“I think you’re avoiding the topic of Lance because you’re afraid.”
“Why would I be afraid of Lance? He’s the one in the dungeon, not me.”
“You’re afraid of what you’ve done to him and what you continue to do to him.”
“You think this is about wounded pride?” When he spoke again, his voice dropped. Quiet was more dangerous than shouting, with him. I’d learned that much.
“Isn’t it?”
“It’s about what he took.” Each word was separated from the next. “What he took, knowing it was mine.” He reached out then and took a lock of my hair between his thumb and index finger. Then he rubbed it as he looked down at it. “You were mine.”
I felt my jaw tighten. “I wasn’t yours,” I demanded. “I’m still not yours adn I will never be yours. Lance was—” I stopped. Reconsidered. “Lance made a mistake and he stood in front of you and admitted to that mistake. That’s more honesty than thiscourt has seen in months, and you put him in the dungeon for it.”
Arthur dropped my hair as his gaze moved over my face the way it always did when he was looking for something to use. The red in his eyes had steadied and the smoke curled from his next exhale and drifted between us.
“You came here for him,” he said.
“I came here because I couldn’t sleep.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.”
Something shifted in his expression. It didn’t soften, nothing about him softened, but a quality of the anger changed. It was still there, all of it, the heat and the affront and the thing he was working very hard to keep shaped into fury. But underneath it something else pressed. I could see him working at the fury the way a man works at a wound he knows he should leave alone.
His hand moved to my face. Not to hit me the way he had in the training yard. But he ran his fingers lightly against the slight bruise that covered my cheek where his hand had found it in anger earlier.
Neither of us moved.
“He took something from you that he had no right to take,” Arthur said, very quietly. “And you’re standing in my room defending him.”
“Yes,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I would have imagined it could. “Because that’s what you do for people who deserve it.”
The anger in his face did something complicated. The red flared once, brief and bright, and then he shut his eyes for half a second. When he opened them the color had pulled back, but the fury hadn’t. It had just found a different shape. Something rawer, more honest, and significantly more dangerous.
“Do you love him?”
I swallowed hard. “Love is a complicated thing.”
“Do you love him?”
I swallowed even harder. “Yes.”
He didn’t move away.
Neither did I.
-ARTHUR-
At the admission that she loved him, a fire erupted inside me that I had a very hard time controlling.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I said.
She is ours. We must mate her, remove the scent of him from her body.
“You put him in the dungeon.” Her voice was steady. That was the thing about her that I couldn’t reconcile: she was afraid of me, I’d seen it, and yet she stood here, looking up at me and refusing to back down. “He told you the truth. He came to you himself, and you—”
“—I’m aware of what he did.”