Page 37 of Promised to the Cursed Laird

Slow, she reminded herself. Whatever this is tae him, ye'll go slow with it.

She knocked once against the frame.

"Aye." His voice wasdistracted, as he bent over something at his table.

She pushed the door open and found him with a ledger spread before him, quill in hand, the fire burning low and gold behind his shoulder. Something in her chest eased at the ordinary sight of him—laird at his work, sleeves pushed back, a frown of concentration rather than anger on his face for once.

"I've brought yer gown back," she said, crossing the room, "and something else I found folded intae it. I thought ye should have it returned properly."

She set the gown over the back of the chair opposite his table, and then, more carefully, laid the small square of embroidered cloth on the surface between them, smoothing it once with two fingers so the worked initials sat facing him, plain and unmistakable.

"It has yer mother's mark on it," she said. " I found it packed in with the wool. I didnae think it should simply disappear back intae a drawer without yer kenning it was found, so⁠—"

She stopped.

Whatever she'd expected, be it surprise, a brief smile, some quiet story offered in exchange for the return of a small keepsake, was not what crossed his face. The change was immediate and total, his whole expression closing like a shutter over a window, the warmth gone from his eyes so fast and so completely that she found herself, absurdly, glancing at the fire to see if it had somehow dimmed with him.

He did not reach for the cloth. He looked at it, and then looked away from it, his jaw setting in a line she recognized from the council-chamber corridor, the anger he carried like armor, except this had none of that day's heat in it. This was colder. This looked more like grief wearing anger's clothes.

"Leave it there." His voice was flat and quiet. He was already looking back down at the ledger, though she'd have wagered every coin she owned that he wasn't reading a word of it.

"I didnae mean tae—" She faltered, uncertain now, the silence in the room pressing against her from every side. "Have I done something wrong? I only thought ye'd want it returned, rather than left with the servants."

Nothing. He'd gone back to the ledger, quill motionless in his hand, his eyes fixed on a page he plainly wasn't reading, and the refusal to look at her was somehow louder than anything he could have said aloud.

He willnae even meet my eyes.

She stood there a long, uncomfortable moment, the fire cracking softly in the grate, and felt the helplessness of having walked, with the best of intentions, directly into a room she hadn't been given a map for.

"I'll leave it here, then," she said finally, quiet, nodding at the small folded cloth still sitting on the table between them. "I only wished tae see it back where it belonged."

He simply nodded. Not a word, not a glance, only the tight, controlled stillness of a man holding something shut by sheer force. She waited a moment longer than was comfortable, giving him every chance to say anything at all, and received nothing but the low pop of the fire and his own too-careful breathing.

She left.

She walked the corridor back toward her own chamber with her arms wrapped around herself against a cold that had nothing to do with the stone, turning the moment over and over, trying to find the shape of what she'd stumbled into.

He'll tell me of a raided keep without flinching. He'll speak of his own father's unhappy marriage on a windswept battlement, plain as reciting a lesson. But a scrap of embroidered cloth with his mother's initials worked intae the corner, and he cannae even hold my eyes.

What happened between them, that even the memory of her comes back tae him like a wound still open.

She had no answer for it. She only knew, walking away from that closed, cold room, that whatever Isobel MacKinnon's marriage had truly been, whatever her son had witnessed and never fully spoken of even on a night he'd offered her nearly everything else, it had left a mark on him deeper than anything she'd yet seen him carry, and that she had, without meaning to, pressed her thumb directly against it.

He hadn't slept. He'd sat a long while after she'd left his study the night before, the kerchief still lying where she'd smoothed it flat on the table.

He hadn't touched it, hadn't moved it, had only stared at his mother's initials worked into that small corner of cloth until the fire burned down to nothing and the candle guttered and he was left in the dark with the familiar weight of having failed someone who'd only ever meant him kindness.

Four words. She stood there with my mother's own hand-stitching, trying tae give me something gentle, and I gave her three words and a shut door.

He'd wanted to go to her. He'd stood outside her chamber past midnight, hand raised to knock, and hadn't, because he didn't yet know how to explain what closed over him whenever his mother's memory surfaced without first admitting things he wasn't certain he could survive saying aloud, even to her. Especially to her.

So he'd said nothing further that night, and this morning he'd come to her door with an apology half-formed and no better than the three words he'd already failed her with.

She'd looked at him with careful, guarded eyes and agreed to ride with him toward the border stone anyway, and he'd told himself, mounting up in the cold grey yard, that the ride itself might do what words hadn't.

It would give them both room, away from the walls and the council and his own closed doors, to find their way back to whatever had been growing between them before he'd broken it with his silence.

I'll make it right on this ride, he thought, watching her settle into her saddle beside him, her spine straight, her eyes not quite meeting his. I'll find the words somewhere between here and the border stone, even if I havenae found them yet.