Author: julianawight
The Laird’s Wicked Desire – Extended Epilogue
Two months later…
The chapel that had held nothing but two candles and a nervous proposal two months past now overflowed with more people than its old stone walls had likely seen in a generation.
Roddy stood near the altar in a fresh doublet that Edwyn had needled him into, tugging at the collar for the third time in as many minutes until Edwyn, standing beside him, reached over and swatted his hand away entirely.
“Leave it be. Ye look like a fulfilled laird fer once instead of a man who’s spent the morning mucking out his own stables.”
“I did muck out me own stables this morning.”
“Aye, and I told ye nae tae, on account of it being yer wedding day, and ye did it anyway, which tells me marriage isnae likely tae change ye half so much as Muire seems tae think it will.”
“She kens exactly what she’s marrying.”
“Daes she, though?” Edwyn’s mouth twitched. “Because from where I’m standing, ye look considerably more nervous than ye did riding intae Eideard’s camp.”
“That’s different.”
“Nae so much, if ye ask me.”
“Aye. Eideard didnae have the whole of Mackenzie territory watching tae see if I’d trip over me own feet.”
The Great Hall’s doors stood open at the chapel’s far end, merchant families crowded in behind the assembled clan leaders, faces Roddy recognized from council meetings sitting easily beside faces he only knew from ledgers Muire had shown him. Traders from the southern routes, families who’d sheltered under his roof through the worst of the poisoning crisis, all of them craning for a better look at the doors.
Mòr sat in the front row. Ferchar, seated two rows back, had already begun arguing with the merchant beside him about whether the ale for the feast afterward had been watered down. It struck Roddy as reassuringly, thoroughly normal for a day that felt, in every other respect, entirely unlike any other he’d lived through.
Then the doors at the back of the chapel opened fully, and every other thought in Roddy’s head went quiet at once.
Muire stood at the threshold with her hand tucked into her father’s arm, Tamhas thinner still than he’d been before the harbor fire but standing straight and steady beside her, color returned properly to his face for the first time since Roddy had cut him free of that wagon wheel.
Her gown was simple, nothing like the elaborate silks Roddy suspected some lairds’ daughters wore to their own weddings, but it suited her exactly. The deep green of it catching the light from the high chapel windows, her hair loose the way he liked it best, one small braid pinned back from her face.
She caught his eye across the length of the chapel and, instead of the composed, demure expression Roddy half expected of a bride on her wedding day, she lifted one eyebrow at him, the same look she’d given him over the rim of a bathtub.
Roddy felt his own mouth pull into a smile, something he had no effort to control any longer.
The walk down the aisle took considerably longer than the actual distance warranted, Tamhas moving carefully, still favoring one side more than the other. He waved off every offer of assistance from the guests nearest the aisle with the same stubborn impatience Roddy had come to recognize as a family trait shared fully by his daughter.
When they finally reached the altar, Tamhas didn’t immediately release her arm.
“Ye ken,” he said, loud enough for at least the front three rows to hear plainly, “I could still change me mind at this exact moment, if the mood struck me.”
“Da.”
“I’m simply saying it’s still technically possible.”
“Tamhas,” Roddy said, “if ye mean tae renegotiate yer blessing in front of half the clan councils of the western coast, I’d ask ye dae it quickly, as I believe the priest has somewhere else tae be by sundown.”
That pulled a genuine laugh from the gathered crowd, and Tamhas’s mouth twitched into something that gave up the pretense of stern fatherly reluctance entirely.
“Take her, then,” he said, finally releasing Muire’s arm and stepping back. “Ye’ve more than earned it, whatever trouble the two of ye brought each other along the way.”
“I intend tae spend the rest of me life making certain it was worth the trouble.”
“See that ye dae.”
Muire stepped up beside him, and Roddy took her hand, the same gesture he’d made in front of his guard on that hillside, in front of her father in the healer’s chamber, now finally, properly, in front of everyone who mattered at all.
The priest’s words passed in a blur. Roddy only half attended, his eyes fixed more on Muire’s face than on the man speaking them, and he answered when prompted with a voice steadier than he expected of himself, given how unsteady the rest of him felt standing there.
“Dae ye, Roddy Mackenzie, take this woman—”
“Aye.” He didn’t wait for the rest of the question, and the priest, after a brief pause, simply continued on with a small, tired smile that suggested this wasn’t the first impatient groom he’d married in this chapel.
When Muire’s turn came, she paused a half-second longer than he had, just long enough to catch his eye and let something pass between them that needed no priest’s blessing to make it true. She gave her own answer with the same flat, unhesitating certainty.
“Aye.”
The chapel erupted the moment the priest pronounced them wed, Edwyn’s voice rising loudest of all in a cheer that had considerably more relief in it than decorum. Ferchar began shouting something about the feast being ready whenever the newlywed couple cared to stop kissing.
Roddy hadn’t actually kissed her yet, but he remedied that oversight immediately, drawing Muire in close enough that the rest of the chapel fell away for the length of it.
“Ye did that on purpose,” she murmured against his mouth, “answering before he’d even finished asking.”
“I’ve waited long enough fer it. I dinnae see the sense in waiting fer the priest tae finish his sentence as well.”
“Ye’re a terribly impatient man, Roddy Mackenzie.”
“Aye. I’ve been accused of worse.”
She laughed and let him lead her back down the aisle through the crowd of well-wishers, past Mòr’s knowing smile and Edwyn’s loud, entirely undignified cheering. Past her father standing straighter than he had in weeks, watching them go with an expression that had finally, fully let go of whatever worry he’d carried since the night his daughter first ran from a burning harbor into a stranger’s protection.
Outside the chapel, the whole of Mackenzie land spread out under a clear afternoon sky, merchant families and clan leaders already spilling toward the hall where the feast waited.
Roddy stood for one long moment at the chapel doors with his wife’s hand in his, feeling happy and fulfilled. It was the life he always wanted. No blade at anyone’s throat, no scout riding hard through the gates with worse news, nothing at all waiting to be carried alone.
“Well, Laird Mackenzie,” Muire said, tipping her face up to his. “What now?”
“Now,” Roddy said, “we go and see if Ferchar’s managed tae ruin the ale before we’ve even had a proper glass of it.”
She laughed, and they walked together into the noise and warmth of the hall, hand in hand, with nothing left ahead of them but the ordinary, hard-won business of a life they meant to build together, one stubborn argument at a time.
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Chapter One
West Coast Harbour, Clan Mackenzie Territory, 16th Century
“Ye’re short by fourteen barrels, Cormac, and daenae stand there telling me the tide took them.”
The man across from Muire shifted his weight, his boots grinding into the grit of the wet dock planking. He looked somewhere past her left shoulder, a telltale dodge that gave away his guilt before he even spoke.
Muire kept her eyes locked on him, her charcoal poised in a steady hand above the open ledger.
“The count was right when we loaded,” he muttered.
“The count was right when ye loaded.” Muire drew a sharp, black line through his fabricated figure and gouged the correct number into the paper beside it. “Which means somewhere between yer ship and this dock, fourteen barrels of our grains went walking. I’d like to ken where.”
Cormac’s jaw worked, a muscle ticking under his weathered skin as he chewed on an argument he lacked the nerve to voice.
Around them, the harbor roared with its usual morning fury. Ropes snapped taut overhead. Heavy wool-clad shoulders jostled past as boots hammered across the damp wood. Men bellowed tallies over the grind of shifting cargo and the deep, groaning creak of rolling hulls. The thick stench of salt, rotting fish guts, and wet twine hung heavy in the damp air.
Muire breathed it in, using the cold sting of the coastal air to anchor her patience before she snapped.
“I’ll have them checked,” Cormac finally growled.
“Ye’ll have them found,” she corrected, snapping the ledger shut with a sharp crack. “Before midday.”
She turned her back on him, threading through the chaotic press of bodies toward the main loading row. Halfway down the dock, her father, Tamhas, stood deep in counsel with a harbor official. His voice carried that low, unshakeable weight that always steadied the docks. Hearing it usually meant the world was spinning exactly as it should.
Then, she felt it.
It wasn’t a sound. It wasn’t a sudden movement. It was a heavy, prickling weight at the edge of her awareness, like a low whisper spoken too close to the skin.
Muire glanced left.
A man stood by the stack of covered crates at the far end of the loading row. He was tall, impossibly broad across the shoulders, his dark silhouette cutting through the shifting morning haze. He wasn’t hauling hemp. He wasn’t checking manifests. He stood perfectly still, his grey-blue eyes locked entirely onto her. When her gaze found his, he didn’t break the contact.
Most men looked away from a direct stare. He did not.
Muire held the look for one long, breathless second before forcing her chin up and turning back toward her father.
It’s nothing.
The docks were a magnet for drifters, scouts, and merchant opportunists. A stranger’s stare wasn’t worth the sudden heat rising in her chest.
“The Aldren shipment is two days behind,” Tamhas said as she reached his side, his eyes never leaving his paperwork.
“Three,” Muire replied, flipping the ledger open to mask her distraction. “They sent word with the dawn tide. The current ran hard against them.”
Tamhas grunted, a familiar rumble that meant he’d already guessed as much. The official nodded, scratched a mark onto his parchment, and moved away. Muire forced her charcoal to make small, precise tallies, but her skin still prickled with the awareness of the stranger by the crates.
She didn’t look back.
Instead, she moved toward the southern loading row to check the next manifest, but a sudden movement near the warehouse stopped her cold.
A cluster of eight or nine barrels was being rolled away from the main inspection line. They were moving fast, diverted toward the dark entrance of the southern warehouse. A clerk was arguing in low, frantic whispers with the foreman directing the crew, pointing twice toward the official checkpoint. The foreman muttered a short, harsh command. The clerk went pale, stepped back, and let them pass.
Muire halted.
As the barrels rolled, she saw the sides facing her. They bore no merchant mark she recognized. That alone wasn’t unlawful, but the pace was wrong. It was too fast, too deliberate. She took two steps toward them, her fingers flipping through the ledger pages to find the southern warehouse intake.
She never found it.
The sound struck first. A deafening, violent crack that shattered the air and emptied her mind of all thought. Before the light even registered, a wall of blistering heat slammed outward from the storage row. Fire tore through the stacked timber, erupting in a roaring, climbing sheet of blinding orange up the warehouse wall.
Panic broke out instantly. Workers shrieked, scattering like mice. Muire froze, the heavy leather ledger crushed against her ribs as the first acrid wave of grey smoke hit the back of her throat.
“Da!” she gasped, twisting wildly to find where Tamhas had been standing.
Above her, a massive oak beam severed from the roof overhang. It dropped without a sound she could hear over the roaring blaze. She caught its massive shadow plunging fast through the smoke, and her instincts screamed. She bent her knees to leap aside, but her boots caught on the uneven wood. The beam was too close. Too fast. She braced for the impact.
Then, a violent weight hit her from the side.
