Free Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) by Sarah Woodbury Page B

Even
worse than the abruptness of his incarceration was the fact that
nobody so far had asked him any questions or spoken to him beyond a
few direct orders. They’d walked him from the garage to an
elevator, descended two floors until he was in the bowels of MI-5
headquarters (or what he had to assume were their headquarters at
Cardiff, given that he couldn’t ask Callum where they were), and
into an interrogation room.
    That it was an interrogation room he had no
doubt. It was painted vanilla white on the ceiling, floor, and
walls, with one wall taken up by a grayed out, ten-by-five foot
picture window that mirrored his reflection back at him. David
assumed it was one-way glass without bothering to put his nose
right up to it to see if he could see anything of the room on the
other side of the wall. That would be too humiliating.
    After Natasha removed his handcuffs and
hood, he unhooked his wool cloak from around his neck and hung it
over a chair. The wool had mostly dried in the warmth of the car,
but he felt his toes squishing a bit inside his boots. He hadn’t
slept in his armor, so he hadn’t been wearing it when the storm
came. It would have been a bear to remove by himself, and he
strongly suspected his captors wouldn’t have been of any help. It
would be nice to get it back once they were done examining it. It
fit him perfectly.
    The agents had already taken his sword from
him, along with his three knives (one from his right boot, one from
up his left sleeve, and a third from his waist), and patted him
down looking for anything else he could use as a weapon. David
wondered if Callum had received the same treatment; David knew
about the gun, of course. As far as David knew, Callum had left the
cog with it still in its holster at the small of his back. He made
a note not to mention Callum’s use of it in Scotland to MI-5.
    Once Natasha left him alone, a quick twist
of the door handle proved that it didn’t twist at all, and a single
pace around the room showed David that he wasn’t going to kick his
way out of this cell either. Where was young Thomas Hartley when he
needed him? David faced away from the one-way glass. It felt
awkward to know that others whom he couldn’t see were watching
him.
    “So. David Lloyd. Or did you want to go by
something else?”
    He turned around at the sound of Natasha’s
voice. She had pushed open the door to the room, already speaking
before she was halfway through it, with a file open flat in her
hands.
    “‘Lloyd’ was my last name before I found out
the identity of my true father,” he said.
    Natasha dropped the manila folder on the
table that took up a good portion of the center of the room, pulled
out the chair closest to her, and gestured that David should sit in
the chair opposite. Unlike the walls, the table was black, finished
with a utilitarian lacquer, and the chair was blue plastic with
metal legs. It rocked under David’s weight as he sat in it. He
appreciated the chance to rest without having to show Natasha how
much he needed it. The initial adrenaline rush of their arrival in
the twenty-first century had passed, leaving him a little shaken.
His sore throat and achiness hadn’t seemed like something he could
pay attention to in the middle of a storm in the Irish Sea, but now
he had to admit that his throat was exploding out his ears.
    “And what is your name now?” Natasha
said.
    David smiled. “David Arthur Llywelyn
Pendragon, King of England.”
    Natasha stared at him, open-mouthed.
“Really? That’s what you’re going with?”
    David brows came together as he looked back
at her, surprised at her surprise. Did she really not believe him?
She had to have known his origins, since she’d spoken with his
Uncle Ted. But then he remembered that he’d become the King of
England after his mom and dad had returned to the Middle Ages from
their brief sojourn in the twenty-first century last November.
Before his crowning, David had been ‘merely’ the