Chapter 16 #2
At the white knuckles on the windowsill. At the line of his jaw. At the particular quality of stillness in him that was not calm. Had never been calm, she understood now, but was what he did instead of falling apart. She saw the cracks in the armor, the depth of the wound he never let anyone see.
Six years of that, she thought. Six years of standing at this window watching that boy breathe. A sudden, sharp wave of empathy nearly undid her.
She picked up her satchel.
"I'll be in the courtyard," she said. She turned and walked out, her feet feeling strangely light.
The rain had started while she was inside. The sky was a uniform, heavy grey, weeping over the stone.
She knew it was raining before she reached the door. Heard it on the stones beyond the entrance, smelled it on the cold air coming through the corridor gap. She pushed through the door, walked into it, and let it hit her. The first touch of it made her gasp.
Cold. Immediate.
The shock of it on her overheated face, on the back of her neck, on her hands that had been working over steam for forty minutes and were still flushed with it. She felt the steam being washed away, replaced by the biting Highland winter.
She walked to the wall on the far side of the yard and put her back against the stone and tipped her head up. The rough granite bit into her shoulders through her shawl.
Rain hit her face. Her eyes closed. She drank in the cold, letting it numb the frantic energy of the morning.
Her hands were shaking. She watched them, the fingers twitching with a fine, uncontrollable tremor.
She had known that would happen. She always knew, in the room, that the shaking was waiting, that it arrived after. That the body held it in reserve until the work was done and then presented the bill. The reaction was a violent, physical release.
She had learned not to be frightened of it. It was not fear. It was the body spending what it had kept back.
She let it spend.
Her chest rose and fell. The air was sweet with the scent of wet earth and ancient rock.
The rain came down steady and cold on the courtyard stones, on the walls, and on the frost that was still on the north-facing surfaces.
The smell of it was clean and cold and outside and she pressed the back of her head against the stone and breathed it in.
The world felt washed clean, for a single, fleeting moment.
He's all right. He's sleepin'. He's all right.
The door opened. The sound of the latch was a sharp crack in the rain.
She didn't need to look. She felt the change in the air before he even spoke.
"Ye said he was gettin' better." Anthony's voice was harsh, the roughness of a man who had been holding something in a clenched fist for forty minutes and had not decided what to do with it yet. He sounded like he was falling apart and fighting it with every word.
He crossed the yard and stopped two feet from her. He loomed over her, a dark shadow in the mist.
Rain darkened his shoulders. He hadn't taken a cloak. The water ran in rivulets down his face, caught in the ridges of his scar.
"He is gettin' better," she said. She kept her head against the wall, eyes open, rain on her face. "This is what better looks like sometimes. The body tries harder before it can do less. The lungs strengthen, and then they test the strength." She met his gaze, her own eyes steady and unblinking.
"Ye push too hard." He stepped closer, his shadow falling over her.
She looked at him then. She felt a flare of defensive pride rise in her chest.
"I push exactly as hard as the treatment requires," she said. "Nay harder."
His jaw tightened. "He couldnae breathe." The words were a low, desperate snarl.
"He can now."
"Because of ye." He said it like an accusation and a statement of fact at the same time. "Because ye were there. What if ye hadnae been there?" The vulnerability in his voice was a raw, bleeding thing.
"I was there."
"What if something worse happened?" He was shaking now, a fine, violent tremor she could see in his hands.
"Anthony." She held his gaze through the rain. "I was there." She reached out, her fingers hovering in the cold air between them.
He looked at her. The rain came down between them and on both of them. His jaw was tight, and his hands were at his sides. He was wet through the shoulders now and had not moved back. The intensity of the silence was deafening.
"Ye've turned this house upside down," he said. Quieter. The harshness still in it, but different now, the roughness of something that didn't know what it wanted to be. His eyes were dark with a desperate, new hunger.
"Aye," she said. "And ye didnae hate it." She felt her heart give a heavy, answering thrum.
Something moved in his face. The mask finally broke.
He kissed her.
Not gentle. Not careful. His hands came up. One to her jaw, one to the wall beside her head. The impact was a collision of pure, concentrated need.
His mouth came down on hers with the force of forty minutes of helplessness and six years of standing at windows and the specific and precise terror of watching the boy go grey at the lips. The kiss tasted of salt and rain and desperation.
She felt all of it come through the kiss like a current, fierce and uncontrolled, nothing of the managed restraint that had governed every moment between them until now. It was a violent surrender.
