Page 40 of Auctioned to the Cruel Highlander
Isobel came to Ava’s side, warm and immediate in her quiet way, as he made for the door. He stepped out, gave them one last look, and then left, the door clicking shut behind him.
Silence settled over the chamber for a moment, and Ava stood in the middle of it, feeling the strange growing weight of her own answer.
She had now been given a way out twice. And twice she had refused it.
That truth rested differently inside her than anything that had come before. She was no longer only the woman who had been chosen at an auction, or the bride who had nearly been killed at her own wedding, or even the wife who had been kissed into silence a few minutes ago.
She was the woman who keptchoosingto remain.
And somewhere beneath the silence, beneath Isobel’s proximity and the sound of her father’s retreating footsteps, she wondered if she had just made the wrong choice.
Twice.
CHAPTER 13
For the next few days,Ciaran focused on work.
After the bloodshed at the wedding, the quickest way to ensure everything went back to normal was to focus on work. The study had been put back into order after the chaos, though the castle itself still carried the quieter signs of what had happened.
His men moved with sharper purpose in the passageways. The doors opened and closed with more care, and the voices dropped when they passed the room. As if everyone understood that some wounds had been dealt with in public and others were still being attended to in private.
Hector sat across from him at the desk with ink, sand, and sealed paper lying ready between them.
“We send it today,” Ciaran said.
Hector nodded. “Aye.”
There was no reason to delay. Jack Scott was dead. News like that needed to be sent properly before it got skewed by gossipmongers and people who only heard half of the story and decided to make up the second half.
Isla’s father would hear what had happened from Ciaran’s hand and no other person. That much was owed. If not from affection, then from order.
Ciaran kept his tone stripped of all but necessity as he spoke. “Write that Jack Scott died at me hand on the day of me wedding.”
Hector’s quill scratched across paper.
“Daenae make it fancy. That man deserves to hear everything plainly and simply,” Ciaran added. “Daenae dramatize what is unnecessary.”
“I ken how to write a clean sentence, Brother,” Hector huffed, looking up at him and rolling his eyes.
Ciaran ignored that.
He stood by the window for a moment, then turned back and headed to the desk. The room smelled of wax, old wood, and fresh ink. A room built for land matters, levies, agreements, and the dull, useful bones of rule.
He preferred it that way.
These things might be minor, but he liked having places like this. They made his brain alert and gave him avenues to think about these matters over and over again.
His eyes fixed on Hector’s hand.“Write that nay blame is laid at his father’s feet, nor at the feet of his clan, for the actions of a dead man who brought ruin by his own will.”
Hector looked up, only briefly. “Aye?”
“Aye.”
It was important that something like that was properly clarified. One man’s obsession had already bled too far across too many years. Ciaran would not feed it a fresh road now that Jack was dead. There was no need to widen an unnecessary feud after something had been settled.
Hector wrote as fast as he could, and when he was done, he read the sentence back. Ciaran corrected a word, then continued to speak.
Suddenly, he paused. The pause lasted so long that Hector looked up at him again.
