Chapter 3
Her father came before the light had fully settled into the room. He did not knock. The bolt scraped back, and he stepped inside and stood in the doorway with the look of a man who had already decided how this conversation would go.
“Ye’re to be married, Chloe,” he said. “I’ve made an arrangement with Laird O’Brien. He has good lands, good standin’. It’s a strong match.”
Chloe stared at him.
“I am to get married?” She almost choked on the word.
“Aye.”
She stared at him, standing there in the middle of the room, disbelieving what she was hearing.
“To a man I’ve never met?”
“That’s how arrangements work.”
Her father was relaxed, his arms loose at his sides, already moving on in his mind to whatever came next.
And she understood it then, all at once and fully.
He had not ridden for three days, walked into Jenny’s hall, and threatened her life because he wanted his daughter back.
He had come because she was useful to him—someone he could trade.
“Ye didnae come for me,” she said. “Ye came for what ye could get for me.”
He did not answer, and he did not turn away.
What she saw in his eyes made something break open in her chest. How could a man who claimed to be her father, who had come to take her away from the life she knew, be so cruel to her?
She had hoped that in some way, he had come after he because he wanted his daughter close to him.
She wondered if he would have bothered to come find her if she were not bringing him profit in some way.
Moira had pressed a folded letter into her hands once, ten years ago, three days before she died, and made her promise to carry it to Lady Jenny herself.
Chloe had been fifteen. She'd never asked what was inside it — Moira hadn't wanted her to — and by the time grief loosened its grip enough to wonder, Jenny already had it locked away somewhere, unopened as far as Chloe knew, and the moment for asking had come and gone.
Jenny was the one who'd made the rest of it make sense back then, a place to go, work to do, a roof over her head. She had not known, until this moment, standing in this room with a stranger who called himself her father, how much of herself she had built around that.
“I am goin’ back. I am goin’ back to Jenny and Thomas, and ye can find yerself another bargainin’ piece because I willnae be—”
“Chloe. Shut up before I make ye regret it.”
“Nay! I willnae do it. I daenae ken this man and I daenae ken ye. I want to go home!”
He turned and looked at her.
“If ye go back,” he said quietly. “If ye run, if ye send word, if ye do one single thing to disrupt what I’ve put in place, Thomas MacLaud willnae see another spring. His wife as well.”
He gave her a minute to let that sink in.
“Ye will find that I am a very determined man, so it is nae in yer interest to defy me orders. So ye will prepare, and we will go meet Laird O’Brien,” he said. “He’s expectin’ us.”
Chloe looked up at him, fighting back tears.
Ye must nae cry in front of this man. Daenae let his cruelty break ye.
Her father pulled out a chair from the table and sat down, unhurried.
He laced his fingers together. “Look. The contract is already signed. Has been for two months. Laird O’Brien is a practical man, and so am I.
This marriage happens with or without yer cooperation, lass.
The only thing ye have any say in is how difficult ye make the next few days for yerself. ”
She turned her face away from him.
“This Laird,” her father continued. “He has a castle, land, and a position. He is ken as a hard man, but is that nae how a laird should be? Apart from that, ye’ll want for nothin’.”
He pulled a folded page from his coat and scanned it.
"Four outings a year, it says here. Beyond the castle grounds. His idea, nae mine, some notion about a wife nae being kept like a prisoner." He folded it away again. "More consideration than most husbands trouble themselves with, if ye ask me."
He said the rest of it as if he were reading from the contract itself. "Are ye nae tired of scrubbing people's floors?"
Chloe bolted upright. “I scrubbed people’s floors because ye did nae come for yer own daughter until ye needed me to push yer bargain.” She paused, swallowed, and tried again in a quieter tone. “This laird ye are forcin’ me to marry. Ye daenae even ken him.”
“Shut yer mouth!” He stood up so fast the chair toppled backward and landed hard on the floor.
He straightened his coat. “Ye daenae understand these things, and I daenae want to hear a word of this from ye again. Obey me, or ye regret it. Now get dressed, yer laird is waitin’.
We must reach the castle today.” He moved toward the door and knocked twice on it from the inside.
The bolt scraped back from the other side.
He left without looking at her again.
A laird’s wife. So this was it.
As they continued their journey, the words kept spinning in her mind, but she did not recognize any of them.
She had been in service since she was old enough to be useful.
She knew how a grand house operated because she had been part of its day-to-day functions.
Capable and completely unnoticed by anyone important.
Now she was supposed to matter. She was supposed to be the one they worked for.
She sat straight on the horse and tried to imagine it, but she could not.
Am I to be a lady of a castle?
