Chapter 17 #2
Harald’s shoulders went still, the way a man stills when he hears a bowstring tighten. “What happened taenight?”
Enya drew a breath that felt like swallowing fire. She needed him to understand the girl she was before he saw the traitor she had become. “Me maither died when she had me.”
The words dropped into the room and stayed there, heavy and cold.
Harald didn't flinch. He didn't offer the hollow sympathies she had heard a thousand times. He only watched her, eyes fixed, giving her no escape and no interruption.
“They told me it was the birth,” she whispered, her throat tightening until it hurt to speak.
“Blood and fever and God’s will. But what they really meant.
.. was me.” Her voice tried to turn sharp, to find the old armor of her anger, but it broke at the edges.
“They looked at me mismatched eyes and decided they had an answer fer why a good woman died and a demon child lived. They decided I was wrong. That everything I touched was cursed.”
Harald’s fingers flexed once at his side, his knuckles popping in the quiet room. He stayed silent.
“I grew up wi’ people lowering their voices when I walked past,” Enya went on, each sentence dragging something out of her she had kept buried for years.
“Women making the sign o’ the cross when I appeared.
Men looking away quickly, like me face could infect them.
Every time a suitor was mentioned, it became a bargain.
How much land tae take the cursed girl? How much gold tae ignore her after? ”
She heard her own breath hitch—a ragged, ugly sound—and hated herself for it.
“Me faither,” she said, and that word hurt most of all, because she still loved him with a loyalty that had nowhere to go.
“He tried. He truly did. He used tae tell me I was beautiful, that me eyes were a miracle, that me maither would have loved me.” Her mouth twisted in a bitter, jagged line.
“But he also… he also left me alone too often with people who hated me. He wanted peace in the clan, and the easiest way tae get it was tae let them whisper and let me endure. He let me become a sacrifice fer the quiet o’ the clan. ”
Harald’s gaze softened by a fraction, a shift so small she might have imagined it if she hadn’t been starving for a look like that her entire life. He looked at her not as a problem to be solved, but as a person who had been shattered and put back together with shaking hands.
The disappointment she felt in Finley was a cold void, but the look in Harald's eyes was a different kind of pain—the pain of being seen.
Enya’s hands trembled. She pressed them together harder. “Then he died.”
Harald’s jaw tightened, the movement restrained.
In the silence of the room, Enya realized with a terrifying jolt how afraid she was of losing him. The feelings she had been trying to bury—the way his presence calmed the storm in her blood, the way he looked at her eyes without flinching—rushed over her in a suffocating wave.
She didn't want to be his enemy. She wanted to belong there, in that room, with that man.
“A Norse raid,” Enya said, voice dropping to a whisper.
“Nay banners, nay honor, only smoke and bodies and men screaming. I was fifteen and I watched me faither’s men carry him back intae the hall, and me braither…
” she choked on the name. “Finley looked at me like he was seeing the curse made flesh. The braither who had cared for me and protected me as a bairn.”
Harald’s eyes flickered, a muscle jumping near his cheek. He didn't pull away. If anything, he seemed to lean into her pain, absorbing it.
Enya forced herself to keep going, the words tumbling out before her courage failed.
“Finley became laird and he became… harder. Nae cruel in the way folk mean when they talk about cruel men. He never hit me. He never shouted unless I pushed him. He just… stopped being a braither.” Her laugh came out jagged, bitter.
“He speaks tae me like I’m a problem. A weakness.
A piece tae be moved in the board o’ his politics. ”
Harald watched her, his silence a heavy, holy thing.
“And this marriage?” he said at last. His voice was so quiet it barely disturbed the air.
Enya’s stomach twisted into a cold, hard knot. She felt the truth clawing at her throat. The letter. The child. The clearing in the woods.
I was just there, Harald. I was just talking tae the man who wants tae destroy ye.
The honesty was right there, a heartbeat away from her lips. It would be so clean to tell him. It would be so honest.
She looked up at him and saw the way his attention never wavered. She saw the restraint in his stillness, the terrifyingly beautiful care in the way he stood his ground. He had listened to her shame without judgment. He had made her feel like a woman instead of a demon.
Fear flooded her—a cold, paralyzing tide.
If she told him the truth now, the light in his eyes would go out. He would see the traitor instead of the woman. He would send her away, or worse, he would look at her with the same dead contempt Finley used. She realized, with a soul-crushing certainty, that she couldn't survive him hating her.
