Chapter 29 A Bond Completed
A BOND COMPLETED
Baird had been acting strange for days. Gone was the attentive, playful man I had spent more than a year with, replaced—almost overnight—by the man I'd first met on Arran.
The one I'd woken beside on his couch in the cottage: sullen, gruff, answering my questions with single words, my attempts at playful banter landing with a dull, lifeless thud. Hollow eyes, tight jaw.
At first, I brushed it off. I even tried telling him about the misunderstood spell from the Mother's Book—the one Sorcha said suggested the Garvies had been using the blood of the Abhartach for centuries…
and using the spell to keep themselves from falling in love with one.
When I told him that, his eyes locked on mine, searching.
For a moment, I thought I finally had his full attention.
But I didn't get a laugh. Not even the smirk I'd been expecting.
I was hoping for questions that turned into a conversation, but it just seemed to drag him down deeper.
Then I wondered if it was me—if I'd been neglecting him.
Too much time spent squinting over spells and half-decoded Garvie incantations in the Mother's Book.
Too many long hours in the studio, sculpting wax and casting the two rings I'd made between other commissions and replacing stock in my retail line.
But something inside me said that wasn't it.
He'd started doing that thing again—rubbing the back of his neck, fingers digging in as if he could work the tension loose from bone and muscle.
He avoided my eyes when I caught him at it, turning away under the pretense of checking the fire, the laundry, the dishes, scratching Bunny's ears—anything that gave his hands somewhere else to be.
There was grief shadowing him. Not the old grief I'd seen in him when we'd first met—the familiar knot of loss and guilt bound up in losing Agnes.
This was different. This was fresh. Raw. New.
Baird was keeping something from me.
He'd been out to hunt—he and Bunny gone for hours—when I heard the cottage door open. Boots shucked and set side by side, careful not to make noise. Quiet hands.
I leaned against the bedroom doorframe, wearing one of Baird's T-shirts, a pair of panties and nothing else, my arms crossed loosely over my chest. Waiting.
When he came around the corner, he stopped short.
His eyes widened, not a trace of the hunger I'd come to expect after a hunt, but instead I saw only surprise—like he hadn't expected me to be up waiting for him. Like he hadn't expected to be seen.
For a heartbeat, neither of us moved.
Then his gaze dropped, just briefly, before he rubbed the back of his neck, fingers pressing in hard. I was right, this wasn't just my imagination. He was bracing himself for something.
“You were out a long time,” I said softly, all the things I wanted to say but didn't hanging in the air between us.
Baird looked at me, something aching and unresolved in his eyes—so sharp I could almost feel it. But he didn't answer.
I pursed my lips and gave a small shrug, forcing casual into my voice to soften the weight of his silence.
As if this were nothing. As if it didn't matter.
But it did. I missed him—I missed us. The crooked smirk that never failed to undo me from the inside out.
The way his eyes used to light up when they found me, like I was something he'd been looking for.
Now he just stood there, shoulders slumped under some invisible weight. I crossed the cold stone floor until I was inches from him and set my hands on his shoulders, steady and sure, forcing him to meet my gaze. “I'm fine,” he said at last.
His lie was so thin I could read the subtext right through it. “I need you to tell me what's bothering you.” One hand slid to his jaw, my thumb pressing lightly there, holding him in place when he tried to look away.
“Mira,” he murmured, the words warning or plea, I couldn't tell which.
“You haven't kept a single thing from me since you told me the truth—about Agnes, about Bastien. About you.” I leaned in and brushed a soft kiss across his lips, tender but deliberate. Then I turned and walked into the bedroom without looking back. “But this withholding from me stops now.”
His voice was low, worn at the edges. “I didnae want to worry ye.”
“That's not your choice to make.” I said quietly. There it was. Not the why. Not the what. But an admission all the same. It wasn't much—but it was a start “What is it?” I asked, grasping at straws. “Money?”
We'd talked, loosely, about his businesses—plural, and mine—single, but our bank accounts were still separate.
Independence by mutual, unspoken agreement.
My dad had gone quiet a few times when I was younger—withdrawn, distant—during the recession when estate jewelry buyers dried up and every dollar mattered.
I'd learned early to recognize the signs.
