Page 39 of Under Arthur’s Protection

Two inquiries in two days. Neither one spelled doom for Round Table, but the ground was shifting under us, and we hadn’t been standing long enough to have strong roots.

I pocketed the phone and went to share the news with Gwen.

The library was on the second floor, taking up the front of the house. The door was ajar, letting warm light spill into the hallway.

I raised my fist to knock and stopped.

She wasn’t at the desk. She was cross-legged on the rug, with printouts arranged in a semicircle around her. The laptop sat open in front of her, and she was hunched over it, scrolling. Her back had to be screaming, but she was so absorbed in the screen she hadn’t noticed when I blocked the light.

My brain went back to the church tower and my hand on the chair. Her hand in mine. The wobble, and my other hand leaving the chair back to hold her. And the way she’d gone absolutely still. I’d been so busy with a fucking fantasy of what her skin felt like under those clothes, the chair had been steadier than I had been.

‘Can you help me down?’ she’d had to ask.

Had to ask. Because I hadn’t been able to let go. She’d looked down at me with those hazel eyes, and I was a fucking statue with a pulse.

She’s a client.

Emotional connections are dangerous, Arthur.

This is work.

I knocked on the door and pushed it open.

She startled, head snapping up, and blinked rapidly while her brain came back from wherever it had been. “Hey.”

“Hopkins is clean.” I stayed in the doorway. Staying in the doorway was important. “No red flags. You can set up the meeting.”

“Thank you.” Her shoulders dropped, and she sat back from the laptop. “I’ll call him. He said he’d be free tomorrow.”

“You don’t need to thank me. It’s the process.”

But it wasn’t the process. The process was checking a box and seeing green across the board on my app. This seemed more like a gift she’d been praying for.

“I know.” She picked up her phone and checked the screen. “I’ve been searching all afternoon. Every database I have access to, every index of medieval Latin inscriptions, every digitized archive. Novae Avallonis doesn’t appear anywhere.”

“Nowhere?”

“Not once.” She waved vaguely at the pages in front of her. “And that’s what I can’t figure out. St. Catherine’s is a fairly popular site. It’s less than thirty miles from Tintagel, where King Arthur was conceived. Scholars have been crawling over this part of Cornwall for hundreds of years studying every Arthurian connection. How did nobody find this? How did nobody photograph that wall and publish a paper?”

I didn’t have an answer. I hadn’t learned enough about medieval inscriptions to have one. But I saw what the question was doing to her. She was vibrating with the kind of energy I recognized from operators who’d found a lead they couldn’t verify and couldn’t let go.

“It might mean it’s genuinely new, or I need to take a different approach,” she said, almost to herself. “Or it might mean I’m wrong.”

“You don’t think you’re wrong.”

“The complete absence of references to Novae Avallonis feels…” She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know.”

“Intentional?”

She sighed. “That sounds like a conspiracy theory, doesn’t it?”

“What does your gut say?”

“That I’m right?” It shouldn’t have been a question, but it clearly was.

“Then I’d go with your gut.”

Something I couldn’t read flickered across her face. Doubt? She dropped her gaze to her laptop and worried her lower lip. Maybe she didn’t trust her gut?