Chapter 7 #2
She was still here. Still upright. Still looking him in the eye with those extraordinary green eyes and telling him the truth of it without flinching, and the sheer scale of what that cost her was something he felt land in his chest like a physical weight.
Not pity. He understood, from some instinct he couldn’t have named, that pity was not what she needed and not what she was asking for.
She wasn’t asking for anything. She was simply telling him the truth and trusting him to bear it.
He was already lost. He knew it in the same moment she stopped speaking. Whatever had been true of him before she started was no longer true. Something had shifted in the arrangement of things, quietly and permanently, and there was nothing to be done about it.
“After Daniel,” Megan continued, her voice nearly inaudible now, “I stopped trying. Because I’d learned the cruelest truth of all.
Anyone who tried to free me would die, and he would make me watch.
And I couldn’t bear any more blood on my hands.
Now you tell me James is dead, and I didn’t even ask him to help me. ”
The fire crackled. Outside, the wind howled. Webb muttered something in his feverish sleep.
Oliver waited a beat. Then another.
“I’m going to kill him,” he said. The words came out flat and certain, a statement of settled fact rather than rage.
Megan’s head snapped up. “What?”
“Penharrow. I’m going to kill him.” Oliver met her eyes. “Not just for Captain Hartley anymore, although James deserves justice. For you. For Daniel. For every person whose life he’s taken or destroyed.”
“Don’t.” The word was sharp. “Don’t make yourself a murderer for my sake.”
“Some men deserve death. War has taught me that.”
“I’d prefer him to rot in a cell the way I rotted in his.” Megan leaned forward, her eyes fierce. “I’ve spent years watching what unchecked violence does to a person. How it corrodes everything. I won’t be the reason you become like him.”
“I could never become like him.”
“You say that now. But revenge changes people.” She reached across the fire, not quite touching him, but close. “Promise me. Promise me you’ll let the law deal with him.”
Oliver wanted to argue. He looked at her face instead, at the plea in those eyes, and found he couldn’t give her a comfortable lie.
“I can’t promise that,” he said quietly. “But I can promise that if it comes to it, it will be a fair fight, and I won’t let it destroy me.” He paused. “That’s what I can give you.”
It wasn’t what she wanted. He could see that in the way her expression closed off slightly, the brief opening between them narrowing. She pulled back, drawing her cloak tighter around her shoulders.
“You asked why you should trust me,” Oliver said.
“Here’s the honest answer. I could have taken advantage of you at any point since we left the lodge.
You’re alone with me in the wilderness, exhausted and without resources.
If I wanted to abuse that, I could.” He watched her hand move almost imperceptibly toward the small knife she’d tucked into her dress, the one she’d thought he hadn’t noticed.
“But I won’t. Because unlike Penharrow, I understand that a person isn’t property.
That you’ve had enough of a man taking what he wanted without asking. ”
Megan was quiet for a long moment. “You’re either the most honorable man I’ve ever met,” she said at last, “or the most skilled liar.”
“Time will tell which.”
Something that might have been a smile crossed her face, faint and fleeting. “I suppose it will.”
The fire shifted between them. The tension didn’t dissolve exactly, but it changed, settled into something more bearable. She lay down on her side, using her bundled cloak as a pillow, and closed her eyes. Then she opened them again.
“Why would any magistrate take the word of a woman such as me?” she said. “I hope you have an answer to that, or your hope of testimony is a waste of time.”
“I have a letter from James Hartley. Written before he died.” Oliver fed a small piece of wood to the fire. “Your testimony together with his account may be enough. I intend it to be.”
She looked at him for a moment, then closed her eyes again.
Oliver sat with his back against the cold stone wall, his pistol in his lap, listening to the sounds of the night. Webb’s breathing had evened out, the fever perhaps beginning to break. The sleet had softened to rain, a steady percussion on the roof that was almost soothing.
He was watching the door when Megan’s hand moved across the floor between them and found his.
Not reaching for him, precisely. More like her fingers had arrived there on their own, and when they encountered his, they stayed. Her hand was cold. Small. He felt the tension in it, the slight hesitation, and then the slow loosening as she decided to leave it where it was.
He didn’t move.
He’d held dying men. He’d gripped Webb’s hand in the mud outside Salamanca when Webb had been certain he wouldn’t survive the night, and that grip had mattered, had been the right and necessary thing to do, but it had not done this.
He’d carried men off fields. He’d caught men as they fell.
His hands had been instruments in every kind of extremity a war produced, and none of it had prepared him for the particular quality of stillness that settled over him now, with this small, cold hand resting against his on a stone floor.
It was such a slight thing. Her fingers against his, barely pressing. And he , not have explained, to any reasonable person, why it required an act of will to stay where he was and breathe evenly. He was not a man undone by small gestures. He’d never been a man undone by small gestures.
But she had chosen to do it. That was the thing that kept returning to him.
She had chosen, in full knowledge of what had been done to her and what men were and what trust had cost her, to close the small distance between them and leave her hand there.
That choice, offered by her, freely, to him specifically, was something he had no adequate category for.
He turned his hand over, very slowly, so that his palm was open beneath hers.
She didn’t pull away.
Outside the rain continued, steady and unremarkable. Webb breathed. The fire burned low.
Oliver kept watch, and did not sleep, and did not move his hand.