A solid, unyielding wall of muscle and wool plaid drove into her, knocking her clean off her feet. The force carried her three full steps through the haze before slamming her hard against the stone wall of an adjacent building. The ledger flew from her limp fingers, skidding into the dark. Pain shot down her shoulder as it struck the masonry.
An instant later, the burning beam crashed onto the exact spot she had just been standing. The deck planks shattered like glass under the weight, collapsing inward into the roiling black water below.
Muire gasped for air, her lungs burning.
The heavy body pinning her to the stone shifted, bracing. A broad, scarred hand pressed flat against the stone right beside her cheek, trapping her. In the sudden, suffocating proximity, she was acutely aware of everything about him. The massive breadth of his chest, the scratch of his heavy wool kilt against her bare shins, and the scent of leather and cold rain cutting through the choking smoke.
She turned her head, her breath hitching.
It was the man from the crates.
Up close, his features were sharp, hard-carved, and forbidding. His jaw was clamped tight, a dark stubble shadowing his face. His grey-blue eyes weren’t looking at her; they were moving with terrifying speed across the burning docks, calculating every exit and tracing the movement of the fleeing crowds. He wasn’t panicking. He was reading the chaos like a map.
“Are ye hurt?” His voice was a low, gravelly rasp, vibrating against her chest.
Muire rolled her shoulder against the stone. It throbbed, but the bone was whole. “Nay,” she breathed, straightening her spine. “Me faither. He was by the main line.”
“Which direction?”
She pointed through the roiling smoke. Before her hand could even drop, he had grabbed her uninjured arm and was moving, cutting a path through the heat. She had no choice but to follow.
The harbor had dissolved into hell in a matter of moments. The wind off the water fed the flames, driving the fire through pitch-treated wood with terrifying speed. Shapes moved blindly through the dark smoke. The skin on Muire’s face blistered from the heat.
The stranger moved through the panic like an iron plow. When a knot of frantic dockworkers blocked their path, he simply turned his shoulder and shoved forward. The men took one look at his face and parted instantly.
Muire noted the submission with a chill, keeping close to his heels.
Chapter Two
“Get down.”
The stranger’s forearm struck her chest like an iron bar before the command even cleared his lips. The second explosion ripped through the air, not from the shattered warehouse wall this time, but from deep within the bowels of the storage row. The concussive blast unleashed a rolling wall of pitch-black smoke and burning debris that swept across the dock, swallowing a cluster of fleeing workers whole.
Muire was shoved hard against the rough crates, her spine jarring against the wood. The blistering heat skimmed her face like an open hand, singeing the stray hairs at her temples.
Around them, the harbor became a hellish gauntlet of fire, suffocating smoke, and sprinting bodies, none of them moving in the same direction.
Men around bellowed tactical positions through the haze, but the words fractured and died against the roar of the flames. Tamhas had been mere yards to her left only a heartbeat ago. Now, the soup of grey-black smoke ate the edges of everything past ten feet.
She slammed her palms against the stranger’s unyielding arm, forcing it down as she straightened her spine.
“Me faither was right there.”
“He moved.” His eyes never stopped tracking the fog, looking for things she couldn’t see. “I saw him. He’s back from the pier edge.”
“Ye saw him? Through this?”
“Aye.”
She wanted to snap back, to tell him he couldn’t possibly have tracked one aging merchant through this madness. But the cold certainty in his voice wasn’t meant to comfort her. She clamped her mouth shut and followed his deadly focus.
Six men.
She counted them through the shifting haze before the realization truly settled. They had slipped from the southern warehouse mouth, the exact path the unmarked barrels had taken. They weren’t running with the wild, flailing limbs of panicked dockworkers. They moved low, close together, and deliberate, using the billowing smoke as a cloak, cutting a lethal path toward the dock’s eastern exit. The six men stopped short.
The leader turned, and Muire watched the vicious calculation harden on his face. Behind them was a wall of fire, ahead was a line of braced shields, and on either side, the timber planks ended in deep, icy water. He muttered a short, brutal command to the man nearest him.
They fanned out, drawing cold steel from beneath their cloaks.
“Stay behind me.” The stranger didn’t look at her. The low rasp of his voice was nearly a growl.
He didn’t wait for her defiance. He was already gone.
What followed was no clumsy tavern brawl. This was fast, silent, and sickeningly efficient.
His men struck the outer flanks of the six attackers simultaneously. The noise of it, the dull, heavy percussion of steel biting into leather and bone, made Muire’s stomach violently contract. She gripped the splintered edge of the crate behind her, forcing her eyes to stay open. Looking away felt like an invitation to die.
Three of the attackers went down in a spray of red. One of the veterans took a brutal elbow to the jaw, staggering back but keeping his feet. The remaining two broke sideways, scattering in opposite directions, and four guards peeled after them with the practiced sync of wolves hunting prey.
That left the leader.
He was broad-shouldered, with a long, angular face and pale, empty eyes. He had watched his men die with a terrifying stillness. He wasn’t panicking, which made him the most dangerous bastard on the dock. Muire’s gaze locked onto him just as his pale eyes snapped directly to her.
She didn’t move fast enough.
His heavy, leather-clad arm violently whipped around her neck from behind. The hard crook of his elbow crushed her throat, cutting off her gasp as the momentum spun her around. Her back slammed against his chest, trapping her body between the killer and the advancing laird.
The icy, biting edge of a blade pressed flat against the soft skin of her jaw.
“Back,” the man spat. “Back, or I open her face.”
Muire’s heart slammed so hard she felt the pulse thudding in her back teeth. The arm choking her throat wasn’t tight enough to kill her yet, but enough to make each short breath a desperate negotiation. She kept her hands pinned to her thighs, her body rigid, her eyes locked forward.
The stranger had frozen into stone.
He wasn’t looking at the man holding the knife. His grey-blue eyes were fixed entirely on her face. His expression had undergone a terrifying change. Everything behind it was instantly buried. One of his hands hung open at his side, the fingers twitching. The other held a short, wicked dirk she hadn’t even seen him draw.
“Let her go,” he said. His voice was incredibly quiet. Almost conversational.
“I’ll let her go when I’m off this bloody dock.”
“Ye willnae be leaving this dock alive.” He took one single step forward. It was slow, heavy, and absolute. “But she will. Let her go now, and I give ye me word ye’ll have a clean death. Keep hold of her, and I willnae.”
The man let out a short, humorless bark of a laugh. The blade shifted against her skin, the sharp steel catching the delicate line of her jaw. A tiny, hot bead of red swelled against the metal. Muire stopped breathing entirely.
Then, the panic cleared, and she dropped her entire weight straight down, letting her knees buckle, becoming sudden, dead iron.
The arm across her throat gripped nothing but empty air. The killer lurched forward into the space she had just vacated, his balance shattered, and the stranger was already there.
It was over in three heartbeats.
Muire hit the damp dock planking, her palms slapping into the wet soot. Her pulse was a deafening roar in her ears as she watched the stranger straighten his massive frame. The attacker was flat on his back. He wasn’t dead, his chest heaving in ragged gasps, but he wasn’t moving again. The stranger stared down at the broken man for a fraction of a second, then his gaze snapped down to her.
“Are ye hurt?”
Her jaw was stinging, a hot line of fire spreading near her ear. She touched the wound with her fingertips and pulled them back to see a thin smear of crimson. Shallow. She’d cut herself worse on heavy ledger parchment.
“Nay,” she managed, her voice steadier than her knees.
The stranger reached down. His hand was enormous, his palm rough and calloused against hers as he wrapped his fingers around her wrist and hauled her to her feet in one effortless, fluid motion. For a fraction of a second, the momentum pulled her too close. She was pressed near his chest, close enough to see the fine, hard lines etched at the corners of his eyes and the dangerous clench of his jaw. The scent of rain, leather, and raw masculinity washed over her, making her dizzy.
Then, as quickly as he had taken her, he released her hand and stepped back into the cold.
Around them, the harbor was quietened by degrees. The fire in the storage row still crackled hungrily, but some men had already organized lines of workers, throwing buckets of seawater across the smoking timbers to check the spread. Three of the attackers were on their knees, hands bound behind their heads. One had been thrown into the black water. The other two had slipped past the eastern gate before it shut, and the distant, echoing shouts of pursuit drifted back over the stone harbor wall.
Muire looked down at her hands, covered in thick soot and a raw scrape across her right palm from the rough decking. Her ledger was gone, likely reduced to ash in the debris behind them.
She looked back up at the stranger.
He was speaking in low, clipped tones to one of his trusted commanders, his eyes never leaving the sealed warehouse entrance. The exchange lasted less than half a minute before the warrior saluted and moved off. He turned his full focus back to her.
“I owe ye a thanks,” Muire said, crossing her arms to hide the slight trembling of her hands. “Twice over now.” She paused, her green eyes searching his hard face. “I’d like to send something to yer household to acknowledge it properly. I didnae catch yer name before the fire.”
He looked at her for a long beat, his expression entirely unreadable.
“Roddy,” he said simply.
The name snagged briefly in her thoughts. The only Roddy she’d ever heard spoken with any weight in this territory was the laird himself, but that was a foolish leap to make over a single name.
She gave a small nod. “And yer clan?”
He said nothing for a second. Around them, the burning harbor groaned and settled, the timber of the southern storage wall giving way with a long, exhausted crash.
“Mackenzie,” he murmured.
Muire heard the word. The name rearranged every single detail she had just witnessed. The way the hardened guards moved around him without a word spoken, the way the desperate killer had tried to bargain with him rather than dismiss him, the way he had looked at the burning docks from the very first second as if every stone and splinter belonged to him.
Laird Mackenzie.
The master of the territory had dragged her from a falling roof, taken down the man with a knife to her throat, and hadn’t even deemed it necessary to mention his title.
She held his grey-blue gaze and dipped her chin. “Forgive me, me laird. I didnae ken who ye were.”
He didn’t offer an apology for the omission. She hadn’t expected one from a laird.
“I need tae find me faither,” she said, bracing her posture against the deep ache spreading through her shoulder and the sharp sting on her jaw. “Thank ye, Laird Mackenzie. Truly.”
He gave a single, curt nod.
She turned, walking away into the thinning, acrid smoke toward the distant, familiar baritone of her father’s voice. She forced her boots to move forward and did not let herself look back, though the skin between her shoulder blades burned with the distinct, heavy weight of his gaze until the shifting crowd finally closed between them.
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Three months later…
The stillroom was warm and close, smelling of drying valerian and crushed juniper and the sharp green scent of yarrow hanging in bundles from the low beams. The healer did not look up when Sìle entered, her hands moving steadily over the herbs spread across the table, sorting with the practiced efficiency of someone who had been doing this work since before Sìle was born.
“Sit,” she said, gesturing toward the stool near the window without turning around.
Sìle sat, her hands folded in her lap, though folded was perhaps too calm a word for what they were doing.
