Chapter 29 #2
Iona lowered her gaze just enough to suggest submission without fully giving it. “And if I come?”
“Then I will ken ye have finally learned the cost of crossing me.”
Iona gave the smallest of nods. “Find, but first ye will tell me why ye have done all of this. Why ye have tormented me.”
“Why? But surely, by now, ye must know why.”
“Humor me,” Iona said cautiously.
“A man’s sins are never his to carry,” Noor said, almost gently. “They fall to his wife. To mend. To silence. And to ensure they never rise to shame him again.”
“I do not understand—”
“He was mine!,” Noor hissed sharply, quickly, before she reigned her anger back in. “Whatever he did or whoever he touched, it me duty to see it corrected. It is a wife’s duty— it was me duty— to never allow her husband to be remembered for weakness.”
“So, that is why ye have spent yer years, hunting and almost killing off women and bairns who ye believed had been yer husband’s past lovers?”
“I did what had to be done!” Noor said with a raised voice.
Iona’s anger nearly boiled over as well, “Ye had nay proof!”
“I had proof enough.”
“But I never lay with him. Jamie is Frederick’s daughter.”
“I was never worried about ye, ye werenae his… typical whore. Nay, ye were my fixation because ye let them all go. Ye ruined everything. But now, I will have justice.”
“There is nay justice in this,” Iona said softly, her head slightly bowing.
Noor’s breathing had increased quite rapidly, her teeth were showing savagely, her fingers bent in an almost claw-like shape, and Iona knew she had her right where she needed her. Emotional.
“I will come.”
The answer pleased Noor almost too much. Iona could hear it in her voice. She had not merely taken the bait. She had swallowed it whole and now thought the line invisible.
The angry redness in Noor’s face paled to a more neutral shade, and her features softened with concerning immediacy into something close to satisfaction. “Good,” she said, almost shakingly.
For one terrible instant, the woman’s hand lifted as though she meant to touch Iona’s cheek. The gesture was so familiar, so falsely gentle, that Iona had to keep every muscle in her body from recoiling. Noor seemed to notice the effort and enjoy it.
“There now,” she murmured. “That was nae so difficult.”
Then she turned and moved back toward the brighter part of the corridor, toward the hall, toward the company she meant to rejoin with all the grace of an innocent guest at dinner.
Iona did not follow immediately. She stood where she was, one hand pressed flat against the stone beside her, and let herself take one full breath. Then another.
It is working.
The thought steadied her as much as anything could. Noor believed herself in control. Noor believed Frederick knew nothing, or at least not enough. Noor believed Iona still stood alone inside her own fear.
Good.
By the time Iona reentered the hall, her pulse had slowed enough that she trusted her face again.
Archer looked at her once, only once, but whatever he saw in her expression sharpened his attention immediately.
Frederick stood a little apart from River, listening to something she said with polite focus that fooled no one who truly knew him.
The moment his gaze found Iona, she felt the force of it.
She crossed the room carefully.
“I should like to retire early,” she said, projecting just enough that Archer would hear if he cared to. “It has been a long day.”
River at once answered with warmth. “Of course. We would nae keep ye.”
Noor did not speak. She only watched.
Frederick’s jaw shifted once. “I will walk with ye.”
There was no refusing that without making too much of it, so Iona inclined her head and allowed him to guide her from the hall.
They said little at first. The corridor swallowed the sounds of the room behind them in slow degrees until it was only the two of them and the hush of torchlight along the walls.
When they reached their chamber, Frederick closed the door and turned to her at once.
“What happened?”
He had not phrased it as a question meant for denial. He had seen enough in her face already.
Iona moved farther into the room, her hands oddly steady now that the hour itself had begun to take shape. “She took the bait.”
His expression darkened instantly. “What did she say?”
“That she is keeping the women in the old lower holding near the east tower.”
Frederick went still.
