Chapter 10
The next day, Callum avoided the east wing all morning.
It was deliberate. Calculated. He gives himself reasons that sound responsible, inventory work, a call he needs to make, a leaking window in the north tower that won’t fix itself, but the truth is simpler and harder to face.
He doesn’t trust himself around her.
Not after the Keir’s private music room.
Not after the heat and the loss of control and the way his hand had known exactly where to go, as if his body had already made decisions his mind hadn’t sanctioned. And the touch of her was like a heat he’d never experienced.
So he stays busy. He stays grounded. He keeps to stone and wood and practical things that don’t look back at him with eyes full of challenge and fervor and something far more dangerous.
Guilt.
He tells himself Isla MacLaren will be doing what she always does, playing, searching, digging where she shouldn’t. He tells himself that if he stays away long enough, the edge will dull. The castle will settle. She will settle.
None of it works.
He hears the piano just after noon.
The sound threads through the stone corridors softly at first, barely there, the way fog rolls in without announcing itself. One note, then another. No flourish. No opening declaration. Just sound, hesitant, spare, almost reluctant.
Callum stops where he is, fingers still on the latch of a supply closet, his breath caught halfway in.
This isn’t the music from the night before.
That had been defiant. Angry. A woman staking her claim with both hands and daring the world to argue.
This—
This is something else entirely.
It doesn’t build the way a performance does. There’s no arc meant for an audience, no clean progression, no satisfying resolution. Notes drift, collide, break apart. Silence stretches too long between phrases, as if she’s forgetting to breathe.
Callum’s chest tightens.
This isn’t technique.
This is grief.
Not the public kind, the kind she’d worn at the funeral with her spine straight and her voice steady. This is private. Unfiltered. A sound made when no one is meant to hear.
And yet—
Here he is. Longing to be near her. Longing to make certain she’s all right.
He tells himself he’s only passing through. Only checking that the staff have kept the wing secure. Only making sure she isn’t doing something that will get her hurt.
It’s a lie he doesn’t bother to believe.
A chord lands wrong, dissonant and sharp enough that Callum winces.
She doesn’t correct it.
She stays there, fingers pressing down as if daring the sound to exist.
Keir used to do that. It drove him crazy, but it was the man’s way of expressing his discontent.
Late at night, when the world stopped asking him to be charming, those nights, the music didn’t swagger. It wandered. It faltered. It circled wounds Keir never named aloud.
Callum stands in the corridor outside the music room and lets the sound sink into him, cold and unavoidable.
Once again, knowing he shouldn’t go in, but unable to stop himself, Callum slips inside the room. Like the great pianist she is, she’s practicing.
He counts the beats the way Keir taught him, one, two, three, four, trying to turn music into math, emotion into something manageable. It doesn’t work. The rhythm keeps changing, slipping out from under him. Isla isn’t counting for anyone. She isn’t trying to stay neat.
Her left hand drops into a low, repeating pattern that feels like footsteps on stone. Not running. Not approaching. Just pacing. The right hand answers with a thin, high line that sounds like a voice calling into a room that won’t answer back.
Callum feels it in his teeth.
The music isn’t pretty. It isn’t meant to be. It is brutally honest in a way that makes him want to look away.
He remembers Keir once saying, “If it sounds too beautiful, you’re lying.” Then Keir had laughed like it was a joke, but he’d played the next chord hard enough to make the keys protest.
Isla plays like she has the same rule carved into her bones.
A pause opens, wide and dangerous, and Callum thinks she’s done. Then she comes back with a phrase so simple it almost hurts: three notes, repeated, each time slightly altered, as if she’s changing the question because the answer refuses to appear.
Here, there had been this castle, this music room, and a man who played like he was trying to outrun his own ghosts. Now the ghost he was trying to outrun sat at the piano, expressing her emotions in ways her father would have applauded.
The man who came for him is the same man who never came for Isla.
It doesn’t make sense.
The music shifts again, and Callum’s chest tightens with sudden, unfair anger at Keir, at Isla, at himself. Because the sound proves something Callum doesn’t want to admit: Isla didn’t inherit money. She inherited the part of Keir that hurts.
How does a man leave this?
How does a father walk away from a child capable of this kind of truth and never look back? Never sit in the back of a hall and listen. Never stand in a doorway and let her playing wreck him.
That isn’t the man Callum knew.
Keir was many things: reckless, selfish, addicted to chaos, but he wasn’t indifferent. Indifference made him cruel. It made him restless. It made him drink.