“Ye kent I was coming,” she said.
“I’ve had eyes fer sixty years.” Nell set her work aside and turned, wiping her hands on her apron, and studied Sìle’s face with the unhurried thoroughness of someone reading a map. “Ye’ve been turning yer nose up at the morning pottage fer a week. Ye went pale when the roasting boar came through the hall two nights ago. I’ve been expecting ye since Tuesday.”
“I thought it was the heat,” Sìle said. “Or the harvest preparations. There has been so much tae manage.”
“Aye, there has.” The healer stepped closer and pressed careful fingers against the side of her neck, feeling her pulse with her eyes closed, humming low in her throat. Then she moved her hands and pressed them gently against Sìle’s middle. She was quiet for a long moment before she straightened. “Somewhere between ten and twelve weeks, by me reckoning.”
The words landed with a weight that Sìle had been half expecting and was entirely unprepared for.
“Are ye certain?” she gasped, though it was not really a question.
“I have been daeing this fer thirty-one years and I have never once been wrong about this particular thing.” The healer moved to the shelf and took down a small wooden vial, uncorking it and holding it out. “Drink this before bed each night. It will settle the sickness by morning. Ye’ll want eat more red meat and dark greens, but I’ll speak tae cook meself on that. Ye’ll want rest, proper rest now, nae the hours ye’ve been managing since the wedding. Ye cannae continue with the same routine ye have been keeping fer the past three months.”
Sìle took the vial. Her fingers were not entirely steady around it.
“Daes anyone else ken about me baby?” she said.
“Only what I’ve observed meself, and I’ve told nae one.” The healer looked at her with the particular warmth of a woman who had sat with enough people in this room to know what this moment cost and what it gave in equal measure.
Sìle took the vial, her fingers trembling. “Torin… he daesnae suspect. He thinks I’m merely tired from the harvest preparations.”
The old woman let out a dry, rattling cackle. “The man can track a deer through a winter storm and spot a MacDougall spy from a mile off, but he’s clueless when it comes tae the magic in his own bed. He’ll nae suspect a thing until ye tell him plain.” She leaned in, her eyes softening. “He’s a good man, Sìle. But a warrior’s heart is a fragile thing when it comes tae a bairn. Go on then. He’ll want tae hear it from ye. Go and tell him, lass. Taenight, if ye can.”
Sìle stood, pressing the vial into her pocket, and looked at the window for a moment at the afternoon light coming through it, ordinary and golden and completely indifferent to what had just changed inside this small warm room.
A bairn. Torin’s bairn.
She thought of his face when she told him, and she was out the door before she had finished the thought.
She did not tell him at breakfast because Fergus was there, in the middle of a story about a disputed boundary line that showed no signs of ending, and Torin was listening with the expression he wore when he was half listening and half working through something else entirely, and the moment was wrong.
She did not tell him in the corridor outside the Great Hall because Bryce appeared from the opposite direction with a question about the eastern patrol schedule and Torin stopped to answer it with the full attention he gave everything, and she stood beside him and watched his profile and thought about the way his face was going to change when she said the words and decided she needed more than a corridor.
She passed the council chamber door mid-morning and heard his voice inside, low and measured, going through something with his captains, and she slowed without meaning to and stood in the corridor for a moment with her hand near the latch and her heart doing something completely unreasonable.
She walked on.
By afternoon she had decided she was going to need the right place and the right hour, and she knew exactly where both of those were, and she went to find him with that purpose and the vial in her pocket and three months of unknowing finally resolved into something she could hold.
He was in the lower bailey when she found him, his hair windblown and his shoulders carrying the end of a long day, and he turned when she called his name and the exhaustion seemed to leave his frame the moment his eyes found her face.
“Sìle.” He crossed to her. “I was coming tae find ye. The men are settled and the gates are barred.”
She reached up and brushed a smudge of dust from his jaw, and his hand came up and caught hers there, and he pressed his mouth to her palm, his lips warm against the skin. Her thumb ran gently over the faint scar where the dagger had caught him months ago.
“Leave the rest for tomorrow,” she said, her fingers curling briefly against his face before she lowered her hand and took his instead. “I want ye tae come with me.”
He looked at her. She could see him reading her face the way he always read her face, assembling the pieces, and she kept her expression composed and gave him nothing yet, because she was saving it.
“Where?” he said.
She tilted her head toward the stair that led upward.
“The roof,” she said. “Where the air is clear and the stars are beginning tae wake.”
Torin’s brow quirked, a slow, predatory grin spreading across his face. “The roof, is it? I wonder what might be nudging the lady Macleod in that direction.”
She tugged on his hand. “Move yer weary bones, MacLeod. I’ve a mind fer the view.”
They climbed the winding stone turnpike, their boots echoing against the cold rock. Every few steps, Torin would squeeze her hand, his thumb tracing the back of her knuckles. The air grew thinner and colder as they rose, until finally, they pushed through the heavy door and stepped out onto the wide, flat expanse of the castle’s highest tower.
The Highland sky had gone deep and clear above them, stars pressing through the dark in their thousands, and the cold off the hills was the clean, sharp kind that made everything feel more real rather than less.
Sìle had given the instruction and a heavy fur had been laid near the ramparts.
“Come lie with me.” They lay down together the way they had the first time, her back against his chest, his arm beneath her head, and for a moment neither of them spoke and the castle breathed quietly below them and the stars held their positions above.
“D’ye remember,” Torin said, his voice low near her ear, “the first night we lay here? I told meself I’d brought ye up because ye needed somewhere quiet after the fright ye’d had.” He paused. “That was only partly true.”
“What was the other part?” she asked.
“I wasnae ready tae stop being near ye and I hadnae admitted that yet.” He was quiet for a moment. “I sat here for two hours after ye fell asleep telling meself it was courtesy.”
“It was nae courtesy,” she said.
“Nay,” he agreed. “It was nae.”
She turned onto her side to face him, and the starlight caught the lines of his face, the jaw she had memorized and the eyes she had spent months learning to read.
“Is something wrong, lass?” he said. “Ye’ve been different today. I noticed it this morning and I’ve been watching ye since.”
“Naething is wrong,” she said, and reached for his hand.
She took it and moved it carefully, pressing his palm flat against her middle, and felt him go completely still.
“The healer saw me today,” she said.
He did not breathe.
“Torin.” She pressed his hand a little firmer. “I am with bairn.”
The silence that followed was not empty but entirely full, the way a room feels when something enormous has just entered it and everyone is still deciding how to stand in relation to it.
“A bairn,” he said. The word came out rough and quiet and nothing like his usual voice.
“A bairn,” she said.
He stared at her for a long moment with an expression she had never seen from him before, unguarded in a way that went deeper than anything she had managed to draw out of him yet, and then he pulled her toward him and pressed his forehead hard against hers and she felt him shaking, just once, very slightly, before he brought himself back.
“Mo ghràidh,” he said, against her temple. “By God, Sìle.”
“I kent ye would say something eloquent,” she said, and felt him laugh against her hair, low and warm and entirely genuine.
He pulled back to look at her face and whatever he found there made something settle in his expression, large and certain and entirely at peace.
“A son?” he said. “Or a daughter?”
“We willnae ken fer many months yet,” she said, a tear of pure, unadulterated joy slipping down her cheek. She watched his face, and paused when he leaned forward to kiss away her tear.
“But son or daughter, they’re here. Our first, Torin. The one we thought we’d never see that day in the courtyard. ”
“A bairn,” he repeated, his voice thick. “By the stones, Sìle… I’m going tae be a faither.”
“The best the Highlands have ever seen,” she promised.
He kissed her then, and it was soft, lingering, and tasted of salt and starlight.
“I was so afeared,” he whispered against her lips. “That day when Raghnall threw the steel… I saw me whole life vanish. And now, ye give me this?”
“We gave it tae each other,” she reminded him.
Torin let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. He rolled onto her, not with his usual weight, but with a terrifyingly gentle care, his hands framing her face.
“Catriona,” he said, after a moment. “If it is a girl.”
She had not expected that name and she felt the weight of it move through her, understanding what he was offering and what it had taken to offer it.
“I think that is a beautiful choice,” she said quietly.
He nodded once. “And if it is a boy, I would call him Iosag.”
“Yer faither’s name,” she said.
“He was a poor laird and a worse faither,” Torin said, “but he was me faither. I think a man can be given a name that was handled badly and dae something better with it.”
She reached up and pressed her hand once against his jaw.
He pulled her close, and they stayed wrapped in each other’s arms as the moon climbed higher, the vast silence of the mountains a witness to their joy. Torin kept his hand anchored on her stomach, his thumb moving in small, possessive circles as if he could already protect the tiny life within.
“He’ll have tae be a MacLeod through and through,” Torin mused, his voice sounding more like the man who led armies again. “I’ll teach him the blade before he can walk.”
“And if it’s a lass?” Sìle asked, arching a brow. “Will ye teach her the blade too?”
Torin paused, a look of mock-terror crossing his face. “A daughter with yer fire and me temper? Heaven help the Highlands. I’ll have tae bar the gates and never let her out.”
“Ye’ll dae nae such thing,” Sìle laughed, leaning her head against his shoulder. “She’ll be a lady of the castle, just as I am. Strong and wise.”
“Aye,” Torin said softly, his teasing fading into something more profound. “She’ll be exactly like her maither. And I’ll be the luckiest man ever tae draw breath.” He pulled her closer, his chin resting on the top of her head.
As the first hint of grey began tae touch the eastern horizon, the castle remained quiet. No alarms sounded. No weapons rose. There was only the steady, rhythmic breathing of a laird and his lady, and the tiny, unspoken promise of the new life that would one day inherit the heather and the steel.
“And a son with me temper will have every woman in the Highlands exasperated with him before he can ride.”
“He will learn,” she said. “His faither did.”
She felt him go quiet at that, and then his arm tightened around her in the way it did when he had no adequate answer and had decided his arms would have to speak instead.
They did not go back inside.
The cold was considerable and neither of them mentioned it, and the stars went on above them in their thousands and the castle slept below and Torin kept his hand where it was and neither of them moved toward the stair.
“Are ye afeared?” he said, after a long quiet. “Truly.”
“A little,” she said, and felt him waiting for the rest of it. “The world is a hard place, Torin. Even behind good walls.”
“Nae fer them,” he said, and his voice had dropped into something low and absolute, the voice he used when he had already decided something and the deciding was final. “I have spent me life building these walls and raising these men and learning every approach tae this land. Whatever comes tae this glen will have tae come through me first, and I promise ye, Sìle, it will find that considerably harder than it expects.”
“I ken it will,” she said.
“The only thing they will ever fear,” he said, and she could hear the smile entering his voice, “is their mother’s expression when they have stayed out past dark.”
She laughed, a real one, surprised out of her, and she felt him press his mouth to the top of her head.
