Page 32 of Fierce Highland Longing

Herhandwentinsideher coat.

I understood what was happening, and I did not blame her for it. She had a man with a bar of iron on one side of her and a liar on his knees in the water on the other, and only one of us was offering her a way out of that cave.

“Give it to him and walk up the passage.” I struggled to push each word out.

She took it out. I saw my own hide in the open air for the first time in what seemed like forever.

Then she turned away from Callum Brodie and ran to me.

He said something and took a step toward her. The water was at his shins. He was a second too slow. She was already down on her knees in front of me.

She put it into my hands. My hands were open on my thighs and could not close, so she closed them for me, one and then the other, and held them shut around it.

“It’s yours.” She had her face right at mine. “It always was. Go.”

She said it in front of a witness. Out loud, in a room with another man in it.

Nothing happened.

I knelt there in the water with my life in my hands and waited for the catch, the way you wait for a wave you have heard and cannot see yet.

The lamp on the rock. Her face. The cold coming up my thighs. Callum standing over the pair of us with the bar in his fist. I had no idea what to do with it.

For years I have been told this did not happen. The last person who put a thing in my hands freely had it sold within the week. I stood on a shore and watched the lid come down, and I had built every hour since on the certainty that nobody did this twice.

The water came up over my thighs and into my lap. Somewhere above us a stone went in the roof, and the sound of it came down the passage and went out again. She was still holding my hands shut. Her mouth was moving. I could not hear one word of it.

There was a part of me that would not open no matter who was knocking. I sat inside it and waited for the trick.

Nothing happened.

And then it did.

The iron came off me all at once.

The end of pain. Nineteen years of a wall between me and every single thing, and the wall was gone, and the first thing I got was not joy—it was noise. The sea through forty feet of rock. Every stone in that passage. Fish out past the mouth, and the shape of the ground under them, and the storm sitting on the water above the cliff, all of it arriving at once through a door that had been shut since the year she sold me.

I lifted my head up.

Then the change had me. It was not a shimmer. It was a body taking itself apart at high speed and putting itself together on theother side of something, and it hurt, and it happened in the time it takes to fall over.

I went into the water.

And the water knew me.

The passage let go somewhere above us, and the sea came rushing down it.

Callum had three seconds.

He did not go for me, and he did not go for her. He went for the wall—waded at it with his hands out through water at his chest, nineteen years and his brother and every night of it, reaching for a thing that has never opened for anybody. The books went off the shelf behind him and into the black without him turning his head.

Then the roof came off the second bend and the water went dark and the lamp went out. He was not there anymore.

Out is down and through. Forty feet of flooded passage and then the mouth, and past the mouth the whole North Sea in a storm.

I was in it. I was three strokes from all of it.

All those years.