Chapter 32
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The passage closed around her with terrifying speed.
The crowd had pushed her in. Not out of malice, but by simple, frantic mechanics of fear. By the time Matilda found her footing, the entrance was a blur of grey behind her and the smoke was a wall ahead. The stone was cold and very close on both sides.
She stopped.
Breathed.
One. Two. Three.
The smoke was real, not a memory, not a trigger.
It had heat, it had weight, and it carried the stinging, sharp smell of burning oil.
She catalogued it with the clinical precision Ivar had taught her.
Fire to the east, passage running west toward the lower hall, two exits if the far door was unblocked.
Then, the darkness pressed.
Not the darkness of the room, but the other thing. The shadow that lived in the marrow of her bones and knew exactly where to find her.
She felt it arrive. The familiar, suffocating tightening in her chest, the world shrinking until it was the dimensions of a locked room. The cellular memory of stone walls and no light and the absolute knowledge that no one was coming.
She pressed her palm flat against the cold stone.
One. Two.
She was twenty-three years old. She was in a stone passage on the Isle of Mull. The door was not locked. And she had a dagger on her left hip.
Three. Four.
She pushed off the wall and moved forward.
Five. Six.
The smoke thickened as she went deeper, the light from the yard dying away. Her breathing was fast and shallow, a jagged rhythm in the dark, but she was managing it. She was the one in control.
Seven. Eight.
She heard footsteps, heavy and deliberate, emerging from the smoke to her right. She turned, the dagger already in her hand before she’d finished the pivot, the grip locked the way Ivar had taught her. Thumb along the spine.
The mercenary lunged out of the grey. Matilda went forward.
Nae backward.
Forward, into the danger. She drove from her back foot, moving inside his reach before he could adjust his lunge. Her arm drove upward with every ounce of her weight.
The strike landed true. The man let out a choked sound and went down.
She stood over him, her heart thundering against her ribs. The dagger felt like it was part of her arm. She was shaking. A violent, full-body tremor of a woman who had just realized she was capable of the unthinkable.
She was upright. She was forward.
She breathed.
Nine. Ten.
The smoke shifted in a sudden cross-draft, and a shape emerged.
Not lunging, walking. He walked toward her without breaking stride, his footsteps heavy and even on the stone.
He didn't reach for a weapon or quicken his pace to close the gap.
He kept coming, his gaze fixed on her face as if she were a prize he had already won and was merely stepping forward to pick up.
She knew him before the smoke cleared enough to see his face.
The width of those shoulders. The arrogant tilt of the head, chin forward, eyes raised. The posture of a man who believed he was the largest thing in any room. She had memorized that silhouette at fifteen and spent eight years wishing she could burn it from her soul.
Callum MacDougall stepped out of the smoke and looked at her.
He looked at the dying man on the ground. He looked at the dagger in her hand. He looked at her face.
And then he smiled, and it was the smile she remembered. The one that said the board still belonged to him, that her resistance was merely part of his plan.
"Matilda," he said. It sounded like a greeting between old friends.
She tightened her grip on the dagger until her knuckles were white.
"Ye look well," he said, moving forward. Slowly. Watching her hand. "Better than I expected, given the company ye've been keeping."
He stopped just outside the range of her blade, tilting his head with a sickening familiarity.
She said nothing. She couldn't afford the breath.
"He's trained ye," Callum mused. "Armed ye. Made ye feel as though ye're something other than what ye are." He took a step. "Ye're nae. Ye're the same lass I took from her faither's garden, and ye ken it. Yer hands are shaking."
Dinnae let him get tae ye, Matilda.
"Aye," she whispered, her voice a low, cold rasp. "They are."
She didn't move the dagger. "And yet," she said.
Steel rang at the passage entrance behind him, the unmistakable, heavy strike of a blade against stone.
Callum heard it. She watched the shift in his eyes, the tiny fraction of attention that pulled backward to the threat.
In that heartbeat of distraction, Matilda stepped forward. She drove the dagger upward, beneath his ribs, with everything she had.
His arm came around with a brutal, reflexive force, knocking her back against the stone wall. She hit the rock hard, the dagger spinning from her hand. Pain flared through her shoulder, hot and blinding, as she began to slide down the stone.
Then the smoke parted completely, and Ivar Gunnarsson came through it like a god of war.