Chapter 28 #2
As Frederick dismounted and reached to help Iona down, he felt the tension in her through the brief contact of his hands on her waist. She did not pull away. Neither did she lean toward him. The distance between those things was beginning to feel like its own sort of punishment.
Archer spoke with his steward before turning back to them. “Rooms have been prepared. We speak more after supper.”
Frederick inclined his head.
Around them, servants moved to take horses and baggage, doors opening wide to admit them into the keep. It looked, for all the world, like the beginning of an ordinary visit between neighboring houses.
Nothing about it felt ordinary at all.
Frederick closed the chamber door behind them, and for a brief moment neither of them spoke.
The room was comfortable in the way all noble guest chambers seemed meant to be.
A fire had already been laid and lit. Their trunks had been brought up and set neatly by the wall.
Fresh water stood ready in a basin near the screen, and heavy curtains had been drawn partway across the narrow windows against the coming dark. It should have felt welcoming.
Instead, Iona stood just inside the room with her gloves still on, her back too straight, her heart too restless.
Frederick noticed at once.
Of course he did.
He turned to face her fully, one hand still resting on the latch, his expression quiet, wary almost, as though he knew she had not asked him here merely to stand in silence.
“Iona?”
She took a breath and forced herself not to look away.
“I do nae want to go into supper carrying this between us,” she said.
Something in his face shifted at once. Not alarm. Something more sober than that.
“Aye,” he said. “Then speak it.”
That, more than anything, made it easier.
Iona moved farther into the room, pulling off one glove finger by finger, only to give her hands something to do. “I was hurt,” she said plainly. “Nae only because ye shouted. Though I did nae care for that either.”
Frederick’s mouth tightened slightly, but he did not interrupt.
“It was the way ye spoke to me,” she continued. “The way ye made it sound as though I was something to be commanded. Something to be overruled because ye are me husband and that should be enough.”
He let out a slow breath through his nose.
“I ken,” he said.
She looked up sharply. “Do ye?”
“Aye.” He crossed the room then, though not so quickly that it felt like pressure. Only enough that she did not feel as though she were speaking across a field. “I kent it the moment the words left me mouth. I only did nae know how badly they had landed until I saw yer face.”
Iona swallowed, the memory of it still uncomfortably fresh. “It made me feel foolish. Foolish for thinking we were… more equal than that.”
His gaze sharpened slightly. “We are.”
“But ye see, that is nae how it felt.”
“I ken,” he said quietly. “And that was me failing, nae yers.”
The answer disarmed her more than any defense might have. She had prepared herself, at least a little, for argument. For stubbornness. For another slow circling of the same wound. Instead, he stood before her and took the blame of it without trying to lessen what he had done.
Iona looked down at the glove in her hand. “I did nae wish to punish ye with silence.”
His brow lifted faintly. “Well, ye did a fair job of it all the same.”
A breath of laughter escaped her before she could stop it, small and unwilling but real. It eased something between them at once.
“I know,” she admitted. “And that was childish of me. But I needed ye to ken that I was nae only angry. I was also disappointed.”
The word seemed to strike deeper than the rest. Frederick’s eyes did not leave her face. “That is worse.”
“Aye,” she said softly. “It is.”
He was quiet for a moment, his expression difficult to read, though not shut away from her. Thinking. Measuring his words in that careful way he did when something truly mattered.
“Iona,” he said at last, “I was wrong to speak to ye as though obedience were the thing I wanted from ye. It isnae.”
She searched his face. “Then what is?”
His jaw shifted once, not with reluctance, but with the effort of saying something exactly as he meant it.
“I want ye safe,” he said. “And because I want that too much, I sometimes try to force the world into a shape where I can guarantee it. That is what happened. It does nae excuse the way I spoke, but it is the truth.”
The honesty of it settled into her more deeply than any polished answer could have.
“And if I disagree with what ye think is safe?” she asked.
His mouth curved, though there was little humor in it. “Then, apparently, I am meant to listen better than I did.”
That drew another small laugh from her, easier this time.
He reached for her then, slow enough that she could have stepped away had she wished. His fingers closed lightly around her wrist, not restraining, only asking.
