instinct as I reached forward and gripped her around the upper arms, pulling her into me. I couldn’t stop myself. Even if I’d tried, which I didn’t.
I didn’t grab her gently either. There was no version of this in which I was capable of doing it gently, not after all this wanting, needing, and not receiving.
Before she could respond, I dropped my head and snared her mouth with mine.
Once I could taste her lips, I stopped thinking about the theory of the thing entirely.
There.
My cock was hard before I’d finished processing the fact that it was. And it had become hard instantly. Unmistakably. Here was the specific, straightforward proof I’d told myself I’d been looking for. And that should have resolved the problem if the problem had been what I’d told myself it was.
But that wasn’t the problem.
I only had one suspended moment of thinking: I’m not broken before she pulled away from the cage of my mouth.
I caught her expression in the half-second before what happened next.
And her face revealed not just anger but something deeper.
It was the expression of someone who’d been genuinely hurt, had spent time deciding what to do with that hurt, and had arrived at a conclusion that she was now implementing.
When her fist pulled back, I didn’t see it coming.
And that wasn’t a thing, on average, that happened to me.
In all my years of combat, I’d never once failed to see a strike before it arrived, courtesy of my precognition.
My gift didn’t distinguish between battlefield and courtyard, didn’t care whether the fist coming at me was gauntleted or bare.
I saw everything seconds before it happened.
Yet, I didn’t see this.
And when her fist connected with my jaw, there was real power in it, which was surprising given that she was such a small thing. Regardless, my head snapped sideways, and I stood there with my ears ringing slightly, my face turned to the wall, as I tried to remember what I was doing.
When the shock of it faded in the next second or so and I turned back to face her, she was glaring up at me, and her chest was heaving.
She hadn’t moved away. She was standing exactly where she’d been, close enough that I could still feel the warmth of her.
Her hands were fisted at her sides, and her voice, when she spoke, was completely controlled.
Quiet even: the quietness of someone who has decided she means every word she’s about to say.
“You don’t get to tell me I’m dead to you,” she whispered, “and then do this.”
I didn’t say anything because there was nothing to say. She was exactly right.
“You don’t get both.” Her voice didn’t waver.
“You don’t get to take away whatever place I held and then reach for me when you decide you want to. You don’t get to use me as a vessel for whatever sexual desires you want gratified at the moment.”
She had no idea how far from a vessel she was to me.
“Even though I’m a prisoner, I’m still a person. I still have my dignity. Whatever I am to you, whatever I’ve done... I’m still owed basic human decency. And this isn’t it.”
She has no idea, I thought. She has no idea what she fucking means to me! She has no idea how much I still care, even when I’ve fucking lied to myself repeatedly.
I still fucking care!
I didn’t say any of those words, though. I just... I couldn’t bring them to my lips, so I just stood there like a dumbstruck fool.
“I’m not asking for you to feel anything towards me again, Lance. I’m not asking for anything. I’m just telling you I won’t be handled this way.” She paused and lifted her chin. “I... I deserve better.”
I was struck dumb for the second time, and this time had everything to do with the way she’d said my name: in the same tone she’d said it so many times before all this ugliness between us had intervened.
“You said,” I started, but the words failed me, and even though I didn’t realize what I was doing, I was reaching towards her again, as if she were my sun and I were her moon.
But she pushed my hands away as the expression on her face cracked. “No,” she said softly, and I was sure there were tears glistening in her eyes. “I’m... I’m still a person,” she whispered again.
Before I could even utter a sound, she’d turned and walked away. She did so with her head up and her back straight, but those hands were still fisted. I watched her as she moved toward the castle until the dark folded her into it and she was gone.
And all I could think about were the unshed tears in her eyes and the fact that I’d put them there.
I didn’t move. I should have. She was a prisoner, and I’d essentially just let her walk back to the castle unescorted.
If she wanted to, it would have been the perfect opportunity to escape.
I knew that logically and knew that I should have followed her, yet I stood there with my palm pressed to my jaw where she’d hit me and I didn’t move.
The sting from her fist against my face was already fading. The other thing wasn’t; my cock was still hard, and I stood there, letting that fact sit beside everything else she’d just said to me, and the combination wasn’t comfortable, not remotely comfortable.
I’d caused those tears in her eyes.
She’d said everything I should have said to myself three weeks ago in that quiet, controlled voice of hers.
While she was a prisoner in this castle where she had no allies, no power, and nothing to protect her, she’d still managed to be more dignified and honest than I’d been from the moment I’d realized who and what she was and how she meant just as much to me as she always had.
I pressed two fingers harder against my jaw as the shrill sound of a raven’s harsh caw cut through the courtyard like a blade through air.
I looked up and spotted not one but three ravens perched atop an ancient ash tree just above me.
Their glossy feathers shimmered under the moonlight, turning them to living obsidian against the night sky.