Chapter 10
The Handcuff Conversation
MORVEN
The file is three hundred pages. Ewan is reading it with his feet up on the coffee table, which Lachlan has objected to on at least four separate occasions. Lachlan is not here. My legs are across Ewan’s lap. I am reading a different section. This is, I think, a strange kind of domestic happiness.
The sitting room off the main corridor. Eleven at night.
The fire was low in the grate and the curtains were drawn and the room smelled of coal smoke and the tea that Ewan had made half an hour ago and neither of us had finished.
The file was Rona’s Mackie analysis, printed on Lachlan’s printer – the good one, the laser one – and divided into sections with the same colour-coded tabs she used for everything.
Lachlan was at the casino. The Mackie dinner had been last night and he had come home late, his face carrying the blankness it wore when he was processing a threat he found intellectually interesting and personally offensive.
He had briefed us this morning – laid out Mackie’s “community register” reference, the partnership proposal, and the Rona revelation at the doorstep – and then he had gone to his study and closed the door, and we had not seen him until he left for the casino at nine.
The house was quiet. Al was at the Hook – he had been sleeping there more often this week, a pattern I was noticing without yet knowing how to address.
Three nights this week. Three nights away from the manor, away from the house that had held its breath during his absence and exhaled when he returned, and now he was choosing distance.
Not from me. From the arrangement. He had not said this yet.
I could feel it in the careful way he said goodnight and the practical way he packed a bag for the Hook and the steadiness with which he kissed my forehead before leaving, every gesture carrying the weight of a man who was protecting people by removing himself from the thing that had put them at risk.
His ribs were still healing. I had seen him wince that morning reaching for a mug from the top shelf, the involuntary tightening across his left side, and he had covered it with the economy of a man who did not believe his pain was anyone else’s business.
The Hook’s narrow cot was probably worse for his ribs than the bed at the manor.
He was choosing discomfort over proximity, and I did not know whether that made his distance noble or infuriating.
This was the part nobody warned you about.
Three men. Three sets of needs. Three versions of withdrawal that looked different and required different responses, and there were nights – this was one of them – when the logistics of loving three people felt less like a gift and more like a job I had not applied for and could not resign from.
I had Ewan beside me and the warmth of him was real and good and I wanted it, and I also wanted Al’s weight on the other side of the bed and Lachlan’s hand in my hair at three in the morning, and the wanting-all-of-it was either the most honest thing about me or the most selfish, and I had not yet decided which.
Rona was in her room with the lock turned. Niamh was at the casino with Lachlan.
Just us. Ewan and me. The file and the fire and the quiet.
“Page seventy-two,” Ewan said. He was holding his section at arm’s length, the way a person does when they need reading glasses and refuse to admit it.
“The harbour board connection. Mackie’s shell company has a directorship link to the board secretary.
Not the harbour master – the secretary. The person who controls the meeting agendas. ”
“Not the same as Al’s intel.”
“No. Al found the harbour master lunch connection. This is one step further in. Mackie isn’t just buying the harbour master’s co-operation – he’s structuring the board’s agenda to prioritise his planning applications.”
I looked at the section. Rona had cross-referenced the board minutes against the planning application timeline and the correlation was clean.
Every session where a Mackie application was reviewed had been chaired by the same board member, and that board member’s meeting schedule had been set by the secretary, and the secretary was Mackie’s.
“She’s brilliant,” I said. I did not specify who. I did not need to.
“Annoyingly, yes.”
We read in silence for a while. Ewan turned to a new section – the one on Mackie’s charitable donations, which Rona had cross-referenced against the timing of his planning applications.
The pattern was clean. Each donation preceded an application by approximately six weeks.
The donations were to local causes – youth football, a food bank, the Cairndhu Heritage Trust. The amounts were large enough to be noticed and small enough to be believed.
The applications that followed were approved with minimal opposition.
“He’s buying goodwill,” Ewan said. “A football strip here, a heritage grant there. And then the planning committee looks at his application and thinks: This is the man who funded the under-twelves.”
“Rona calls it reputation laundering.”
“It’s smart. It’s also transparent if you know where to look.” He tapped the page. “But the committee doesn’t know where to look. They see a businessman who gives to charity. They don’t see the property acquisition timeline underneath.”
Ewan’s hand was on my ankle. His thumb moved in small, absent circles against the bone – the kind of touch that was about presence, the physical confirmation that someone was in the room with you and the room was safe.
“What do you want from this?” Ewan said.
He had put the file down. His feet were still on the coffee table.
His face was turned towards me and the firelight was on the left side of it and in the firelight the Fixer’s mask was almost entirely absent.
What remained was the face beneath – sharper, less handsome in the conventional sense, more real.
The face of a man who had been performing charm for so long that showing the thing underneath it was its own kind of bravery.
“From what?” I said. “The Mackie situation?”
“From everything.” He gestured. A small movement – his hand indicating the room, the house, the file, the fire, us. “All of this. What do you want?”
“I want to stay,” I said. “I said that. I meant it.”
“And us? What are we?”
I looked at him. The question was simple and the answer was not and we both knew this – it was what we had been circling for months, the conversation we had been having in gestures and touches and late-night silences instead of words, because words required a precision that the reality did not yet have.
“I don’t know the word for what you are,” I said. “I don’t think it exists yet.”
His mouth moved. A smile that was not the Fixer’s smile – smaller, less controlled, the kind that escaped rather than was deployed.
“We could make one up,” he said.
“What would it be?”
He thought about this. The fire cracked. The coal shifted in the grate and a small shower of sparks went up the chimney and the room brightened for a moment.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But it would have to be a word that means ‘the person who reads Mackie files with you at midnight and doesn’t get bored.’”
“That’s a sentence, not a word.”
“I’ll work on it.”
He produced the handcuffs from his jacket pocket.
He did it without drama. He reached into the inside pocket of the jacket he had been wearing all evening – the one thrown over the arm of the sofa – and brought out a pair of handcuffs and placed them on the coffee table between us. On top of the Mackie file. Chrome against paper.
I looked at them.
“When did you start carrying these?” I said.
“About three weeks ago.”
“And you waited until now?”
“I wanted to be asked.”
The room was still. The fire was low. The curtains were drawn and the door was closed and the house above us was dark and silent.
I picked them up. They were warm from his pocket – the warmth of a man’s body heat stored in metal, transferred to my hand.
They were heavier than I expected. Real weight. Real metal. Not a costume.
I clicked one closed around my own wrist.
The sound filled the sitting room. The ratchet mechanism – click, click, click – three small precise sounds that settled into the walls and the furniture and the air between us. Ewan watched me. His face was still. His eyes were not.
“The key,” I said.
He produced it. Small. Silver. He held it between his thumb and forefinger and the firelight caught it and it glowed.
“Where do you want it?” he said.
“Where I can reach it.”
He placed the key on the coffee table. Beside the file. Beside my cold tea. Within arm’s reach.
What followed was ours.
He came to me on the sofa. The Mackie file slid to the floor – three hundred pages of financial analysis fanning across the rug – and neither of us looked at it. His hand found the cuff on my wrist. His thumb traced the chrome, then the skin beneath it, the faint line where the metal pressed.
“Can I?” he said.
“Yes.”
He lifted my cuffed wrist above my head and pressed it against the sofa arm.
The chrome was cold against the upholstery.
His other hand was at my waist, sliding beneath my shirt, his fingers warm on my ribs.
He touched me the way he talked – with attention, with specificity, with the care of a man who wanted to know whether each thing landed before he moved to the next.
“Here?” His thumb traced a line beneath my navel.
“Yes.”
“Here?” Lower.
I stopped answering with words.