Page 72 of The Merciless Laird
What Gunnarsson had actually done was stand in front of two royal delegations and tell the world the marriage wasn't what it claimed to be. Then he'd offered a public celebration and called it an answer, and now he was going to stand in front of his entireclan and the King's observers and present his wife as evidence of an alliance that the sheets would have proven simply and quietly and without fanfare.
The window he'd opened himself wasn't going to close in time.
Callum started walking. His boots were loud on the frozen ground, deliberate and unhurried, the sound of a man who had already done the difficult part of the work, which was the thinking, and had only the doing left.
He had work to do.
The coast was waiting, and so was everything else.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
She’d gone to the library because it was quiet.
The rest of the keep hummed with the frantic noise of preparation. Boots thudded faster than usual on the stone stairs. Voices carried from the sweltering kitchens. In the Great Hall, heavy oak tables scraped across the floor as the space was rearranged for the gathering.
Matilda needed a place the clamor couldn't reach, a sanctuary where the air didn't vibrate with expectation.
The library sat at the end of the west corridor. It smelled of ancient leather, woodsmoke, and the deep, persistent chill of a room that rarely felt a hearth's heat. Three lairds' worth of books crowded the shelves, their spines cracked, and gold-leaf lettering faded to ghosts.
She’d claimed the high-backed chair by the fireplace as her own. She built the fire herself, watching the sparks catch andthe small flames lick the dry wood, and lit the candles until the shadows retreated. She sat with her book and let the silence settle over her like a heavy cloak.
She didn't know how long she’d been reading when the draft found her.
It snuck through a hidden gap in the heavy shutters, pushing through in one cold, purposeful gust. The candles guttered and died in a swift, merciless sequence.
The amber glow only came from the dwindling fire, replaced by a suffocating, slate-colored grey.
Matilda went rigid. Her fingers dug into the vellum pages of her book until the edges bit into her skin.
The fire is still going. There is still light. The room is nae dark. Ye are fine.
She stared at the pulsing orange embers in the grate. She kept her hands flat, forcing her palms to stay still against the leather cover, and dragged air into her lungs in slow, jagged pulls.
She had the flint in her pocket. She could feel the hard, familiar weight of it through the thick fabric of her dress. It was a weight she'd carried for eight years, a charm against the darkness. Her fingers twitched ready to strike, an old reflex before her mind could finish the thought.
She did not reach for it.
She looked at the nearest wick, a thin thread of smoke rising from the dead candle, and willed her arm to move. Her hands stayed locked on the book.
The thought arrived without her permission, a quiet, honest truth that echoed in the hollow of her chest.
Because ye want tae see if ye can hold until he lights them.
Now that the thought had taken root, she could not pull it out.
One. Two. Three.
The grey pressed in from the corners of her vision. The room was still there. The dark bulk of the shelves, the silhouettes of the books, but theothergrey was closer. The one that lived in the dark, the one that had been haunting her for eight years, knowing exactly which part of her soul was the most fragile.
She counted. She breathed.
Four. Five. Six.
She was twenty-three years old. She was in a Norse keep on the Isle of Mull. The door was not locked. No one was coming to hurt her.
She heard his footsteps in the corridor before the latch turned.
She knew his gait now, the weight and pace, the way his boots landed with a solid thud on the stone. Something deep in her chest unknotted two full seconds before he appeared.