So why?
The question digs in deep, sharp as a splinter.
Callum takes one step inside the music room, then stops. If he doesn’t stop, he’ll do something stupid.
He’ll say something that can’t be unsaid.
He’ll touch her again.
He’ll forget she’s here to take the castle from him.
The music shifts, lower now, stripped down to a handful of notes, spaced wide. It sounds like waiting. Like standing at a door that never opens and telling yourself you’re not waiting at all.
Callum’s jaw tightens.
He doesn’t announce himself. Doesn’t clear his throat. He listens until it hurts.
Isla sits at the piano, posture imperfect for once, shoulders tense, head bowed slightly as if the instrument itself is too heavy. Her bright red hair is pulled back hastily, strands escaping near her neck. She’s not dressed for an audience. She’s dressed to survive the day.
Her hands move slower than he’s seen them before, deliberate, careful, like every note costs something.
The melody turns into something spare and jagged. No prettiness. No comfort. Just the sound of a wound being pressed until it admits it exists.
Callum swallows.
He’d thought she was steel.
Now she’s the fracture.
The music thins until only single notes remain. In the gap between them, Callum can hear her breath. He can hear the soft scrape of the bench when she shifts. He can hear the castle settling around them.
Then the line resolves, not into peace, but into stubbornness. A decision made through clenched teeth.
Isla’s shoulders lift.
She knows he’s there.
Her hands fall from the keys, hovering a moment before lowering to her lap. She sits very still, listening not to the piano but to the room.
“You can stop pretending,” she says, voice tight. “I heard you this time.”
Callum steps fully into the room.
“I was drawn to the music,” he says.
She laughs once, sharp and humorless. “That’s what everyone says.”
He stays near the door like it’s a line he shouldn’t cross.
Isla turns on the bench to face him. Her eyes are bright, not with tears, but with the effort of holding them back.
“What do you want?” she asks.
Callum hesitates. The truth feels dangerous.
“The music,” he says finally. “It didn’t sound like… last night.”
“Last night was anger,” she snaps. “This is what comes after.”
“It sounded like grief,” he says.
Her mouth twists. “Congratulations. You’re perceptive.”
“It didn’t feel like performance.”
“Because it wasn’t.”
Silence stretches. The piano sits between them like a witness.
Callum tries for neutral and fails. “Keir taught me everything I know about music.”
The words are out before he can stop them.
Isla’s expression shatters.
“Of course, he did,” she explodes, standing so fast the bench scrapes against the floor. “Why wouldn’t he? He gave everything to everyone else. Everyone but me.”
Callum stiffens. “That’s not—”
“He taught you,” she barrels on, voice rising, brittle and sharp. “He taught his bandmates. His friends. His protégés. He poured himself into strangers and called it generosity. But his daughter? Oh fuck, no.”
Her hands shake at her sides now, fists clenched. “And then he sent checks and thought that made him decent.”
The blow lands hard in Callum’s chest. Loyalty flares, hot and automatic.
“That’s not the man I knew,” he says, too quickly.
Isla laughs, harsh and broken. “Then you didn’t know him the way I did.”
The second the words leave her mouth, Isla goes still.
Color drains from her face.
“I—” She swallows. “I didn’t mean—”
Her hand rises, then drops, useless. Her voice turns small in spite of her. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair.”
“No,” Callum agrees. “It wasn’t. But I fear it's true.”
For a moment, Isla looks like she might bolt, as the room has suddenly become too small to contain her grief. She takes one step, then stops, jaw clenched, forcing herself to stay.
“I don’t want to be like this,” she says, voice low. “I don’t want… you.”
It comes out wrong, not what she meant, and her eyes widen with fresh panic.
Callum’s pulse kicks. “I know what you mean.”
Isla huffs out a breath, then drags a hand through her hair, pulling loose strands tighter as if she can tie her emotions back into place. “I didn’t want you to see that,” she mutters.
“The anger?” Callum asks.
“No.” She gestures between them, then toward her own chest. “The… need. Always the need to know what he thought about my career. About me. About the young woman I’ve become. And now…nothing.”
Callum’s throat tightens. He understands need. He’s lived with it like a second skin.
“You listened to the tape,” he says.
Her eyes flick up, wary. “You knew.”
“I guessed.”
She nods once, jaw tight. “I did. And it was nothing.”
“Nothing?” he repeats.