They lay quietly after that, his hand still over her middle, his thumb moving in slow and absent circles, and the Highland night deepened around them and the stars held their cold and ancient positions above.
“It first knew I was in trouble when we were at the loch. But this is where it started,” he said. “Fer me. This rooftop, that first night. I sat here with ye asleep against me arm and I understood that I was in a great deal of trouble and had been fer several days already.” A pause. “I told meself I would manage it.”
“Did ye?” she said.
“Evidently nae,” he said, with a dry and comfortable certainty. “Though I made an admirable effort.”
“Ye did,” she said. “I watched ye making it.”
His hand pressed a little warmer against her.
Above them a star crossed the dark and was gone before either of them could point at it, and the hills sat steady on every side of the castle, and the wind moved through the glen below with the long, patient sound of something that had been doing this since before the castle was built and intended to keep doing it long after.
“Go tae sleep, mo ghràidh,” he murmured. “I will watch the stars fer both of us taenight.”
She closed her eyes, and felt the solid warmth of him at her back and his hand anchored over their future, and below them the castle breathed in its quiet, and above them the sky went on without end, and she was exactly where she had chosen to be.
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The Laird’s Reckless Claim (Preview)
Chapter One
1596, on a carriage to the Northern Highlands
“‘Tis nae a road, Maggie, ‘tis a personal insult tae me spine,” Sìle said, bracing her palm flat against the velvet-lined door.
The carriage lurched, a violent jolt that sent a shuddering ache through her ribs.
Her maid, Maggie, clutched her rosary beads until her knuckles were white as bone. “Och, me lady, dinnae say such things. The Highlands are a wild place, and the Earth has a memory of its own.”
“I have a memory of every loose stone that’s currently bruising me back,” Sìle shot back.
She looked down at her lap.
Her charcoal stick had snapped in two, leaving a jagged black smear across the gray peak she’d been sketching. She stared at the ruined drawing, the sharp lines blurred into a mess of soot, then set it aside. Her fingers felt cold, the air inside the cabin thickening with the damp of the moors.
Her father had paid a king’s ransom for this carriage. He’d boasted of the Lowland steel springs, promised her a journey befitting a merchant’s daughter of her standing.
But the north didn’t care for Lowland gold. The mountains had their own opinion on her father’s vanity.
“This is fer the best, me lady,” Maggie whispered, her eyes fixed on the suffocating mist pressing against the glass. “A MacLeod. A title. Ye’ll be a Lady, a real Highland Lady.”
“A Lady of what, Maggie?” Sìle turned back to the window.
Out there, the hills didn’t roll; they jagged upward like broken bone. The peaks were bruised purples and unforgiving grays. They looked like teeth. “I am travelin’ tae marry a man I have never laid eyes upon. A stranger in every sense of the word.”
“Most lasses would give their left arm fer a laird,” Maggie countered.
“And I would give me right arm tae be a wife tae a man of me own choosin’.” Sìle picked up the longer half of the charcoal.
Her hand moved with a frantic, rhythmic energy, shading the underside of a crag. It was the only way to quiet the thrumming anxiety in her chest.
“I wanted a heart that beats fer me, Maggie. A slow courtship. The kind where a look across a crowded room causes a fire in the blood, and where fallin’ in love is a voluntary plunge and nae a hard shove intae the dark.”
“Och, me lady. I ken it’s difficult.”
“What is real,” Sìle interrupted, her voice dropping to a low, tight whisper, “is that I am travelin’ toward a man I have never met, tae live in a castle at the edge of the world, and I am tae smile and be grateful fer the privilege.”
She pressed the charcoal too hard. Clack. The tip snapped again. She stared at the black smudge on the parchment, her pulse hammering in her throat. “I thought, perhaps, Faither might give me the chance tae find me own happiness.”
“Ye have a romantic heart, dinnae ye?” Maggie said gently. “I ken it well. Ye draw those bonnie pictures too.”
“I draw what feels real,” Sìle said, her jaw setting in a firm line.
She brushed the charcoal dust from her palm, her skin stained gray. She wouldn’t cry. Merchant’s daughters were raised to understand value, and she knew exactly what she was worth. She was a trade, a piece of coin passed from one hand to another.
The carriage fell into a heavy silence. Sìle watched the landscape, her eyes tracing the way the pale light died against the granite peaks.
“‘Tis a jagged sort of beauty, isnae it?” she murmured.
“‘Tis somewhat fearsome, me lady,” Maggie replied.
Sìle didn’t answer. The fear was a cold weight in her stomach, but she forced it down.
The world suddenly inverted.
The carriage shuddered as if a giant had reached up and seized the wheels.
Sìle’s charcoal skittered across the page once more. A long, ugly black line splitting the mountain she’d been crafting clean in two. Outside, the rhythmic clop of the escort’s horses broke into a frantic, splashing scramble of hooves in the muck.
“Captain!” Sìle called out.
She reached for the leather curtain, but before her fingers could touch the hide, a whistle sliced through the mist.
It was a high, jagged sound, human and sharp as a whetted blade.
The carriage lurched violently, throwing Sìle against the velvet padding. The air filled with the frantic neighing of horses and the wet, metallic sound of steel leaving leather scabbards.
“Stay down!” Sìle shouted. She lunged across the swaying cabin, shoving Maggie toward the floorboards. “Get under the seat, Maggie! Dae it now!”
A heavy weight slammed into the side of the carriage, rocking the frame on its hinges. Then came the sound that turned her blood to ice. A single, choked-off cry that ended in a sickening, bubbling gasp.
Trembling fingers pulled the leather curtain back just an inch. Through the sliver of the window, Sìle saw them. Men in dark, weathered plaids and rough linen masks emerged from the heather like ghosts made of wool and steel.
Her father’s guards, men who looked imposing on the paved streets of the south, were being cut down like wheat.
A body slammed against the exterior paneling with a dull thud. She heard the firm thwack of a blade finding home, followed by the heavy slide of a man falling into the mud.
She held Maggie down, her own heart battering against her ribs. “Nay matter what ye hear, remain under the seat until I tell ye otherwise!”
Terror raced down her spine, but beneath it, a cold, sharp clarity took hold. They weren’t after the gold. The chest in the boot was a pittance. The real value was the woman holding the MacLeod marriage contract.
She reached into the hidden pocket of her dress, her fingers trembling as they wrapped around the cool filigree hilt of her small, silver-handled fruit knife. It was a pathetic thing, meant for peeling pears, not parrying Highland claymores. But it was sharp.
The carriage door was suddenly wrenched open. The hinges screamed. Cold Highland air rushed in, smelling of wet earth, iron, and the pungent scent of unwashed skin.
“Out with ye, lass!”
The man wore a mask of rough linen, his eyes bloodshot and hungry. He reached into the dim cabin, his hand a blackened iron vice as he clamped onto Sìle’s wrist and pulled with a brutal, bone-jarring jerk.
“Let me go, ye coward!” Sìle didn’t scream for help. She knew there was none. As he dragged her out, she swung the knife. Not for his chest, which was protected by metal studs, but for the flesh of his thigh, where his kilt shifted.
The small blade sank deep.
The man roared. A sound of pure, animal shock. He recoiled, releasing her wrist to clutch his leg. Blood, dark and hot, bloomed against his tartan.
“Ye little bitch! I’ll have yer tongue fer that!”
His grip returned, iron fingers crushing her wrist hard enough to grind the small bones together.
Sìle twisted, drove her elbow into his ribs, feeling the grunt of air leave him. She used the half-second of his surprise to wrench sideways. He caught the back of her bodice instead, the heavy silk pulling taut and straining against her throat.
“Maggie!” Sìle’s voice cracked. “Run, go!”
She saw the flash of Maggie’s skirts as the woman ducked low and threw herself toward the far door. The man behind Sìle cursed and lunged after the maid.
That was his mistake.
Sìle scrambled out the opposite door, her boots hitting the slick mud with a splash that soaked her hem.
The air was thick with the clank of steel. She didn’t look back. She ran toward the treeline, the heavy silks of her skirts snagging on the gorse, tearing with a sound like a dying scream.
“Stop the lass! Dinnae let her reach the brae, she’s the one we came fer!” a voice bellowed.
Sìle sprinted into the woods, ferns slapping at her face, stinging her skin. Her breath came in ragged, burning gulps.
The Lowlands were flat and kind. This land was a predator, full of hidden dips and treacherous rises. She could hear the crashing of boots behind her, the heavy, rhythmic breath of men who hunted these woods for sport.
She pushed through a thicket of rowan, her lungs screaming for air.
Just a little further. Find a crevice. A hollow. Anything.
A hidden root, slick with moss, caught the toe of her boot.
She went down hard. The world tilted into a chaotic blur of green and brown. A sickening crack echoed in the silence of the woods. Then, a white-hot flash of agony exploded in her ankle, turning her vision to sparks.
Sìle tried to rise, but her leg buckled, a scream catching in her throat. She collapsed back into the dirt, the scent of crushed pine needles and damp earth filling her senses as she gasped.
“Cannae run now, can ye, bonnie lass?”
She rolled onto her back.
The man was a mountain of a human. His chest broad under a tattered plaid, his face twisted in a cruel, jagged grin. He held a dirk that looked a foot long, the steel notched and stained. He looked at her ruined emerald dress, then at her useless ankle, then at her face.
“A bonnie prize,” he sneered, stepping over a fallen log with slow, deliberate malice. “But dead weight is easier tae carry than a fighter.” He raised the dirk, the blade catching a sliver of gray light. “I’d prefer tae take a souvenir. Ye and whatever gold ye carry would be worth me while.”
Sìle’s fingers clawed at the knife still at her hands. She gripped it hard until her knuckles turned white. She watched his eyes, calculating the distance to his throat.
Tremors betrayed her entire body, but she would not die as a merchant’s mistake.
She raised the knife. He smiled. The idle, mocking smile of a predator, and stepped closer, his shadow falling over her like a shroud.
His hand shot out, seizing her wrist and slamming it into the dirt. The knife dropped. He twisted her arm, forcing her flat onto her back, and pressed the cold, biting edge of the dirk against the sensitive skin of her throat.
“There’s a good lass,” he breathed, his hot, foul breath ghosting over her face.
Sìle stared up at the pale strip of Highland sky, her chest heaving, her ankle screaming in a rhythmic throb of pain. She felt the cold, specific weight of having nothing left to fight with.
All was quiet except the wind in the pines and the slow, satisfied sound of her captor’s breathing.
It was over.
Chapter Two
She felt him before she saw him.
A low vibration in the earth beneath her. A rhythmic, heavy drumming that traveled through the damp soil and vibrated upward into her very bones.
It was disciplined. The kind of thunder that belonged to warhorses that knew exactly what they were running toward.
Above her, her captor’s head snapped toward the ridge. The malice in his eyes flickered, replaced by a sudden, sharp spike of alarm.
That half-second of distraction was all Sìle needed.
