Arthur had moved, his hand half raised as if to stop Gawain. But the words had already been spoken. Words that Vera didn’t quite comprehend, but a singe rose over the surface of her skin—like she’d touched a scorching oven burner, but her mind hadn’t yet recognized the damage.
A potion. For attraction.
Gawain had to be mistaken.
There hadn’t been any potion. Well, except for the one for the memory procedure and that was only for the procedure, wasn’t it?
But …
She’d never asked Merlin what was in it. And her attraction, that … desire, that need for Arthur was new.
Fuck. Her head swam. Her feelings for him had come from the potion. Did Arthur know? Did he know that Merlin had drugged her into desiring him? Her cheeks flamed with the shame of it as she tried to think through how pathetic and desperate she’d behaved with him. He’d certainly reciprocated, though. And it wasn’t as if he’d had a potion.
Wait.
There’d been the package from Merlin. The one Arthur had grimaced at. The one his eyes shot to in their room when Vera had been drinking the apple wine.
No. No, no, no. He wouldn’t lie to her about that. Gawain was mistaken. Or … Arthur didn’t know. He couldn’t.
She expected his denial or outrage, but he stared back at her, still as a statue.
Vera’s field of vision narrowed. Her ears started ringing.
“There’s another route we could …” Gawain was still saying something, but his words melted in with the ringing and became noise, and noise only. Vera’s breath sped up, and her rage expanded with each moment Arthur held her stare and silently admitted his complicity.
“Are you going to say anything?” she said, interrupting an oblivious Gawain mid-sentence.
Arthur cast a fleeting glance at the mage. “It’s complicated.”
Vera was so angry she could hardly see straight. “Oh. It’s complicated,” she repeated, drawing out every syllable.
Gawain glanced warily between them as he shifted in his seat. “I am unsure what is happening.”
“I will un-complicate it,” Vera said as her muscles began to shake with tension. She wished that she could have screamed at him, but she’d never felt smaller. “Stay away from me.”
She didn’t want to be near him for another second. She stumbled out of her seat, nearly losing her footing as she rushed for the door. She was in the back courtyard before she realized her feet were taking her there. The water tower loomed ahead of her. Merlin’s tower.
She wasn’t even sure the mage was here. He’d wisely avoided her since the day with the procedure—and the potion. But the door to his study was open, so she stormed right in.
Merlin sat at his desk and looked up from the assortment of potion bottles in front of him, the shock at her entry shifting from a smile of greeting to concern as he saw her face. It all flickered through his features in the space of a second. “Guinevere?” He stood, keeping his fingertips on the desk below him.
“Is that it?” She pointed at the bottles on his desk.
“What?” Merlin’s bewildered stare followed her eyes. “Oh, this,” he said. He picked up the smallest bottle and walked toward her, holding it in front of him. “This is a brand-new potion I’ve developed for—”
Vera snatched the bottle that he cradled so delicately and threw it with all her might at the wall behind him. It shattered, the crash and Merlin’s subsequent shock urging her on.
“For secretly drugging me and fucking with my feelings?” Vera asked. But it wasn’t a question. Not really.
Merlin sighed before he, infuriatingly, smiled sadly. “No.”
“Where is that one?”
“Guinevere—”
“I will smash every goddamn one if I need to.” Her eyes shot to the shelves where Merlin’s hundreds of colorful bottles blinked back at her in the orb light.
“That would be unwise,” he said quietly. He crossed back to his desk and sat down, scooting the remaining bottles there to the corner farthest from Vera. “Many of those are rare, one of a kind. And I’ve no access to the necessary gifts to replicate them. Including the potion for traveling through time.”