She froze for one heartbeat. The shock of his heat against the cold rain was staggering.
Then she kissed him back.
Her fingers caught his tunic. Both hands, fistfuls of wet wool. She pulled him closer, her body arching into his as the cold of the wall vanished.
She pulled him in because the cold of the rain and the shake in her hands and the fear that had been waiting behind the work for the last forty minutes needed somewhere to go. This was the only place she could find peace.
This was where it went, into the kiss and his hands and the solid unmovable fact of him against her in the rain. The weight of him was a comfort she hadn't known she needed.
He deepened it. His tongue traced her lip, a slow, searing claim.
His hand moved from the wall to the back of her neck, and she felt his fingers in her wet hair.
She felt the breath go out of her and not come back for a moment.
She felt, underneath all of it, the particular and dangerous warmth of something she had not been feeling for weeks, arriving all at once.
The fire in her blood was hot enough to defy the storm.
She shoved him. The movement was sudden, a desperate reflex.
Both palms flat on his chest, hard, and he went back a step. Not far, he was too large to move far with a shove, but back, the distance between them restored, cold air replacing warmth. She stood there, gasping, her chest heaving.
She was breathing hard. Rain on her face. She did not look away. The anger was a cold, sharp blade now.
"Ye told me ye couldnae wait for me to leave," she said. Her voice was a low, trembling accusation.
He was still. His chest rising and falling. Rain darkening his hair. He looked at her with an expression she couldn't name—a mix of shame and a raw, naked want.
"Ye said that." She kept her voice level through the unevenness of her breathing. "Ye stood in this keep and ye said it plain. Cannae wait." Her hands dropped from his chest. "So how dare ye touch me as though I belong here." The pain in her voice was a physical weight.
His jaw moved. He seemed to be searching for words that wouldn't come.
"I willnae be somethin' ye reach for when it suits ye," she said. "I willnae be the woman ye pull close when ye're frightened and push away when ye're proud." Her eyes were blazing, green fire in the mist.
Her hands were shaking again. Not the post-work shake this time, the other kind, the kind that came when anger and something rawer ran together and couldn't be separated. "Daenae cage me with one hand and claim me with the other." The words landed like stones in the quiet yard.
The rain came down between them.
He looked at her. At her face, her wet hair, her hands at her sides. He looked at her as if he were seeing her for the first time, and the last.
She watched him draw breath. Watched his chest expand, watched the set of his jaw, watched the flicker behind his eyes that was not nothing.
That was not the flat composure he carried in the hall and the study and the yard, that was something older and more specific, the look of a man who had heard a truth land in a place that was already damaged.
He stood there, broken and magnificent in the rain.
He did not argue. The silence was his final answer.
She had wanted him to argue. She had stood here in the rain and said those words and waited for him to push back, to say, Ye're wrong. That isnae what I meant. The hope in her chest died a slow, agonizing death.
Anything that meant he was in this room with her and not on the other side of a wall she couldn't see or reach.
He stepped back. The movement was a final closing of the door.
Cold. Still. The Dragon, back in his armor, the expression closing over itself the way it always closed, the window shuttered from the inside. The man who had just kissed her was gone, replaced by the Laird of McArthur.
Silence.
Nothing.
She looked at him for one more moment. Her heart felt heavy, a cold stone in her chest.
"Aye," she said, quietly. To herself. "That is the problem." She turned away, the rain blinding her.
He turned.
He walked back across the yard toward the keep door. Even. Unhurried. The way he walked everything, as if the stones had been placed specifically for his stride and the whole world had agreed in advance to get out of his way. He didn't look back.
The door closed behind him. The thud of the wood was final.
She stood in the rain.
Her hands had stopped shaking. The cold had reached her shoulders now, through the shawl, through the wool beneath, down to the skin. She shivered, a deep, rhythmic racking of her whole body.
She tipped her head back against the stone wall and looked up at the grey sky and the rain falling from it and felt the ache in her chest settle into the specific shape of something she was going to have to carry for a while before she could put it down. The loneliness was a vast, echoing space.
“And so the Dragon fooled the Fox…”
She said it quietly, to the rain and the courtyard and the empty space he'd left when he walked away. The words felt like a cold, final benediction.
Then she pushed off the wall, straightened her shawl, and went back inside. Her feet were heavy, her heart heavier still.