She drove her knee upward with every ounce of strength left in her lungs, catching him square in the gut. He let out a strangled grunt, the air whistling out of him as his grip on her wrist loosened just enough.
She wrenched sideways, her skin burning where his fingers had clamped, and clawed at the mud and her knife with her free hand. She dragged herself back, ignoring the white-hot agony that screamed through her ankle in protest.
Then, a blur of dark wool and gleaming steel erupted from the mist on the ridge above them. A rider on a horse as black as a peat-stained loch descended like a thunderbolt.
Sìle had one clear, staggering impression. Broad shoulders, a heavy cloak snapping behind him like a raven’s wing in the wind, and the silver arc of a claymore catching the pale, dying light, before the blade swept down with terrifying speed and bone-crushing force.
There was a sickening, heavy thud.
Her captor was lifted clean off his feet by the momentum, thrown back against the trunk of a gnarled oak. He hit the bark with a sound like a felled tree and slumped forward into the moss. The dirk slipped from his lifeless fingers, clattering uselessly against a stone. He did not move again.
Sìle lay in the dirt, her chest heaving in ragged, burning gulps, her fruit knife still gripped in her fist.
Riders thundered past her on both sides.
Four, five, six of them.
Wearing muted tartans of forest green and charcoal. They moved with predatory efficiency that made her father’s guards look like children playing with sticks. They drove the remaining attackers back up into the jagged crags without hesitation, the sounds of clashing steel and guttural shouting fading fast into the swallowing mist.
The man on the black horse pulled back on the reins. The animal reared slightly, its hooves churning the muck, before he brought it to a halt mere feet from where she lay.
He looked down at the dead man by the tree first, his gaze cold and assessing. Then slowly, he turned toward her.
Sìle had imagined many things on the long, grueling road north. She had sketched faces in the margins of her parchment during the quiet hours. The kind of soft, noble face she might have chosen for herself, given the choice.
She had not imagined this.
He didn’t look like a hero from one of her sketches.
He looked like the Highlands themselves come to life. Grim, jagged, and beautiful in the terrifying way that wild, dangerous things are beautiful. His hair was the color of a winter hearth, dark with deep copper where the pale light caught the strands. His jaw was set hard, an uncompromising line of granite, and his eyes were a piercing, unsettling blue. They were eyes that assessed rather than simply looked, taking in the knife in her hand, the ruin of her emerald silk, and the mud smeared across her face with the same cool, deadly efficiency.
He swung a leg over the saddle and dismounted in one fluid, practiced motion that spoke of a life spent in leather and steel.
“Ye can put that away, lass,” he said. His voice was a low, resonant burr that seemed to vibrate somewhere deep behind her sternum. “Unless ye intend tae use it on me.”
Up close, he was even more disquieting.
The cut of his features was sharp and severe, the kind of face that had been weathered by wind and war. There was no warmth in it, not exactly. And yet he had ridden out of the mist and cut down a man about to drive a dirk into her throat without a heartbeat of hesitation.
Sìle did not lower the knife. The silver hilt felt small and ridiculous in her hand, but she held it steady.
“Who are ye?”
***
He didn’t answer.
He crouched beside her with deliberate, unhurried movements. She was wound tight, clearly ready to startle at the wrong move, and he kept himself slow and steady because of it. He turned the same unsentimental focus on her ankle that he’d turned on the dead man a moment ago.
“Dinnae touch me,” she snapped, her voice tight.
“Ye’ve a tongue on ye, lass,” he replied, without looking up. “Hold still now. Let me see the damage ye’ve done tae yersel’.”
She held still. It was not from obedience—he could see that plain enough. It was calculation. She’d looked at her situation, weighed it, and made a decision in about two seconds flat.
He moved his hands with precision, tracing the anatomy of the joint, pressing carefully. He kept his eyes on her foot as he worked, but that did not stop him from looking at her face from beneath his lashes, gauging her reaction.
And it was, he had to admit, not an unpleasant thing to watch.
She was young. Younger than he’d expected his betrothed to be. But he was not disappointed with what he saw.
Her hair was the color of autumn bracken, deep ginger darkened by the rain, and it had come half-loose from whatever arrangement it had started the morning in, long strands of it clinging to her jaw and throat. Her eyes were dark—almost startling against all that copper—and they hadn’t left his face since he’d crouched beside her. Watchful. Measuring. Not the eyes of a woman who frightened easily, whatever the rest of her was feeling.
She was slender, her neck long and pale where the rain had pulled loose strands of ginger hair away from it. The wet had done nothing kind to her dress, and he was aware, with the awareness of a man trying very hard to be dispassionate, of the soft swell of her figure beneath the ruined fabric.
He moved his gaze back to her ankle with more deliberateness than the action required.
She kept her expression neutral. Each press of his thumbs against the swollen joint drew not a sound or wince from her, though the heat beneath his fingers told him the damage was bad enough. She would not give him the satisfaction. He could read it in the hard set of her jaw.
“Yer fingers move as though ye ken what ye’re daeing,” she said, her breath hitching despite herself as his thumb pressed against the heat of the swelling. “Are ye nae only a warrior but a medic too?”
Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Involuntary. He let it pass.
“In the Highlands, lass, a man has tae ken how tae kill and also how tae mend if he wants tae see the mornin’.”
He pulled a strip of clean linen from the pouch at his belt and began binding her ankle with the same quiet competence. He wrapped the joint firmly, his movements certain and unhurried.
He was aware of her gaze dropping to his hands. He didn’t look up. He simply worked—wrapping, pressing, keeping each pass deliberate. His hands were large, scarred across the knuckles from years of exactly the kind of morning he’d just described. They were not the hands of a gentle man. But they knew how to be careful when careful was what was needed.
“Me maid,” she said suddenly. “Maggie, she ran from the carriage when the attack began. Where is she?”
He paused his binding for only a moment. “Me men will have found her. She’ll be at the road.” He tied the linen off with a firm, neat knot. “She’s safe, lass.”
She exhaled a long, shaky breath. The sound told him she’d been holding it since the maid had fled.
He finished the binding and looked up.
In the rain-soaked quiet of the forest, with the scent of horses, wet earth, and pine needles thick around them, his eyes met hers. He held the look a beat longer than was strictly necessary. Her dark eyes were direct and unguarded in a way the rest of her carefully wasn’t, and he found, against his better judgement, that he wanted to see what she would do with the silence.
She was the one to look away first.
“Me name is Sìle, nae lass. I am tae be married,” she said, as if the quiet had become a weight she needed to lift off her chest. “Tae Laird MacLeod. He will nae appreciate a stranger’s hands upon me.”
Torin would have laughed, if he hadn’t been so angry that someone had the audacity to attempt to kidnap his bride-to-be, and in his own territory no less.
Sìle. Daughter of Tamhas Fairfield.
He’d been given the name weeks ago, in a letter he’d read once and set aside with the same detached efficiency he applied to livestock tallies and border disputes. A merchant’s daughter, his councilors had told him. Young. Well-bred enough for the arrangement.
Her father wanted the MacLeod name above his door and the MacLeod reach behind his trade routes. Torin had wanted the Fairfield gold and the political quiet that came with it. A clean exchange. Uncomplicated.
He had not anticipated her looks.
He had not anticipated any of this.
The irony of it landed sharp, quiet, and entirely unwelcome. He hadn’t ridden out this morning to collect a bride. He’d ridden out because his scouts had flagged an ambush on the eastern road and he’d wanted to know who was bold enough to move armed men through his territory without his leave. That the woman at the center of it turned out to be the one already promised to him was the kind of thing that would have made a lesser man believe in fate.
When he finally looked up, he’d schooled his expression back to something even, though he could feel the trace of it still sitting at the corner of his mouth, refusing to leave entirely.
“Is that so?” He kept his tone carefully level. “I am certain yer future husband wouldnae mind. Any reasonable man would appreciate a wound well-tended.”
He said it and let it sit there, and did not elaborate.
Before she could press him, and she would have because he could see it forming in those dark eyes, he slid one arm beneath her knees and the other behind her back and lifted her in one clean, efficient motion. She grabbed his shoulder on instinct, her fingers pressing into the rough, damp wool of his plaid. Light, he noted. Slender as she looked. But she held herself with a stillness in his arms that was deliberate rather than passive. She would not cling, and she would not squirm, and she fixed her gaze on the tree line as though he were simply a vehicle she’d decided to make use of.
He carried her with the unhurried ease the road required and said nothing either.
The tree line broke and the road opened before them.
He took in the scene in a single sweep. Most of her father’s guards were wounded and shaken, but standing. Two were not, lying still in the mud where they’d fallen. He noted the carriage, the rear wheel splintered but holding. It would make the distance.
He carried her past without comment.
Beside the broken wheel, small and round and wailing loudly into her apron, was the maid.
The moment she saw her mistress, she launched herself forward with a sound that startled two of the horses and sent several of his riders’ hands instinctively toward their hilts.
Something moved in his chest. He kept it from reaching his face, but it was a near thing.
“Me lady! Me lady, ye’re alive! Holy Maither, I thought those cursed devils had taken ye fer good!”
He set her carefully back beside the carriage. She balanced herself on one good foot and steadied herself against the doorframe. The maid threw her arms around her before she’d fully straightened, and she let her, pressing one hand briefly to the back of the older woman’s lace cap. A small, quiet gesture.
“Maggie.” Her voice came out steady. “Maggie, look at me. Are ye hurt?”
The maid pulled back, hiccupping, and turned herself over for inspection. “Nay, nay, I’m whole, me lady, I hid as ye told me. But yer dress, yer ankle.”
“I’m alive.” She cut through the panic gently, cleanly. “We’re both alive. That is enough fer now.” She squeezed the older woman’s hands once, firmly. “And ye’ll be home soon enough, back tae yer family, safe and sound. I promise ye that.”
The maid’s eyes filled again, but she nodded and pressed her lips together and held.
He had been watching longer than he’d intended to.
She looked up and caught him at it. He didn’t look away. He held her gaze with the same directness she turned on him, because she was the kind of woman who would notice if he didn’t, and he wasn’t in the habit of flinching.
She had steady eyes. Steadier than most men he’d ridden with.
“What happens now?” she asked.
“We ride.” He kept his voice even. “Me men will guard the party. Ye’ll be safe the rest of the road.”
She climbed carefully into the carriage, holding her maid’s hand for support. When she was seated, she turned to him, nodding politely.
“I’ll see ye are rewarded fer yer time and effort. Especially fer savin’ me life. I will make sure me husband sees tae it.”
“Indeed.”
“And the men who attacked us? Who sent them? Why did they come fer me specifically?”
“Questions are fer the hearth, lass. Movement is fer the road.” He reached for the heavy door. “We are nae safe here.”
“I am nae a woman who accepts that as an answer.”
He closed the door and clicked the latch.
He heard the pause on the other side of it, before she leaned through the window frame.