“I daenae want coldness between us,” he said. “Nae now. Nae with what lies ahead.”
“I daenae want it either,” she admitted.
For a moment, they simply stood there, close enough now that she could feel the warmth of him, the steadiness of his presence, and with it the familiar ache of wanting to lean nearer and not yet doing so.
It was Frederick who broke first, though only just.
“Have ye any more grievances to lay at me feet before supper,” he asked quietly, “or may I kiss me wife?”
Iona felt her mouth soften before she meant it to. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether ye mean to do it properly.”
His eyes darkened slightly. “Aye,” he said. “I mean to do that.”
She let the glove fall onto the bed beside her and stepped close enough that her hand brushed the front of his coat. “Then ye may.”
The kiss was brief, but no less meaningful for that.
He touched her as though he meant to reassure rather than unravel, his mouth warm and certain against hers, one hand at her waist, the other settling lightly at the back of her neck.
Iona kissed him back at once, feeling the last of the stiffness between them give way beneath that simple, familiar intimacy.
When they parted, it was only by a little.
“We should change,” she murmured.
“Aye,” he said, though he did not move at once.
She smiled. “Go on.”
He pressed one last kiss to her brow, then stepped back toward the adjoining chamber set aside for his things. “I will go down first.”
“I shall follow shortly.”
He gave her a final look, one she could not entirely decipher, then disappeared behind the screen and out through the inner door.
Once alone, Iona let out a slow breath and pressed her fingertips briefly to her lips. Then she turned toward her gown and began to change.
By the time she left the chamber, the corridor beyond had grown quieter with the falling evening. Torchlight burned low along the walls, turning the stone a warm gold in some places and a deeper, more uncertain brown in others. She had meant only to walk downstairs and join the others.
Instead, halfway to the stair, something caught in her chest. It was the smell first. Damp stone and heated rushlight. Nothing more than that. Nothing uncommon in an old Highland keep. And yet the moment it reached her, her steps slowed.
The O’Douglas corridor here narrowed before turning toward the main stair.
The ceiling dipped slightly lower overhead.
The torch brackets were set farther apart, leaving pockets of shadow between each pool of light.
On one side, three doors stood closed, identical in their dark wood and iron latches.
Iona went still. She recognized this shape.
Not this exact passage, not this castle, not these walls.
But the arrangement of it. The architecture of control.
Narrow halls that funneled movement. Doors that could be watched from one end.
Light placed just so, not to comfort, but to expose whoever passed through it.
She had walked corridors like this before with a bucket in hand and her eyes lowered, praying not to be noticed and yet never truly escaping notice.
Her throat tightened.
For one terrible moment, she was back there.
Not at the O’Douglas Castle, where her husband was, but back at MacFarlane Keep.
Back in the place where every corner seemed to listen.
Where the walls themselves had felt complicit in what they concealed.
Where Lady Noor moved through the keep like a blade hidden in silk, never raising her voice, never needing to.
A glance had been enough. A question asked too sweetly. A silence held too long.
Iona’s palm pressed flat to the stone beside her without her fully meaning to do it.
She could almost hear it again. The echo of keys. The muffled sound of weeping she had once convinced herself must have come from some other part of the keep, some other sorrow, anything but the truth. The truth had been worse. It had always been worse.
Her breath came shallower. Noor has not changed. The certainty of it moved through her with quiet horror. And neither has the danger.
That was the part that mattered now. Not memory for its own sake.
Not fear returning merely because stone and shadow resembled what they once had.
This place was different. These people were different.
Yet what waited beneath it all remained the same.
The same hunger for control. The same ease with cruelty.
The same willingness to hide wickedness behind rank and manners and a lady’s smile.
Iona closed her eyes for the space of one breath, then opened them again. When she began walking once more, it was more slowly, but with greater purpose. She was not being dramatic. She was not imagining dangers where none existed. She knew what Noor was. She had lived too close to it not to know.
And when she reached the foot of the stairs at last and saw the light from the dining hall spilling warm across the floor, she went toward it with that knowledge settled more firmly than ever inside her.