Iona watched the anger move through him without noise, settling first in his shoulders, then in the set of his mouth, then in his eyes. It was not wild anger. That would have frightened her more. This was colder. Sharper. The sort that promised action.
“And?”
“She told me to come tonight,” Iona said. “Alone. So nay one will suspect her.”
He looked at her for a long moment, then crossed the room in two strides and caught both her arms, not hard, but firmly enough that she had no choice but to look directly at him.
“Ye have nothin’ to fear,” he said.
The words struck her more deeply than they ought to have, perhaps because they came from him in exactly the tone she had once trusted without question. Perhaps because some part of her still wanted to. Still needed to.
“She thinks I am by meself,” Iona replied. “That is what makes this possible.”
“She is wrong.”
“Aye.”
His grip eased, though his hands did not leave her. “Lennox, Archer, and four of his best men will be behind ye from the moment ye leave this room.”
“I ken.”
“Iona.” His voice dropped lower. “Ye daenae go one step farther than planned. Ye shouldnae attempt anything foolish. And if there is even the slightest turn in it, ye let us move.”
There it was again. Command brushing too near care. It ought to have annoyed her. Instead, with so much waiting in the next hour, it only made her chest tighten.
He is worried.
That truth slipped through her before she could stop it.
Not dutifully watchful. Not merely responsible, but worried.
And though she had decided, had sworn to herself only yesterday, that she would step back from wanting more of him than he had offered, she felt desperation rise all the same.
Sudden. Fierce. Entirely without dignity.
What if this is the last quiet moment?
The thought came and undid whatever distance she had meant to keep. Before she could reconsider, Iona rose onto her toes and kissed him.
For a breath, Frederick did not move. Then his hands came up fully, one at her back, the other at the nape of her neck, and he kissed her back with a force that was not rough but carried all the strain of the day beneath it.
The kiss deepened almost at once, not into passion exactly, but into something hungry and pained and far too honest for either of them to disguise.
Iona clung to him for one helpless moment, letting herself feel the heat of him, the steadiness of him, the way his breath shifted when she pressed closer. This was a mistake, she knew. It changed nothing. It promised nothing. Yet she could not stop herself from taking it.
When they parted, it was only because he drew back enough to look at her.
His thumb brushed once over her cheek. “Come back to me.”
The words almost broke her. She nodded instead of answering, because she did not trust her voice. The departure itself was quiet. Deliberately so.
By the time Iona slipped from the side door of O’Douglas Castle, the night had settled fully over the grounds.
The air was colder now, damp with the coming of mist, and the moon gave only a weak, veiled light through the clouds.
She had drawn her cloak close and pulled the hood low enough to shadow her face, though she knew perfectly well it was not concealment that would protect her tonight.
It was the men behind her.
Frederick. Lennox. Archer. Two of Archer’s guards and two of Frederick’s own. All of them keeping far enough back that Noor’s watchers, if she had any, would see only what they were meant to see.
Iona walked alone, or that was the appearance of it.
But every few steps, when the wind shifted or the gravel changed underfoot, she caught the faintest sign that the others remained there.
A distant footfall. The soft click of harness checked quickly.
The brief shape of movement swallowed again by the dark.
She was not alone anymore.
The thought gave her strength enough to keep moving.
The path toward the old lower holding curved away from the main grounds and down toward the east side, where the land fell into harsher shadow and the older stones of the estate rose more bluntly from the earth.
Iona knew this sort of place too well. Built for storage once, perhaps for livestock, perhaps for keeping unruly things where guests would not see them.
Repurposed later because old walls asked too few questions.
Her hand closed inside the folds of her cloak.
Noor believed she had come here to surrender. The thought nearly made Iona smile.
Tonight, if it came to it, she would put her own hands around that woman’s fine white throat and end every last shadow she had cast over other women’s lives.
Iona kept walking, her steps sure despite the dark, her pulse steady now for the first time all evening.
Let her try.