“At the very least,” she called after him, “tell me yer name. Ye ken mine well enough.”
He had his hand on the saddle. He turned his head just enough to look at her over his shoulder.
She was watching him with those dark, direct eyes, her ginger hair still half-loose and rain-damp against her jaw, waiting for an answer he had no intention of giving her.
Nae yet.
He mounted in a single clean motion.
“Ride,” he said to his men.
The carriage jolted forward, and he did not look back.
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Two years later
Two years had done something entirely remarkable to the light.
Or perhaps, she considered as she watched the soft descent of the day, it was only that she noticed its behavior differently now. The specific way the late afternoon sun broke across the vibrant green meadow below the eastern ridge, falling low and long at this time of year, turning the high grass a color that didn’t possess a precise name in either the English or the Gaelic tongue.
It was an ethereal hue resting somewhere between bright gold, deep clover, and the particular, rich amber of late afternoon in a place that had finally, painstakingly learned how to be peaceful. She noticed the light now the way she never had during her structured years at Croft Estate.
Small abundances. A ledger of quiet mercies.
The baby had found a stone.
He was sitting perfectly upright in the thick grass. He was gripping this particular granite stone with both of his small, chubby hands, examining its rough surface. He turned it over meticulously. Looked at the dark underside. Turned it back to the sun. Appeared to reach a profound intellectual conclusion.
Then, with absolute efficiency, he put it directly into his mouth.
“Alasdair,” Rosalind said, her voice laced with an affectionate sigh.
The boy looked up at her, his dark eyes wide. He slowly took the stone out of his mouth, considered it in the palm of his hand, and then promptly shoved it right back in.
Bethany leaned over from the wool blanket beside him and removed the wet pebble from his mouth.
“That is distinctly not food,” Bethany told him, her voice maintaining the perfectly level, conversational tone she utilized for everything regarding the baby, as though they were two equals engaged in a highly reasonable parliamentary discussion. “We have talked about this choice several times this week, Alasdair.”
Alasdair looked at her. He looked intently at the stone now resting safely in her hand. Then, he looked straight back up at her face
“He’s incredibly sure of himself,” Lachlan noted from the grass.
“He gets that entirely from you,” Rosalind replied, looking down at her husband.
“He gets that from his maither,” Lachlan said, his voice a low rumble completely stripped of heat. “I’m never that certain about anything in this life.”
She looked at him sidelong, a smile touching her lips.
He was lying flat on his back in the deep clover with his large arm folded behind his head and his dark eyes half-closed against the low glare of the sun, entirely at rest in the way he had slowly, painfully learned to be at rest over the past two seasons.
It was a transformation that had taken longer than anything else in the valley. Longer than the structural rebuilding of the cracked granary, longer than the grueling administrative work of hunting down and dismantling what remained of Graham’s border network, longer than any of the external, military tasks. The internal things always took the longest. The rebuilding of a man’s spirit was slow mathematics.
“You’re entirely certain about most things, Lachlan Buchanan,” she said.
“I am decisive,” he corrected, opening one dark eye to look at her. “That’s a different variable entirely.”
She considered the distinction, smoothing her skirts over her knees. “Is it?”
“Aye. Decisive is when ye make a choice quickly because a situation requires movement. Certain is when ye ken fer a fact that ye’re right.” He closed his eye again, a trace of a smile tugging his jaw. “I’m often wrong, Rosalind. I just commit meself fully tae the path I’ve chosen.”
She handed him a thick piece of fresh bread from the cloth laid beside her. He took it into his large hand without even bothering to sit up from the grass.
The meadow was exceptionally quiet around them. A pair of high birds crossed the blue sky above the eastern ridge, their wings catching the amber light. Somewhere further below them, toward the dark tree line of the valley, the burn was running over the rocks. She could hear the steady murmur of the water if she stopped paying attention to everything else, the low, constant rhythm of the wild land moving over its stones.
Alasdair had accepted the tragic loss of his stone with surprising equanimity, immediately moving on to the far more accessible project of pulling at the grass. He extracted a messy handful of roots, examined the dirt clod with fascination, and then held the green offering out toward Bethany.
“Thank you,” Bethany said with complete seriousness, accepting the handful of dirt and grass into her palm.
He appeared thoroughly satisfied with the transaction and immediately began looking for more grass to conquer.
Rosalind watched the child’s profile. There was a strange thing that occurred sometimes—not often, but sometimes in the quiet spaces of the day—when she looked at him and the entire world seemed to tilt slightly on its axis with the simple, breathtaking improbability of his existence.
The mere fact of him. That he existed at all, specifically. This particular, tiny human being possessing Lachlan’s stubborn jawline, her own father’s expressive eyes, and a fierce personality that appeared to be entirely his own, emerging daily in new, small ways that neither of them could have ever predicted.
She remembered thinking, months before he was born, that she would be profoundly frightened by motherhood. She had worried that the sheer scope of caring about something so remarkably small and so utterly undefended would feel exactly like the carriage ambush. Like raw exposure, like a terrifying vulnerability with no available castle protection. She had braced her soul for that familiar anxiety.
But it hadn’t felt like that at all.
It had felt, instead, like standing on solid bedrock. Like ground that went all the way down to the center of the earth.
“He’s going to walk soon,” Bethany noted quietly.
She was watching Alasdair pull at the roots. “He’s been looking at the ground differently these past three days.”
“How does a baby look at the ground differently?” Rosalind asked, amused.
“Like it’s a structural problem he’s currently working out in his head.” Bethany glanced up at her, her eyes bright. “He also gets that look entirely from Lachlan.”
Lachlan, who had appeared to be nearly asleep beneath the sun, murmured, “I heard that, Bethany,” without moving a single muscle.
Bethany simply smiled up at the clear sky, unbothered.
The picnic food was simple, rustic fare. Fresh, crusty bread, soft white cheese, dried winter fruit, and something the castle kitchens had sent up wrapped carefully in linen cloth that turned out to be small, sweet oat cakes baked with wild honey.
Lachlan had already consumed most of them before anyone else had even a single chance at the basket, claiming absolutely no knowledge of the theft when asked directly about the empty cloth.
Alasdair was given a small, broken piece of the oat cake, which he received into his hands. He managed the consumption with impressive focus, utilizing both hands and smearing a great deal of the honey directly onto his cheeks and chin.
Rosalind patiently cleaned his face with the corner of a damp cloth.
Later, when Alasdair had entirely exhausted his investigation of the immediate patch of meadow grass and had been shifted gently into Bethany’s lap, he became engaged in the grueling process of falling asleep. Rosalind lay back down on the wool blanket, her shoulder resting securely against Lachlan’s side.
The sky above them was that brilliant, particular blue that only appeared in the late afternoon at this time of the autumn season. Deep, clear, and infinitely far away. A lonely white cloud moved lazily across the upper edge of the eastern ridge, appearing to change its mind about its direction, and drifted slowly back toward the peaks.
“Kenina wrote to me,” Rosalind said softly, her eyes on the cloud.
“I ken. Tristan brought the runner’s letter up tae the keep this morning.”
“She and Peadar are coming north fer Michaelmas.”
“Aye,” Lachlan murmured, his hand resting in the grass. “Alpin and Mhairi are traveling with them too, and so are Hamish and Isobel, according tae Tristan.”
“All of them taegether again,” Rosalind said, a wave of warmth washing over her. “The Great Hall will be incredibly loud.”
She could feel the physical shift of his smile beside her without even having to turn her head to see it. She had learned that about him too. The small physical facts of his presence, the slight, comfortable shift in the air beside her whenever something landed correctly in his heart.
The distant burn moved steadily below them in the valley. The birds had gone wherever birds retreated to in the early Scottish evening. The high meadow grass bent in a sudden, cool breath of wind and then gracefully straightened itself against the light.
“My father would have loved this place,” she said quietly.
Lachlan went quiet for a long moment, the silence respectful. “The meadow?”
“All of it. The hills, the peace.” She looked up at the vast blue expanse. “He would have liked you, Lachlan. He had a particular way of knowing immediately which people were truly worth knowing in this world.”
She paused, a soft laugh escaping her. “He would have made you talk significantly more than you wanted to, and he would have been entirely unapologetic about the intrusion.”
“Most people make me talk more than I want tae,” Lachlan noted dryly.
“He would have been exceptionally good at it.”
She felt Lachlan’s large, rough hand find her fingers in the grass between them. It wasn’t a grand gesture, just a placement, a solid fact of her life, his long fingers aligning perfectly alongside hers.
“I ken,” he said simply.
And in those two short words she heard, as she had thoroughly learned to hear over their years together, the full and specific understanding of exactly what she meant. It was a language that contained not only the words she spoke, but the profound shape beneath them. The grief of her past, the absolute fact that the loss was bearable now, and the beautiful, undeniable truth that it was bearable here, in his arms.
A small, soft sound came from Bethany’s direction. Rosalind lifted her head slightly from the blanket to look.
Alasdair had finally lost his long battle with sleep. He was nestled securely in Bethany’s arms, his round cheek pressed flat against her grey wool sleeve, both of his small hands curled loosely into fists against his chest. His face was entirely smooth, all the solemn investigation and stubborn defiance of the afternoon gone somewhere deep behind his closed eyes.
Bethany met her eyes across the child’s head.
Rosalind looked back at her loyal friend for a long, silent moment. Two years ago, during the terror of the siege, she had held a single, fraying thread of Bethany in the dark of Graham’s tower. She thought sometimes about how thin that thread had been. She thought sometimes about how miraculously it had held against the weight of the world.
Bethany gave her a small, simple nod through the amber light.
I know, Rosalind.
Rosalind laid her head back down against the soft grass, her fingers laced tightly with Lachlan’s.
The ancient meadow held them securely. All four of them, bathed in the long, beautiful amber light of the setting sun, the stone castle visible on the ridge above them and the wild burn moving endlessly below. The sky above was enormous, calm, and going slowly, slowly golden at its edges as the afternoon completed its work and the evening began its patient, unhurried arrival.
She closed her eyes against the sun.
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Chapter One
1656, Croft Estate
“You’ve not even looked back once.”
Rosalind kept her eyes anchored to the mud-slicked road ahead, her spine rigid against the rhythmic swaying of the carriage.
A sharp jolt racked the frame as the wheels dropped into a deep, water-logged rut. She pressed her palm flat against the cold leather seat to steady herself, her fingers cramping with the effort to remain still.
“I looked back,” she stated, her voice sounding thin and brittle in the cramped space.
“You didn’t.”
“I did. Before you climbed in.”
Bethany made a soft, clicking sound with her tongue, a noise that was not quite agreement.
She was watching Rosalind with that quiet, pervasive intensity she always possessed. Her gaze not a stare, but a constant presence, like a single candle flame in a drafty room. She was close enough to notice the slight tremor in Rosalind’s jaw, the way her knuckles had turned as white as the frost on the windows.
