Page 37 of Under Arthur’s Protection

Chapter 12

Arthur

The monitoring app showed green across the board. No motion alerts, no perimeter breaches, nothing but empty gravel and dark hedgerows on every camera feed.

I set my phone on the arm of the sofa and let my head tip back. The sitting room was warm from the fire Lance had started earlier, and my body was making a solid case for closing my eyes for thirty seconds.

Three days and two nights. Between work, the hotel break-in, and being up until all hours last night, I’d barely slept since I met Dr. Gwen Lyons. Maybe five hours total? She was upstairs in the library, where she’d been since we returned from the church. Lance was on duty, somewhere in the house, nominally alert but probably as exhausted as I was.

My eyelids dropped, and I saw my hand on the chair at the church. Felt the small of her back under my palm. Heard the tiny gasp when I gripped her waist to hold her up.

Don’t go there. Open your eyes.

I picked up my phone and scrolled through the camera feeds one by one. North approach. South approach. The lane. The garden wall.

Green.

Green.

Green.

My phone buzzed with an incoming call from Merlin.

Thank fuck. “Tell me something good.”

“Dr. Theodore Hopkins,” he said without a hello. “Sixty-one. British citizen. PhD from University College London, specializing in early medieval decorative metalwork.”

“Published?”

“His most-cited work was a fibulae analysis conducted at the British Museum in 2019. Additional papers in the Journal of Early Medieval Archaeology and Anglo-Saxon Studies. Guest lectured at Exeter and Bristol last year.”

“So what’s he doing wandering around St. Catherine’s Church on a random Friday morning?”

“He set himself up as a consultant in Bodmin about eight years ago. Pays his taxes. No criminal record, no financial irregularities, no outstanding warrants.” Merlin paused. “He’s basically a country academic who likes old metal and doesn’t bother anyone. His most exciting activity in the last year, outside of work, was attending a talk in New York on Anglo-Saxon belt fittings.”

I stretched my neck. Hopkins was precisely what Gwen had said he was—a credentialed scholar in a related discipline who happened to be at the same church at the same time. Cornwall was full of medieval sites. A metalwork specialist visiting an old church wasn’t suspicious. “So he checks out.”

“He does. But I’ve got more, and you’ll want Lance for this.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “Give me a few to find him.”

I put the phone on mute and forced myself off the sofa.

Lance was in the kitchen, hunched over his laptop at the island with a cup of tea that had probably gone cold an hour ago. “You look like shit.”

“Fuck off,” I said, not quite holding back a laugh. “Merlin’s on the line. He’s got an update.”

Lance turned his laptop toward me. On the screen was a draft press release with the RTS logo at the top.

I might have been dragging my feet on finishing the office renovations, but the second I’d agreed to the ridiculous company name, Lance already had branding proposals from three design firms ready for me. He’d approved the logo and ordered pens in under a week.

“I want to get this out tonight. I’m also planning a social media campaign on the sword project. It’ll show people what we actually do isn’t mercenary work.”

I skimmed the first two paragraphs. It was sharp—no jargon, no defensiveness. Lance had an eye for this kind of thing, the PR side of the business I’d rather chew glass than handle. But the timing was wrong. “Hold off on putting anything out about the sword until we’re done. We want to show them success, not a work in progress.”

“The in-progress angle has value. People want to see progress, Arthur. It humanizes us.”

“It also tells anyone watching exactly what we’re doing and where we are.”