“This marriage terrifies me,” she said instead, the word barely audible.
Harald stepped closer. He moved slowly and carefully, like a man approaching a wounded animal that might bite or bolt.
He didn't stop until the heat from his body reached her, until she could smell the iron and salt and woodsmoke that was him.
His voice was a low vibration that thrummed in her very bones.
“Why are ye afraid, Enya? Is it the vows... or is it me?”
The words struck too close, and Enya’s composure cracked at last. Her hands clenched in her skirts as she swallowed against the lump of grief and longing in her throat. The answer had lived in her body for long—a secret pulse she had tried to ignore until it became her entire heartbeat.
“O’ ye,” she admitted, her voice a fragile thread. “O’ wantin’ somethin’ I’ll never be allowed tae keep.”
Harald reached for her then. He moved with a deliberate, agonizing slowness, giving her every heartbeat of time to step away, to bolt, to stay in the dark.
But she remained rooted as he cupped her face with one broad, calloused hand.
His thumb was a brand of heat against her cheek, steadying her world.
“Look at me,” he said.
She did, helplessly, her vision blurred by the shimmer of unshed tears.
His gaze searched her with the steady, reverent intent of a man committing a holy thing to memory. He looked at the blue, and then the brown. When he spoke, his voice was a low, vibrating certainty that settled deep in her marrow.
“Yer eyes are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Enya’s breath caught hard enough to hurt.
“They’re the first thing I noticed,” he went on, his voice dropping to a rough murmur. “And the last thing I see when I close me own eyes at night.”
Something inside her gave way entirely—a heavy, rusted armor she had worn since the day she was born.
His mouth softened, his eyes darkening into a storm of gold and shadow. He leaned closer, his forehead resting against hers, trapping her in the heat of his gaze.
Enya’s pulse leapt so violently she felt light-headed, the world outside the room dissolving into static. His thumb moved with agonizing slowness, tracing the trembling line of her lower lip. It was a plea for permission that made her breath hitch in her throat.
Then, he leaned down.
The movement was sudden enough to steal the very air from her lungs.
The first brush of his lips against hers was so impossibly light it barely seemed real—a ghost of a touch, a breath more than a kiss. He was testing her, giving her one last heartbeat to pull away, to stay safe in her solitude.
Enya’s breath broke apart in her chest.
The shock of his mouth on hers sent a rush of heat through her so sharp it left her knees weak.
For an instant, thought was impossible. There was only the scent of him, the surprising softness of his lips, and the way he held himself back even as every nerve in her body strained forward to meet him.
She answered him without permission from her mind.
Her lips moved against his, tentative for a heartbeat, then surer, driven by a desperate, starving need that had already chosen for her.
Her fingers rose, clutching at his forearm, gripping the hard muscle through the wool of his tunic as if he were the only solid thing in a world turned to water. The contact sent a fresh jolt through her, low and dizzying, making her head swim.
Harald’s breath hitched audibly, a low growl of surrender. The kiss was no longer tentative.
The pressure deepened, turning unmistakably hungry, his control finally snapping to reveal the raw, crashing want he had been guarding. His hand tightened at her jaw, his fingers threading into her hair, pulling her closer until there was no space left between them.
The sensation tore a sound from her chest—soft, broken, and utterly vulnerable. It frightened her, how much she was giving him, but the fear only made her want him more, made her want to sink deeper into the safety of his arms.
Enya felt the sound vibrate against her lips. Then Harald broke away abruptly, as if he’d been burned.
His forehead remained pressed against hers, his breath coming in uneven, ragged gasps. The hand at her jaw was still warm, his fingers trembling slightly.
For a long moment, he said nothing, as though the weight of the moment had rendered speech impossible.
They stayed like that, suspended in the charged silence, close enough that she could feel the frantic thud of his pulse against her own.
There was no pretending now. No hiding behind politics or duty.
“There’s nay retreat from this,” he murmured, his voice a rough, shattered rasp.
Enya swallowed, her throat raw with the effort not to cry. “I ken.”
His thumb brushed her jaw again, a lingering, reverent touch, as if he couldn't stop himself from reaching for her even now.
Enya’s chest ached with the sheer weight of it—the terrible, beautiful hope she had spent her whole life trying to kill.
For the first time, she wasn't the demon child or the cursed girl. She was simply his.