Chapter 21 #2
She hit the ground on her hands and knees, tasting copper, ears ringing, her mouth too sore to make a single sound despite her instincts screaming at her.
“Feisty wee thing…” He was pressing his palm to his cheek, staring at the blood on it. Then, he turned to someone she hadn’t yet seen, “Cormac! Get her arms.”
Heavy footsteps approached. A bigger man, with a length of rope already in hand and the brisk, businesslike bearing of someone who had done this before.
Then, the air in the alley shifted.
Ragnar’s massive shape appeared through canvas at their backs and Isolda felt the man’s grip go rigid with surprise.
She stopped fighting and held perfectly still.
Ragnar crossed the narrow space between them with that particular unhurried certainty, the way he moved when he already knew how something would end, and she had long since learned to find it both the most frightening and the most steadying thing about him.
His eyes found hers for one fraction of a second, and then the savage rampaged.
Ragnar caught a swinging arm at the elbow, stepped past it, and drove the man face-first into the timber support post. The sound it made was not something Isolda would forget quickly. The man folded at the knees and stayed down.
Cormac drew his blade. “Back off, heathen scum. Come any closer and I’ll—”
“Choose yer next word like ye mean it.” Ragnar wasn’t moving.
Loose-handed, perfectly still—the stance of a man who had already accounted for every outcome and found none of them particularly concerning.
It was, Isolda thought from the ground, the most frightening thing she had ever seen on a human face.
Cormac lunged.
Ragnar moved and then he had Cormac by the collar, pivoted, and walked him into the stone wall of the outbuilding with a controlled force that shook the mortar dust from the joints and drove the air from the man’s chest in a single grunt.
Cormac scrabbled at the grip around his collar. Ragnar waited patiently for him to stop squirming.
“How many more of ye are on me island?”
Cormac’s answer was to spit at his feet.
Ragnar looked at him for one unhurried moment. Then he took a fistful of the man’s collar, pivoted, and reintroduced his face to the wall with a sickening thud.
He stood there a moment in the narrow space, his breathing even, looking at the man on the ground with a flat expression. Then, he let out one slow breath through his nose and turned.
His eyes found her face and stayed there.
It lasted less than a breath.
Then his hands were at her face—broad and warm and slightly rough with dried ash—tilting her chin toward what pale light filtered between the buildings, moving carefully over her cheekbone, her jaw, searching.
His thumb found the graze on her cheek with a steadiness that didn’t quite match the muscle working in his jaw. “How bad?”
“‘Tis naethin’.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt.
“Isolda.”
His hands came up—both palms framing her jaw, broad and warm and careful. He tilted her face toward the pale light above the alley wall.
“Ragnar, ‘tis all right,” she said quietly, when he’d finished. “I’m still here.”
The tightness in his shoulders eased, but only slightly.
“I’ll survive.”
“I’m aware,” he said, very quietly. “I’d simply prefer ye didnae have tae.”
He released her slowly, and for a moment neither of them moved. The sounds of the village filled the space between them, the water chain, shouting, the settling groan of cooling timber.
Then he stepped back and reached for her satchel, where it had fallen in the dirt. He turned it over in his hands. The latch had bent where it hit the ground and he began working it back with his thumb—methodical, unhurried, as if this was the only thing in the world that mattered.
This is how it happens. Nae all at once. Just… one wee latch at a time, until ye look up and realize ye’re somewhere ye never meant tae be, and ye find ye’ve nay interest in leavin’.
“‘Tis fine,” she said.
“‘Tis bent.” He didn’t look up.
“I can see that.”
“Then ye can see ‘tis nae fine.” After a few more seconds of careful work, he held it out, the latch perfectly restored.
Isolda took it, and when the backs of his fingers found hers in the exchange, slow and deliberate, heat shot up her arm.
“Proper little wolf, arenae ye,” he said quietly. “Gave ‘em a real fight.”
“I almost scratched his eyes out.” She nodded toward the man slumped in the corner.
“Aye.” The corner of his mouth moved—barely, but she caught it. “The screechin’ sounds he made were difficult tae miss, lass.”
“Well, I didnae have any of me wee knives with me, so I had tae improvise.”
Ragnar made a soft, low grunting sound. When he spoke next, his voice was gentle. “Ye held on long enough. That’s all ye needed tae dae.”
“Dinnae sound so surprised.”
“I’m nae.” He held her gaze a moment longer, something unspoken settling in the space between them, heavy and warm.
Then, he reached out and tucked a loose strand of hair back from her scraped cheek with two fingers.
“From now on, ye stay close tae me,” he said. “And I dinnae want tae hear any clever arguments about it.”
She looked up at him. Felt the weight of—something that had no name yet and wasn’t going to get one, not here, not with his warriors within earshot and ash still drifting in the air between them.
“Close enough tae bite the next one?” she asked with an impish smile.
“Aye. Close enough fer that,” he said, his voice rough.
He held out his hand. She looked at it, broad, calloused, a scar across the knuckle she didn’t know the story of yet—and placed hers in it.
They walked out of the alley together, his hand warm and steady around hers.
Isolda didn’t let go. The village was partially ruined, a wound that would take weeks to heal.
And Isolda couldn’t help but wonder what Douglas would do when he learned that his plan had failed.