19. Chapter Nineteen #2
étaín bent over the map, one finger hovering above the inked roads. Brennach muttered something that made her grin. Donal answered a question after a pause, and Aingeal saw étaín’s eyes sharpen again.
Recognition almost. Or the beginning of it.
Aingeal’s stomach tightened.
She heard Father Cillian ask her something about the displaced families and answered because she knew how to answer while only half present. She had done it for years.
But from across the hall, she watched étaín glance down at Donal’s hand. At the ring. Then back at his face.
Aingeal went cold. The ring was Donal O’Raida’s. It was proof of identity. She turned away before anyone could read too much in her face. Had she been blind?
She had asked for truth. Demanded oaths. Tested him in council. Watched him answer. Watched him lie? No. Not lie. She did not know that. She knew only that parts of him did not fit neatly where he claimed they belonged.
But how much had she let pass because he had stood beside her well? Because he had saved grain, steadied frightened villagers, made boys laugh, kissed her until the world seemed briefly remade?
By the evening meal, the strain had become unbearable. The hall felt too close. Cups struck wood. A boy at the lower tables laughed too loudly. One of the hounds beneath the bench whined for scraps. Fire snapped in the long hearth.
étaín sat two places down from Donal and asked some small question about the weather in the southern marsh, light as ever, impossible to rebuke. He answered with his usual grave courtesy.
Aingeal heard none of the words clearly.
She saw only the careful way étaín listened.
The brief tension in Donal’s hand.
The silence beneath what was spoken.
Aingeal excused herself early and went up to the battlements, hoping the cold wind might scour the feeling from her.
She heard footsteps behind her and knew it was Donal. He came to stand at her side as though he had every right in the world to do so. And she wanted him to be there. The wind was sharp above the wall. Torches bent and spat.
“Aingeal,” he said quietly.
She did not answer.
He waited. “Has étaín spoken to you?”
It was like throwing wood onto a fire.
She turned her head slowly. “Should she have?”
Something tightened in his face.
“You hide behind silence.”
His eyes did not leave her face. “Do I?”
“Yes. You stand in my hall and at my side. You ride my borders. You let men trust you, and boys follow you, and my people grow used to the sight of you, and all the while the truth of you stays locked away where no one may touch it.”
He drew a slow breath. “If you have an accusation, make it.”
“I have a hundred.”
“Name one.”
She gripped the stone railing hard enough that her fingers ached. “You let yourself matter. That is accusation enough.”
Something flickered across his face. Hurt, perhaps. Or recognition. “That is not a crime.”
“No?” She turned on him. “Then what would you call it when a man means to leave and still lets a castle shape itself around him as though he belongs there?”
He went still. “I told you I would leave.”
“Yes. You told me many things. Enough to keep me quiet. Enough to make me accept your nearness. Enough to let me think I understood the terms of it. But never enough to understand you.”
His jaw tightened. “You ask for certainty where I cannot give it.”
“That is because you will not.”
He looked away for the first time. When he looked back, there was less calm in him. “You are punishing me for suspicions you have.”
Aingeal laughed once, low and bitter. “Should I thank you for noticing?”
“I notice,” he said. “I notice every time you turn cold when I come near. Every time you look as though I have offended you merely by standing where I stood the day before.”
“Then consider why.”
“I do. I have done little else.”
The answer struck harder than she expected.
For a moment, she saw the strain in him clearly: fatigue, frustration, and something darker beneath both that he still would not let her touch. Good, let him feel some portion of what I feel.
Another part recoiled at once. She did not want him hurt because of her. She wanted his truth. What was he hiding? That, more than any defense, made the anger rise again. “There is something in you I cannot read.”
“Yes.”
“You admit it?”
“I am not a fool.”
“No. Only determined to make one of me.”
He stepped closer. “You are not a fool.”
Aingeal felt every part of herself wake to his nearness even while anger burned in her chest. “How would you know?”
“Because a fool does not see nearly as much as you do.”
“Do not flatter me. Not now.”
“It is not flattery.”
“Then what is it?”
His voice lowered. “An answer.”
She swallowed.
He stood close enough for her to see the pale line of the scar at his brow and the weariness under his eyes. Close enough for the memory of the first kiss to return and set her body aflame.
She should have stepped back.
“You want truth from me,” he said. “But you are not only angry about what I hide.”
“No?”
“No.” His gaze searched hers with unbearable steadiness. “You are angry because of what you feel. Jealousy.”
The word struck so cleanly she forgot to breathe.
“Tell me I am wrong,” he said.
She opened her mouth. Nothing came. Because he was not wrong. But he was not wholly right either. A ragged breath escaped her. “I am jealous,” she said. “God forgive me, I am. But do not mistake that for all of it.”
His expression changed.
She stepped closer now, not away. “étaín sees something in you. Not charm. Not handsome shadows. Something else. I can feel her circling it, and I hate that she may reach the truth of you before I do.”
“Aingeal --”
“No.” The word broke sharper than she intended. “I have stood beside you. Defended you. Needed you. Wanted you. And still you leave me outside the locked door of your life while everyone else begins finding keys.”
He looked as though she had struck him.
“You have made yourself matter,” she said.
The words broke loose now, and she could not stop them.
“You stand too easily at my side. You move through this castle as if you were built for it. Men trust you. I trust you when I do not mean to. And every time I remember that you still mean to go, it feels…” She stopped.
His voice was rough. “Feels like what?”
She looked at him. If there had been mercy left in the world, she would have turned away. Instead, she said it. “Like you have made leaving unbearable.”
The words hung between them.
Donal looked as though she had struck him straight through the chest. He caught her face in his hands, not gentle, not rough, but with the force of a man who had held himself back too long. “Aingeal,” he breathed, half warning, half surrender.
Then he kissed her.
This kiss was nothing like the first. The first had come out of closeness and tenderness and the dangerous quiet of candlelight and blood-stained linen.
This came out of pressure. Out of accusation, silence, and need sharpened until it hurt.
Aingeal kissed him back before she could think better of it.
Fiercely. As though all the frustration and jealousy and hope of the past days had been waiting for exactly this crack in the world.
Her hands came up to his shoulders, then into the front of his tunic, gripping hard enough to crease the cloth.
His mouth was hot and demanding. There was no caution in it. No pretense that either of them had stumbled into this by mistake.
He made a rough sound low in his throat when she moved closer, and his hands slid from her face to her waist, pulling her hard against him. The force of it stole her breath.
This was no revelation. This was everything they had refused to say, finding its own fierce language.
For one blinding instant, she wanted everything. Not only his mouth. Not only his hands.
All of him.
She wanted him to stay. She wanted him to choose her. She wanted the silence broken, the danger gone, and the whole world remade around the impossible thing standing between them.
The force of that wanting terrified her. The old fear rose with it, swift as cold water.
What happens when hurt becomes anger, and anger becomes ruin?
Aingeal tore herself away.
The break was sudden enough to leave them both breathing hard. She stumbled back a step, then another, one hand pressed to her mouth.
Donal moved instinctively toward her.
She recoiled.
That stopped him as surely as a blade. “Aingeal,” he said.
She shook her head once, then again. Not because she did not want him. Because she did. “Do not,” she whispered, though she no longer knew what she meant. Do not touch me. Do not look at me that way. Do not make me want this more. Do not leave. Do not stay unless you are true.
He did not move.
She backed toward the stair door.
His face in the torchlight was still, but not cold. She saw too much there: desire, yes, and pain, and something deeper that might have been love if she were foolish enough to believe it.
That was what drove her into the corridor. She fled him not because the kiss had meant too little but because it had meant far too much.