Rosalind had made herself a jagged promise before the carriage door had finally latched shut. She had stood in the hollow entrance hall of Croft Estate one last time, wrapped in a silence that had lived there since the fever took her parents three weeks ago, and she had been very clear with herself.
Don’t look back. There is nothing left to look at.
It was a promise that felt easier to keep when she knew Bethany was weighing her every flinch.
“You could have taken longer,” Bethany said quietly, her voice softening with a sympathy that Rosalind wasn’t sure she could bear. “No one would have said a word, my lady.”
“The solicitor said the estate passes to my uncle’s management by the end of the month.”
Rosalind focused on a tiny, imaginary crease in the wool of her skirt, smoothing it over and over until her fingertips felt raw. “Staying longer would only have meant watching it stop being mine in person. I’d rather the road than the slow rot of waiting.”
Bethany said nothing.
That was one of the things Rosalind had always valued most about the woman. She knew when words were the wrong tool.
Outside, the grey morning smeared past the small window in jagged pieces. Low stone walls, bare fields, and trees stripped to their skeletal bones by the season, their black branches cutting up against a sky the heavy color of old pewter.
Father had loved this time of year.
He’d called it honest.
The land shows you what it truly is in winter, Rosie. No prettiness. No hiding.
The memory of his voice brought a sudden, hot prickle to the back of her eyes. She pressed her thumbnail deep into the meat of her palm, the sharp sting grounding her, and forced herself to stop thinking about him.
“How long until we reach the border?” she asked, her voice tight.
“Thomas said four days if the roads hold.” Bethany adjusted the heavy woolen blanket across her lap, her movements restless. “Five if they don’t.”
“They won’t.”
Bethany smiled faintly, a ghost of an expression that didn’t reach her worried eyes. “No. They won’t.”
The roads didn’t hold.
By the second day, the carriage wheels were grinding and screaming through mud thick enough to slow them to a walking pace, and the sky had dropped so low it seemed to rest heavily on the treeline.
The landscape had curdled around them without Rosalind quite noticing when the gentle southern rolls replaced by something older, darker, and less forgiving. Great hills began to crowd the road on both sides like slumbering giants, and the ancient forest pressed closer with every grueling mile.
She watched the light shift through the glass, turning flatter and greener, stripped of all warmth, and felt the first real coil of unease settle into the pit of her stomach.
It wasn’t grief. Grief, she knew. It was a heavy, familiar cloak.
This was different. Quieter. It was the primal feeling of being watched by something that hadn’t quite decided what to do with her yet.
Thomas brought his horse alongside the window on the afternoon of the third day. He was a careful man. Careful with his words, careful with his silences.
She could read the tension in his shoulders well enough to know that whatever he was about to say, he had been turning it over in his mind for miles.
“My lady.” His eyes moved restlessly across the thick treeline before they settled on her face. “We’re nearing the border territory.”
“I know where we are, Thomas.”
“Yes.” A long, heavy pause followed. “There’ve been incidents along this stretch. Over the past two years. Travelers. Carriages.”
Rosalind looked at him steadily, her heart beginning to drum a frantic rhythm against her ribs. “What kind of incidents?”
His jaw shifted, the bone prominent beneath his weathered skin. “The kind that don’t end well, my lady. I’d ask you to stay inside and keep the curtain drawn until I say otherwise.”
Bethany’s hand found Rosalind’s wrist beneath the blanket. Just her cold fingers, pressing once with a strength that spoke volumes.
Don’t ask him anything else.
Rosalind looked back at the trees through the gap in the curtain. They stood unnervingly still. No wind. No birdsong. Just the heavy, wet thud of hooves in the muck.
“All right,” she said.
She kept the curtain drawn, but it was a mistake. She was forced to watch Bethany’s face instead, which proved to be a worse torment.
Bethany had been frightened since yesterday and was doing a poor job of hiding the cracks in her composure now that Rosalind was looking closely.
The way she held herself too still, her breath hitching in her chest. The way she kept glancing at the window despite the heavy fabric, as though she could see through it if she only tried hard enough.
I should have noticed sooner.
The guilt moved through Rosalind’s chest, hot and sharp, before she could stop it. She had been so occupied with her own mourning, her own careful management of her shattered life, that she had not truly thought to look at the woman sitting three feet away from her.
She was still spinning in those thoughts when Thomas let out a sudden, jagged shout.
The carriage lurched to a violent stop so suddenly that Rosalind was thrown forward, her hand catching the wooden frame with a painful crack. Bethany’s arm caught her other side, anchoring her.
Outside, the horses were erupting in a high-pitched, panicked scream that set her teeth on edge.
She was out of the carriage door before any of the guards could tell her to stay inside.
Twenty yards ahead, a carriage sat skewed across the narrow forest track like something thrown there by a giant, careless hand.
One wheel had been sheared clean off and lay spinning in the mud. The door hung open at a broken angle, the wood splintered outward as though something had hit it with terrifying force from the inside. The contents had been brutally scattered across the road. A trunk hacked open, fine clothing beaten into the filth, and a single woman’s shoe lying on its side thirty feet from anything it should have been near.
Recently.
Her breath caught in her throat. The mud around the wreckage was still weeping water, the tracks fresh.
This happened recently.
“My lady.” Thomas was suddenly at her shoulder, his hand white-knuckled on his sword hilt. His voice was very controlled, too controlled. “Get back in the carriage.”
“We can’t go around it.” She could already see the truth of it. The forest pressed the road on both sides with no gap, no room for a wheel to pass. “And we can’t move it.”
Half the heavy frame had collapsed inward. She turned to him, her grey eyes sharp with a sudden, desperate focus. “We go on horseback.”
He didn’t argue. She could see him calculating the same grim reality. He had likely been calculating it from the moment the wreckage came into view.
“Release the horses,” he told his men, his voice snapping like a whip. “Me lady and the maid ride. We move now.”
The men worked with a frantic, silent speed. Rosalind turned back for her satchel. Bethany was already there, pressing the leather strap into her hands, her face arranged very carefully into a mask that wasn’t quite fear.
“Bethany.”
“We’ll be fine.” Her maid said it like a command, a decision rather than a reassurance, and Rosalind felt a rush of something sharp and tender at once.
She pressed Bethany’s hand once, a silent promise, and said nothing because there was nothing useful to say. She went to the horse Thomas had brought around, her boots sinking deep into the mire.
She was halfway into the saddle, her muscles straining, when the trees moved.
It wasn’t the wind. It wasn’t the flight of an animal. It was a branch displaced with heavy purpose. A shadow detached itself from other shadows with the slow, deliberate patience of a predator that had been waiting a long time for its meal.
Oh.
She thought, with a clarity that surprised her even as her heart stopped.
This is how it happens.
Then the shouting started, and the road came apart in a chorus of steel and screams.
They came from both sides. A dozen men at least, breaking from the treeline with rusted blades already drawn and hungry.
Thomas’s guards turned to meet them, and for one suspended, horrific second, Rosalind watched it from the back of the shying horse with the detachment of someone who could already see the end.
Too many. Too practiced.
Her men were good, but they hadn’t expected this ambush, hadn’t had the time to form a line, and the men pouring out of the trees moved like they’d done this a hundred times before.
Her horse screamed and shied sideways, nearly unseating her. She held on, her fingers clawing into the mane.
“Ride!” Thomas bellowed, his voice straining against the clash of metal. “My lady, ride.”
But the road was blocked in both directions. She saw it in the same instant he did, because his voice cut off mid-command as a second wall of men appeared ahead of them, and the word died in his throat.
She hit the first man who reached her horse across the face with her heavy satchel. He barely flinched, his eyes cold and empty.
She tried to wheel the horse away, but there was nowhere to go, and then rough, calloused hands were on her arm and her waist, hauling her down with brutal force.
She fought them without stopping, without making it easy, kicking and clawing at any skin she could reach. But there were too many hands, and they were too practiced, and her arms were pinned behind her back before she’d managed anything useful.
“Bethany!”
The shout tore out of her, raw and desperate.
Across the chaos, she caught one fleeting glimpse. Bethany struggling between two massive men, her mouth open, fighting with a ferocity Rosalind had never seen.
Then something rough, dark, and foul-smelling was yanking over Rosalind’s head, and the world disappeared into black.
Old, abrasive cloth against her face. The suffocating smell of soil, stale ale, and horse sweat. Someone’s iron grip on her arms steered her forward, off the road and onto what felt like steep, uneven ground.
She called for Bethany twice more. The third time, her voice broke in a way that frightened her more than the blindfold did, and she forced herself to stop.
She counted her footsteps instead, because it was the only thing she had left in the dark. She counted, and she kept her breathing even against the panic, and she held onto the one thought that felt like a foothold.
Stay calm. It is the only weapon you have.
By the time she lost count, the road was far behind her, and the hungry silence of the forest had swallowed every sound she’d made.
Chapter Two
1656. Dungeon/ Main Auction Hall.
“Dinnae look at them,” the girl beside her whispered, her voice a dry raspy thread in the gloom. “If ye look at them, it might provoke them.”
Rosalind looked anyway. Her heart hammered a frantic, uneven rhythm against her ribs, but she refused to let her gaze falter.
Bethany pressed her back against the door instead, as though the few inches of wood and iron between her and the corridor might matter, and slid down until she was sitting.
The dark was absolute.
“What do you think they want?” she asked. Her voice came out steadier than she felt.
“I think,” Bethany said carefully, “we should not speculate on that yet.”
Yet. The word sat between them, thorned and unspoken.
“All right,” Rosalind said.
Silence. The drip of the water. The far-off sound of boots on stone, two floors up at least, that came and went and came again.
“Bethany.”
“My lady.”
“Are you frightened?”
A pause that lasted exactly long enough to be honest.
“Yes,” Bethany said. “Very.”
Rosalind exhaled, something loosening in her chest at the plain admission. She had been more afraid of the performance of calm than of her own fear, she realized. Of having to manage the maid’s terror while quietly drowning in her own.
“Good,” she said. “So am I.”
She heard Bethany shift. Then the warmth of her shoulder found Rosalind’s in the dark, pressed close, and stayed there.
***
They marked time by the meals.
Watery broth, shoved through a low hatch in the door twice a day—or what Rosalind estimated was twice a day, once in what felt like morning, once in what felt like late afternoon. She counted each one. She scratched marks into the damp mortar with her thumbnail where the wall met the floor.
One. Two. Three.
She and Bethany talked, because silence was worse. They talked about small things. Bethany’s sister in Derbyshire, who kept chickens and wrote letters Bethany claimed were boring but always read twice. The estate cook’s recipe for gingerbread that Rosalind had been trying to extract for two years. Bethany’s very strong opinions about the inferior quality of northern wool.
They talked about her parents once, briefly, and then by mutual and unspoken agreement did not again.