The careful silences, forced smiles to protect my mom from the truth. Maybe that's what this was.
His look of incredulity—followed by the first small smile I'd seen in weeks—told me I'd been way off base. He shook his head, then dragged a hand down his face. “No, lass.” He let out a sigh. “Not money. Ye'll never need to worry about money.”
“Then what is it?” I asked. It came out rougher than I meant, my patience thinning after days of tiptoeing around him.
He crossed the room and sat down on the bed. He looked defeated, but somehow relieved at the same time. “Sorcha said I should just tell ye, but I didnae ken how.”
“Sorcha?” I echoed. “You talked to her?” I said slowly.
“But not to me?” A spark of frustration rose, small but it burned bright.
“What does she have to do with this?” The edge in my voice surprised even me.
I was more than a little irritated that he'd gone to her.
I still felt like she was withholding things from me, and now it felt like a team sport.
“She kens…things, Mira. Ye've got to admit that.” He glanced up at me, where I stood. “Robbie agreed I should ask her.”
“Robbie?” I spat. “Robbie knows what's wrong?” Heat flared in my chest. “Robbie knows what you've been keeping from me?” I crossed the room and stopped directly in front of him, close enough that he couldn't look anywhere but at me.
“I didnae go lookin for opinions, Mira.” He said quickly. “I went lookin for answers.”
“What is it?” I demanded, the last of my patience gone. Everyone seemed to know the truth. Everyone but me.
His face shifted as he tried to find the words—jaw tightening, then easing, bracing for what I didn't know.
His eyes flicked away from mine, not in guilt exactly, but in calculation, as if he was replaying this moment and searching for the version where he could make a different choice.
A muscle jumped once along his cheek. He drew in a breath he didn't seem to need, let it out slowly, and when he looked back at me, there was something raw there now. Regret, yes—but layered with resolve.
His mouth opened, closed again. So much for the resolve.
“Spit it out, Baird Campbell. What was so damn important that you went to Robbie and Sorcha—but couldn't be bothered to tell me?” I bit down hard on the last word, daring him to answer.
“Ye were just so happy, Mira.” He said it quietly, like that alone should explain everything.
“Once ye got your hands on the book and buried yourself in your connection to the goddess…it was like something clicked into place.” His gaze dropped, then lifted again, searching my face.
“That little dark space inside ye—the one I can feel—that hollow place that's been there since the first day I met ye, even before the bond formed.” His jaw tightened. “Self-doubt? Fear? Always gnawing’ at ye, even when ye tried to pretend it wasnae.” He drew in a slow breath.
“But since ye let your magic loose—since ye committed to the ruby ring—that little black hole's been shrinking. Every day. Replaced by confidence. By strength. By joy.” His voice roughened.
“It was a hole I could never fill for ye.
And seeing ye like this…seeing ye complete—“ He shook his head faintly.
“There's nothing that's brought me more happiness than that.”
“Then why do you look like you’re losing me?
” I asked. I couldn't reconcile how this had become a problem—especially when he was right.
The ache of not belonging, of being somehow flawed, had begun to fade.
Purpose had taken its place. Destiny. And now, quietly, even that was changing, growing, reshaping itself into something bigger I didn't yet have words for.
He saw it on my face. The confusion. The waiting question.
Slowly, he lifted his hand between us—not to touch me, but in a silent plea.
There was more. “The night ye had the dream of being on the mountain with the Goddess. It started then.” It all came spilling out at once—the way I'd said I felt the Goddess had chosen me for some purpose, beyond the ruby.
The words I'd spoken without knowing where they came from.
The way Baird had heard it too, in the mutterings I'd made in my sleep.
Someone else's voice, he'd said. The same thing I'd heard in my dream.
And then there was Agnes. The things she'd claimed. The way Baird had once dismissed them as madness, as fear talking. But now…now he wasn't so sure she'd been wrong. And how afraid he'd been to bring her up again—to reopen the wound between us, the one that had driven me to leave him once before.
He believed she'd been trying to warn him. To warn us. The Garvie clairvoyance I'd just recently made peace with had perhaps driven her to madness. That being chosen—whatever that meant—wasn't a blessing. It was something dangerous.
“You think this ends with me dead,” I said.