She thought about the contract her father had mentioned. Already signed, he had said, two months ago. Which meant that while she was at Jenny’s, going about her days, this had already been decided. She had already been someone else’s arrangement. She just had not known it yet.
The castle gates were enormous. Dark timber and iron, set into walls that had been standing long enough to grow moss along the upper edges. They swung open as the party rode up, and the sound of them moved through her chest.
Chloe looked around the castle, its pillars and clan banner flapping against the wall, and she felt faint with fear.
How will I ever be a lady of a place so grand?
Panic flowed through her in waves until she was desperate enough to throw all pride to the wind. She pulled her horse alongside the father’s before she could talk herself out of it.
“I am askin’ ye one last time.” She kept her voice low, but she could not control the emotion in her voice. The guards were close enough. “Daenae do this.”
He did not look at her. His eyes stayed on the path ahead.
“The contract is signed, lass. This is yer life now.”
“I daenae care about the contract.” Jenny did not know where she was.
That was the thing pressing hardest against her ribs.
Not the castle rising in front of her, not the stranger waiting inside it.
Jenny and Thomas were sitting somewhere, not knowing where she was; they would be worried.
When they went to visit her at her father’s castle, they would find her gone.
She was certain they would search for her, but if this laird was even half as terrible as her father, he could hide her somewhere Jenny and Thomas would never find her.
“Please, I am yer daughter. Does that mean nothing to ye?”
He was quiet for a long moment. The horses moved beneath them.
“It means ye’ll have a better life than the one ye had,” he said.
There was a long moment of silence before Chloe murmured, “Did ye ever think about me?” She said it quietly. “Before ye found out I existed. Did it ever occur to ye to wonder?”
He looked at her, his expression giving nothing away.
“Siobhan kept her own counsel.”
“That isnae what I asked.”
She expected something from him. Even a made-up response. She did not expect the silence that followed her question. The horses kept moving.
"It doesnae matter now," he said finally, eyes still on the path. "What's done is done. Ye were kept safe. That's the whole of it."
Kept safe.
As if she'd been a coin tucked in a drawer, forgotten until someone remembered its worth.
She thought about Jenny’s kitchen. The particular smell of it on cold mornings.
The way Jenny had taken her in at fifteen with nothing but a dead woman’s letter and never once made her feel like she owed anything for it.
She had built a life in that house. A small one.
A quiet one. But hers, built without him.
“I was nae nothin’,” she said. “Whatever ye told yerself to make this easier - kept safe, forgotten, whatever word helps ye sleep - I was nae nothin’.”
Something crossed his face, just for a moment. Then he hitched his horse forward, and there was nothing left to do but follow.
Chloe swiped a single tear from her cheek angrily, determined not to show how much it hurt that her own father had no feelings for her. She raised her head and continued riding behind him. They had barely cleared the courtyard when her father jumped off his horse and was at her side.
“Down,” he said. “We havenae got long”
She looked at him. “Long before what?”
“The ceremony is ready. I told ye, ye are to be married today.” The words were flat and forward-facing. “The kirk is just inside the east wall. Come.”
Chloe felt a cold hand squeeze her heart. She did not move. “Now? We’ve just arrived.”
“Aye.” He reached up and took hold of her horse’s bridle. “Now.”
She looked at the courtyard around her. Staff lined the walls, watching. Guards from her father’s entourage spread out behind her. The castle loomed on all sides, with gray stone and narrow windows, and aside from her father, not a single face she recognized.
She climbed down. She was shaking so badly that she stumbled and almost fell. A guard close to her reached out to steady her.
Her legs were stiff from the ride, and her back ached.
Her hair was still road-dirty under the hood of her cloak.
She had imagined, in whatever small way she had allowed herself to imagine anything this past week, that there would at least be a moment.
A room to herself. Water to wash with. A breath.
With barely a glance in her direction, her father was already walking with a hurried gait.
Straining to keep her legs moving, she followed him across the courtyard, through a low archway, along a path beside the east wall.
The kirk was small and stone-built, with a simple wooden cross above the door.
Through the open door, she saw the candles burning inside, casting a warm, flickering light across the flagstone floor.
This is it. I am to be wed to a stranger. A cruel man, perhaps. Someone who would treat me as badly as me own father has.
She stopped walking. Her father turned. “Chloe.”
Then, from the shadowed doorway of the kirk, a voice she had never heard before cut through the cold air. Low. Unhurried. Certain of itself.
“Ye’re late.”
“The roads were poor,” she said.
Something shifted in his expression. Not warmth exactly. But something that had not been there a moment before.
“Aye,” he said. “They are.”