At night, Bethany slept pressed against Rosalind’s back, her solid warmth the only real thing in a dark that had no edges. The faint smell of rosewater still clung to her hair. She put it in every morning, every single morning, and she had done it the morning they’d set out from the estate and Rosalind had not thought to notice until now, trapped in a cell that smelled of rot and stone, when it felt like the most important detail in the world.
Don’t lose this, she thought. Pay attention. Notice her.
She fell asleep telling herself that.
***
On the third morning, she woke to silence.
Not the ordinary silence of sleep. The too-large silence of an absence.
She lay still for a moment, waiting for the sound of Bethany’s breathing, the small shift of her weight, anything. She told herself she had simply woken first. That Bethany was there, just quiet.
Then she turned over.
Her hand found the floor. The stone held a faint, fading warmth in the shape of a person.
She was already at the door before she had decided to move, her palms flat against the wood, the iron cold against her face.
“Bethany.” Her voice cracked immediately, and she pressed harder against the door as though force might carry the name further. “Bethany!”
Nothing.
The corridor beyond was utterly silent.
She hit the door with the flat of her hand once, a dull, swallowed sound that didn’t carry. She hit it again. Again.
“Bethany!” The word tore out of her. “Bethany, answer me, please—”
She stopped. Pressed her forehead against the wood. Breathed.
Then, much softer, in a voice she wasn’t sure she meant to speak aloud at all.
“Please. Please. Let me out. Someone, please—”
The corridor gave her nothing back but her own echo.
She stood at the door for a long time after that. Long enough for her breathing to slow, for the frantic hammering of her pulse to subside into something dull and steady. She turned back to the cell. The indentation in the dust where Bethany had lain was already cold.
She went and sat beside it anyway.
She did not mark a scratch in the mortar for the morning meal when it came. She simply sat with her back against the wall and her hands in her lap, and stared at the empty floor, and breathed, because breathing was the one thing left she could control.
I don’t know what happened to her.
The thought arrived with a terrible clarity and then settled into her chest like something that had decided to stay.
I don’t know, and I have no way of finding out.
She pressed her thumbnail into her palm until the pain sharpened into something useful, and then she did the only thing left to do.
They came for her without warning.
It was with a sudden, violent crack of the bolt being thrown back, and then the door swinging inward so fast she barely had time to get to her feet before a hand closed around her arm and hauled her into the corridor.
“Move.”
The man didn’t look at her. That was the first thing she noticed. He stared straight ahead, his jaw set, his grip on her arm impersonal and absolute, the way a man might carry a crate he’d been told to shift.
The corridor was lit by a single torch bracketed high on the wall, and after so many days of total dark, even that thin, guttering light was enough to make her eyes flood and sting. She blinked hard, trying to force them to adjust, stumbling once on the uneven stone.
He didn’t slow down.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked. Her voice came out raw. Two days since she’d spoken to anyone, and her throat had tightened around the disuse. “I demand to know where—”
“Quiet.”
He said it without heat. Without interest. It was worse than anger would have been.
She looked at the corridor as they moved through it—memorizing it as much as her warped thoughts could. The number of doors. The direction of the draft. A narrow staircase rising to the right, another descending to the left. He took neither, pulling her straight ahead through a low archway and into a passageway that widened gradually as the stone gave way to plaster, and the plaster gave way to something almost civilized.
She could feel the floorboards beneath her feet now. The smell changed. She could smell tallow candles, pipe smoke, and beneath both of those, the warm press of many bodies gathered in an enclosed space.
She could hear a low murmur ahead. Voices. A crowd.
Her pulse lurched.
Oh God. What is this place?
He stopped before a heavy velvet curtain, its dark fabric pooling against the floor. On the other side, the sound of the crowd sharpened slightly with the hum of people waiting for something.
He thrust her through a gap in the curtain’s edge into a space behind it that was dim and close.
Five other women were already there, ranged in a loose, miserable line along the back wall. Young, all of them, or young enough. Their faces wore the emptiness of people who had long since exhausted their tears and arrived at something harder on the other side of them.
They looked at her when she entered. Then they looked away.
Rosalind pressed herself against the wall, her breathing shallow. She looked at the curtain. The velvet was thick, but not thick enough—she could see the faint movement of light through it, the flicker of hundreds of candles, and through the gap where it didn’t quite meet the adjacent panel, a sliver of the hall beyond.
She looked through it and her stomach dropped.
The hall was large and well-appointed, its walls paneled in dark wood, its floors laid with a rush-strewn oak that had been swept clean. Men were filing into rows of chairs arranged in a neat, formal semicircle facing a low stage with a platform that was raised perhaps two feet from the floor, with a podium at its center. They were not rough men. They were not the type she had imagined. Fine coats. Silver buckles on their shoes. One wore a wig, powdered and carefully dressed. Several were conversing in the easy, unhurried tones of men who met like this regularly, men who saw nothing unusual in the evening ahead of them.
What is this place?
The thought flashed a second time, and then immediately answered itself in the slow, terrible way of a thing she had already known and simply refused to finish knowing.
She let the curtain fall back.
Her hands were trembling. She pressed them flat against her thighs and looked at the other women.
The one nearest her was perhaps sixteen. Dark hair, a dress torn at the shoulder and never mended. She was staring at the floor with a concentration that had nothing to do with the floor.
“What is this?” Rosalind asked. She kept her voice low, though her throat was closing around the words. “What are they doing out there?”
The girl’s eyes cut sideways. White-rimmed, and sharp with something that might have been pity.
“Ye ken what this is,” she spat, her voice hard.
Rosalind swallowed and turned to look around.
From beyond the curtain, a single man’s voice rose above the murmur. It was assured and smooth, with the practiced carry of someone accustomed to performing before a crowd. Rosalind heard the scrape of chairs being settled, the last rustle of an audience taking its place.
Then the voice began, and she stood very still, and she listened.
Lineage. Age. Temperament.
Each word landed in her chest like a stone dropped into still water.
In excellent health. A gentlewoman’s upbringing, well-suited to a discerning household.
She looked at the stage through the curtain’s gap. At the podium. At the first woman being walked out from the far side, her chin down, her hands bound in front of her. Then at the man at the podium who did not look at her face once.
At the slow, polite lift of hands beginning in the rows below.
Oh.
The word formed in her mind with a crystalline, terrible precision.
Oh, no.
Her legs wanted to give way, but she struggled until they obeyed her and remained locked. She would not fall in this room. Not in front of these women. Not in this place that had clearly been designed to reduce her to less than a person.
The bidding was quiet. That was the obscene part. It was not frenzied or loud or brutish. It was measured and businesslike, the voice at the podium rising and dipping with a professional cadence she recognized from the estate solicitor, from the cold, unhurried reading of terms and values and transfers of property.
That is what this is.
She pressed her thumbnail deep into her palm and let the pain anchor her.
A transfer of property. And I am the property.
From somewhere beyond the curtain came the sharp, clean crack of a gavel.
The first woman was led away through a side door. Rosalind watched her go.
She didn’t make a sound. Not one sound.
She understood then that the silence was not resignation.
It was the other side of every scream already spent.
The handler moved along the line. Five women. Then four. Then three.
Rosalind kept her eyes on the door at the back of the room, her breathing even, her feet exactly where they were. The guard had let his weight shift to his left hip again, his chin dropping toward his chest. Bored. Tired.
Now.
She moved. One slow, careful step toward the shadow at the edge of the wall—and a hand clamped around her upper arm so fast she didn’t hear him coming.
Not the handler. A different man entirely. He had been standing so still she had counted him as part of the wall.
He walked her back into her place in the line without a word. Didn’t grip hard enough to bruise, didn’t look at her face. Just corrected her position, set her back where she’d been, and went still again.
The casualness of it was worse than a blow would have been.
She thought about screaming. She could do it—one raw, jagged sound to tear through the performance happening on the other side of that curtain. Her chest was already full of it.
Then she thought about the woman taken through the velvet three minutes ago. The way she had gone without making a single noise. Not because she hadn’t wanted to scream, but because she was long past the point where it would change anything.
One woman left ahead of her now.
The voice beyond the curtain was building, the bidding quickening toward its close. She could hear the rhythm of it—the call, the counter, the pause, the call again, each one tighter than the last. Her jaw ached from clenching.
The woman in front of her was grabbed by the shoulder and shoved through the velvet.
The curtain swung back into place.
Rosalind was at the front of the line.
The dust from the curtain’s folds reached her nose. Behind her, the handler’s weight shifted. His fingers found her shoulder, digging in.
The gavel cracked.
She closed her eyes.
Then someone in the hall screamed. It was not a scream that came from fear. This was filled with rage, sharp and ugly. The next moment, the low murmur of the room broke apart all at once into shouting.
The curtain lurched toward her.
A man came through it backward, his face split open above the eye, and he hit her handler with his full weight. The grip on Rosalind’s shoulder lifted.
She moved sideways, away from the back door that was already blocked by guards piling into the corridor. Until her back found the cold stone wall. Steel rang out close. She pressed flat and kept her breathing steady.
Just as she was beginning to think she might be safe for the time being, the floor shook.
The explosion came as a single hard crack of force that punched through the wall to her left. Plaster dropped from the ceiling in a white, choking fall of dust. Two candles went out. The corner went dark.
From beyond the curtain, the screaming changed pitch. The composed crowd was gone. She could hear chairs overturning, boots hammering stone in every direction, men shouting over each other with no one in charge anymore.
Someone shouldered in from the corridor and hit the dark-haired girl full in the chest. She went down hard on the stone.
Rosalind drove her shoulder into the current of bodies, got her hand under the girl’s arm, and pulled her up.
“The back door. Go. Go now.”
The girl stared at her, eyes wide. Then something behind them sharpened. She nodded once, got her feet under her, and ran.
The curtain tore free of its rail with a screech of iron.
The hall poured in.
Rosalind was shoved sideways, then forward, then sideways again. Her shoulder hit a pillar and the breath left her in one hard gasp. Her feet left the floor for a second as the crowd pressed in from every direction and her grip on the pillar slipped.
Don’t fall.
She got both hands back against the stone and held on. If she went down in this, she was not getting up.
Do not fall.
She held. The bodies broke around her and kept moving and she stayed, searching the smoke ahead for anything fixed—a wall, a door, anything that wasn’t moving.
That was when she saw him.
He was standing still.
Every other person in the room was running. He wasn’t. Dark auburn hair, jaw hard, eyes moving through the smoke with a steady, deliberate focus that had nothing of panic in it. He had made this happen. She was certain of it the moment she looked at him. He had set every piece of it in motion and was not afraid of a single second of it.
He’s looking for someone.
The crowd surged. The pillar was gone from under her hands.
Her knee hit the floor before she knew she was falling. Her palms scraped the grit. Boots churned the ground around her head, and the auburn-haired man disappeared behind the crush of bodies.
Get up.
Her hands were already moving.
Get up right now.
She pushed.
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