Corvin didn’t move. He kept his hand where it was.
That was the thing that struck me most: that he didn’t reach for a weapon. He also didn’t shift his weight or angle his body for a fight. He just stood between her and me, the way he used to stand between me and every other threat that entered a room.
HE BELIEVES SHE IS HIS. END HIM!
I silenced the dragon. Or tried to, but the beast was nearly impossible to control.
“I didn’t expect to see you.” My voice was flat.
“Yet here I am.” His was flatter, though it wasn’t unkind. Just true. That was always his particular skill: landing a blade without cruelty, but killing all the same.
Something moved in his expression then, something that was more complicated than anger. Perhaps anger mixed with guilt. It was the look of a man who’d made a decision he still believed in, standing in front of the person he’d sacrificed to make it.
And then something else occurred to me. If Corvin had broken Guinevere out of my dungeon, then Merlin had to be well aware that I’d not only found her out but that I’d captured her and placed her in my dungeon. Thus, we could no longer operate on the assumption that Merlin only knew what I wanted him to know. I had to admit that it was a disappointment. Very soon he’d also realize that Corvin had failed in his mission to rescueher. I had to smile at that, at the fact that two pawns on the chessboard now belonged to me.
Behind Corvin, she shifted as she tried to step around him, but he moved his body to disallow her.
“Arthur, this is between the two of us.” Her voice came out steady, even as she had to speak around Corvin’s shoulder. It was steadier than I would have expected from a woman who was facing down death in a room full of armed knights. “Corvin has no part in whatever argument you have with me. Let him go.”
I looked at her, and I was torn between laughing and slapping her across the face for her fucking audacity.
At the violence of the thought, the dragon lurched against my ribs. The heat that moved through me was entirely the beast’s, but I refused to pay it any attention. Just as I refused to look at her the way the dragon did, as our fucking mate. No, she was my prisoner, and she was going to fucking suffer for attempting to escape me.
I suddenly laughed, surprising myself. “Let him go,” I repeated while shaking my head as I took a step closer to the two of them. My tone was soft, almost amused. “Next to you, Corvin of Blackhollow is at the top of my most wanted list.”
“This doesn’t have to get ugly,” Corvin started as she pushed away from him and took a step towards me.
“I’ll go with you willingly if you allow Corvin to leave.”
And that angered me more than I could say because it meant that he meant something to her. And a great deal, it seemed.
WE MUST DESTROY HIM! HE CLAIMS WHAT IS OURS!
I shook my head, still amazed at her nerve. “You’re a prisoner inmykingdom. You broke out ofmydungeon. You’ve led all of us on this chase...” I tilted my head, the anger billowing within me. “And you have the fucking audacity to issue instructionsto me?”
“I’m pointing out what’s—”
I crossed the room in four steps and then my hand found her throat as I slammed her against the wall behind her.
“Arthur!” Lance and Corvin called out at the same time.
But my attention rested entirely on her and my fingers which were closing over her throat. My hold wasn’t hard enough to hurt her, but it was hard enough to communicate, with absolute certainty, that she was the puppet and I was the one holding her strings. I held her there against the wall and watched her eyes go wide with the calculation of a woman deciding whether to fight.
“If you attempt your magic against me, you will regret it.”
I watched the choice play out in her eyes: even as powerful as she was, she wouldn’t be victorious against a room full of magically powerful knights. And she had to have realized as much because something changed in her eyes and the fight started to die out of them.
Regardless, my free hand found the dagger at my hip. The blade cleared the sheath with a sound that seemed to silence the entire room. I brought it up slowly and pressed the flat of the blade against her cheek, just as I’d done in the Great Hall when I’d tried to put her in her place and failed. I would put her in her fucking place this time.
“Perhaps what you need most is a lesson,” I snarled between gritted teeth. “I should slash each of your cheeks and ruin the beauty which has doomed more than one man.”
At the feel of the dagger against her skin, her breath caught, but then she held my gaze for three full seconds. Defiant to the last, her chin raised despite the steel threatening her.
Lance moved first. His sword cleared the scabbard in one motion, the steel catching the gray light from the shuttered window, and for one suspended moment, the blade was angled toward me, toward my arm, toward the dagger at her face.
“Please tell me you didn’t just pull your fucking sword on your king,” I said, without turning to look at him.
“Arthur, this isn’t the way,” he started, concern in his tone.
