Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“Ye think ye’ve won,” William said. Breathing hard, voice cracking at the edges.
“Ye think because ye have the clan and the castle and that woman that ye’ve won somethin’.
But ye’re wrong. There are others who ken what was taken from me.
Others who’ll carry it forward after I’m gone. And this will never truly be done.”
He had a second blade, smaller, the kind kept in a coat lining—something a man carries so long he forgets it’s there until he needs it. He held it in his left hand and was already moving, the arm rising quickly and low, with nothing left to lose in the motion and everything left to prove.
Noah moved into the angle instinctively, not thinking. It was how he’d been trained before he was old enough to understand why. His left hand grabbed William’s wrist, and his right shot forward.
His dirk, retrieved from the stones in the scramble, without knowing he’d done it, went in below the ribs.
William’s breath left him.
The stable went entirely quiet.
Noah held the grip for one second. Two.
He felt his brother’s weight shift against him. Not fighting, not resisting anymore, just leaning, like a man leans when the support holding him up has given out. He carefully lowered him to the ground, laid him against the cold flagstones, and did not look away from his face.
William looked up at him. His expression in those final moments was something Noah had not expected. Not rage, nor the grinding resentment that had lived in his face for as long as Noah could remember, but something closer to the absence of both. His mouth moved.
“All… this… should … have been. Mine,” William said.
Then nothing.
Noah stayed crouched over him for a long moment.
He had spent twenty years managing William. Keeping him at arm’s length, giving him the edges of territory, and maintaining a guilt that was not entirely guilt and not entirely pity but had lived in the same part of his chest as both.
He had told himself it was what family meant, that it endured even when it had stopped deserving to. That there would always be more time. Another conversation. Some version of this that ended differently.
He looked at William’s face, still now. The grinding resentment that had lived in it for as long as Noah could remember was finally, completely gone. He felt nothing he had words for yet. He suspected he would, later, in the dark, when there was nothing else to occupy the space. But not now.
He straightened up, stepped back, and stood quietly for a moment—just that, just standing—and then he turned.
Ava was at the stable entrance. She had not gone inside. She stood very still with her arms at her sides and looked at him with an expression he couldn’t entirely understand. Not fear, not shock, something more complex than either. Her cheek was darkening along the bone where William had hit her.
He crossed the courtyard toward her.
“Are ye all right?” he said.
“Aye.” She did not look away from his face. “Are ye?”
He considered this honestly. “I’ll tell ye when I ken.”
She nodded as if this was a reasonable answer, which was one of the things he had come to understand about her. She accepted the truth of something even when it was not yet clear. She did not expect him to be further along than he was.
“Esther,” he said.
“She’s inside with Elliot. She doesnae ken.” Ava paused. “She ran the whole way, Noah. I could hear her footsteps from across the stable.”
“I ken.” Something tightened in his chest. “I was at me desk when she came through the door. She couldnae get the words out at first.”
“What did she say?”
“He’s hurtin’ Ava. Uncle Noah, he’s hurtin’ Ava, please come.” He looked at the bruise on her cheek. “He put his hands on ye.”
“Aye.”
“And I came through that entrance, and ye were standin’ there with his mark on yer face, and he was still there with ye.” He held her gaze. “I went a little mad.”
“I noticed,” she said, with something that was almost her usual dryness, and almost, almost not.
He looked at her. At the bruise, her steady eyes, and the particular way she was standing—not putting on a facade, but actually having one.
The specific kind of courage that belonged to a woman who had grown up learning not to flinch and had made it entirely her own.
He took her arm gently. "Come away from here. "
He led her through the side gate and into the narrow passage along the castle wall, away from the stable and the men who were wrapping a burial blanket around William's still form. He stopped when the sounds behind them had faded enough.
He turned to face her.
He ran a hand over chee. He looked at the bruise once, briefly, then at her eyes.
“I want ye to marry me,” he said.
The courtyard went quiet in a different way.
Ava stared at him.
He watched the surprise flicker across her face, and beneath that surprise, the thing that was not surprise at all.
That had been lingering there longer than either of them had spoken it, then the expression of a woman whose first instinct was yes, but was now gathering every counterargument she had.
“Noah.”
“I mean it.”
“I ken ye mean it,” she said it with the frustrated patience of someone who wished the problem were simpler.
“But I cannae. I’m nae noble-born. I have nay family worth mentionin’, nay standin’, nay name that means anythin’ to anyone in this county.
