“Whatever I say is the fucking way.”
He didn’t come any closer, and when I turned just slightly, I watched the muscle in his jaw jump, watched something move behind those dark gray eyes, some private argument with himself that lasted less than a breath. He didn’t drop his sword, but neither did he make any move against me. He just stood there, armed and ready. But when he nodded at me, I understood that his sense had returned.
I moved the dagger down to her throat, and her pulse beat against my palm. Fast. I could tell she was working to keep it controlled, but it was racing regardless. I looked at her for a long moment, and she looked right back at me. Her eyes held mine; they didn’t flinch, and the dragon said something I refused to translate into language.
It was then that Corvin lunged for me. But my men intercepted him easily. I glanced to the light outside, which was quickly turning from the nascent blue of dawn to the yellow of full morning. And daylight meant Corvin’s magic was at its lowest. Truly, he was now only as powerful as any other man, a particularly adept one but a man, all the same. His shadows wouldn’t return to him until the evening, and by then, he’d be in my dungeon where Mordred’s wards would disallow him from using his magic at all.
“Restrain him,” I said, without letting my eyes leave her face. I could hear a shuffle behind me as my men did as instructed.
Dropping my dagger from her throat, I turned around and approached Corvin.
“I believe I owe you something,” I said. “And not only for attempting to flee with my prisoner... no, for much more thanthat. This is something I’ve owed you for a while now, and it’s been a long time coming.”
With that, I cocked my arm back and released it across Corvin’s face. I put my full weight behind the blow, and the crack of it filled the low-ceilinged room. His head snapped sideways, and the two knights holding him, Agravaine and Tristan, staggered with the force of it. Corvin didn’t go down, but I’d known he wouldn’t. He’d taken harder and in worse places with worse odds. He straightened slowly, turned his head back to me, and a thin line of blood ran from the corner of his mouth.
He looked at me and turned the other cheek, a smile spreading across his mouth. It was a smile that said he hadn’t been bested. And it was a smile that stoked the fires of my temper.
Behind me, she made a sound. It was almost a gasp, cut off before it fully started, like she’d bitten down on it, like she hadn’t meant to make it at all.
I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t. Not yet.
Instead, I watched Corvin’s face and noticed he was now looking past me, past my shoulder. He was looking at her, and his expression did something I hadn’t expected. Something opened up in it, something unguarded and immediate and so plainly legible, I could have read it from across a battlefield.
He was in love with her.
At that thought, the dragon detonated.
Heat came up from my gut into my throat, behind my eyes, and I felt the tattoo move, that slow awful ripple across my chest that meant the thing was furious. Furious with a possessive rage so absolute it had no edges, just a roaring center...
Mine!It screamed.She is mine!
The ugliness of the thought landed in my own ears like a stranger’s voice, and it was all I could do to force the beast back down again. I had to breathe in deeply for a count of three andthen exhale as I clenched my eyes shut tight and put everything I had into slamming the door shut against the creature’s ire. Because the alternative... no, there was no alternative.
I took a breath. Then another.
When I turned around, she was still pressed against the wall where I’d left her. Her eyes moved from Corvin to me, and the calculation in them had returned, sharp and steady, but underneath it, there was something else. Something that had cracked open when I’d hit him.
If he loved her, she loved him just as much.
And that infuriated the dragon. It probably would have infuriated me too, if I’d allowed myself to feel anything. As it was, I was too busy convincing myself that their love for one another was a good thing because I could use their feelings against them.
I looked back at Corvin, at the blood that had reached his chin.
“You left.”
The words came out wrong. They were too stripped down. I’d meant them to come out as an accusation, as a charge, something I could prosecute, but they didn’t. They came out like something that had been sitting in the back of a drawer for years and had fallen out when I wasn’t braced for it. “You chose Merlin.”
Corvin held my gaze.
“Arthur—”
“—we built Camelot together.” My voice dropped on the last word, the fracture small and complete, and I heard Lance shift his weight behind me. “We bled for it together. We built everything we said we would, and then you—”
I stopped.
The room was very quiet.
Corvin said my name again, but his voice was softer this time. It was the tone he used when we were both young, and I was convinced of my own invincibility, and he was the only one willing to tell me I was wrong.
