Page 6 of The Merciless Laird
The silence lasted exactly three seconds.
"Ye're very calm fer someone whose castle is under attack," he said.
"I'm furious," she retorted. "I'm simply also curious." She held his gaze. Something crossed his face that was a mix of amusement and some respect. It was also the look of a man recalculating.
"Who are ye?"
His response did not come immediately, and she had the unsettling impression that he was deciding something. Not about whether to tell her, but about something else entirely.
Then the sounds outside shifted again. Closer. Purposeful.
"Later," he said, and his hand closed around her arm. It was not rough, yet his grip was certain in a way that her body recognized as different before she'd finished deciding how she felt about it.
"Right now we need tae move. Fast."
She moved. She told herself it was because he was right about the timing.
CHAPTER THREE
"Move. Stay close."
He said it quietly, the way men said things when they weren't asking.
Matilda moved.
The corridor outside the storage chamber was chaos. Guards pushing forward, voices crossing over each other, torchlight jumping off stone walls thick with smoke.
The attackers were retreating, she could tell by the sound of it, the way the violence was becoming more ragged and less organized, men running rather than fighting.
The warrior kept himself between her and the open courtyard without making a show of it. Every time the corridor narrowed he was simply there, slightly ahead, slightly to her left, blocking the angles without being asked.
She noticed. She said nothing about it.
Her knee screamed with every step and she was doing a reasonable job of hiding it until she wasn't, and then his eyes dropped to her leg for exactly one second before he looked away again.
"I'm fine," she said, before he could speak.
"Ye said that already."
"It keeps being true."
He said nothing. But he slowed his pace by half a step, and she hated that too.
They came out into the courtyard and she made herself look at it plainly. The fallen men, the blood dark across the stone, the torches burning too bright over all of it.
She had learned a long time ago that looking directly at something terrible was better than glimpsing it sideways. Sideways was what gave you nightmares.
She was still looking when her father came through the far gate.
"Matilda." His voice carried the sound of a man who had been frightened and was presenting relief as anger instead.
He pushed through his guards and took her face briefly in his hands, scanning her the way he always did. The full inventory, top to bottom, checking for damage. "Ye're all right. Tell me ye're all right."
"I'm all right, Faither."
His eyes moved past her to the warrior, and something passed between the two men. Recognition, she realized, immediate and certain, no introduction required. Her stomach dropped.
He knew him. He knew exactly who he was.