I swept tavern floors. I wandered onto yer land with someone else’s child and a change of clothes. ”
“Ye came onto me land, and ye saved Esther. And then ye stayed, and ye built somethin’ here. That’s what ye did.”
“And I’ve nay trainin’ for what a laird’s wife is required to be. The clan would never accept it. There are expectations, obligations, things I daenae even ken to ask about.”
“I’m the Laird.” He said it plainly. “The clan follows what I decide. That’s what the title means.” He stepped closer to her. “And I’ve decided.”
“Just like that?” Her chin had come up slightly, the way it did when she was digging in.
“I’ve been decidin’ for days,” he said. “I’ve just been waitin’ until I could say it plainly.”
He looked at her, at the bruise, at her hands, at the set of her jaw that meant she was fighting herself and not him.
“I love ye, Ava. I’ve been trying nae to name it for longer than I should have.
The way ye argue with me. The way ye are with Esther.
The way ye tell me hard things plainly when it would be considerably easier to let me stay wrong.
” He paused. “The way ye stood in that stable today with his mark on yer face and held yer ground without flinchin’. The way ye’re standin’ here right now.”
His voice was steady. “I want ye beside me. I want ye in this castle because ye belong here, nae because I hired ye, nae as a favour to anyone. After all, ye belong here, and ye ken it and so do I.”
Ava was very still.
He could see the yes in her.
He could also see the old argument moving through her eyes.
“It is complicated,” she said.
“Aye.”
“The clan will talk.”
“They’ll get used to it.”
“I daenae ken how to be a laird’s wife.”
“Ye’ll learn. Ye learn everythin’ fast, it’s genuinely irritatin’.”
Something moved at the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile. Close enough that he felt it.
“I’m serious,” she said.
“So am I.” He held her gaze. “Set aside what ye’re supposed to want and what makes sense on paper. Tell me if ye want it. Just that.”
She looked at him. He could see her doing so. The honest assessment she applied to everything, not just for show, but truly considering it. The castle behind him. The title. The weight of a life she hadn’t been raised to. Esther was inside, waiting, not knowing what had just happened.
“I’ve been afraid of wanting this too much. In case it wasnae real. In case ye changed yer mind.”
“It’s real.”
“Ye say that now.”
“Ava,” he said her name the way she had once told him Esther needed things said. Plain, direct, no softening. “I am nae going to change me mind. Hear that as a fact, nae a reassurance. A fact.”
She held his gaze for a long moment, long enough for him to feel the full weight of her attention when she was making a truly important decision.
Not performing hesitation. Actually reckoning.
“Do ye love me?” he said.
“Aye,” she said quietly. “I do. I have for...” She stopped. Looked at him directly. “A while. Longer than I admitted to meself.”
“Then marry me.”
One more moment, long enough for him to feel it—the full weight of what she was being asked to face.
Then something in her face shifted. The argument left her expression.
Not defeated, but resolved—like a woman who has carefully weighed something and arrived at her answer, done carrying the burden of her decision.
“Aye,” she said. “All right. Aye.”
His mouth came down on hers.
Something slower and more deliberate, with both her hands finding his coat and the cold courtyard air around them, weighted by the full weight of the morning, yet none of it seeming to matter at this moment.
She kissed him back. Her hands gripped the front of his coat, and she gave it back to him without the small internal argument she usually felt herself conducting. Just her, present and committed, nothing held back.
When they pulled apart, her eyes were bright, and she looked at him with a genuine smile.
The one that reached her eyes before she’d decided to allow it. The one he had been working for, he realised, to earn since the moment she’d walked into his life with his niece on her hip and had looked at him like he was something to be assessed before she made up her mind.
She had made up her mind.
“Ye’re still an impossible man,” she said.
“Aye.” His thumb moved carefully across her cheekbone, just below the bruise. “Ye’re going to marry me anyway.”
“Apparently.” She looked at the cut along his jaw, and her expression settled into the warm, exasperated practicality that was, he had come to understand, simply how she looked at him when she had decided he was hers to deal with. “Come inside. Let me see to that.”
“I’m fine.”
“Noah.” The way she said his name, that particular combination of warmth and patience and absolute intolerance for nonsense, settled in his chest the way it always had. The way it always would. “Come on.”
She kept one hand in his and led him toward the door.
He went without argument.
For once in his life, without a single argument.