It wasn’t that I constantly thought about her on purpose. The thoughts just came, the way they’d been coming since Arthur had thrown her into my cell. I’d be cataloging guard patterns, and then, without any warning at all, I was back in this cell with the light making her skin look like alabaster, and then I’d remember the way she’d said my name.
The images of her weren’t soft, and they weren’t tender. It was the same visual every time: her bent over and that beautiful ass facing me. I remembered my hands on her hips and the way I’d spread her cheeks so I could see the wet softness between her thighs. I remembered the pinkness of her quim and the way my mouth had started to salivate. I remembered the sound she’d made the first time I pushed into her, and I remembered the feel of her wetness, her tightness, the particular way her cunt had wrapped around my cock so perfectly that I’d nearly come as soon as I’d entered her. Gods, I’d wanted her so fucking badly that the wanting had stripped something out of me, some layer of restraint I’d spent years cultivating, and I hadn’t been gentle. I hadn’t gone slowly. I’d thought about it afterward constantly, in those first raw hours afterward, and every moment since. And I kept arriving at the same uncomfortable conclusion.
She deserved so much better.
Not because she hadn’t wanted it. I believed her when she said she wanted me. I’d read as much from her body to know she had. But there was a difference between wanting andhandled well, and I hadn’t handled her well. I’d been too wound up, too hungry, too deep in the kind of want that narrowed everything down to sensation, breath, and the slick heat of being inside her. I’d given in to Arthur’s order with an ease that still embarrassed me.
Because I hadn’t been able to stop myself.
That was the part I kept circling. Arthur had told me to fuck her, and I’d fucked her. Yes, I could dress it up in strategy: that I was keeping her close, buying us both time, but underneath all of that was the simple, unflattering truth that I’d wanted to fuck her since the moment I’d laid eyes on her, and I hadn’t needed any convincing.
I pressed the back of my head against the stone wall and closed my eyes against the rune light.
She was probably somewhere above me right now, and I could only hope she was fed and warm. That she was safe... well, as safe as she could be in Camelot. I didn’t believe she was in danger of being killed because I knew Arthur well enough to know that he wouldn’t damage something he considered useful. I told myself that and only half believed it because I’d seen the look in his eyes when I fucked her. No, he wouldn’t kill her, but he wanted to fuck her just as badly as I had.
The cat appeared without ceremony, and I welcomed it because it meant a break from the relentless onslaught of my thoughts. One moment the floor was empty, and the next, a small black shape threaded between my ankles, tail raised, utterly unbothered by the warded light or the locked door or the basic impossibility of its presence.
I looked down at it, and it looked up at me with eyes the precise green of new leaves.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I said quietly, knowing exactly who this was.
The cat sat down and wrapped its tail around its feet with the particular dignity of someone who found the observation beneath them. Then it just looked at me.
“Morgan,” I whispered. “It’s not safe here for you.”
Footsteps sounded from the corridor. I heard them two seconds before they rounded the corner; these were the heavier heel of the midday shift, the left-foot drag. The cat dissolved. Not fled, not slipped into shadow the way a normal animal would, butdissolved, like smoke pulled backward into a lamp, and then there was nothing at the floor near my feet but empty stone and the constant unwavering light.
I was relieved she’d left, that she hadn’t been caught. The guard passed without stopping.
I exhaled.
Morgan.I didn’t know what she wanted. I didn’t know how she’d found me down here or what she’d been able to see in those few seconds before the guard made himself known. But she’d come, which meant she knew where I was, which meant the information was traveling.
Whether it would travel to anyone useful in time was another question.
Kay arrived after the third shift change.
He came alone, which wasn’t surprising. What was surprising, though, was the fact that he carried a chessboard under one arm. His expression was the same as it always had been: the look of calculated boredom that hadn’t convinced anyone in thirty years. Although the chessboard did throw me; I’d admit.
A guard unlocked the door, and Kay stepped through it like a man visiting a mildly inconvenient acquaintance. The guard locked it behind him. Kay looked around the cell with the studied neutrality of someone noting flaws, which, I supposed, was exactly what he was doing.
“Comfortable?” he asked.
“Do you really need to ask?”
He chuckled as he looked up at the wards, which were doing a damned good job of bathing us in light. “Mordred’s work, I’m assuming?”
I just nodded.
Kay set the chessboard on the floor between us and lowered himself onto the stool the guard had brought in without my noticing.
“Mordred is nothing if not thorough.”
He began setting up the pieces without asking me if I wanted to play. His movements were efficient, almost aggressive: the bishop placed with a smallclick, the rook dropped without ceremony. I watched his hands.
“You don’t have to play if you don’t want to,” he said.
I crossed the floor and sat across from him. “It’s not as though I have another fucking thing to do.”
