CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE #3
“I knew that. I knew it every time you looked at her, every time you stood in the same room with her and went quiet in that way you go quiet. I knew it, and I understood it, and I still—” I stopped, took a breath, then started again.
“I still couldn’t make myself be what I should have been, what you deserved me to be.”
I took another breath and even though I was staring at his face, I could feel her eyes on me.
From my peripheral vision, I could see the shine that was overcoming them. But I couldn’t look at her.
Arthur’s jaw was a locked thing now, a held thing. The muscle at his temple ticked once. I watched his throat move as he swallowed.
I’d seen Arthur kill men with less emotion in his face than this.
“This was by no fault of hers. It wasn’t her failing,” I continued, and I meant that more than I’d meant anything in some time. “I want that to be clear. She didn’t come to me. I—” I cleared my throat. “It wasn’t her failing. It was only mine.”
His eyes were still on mine; they hadn’t moved. But I couldn’t look at her; I couldn’t do that to Arthur. So, my gaze remained fixed on his. I wasn’t sure he’d even blinked.
There was something happening in his expression, something that lived between grief and fury and something rawer than either of those, something that a man who wore a crown had probably learned very young to keep below the surface.
I watched it press against the inside of his face now like floodwater behind cracked stone, and I watched him hold it.
I owed him the truth and I owed him this too: the full weight of it, without flinching.
“I’m sorry.” The words came out quiet. They weren’t desperate, and they weren’t performed.
They were just the stripped-down fact of it.
“I know what it’s worth, which isn’t much. I know what it doesn’t undo. But for whatever it is... for whatever it means... I am sorry, Arthur.”
I paused. Took another breath. “You have no idea how many times I’ve wished I could have been stronger. That I could have been a better man than I was and am.”
The silence after that was different; it was heavier in a way I couldn’t explain.
Arthur didn’t speak. He didn’t move. He only looked at me, and what was in his face was so unguarded and so devastating that I had to work to keep my eyes on his. Because it felt like I was witnessing something a king should never have to show another man.
He was still holding it. That was the thing that undid me. And when he finally crossed the distance between us, giving me time to step back, I didn’t.
The first blow came without announcement.
There was no shift in his stance, no drawn-back fist.
He simply hit me with his fist across the jaw, and I felt myself stagger backward against the stone wall.
Because the force of that blow hadn’t been a man’s force; it was the dragon’s.
I felt my teeth knock together, and I tasted copper immediately.
“No!” I heard her yell.
Somehow, I managed to stay on my feet.
“You.” He hit me again with the same fist and the dragon’s heat bleeding through it. “You.” Another time. This time, I went down to one knee. “Everything I gave you. Everything I fucking did for you.” His boot connected with my ribs, and I heard something pop; I bent double over it. “I trusted you!”
I got back up, not because I intended to fight him. I could have; he knew it, and I knew it. But, no, I got back up because I wasn’t going to stay on the ground. That much I could give myself.
He hit me twice more, and I stood there and took it because some part of me thought I deserved it.
Some part of me believed I had this coming, but not for the reasons one might think.
No, the voice that sounded in my head didn’t say Arthur’s name; it said hers.
I deserved this for the months of watching her suffer under Galahad while I kept my fucking mouth shut.
What was more, I deserved this for the months of pretending she was nothing to me.
I deserved it most of all for the moment I’d stood there and told her she was dead to me.
It was then that I heard her voice again. It was hard to see her, owing to the blood that was coursing down my face from the busted skin above my left eye.
“Stop it!” she yelled as she threw herself on him when he held his fist up, ready to hit me again.
“Don’t fucking touch me,” Arthur growled in response as he turned his wrath on her.
She released him and took a step back, fear suddenly resident in her eyes. At the same time, I tried to move forward, tried to intervene in case he attacked her.
“He’s not fighting back—” she insisted.
“—this is your fault,” he roared at her, and by now, his eyes were glowing red.
I straightened as best as I could, which caused my vision to do something unpleasant. One eye was already half-swollen shut, and the other was a close second. “She has... nothing to do with—”
“—she has everything to do with it,” he spit the words at me as he then advanced on her. “You walked into my court, and you looked at my men, and you—”
“—I didn’t do anything to your fucking men.” Her voice was entirely level, the stillness of something past the point of fear. “You have only yourself to blame.”
He backhanded her.
The sound of it moved through the yard like something breaking that couldn’t be put back. I didn’t remember deciding to move. One moment I was standing apart from it, and the next I wasn’t. My body had made the decision before my mind could weigh the cost of it.
The cost was immediate.