Page 124 of The Merciless Laird
She stopped.
Breathed.
One. Two. Three.
The smoke was real, not a memory, not a trigger. It had heat, it had weight, and it carried the stinging, sharp smell of burning oil. She catalogued it with the clinical precision Ivar had taught her. Fire to the east, passage running west toward the lower hall, two exits if the far door was unblocked.
Then, the darkness pressed.
Not the darkness of the room, but theotherthing. The shadow that lived in the marrow of her bones and knew exactly where to find her.
She felt it arrive. The familiar, suffocating tightening in her chest, the world shrinking until it was the dimensions of a locked room. The cellular memory of stone walls and no light and the absolute knowledge that no one was coming.
She pressed her palm flat against the cold stone.
One. Two.
She was twenty-three years old. She was in a stone passage on the Isle of Mull. The door was not locked. And she had a dagger on her left hip.
Three. Four.
She pushed off the wall and moved forward.
Five. Six.
The smoke thickened as she went deeper, the light from the yard dying away. Her breathing was fast and shallow, a jagged rhythm in the dark, but she was managing it. She was the one in control.
Seven. Eight.
She heard footsteps, heavy and deliberate, emerging from the smoke to her right. She turned, the dagger already in her hand before she’d finished the pivot, the grip locked the way Ivar had taught her. Thumb along the spine.
The mercenary lunged out of the grey. Matilda went forward.
Nae backward.
Forward, into the danger. She drove from her back foot, moving inside his reach before he could adjust his lunge. Her arm drove upward with every ounce of her weight.
The strike landed true. The man let out a choked sound and went down.
She stood over him, her heart thundering against her ribs. The dagger felt like it was part of her arm. She was shaking. A violent, full-body tremor of a woman who had just realized she was capable of the unthinkable.
She was upright. She was forward.
She breathed.
Nine. Ten.
The smoke shifted in a sudden cross-draft, and a shape emerged. Not lunging, walking. He walked toward her without breaking stride, his footsteps heavy and even on the stone. He didn't reach for a weapon or quicken his pace to close the gap. He kept coming, his gaze fixed on her face as if she were a prize he had already won and was merely stepping forward to pick up.
She knew him before the smoke cleared enough to see his face.
The width of those shoulders. The arrogant tilt of the head, chin forward, eyes raised. The posture of a man who believed he was the largest thing in any room. She had memorized that silhouette at fifteen and spent eight years wishing she could burn it from her soul.
Callum MacDougall stepped out of the smoke and looked at her.
He looked at the dying man on the ground. He looked at the dagger in her hand. He looked at her face.
And then he smiled, and it was the smile she remembered. The one that said the board still belonged to him, that her resistance was merely part of his plan.
