Page 10 of Under Arthur’s Protection

“Morganna.” He sat up straighter, reading instead of numbing himself. “She sent me a link with one word. ‘Thoughts?’”

“Thoughts about what?”

“Give me a second.” He tapped the link and read the headline aloud. “‘Round Table Security: Camelot or Mercenary Outfit? Inside the Pendragon Connection.’”

A cold, hard rock settled in my stomach.

“Sounds like a gossip blog,” Lance said, still scanning. “The byline says ‘Staff Reporter.’”

His phone buzzed again. “It’s her. Want me to put her on speaker?”

“Do it.” I hit the pairing button for the SUV’s system, and Lance connected.

Marjorie “Morganna” Vale’s voice filled the cabin. “Did you read it?”

“I’m reading it now,” Lance said. “It looks like clickbait.”

“It’s Crécy Defense Review, Lance.”

“Fuck.” He shook his head. “Not sure how I missed that part.”

Crécy Defense Review wasn’t a blog or a gossip site. It covered the private military and security industry and had reliable sourcing that got contracts pulled on the regular. Their readership was exactly the sort of people who hired companies like ours, and they didn’t run unvetted opinion pieces.

“What does it say?” I asked.

“In summary: Round Table Security is a subsidiary of Pendragon Security in all but name,” Morganna said. “They lay out your funding, operational underwriting, and the author was pretty keen on the jet. They reference the Prague operation and allege Pendragon paid off the authorities.”

Prague.

We’d barely been up and running when Prague happened. Everything before that had been startup noise, including our job for Tristan’s girlfriend. We didn’t have people in Czechia with the right clearance for protection work, so we’d brought in Pendragon’s local operators. What was supposed to be a straightforward authentication escort had turned into a shitshow.

“I thought Prague was contained,” Lance said.

I’d thought so, too. But the police had shown up, and I’d been detained. My father had called people—not paid them—and the charges had disappeared within hours. Unless he had paid them and hadn’t told me.

“The article also questions your credentials, Arthur,” Morganna continued. “It doesn’t say you’re unqualified, but it frames your trajectory as a series of doors opened by your father.”

“Fucking hell.” I could call Pendragon’s crisis communications team. They had a department full of experienced, connected staffers who knew the right editors and journalists. I held back a sigh. That would prove I needed my father’s help for this, too. I pulled into an empty parking space on Main. “Send it to me.”

“Here you go,” said Lance.

I grabbed my phone as his text came through, and began reading the hit piece.

It read differently than it sounded. Morganna had been clinical. The journalist was persuasive. Each paragraph fed the next, footnoted, patient, impossible to wave off. The Pendragon funding wasn’t presented as a scandal—it was presented as a fact. Then the journalist spent three thousand careful words asking what that fact meant.

All of it was fucking real, including the jet, the money, and Prague. There wasn’t a single lie in the piece, but it had been arranged deliberately to cut deep.

But why? The level of detail about my background sat wrong. Why pull my Academy class year, my SEAL class number, and the exact Pendragon division I’d been assigned to? Plenty of this information was available on the open internet, but not all of it. Someone must have talked. Someone who knew me, or who’d been close enough to share what they knew.

“I’m up to speed.” I pulled back onto Main, faster than I should have. “None of it’s incorrect.”

Lance’s phone buzzed. “Merlin’s calling.”

“Probably about this,” I said. “Patch him in.”

There was a click through the speakers, and Lance said, “I’ve got you on with Arthur, Morganna, and me.”

“Good,” Merlin said. “I assume we’re all reading the article?”