Chapter Four #3
“You’re a Munro too. Why should I listen to you?”
“Until but an hour ago, I was still a Gunn.” Destiny squared her shoulders. “Can I ask a question?”
“I am not going anywhere,” the prisoner said in a snide tone.
“Why were you trying to kill me and my kinswoman in the forest? My father claimed this marriage was to help merge our clans—Gunn, Mackenzie, Munro?” She should be angry at this man, but even though he had threatened her and Sorcha’s lives, she understood clan strife.
It had been going on for centuries. It did not make what he had done right, but she could forgive him for blindly following the ways of many Highlanders before him.
“It wasn’t personal. Not all of us Mackenzies want the clans to settle their animosity.
” The man’s gaze shifted between her and Cameron standing behind her.
“Those of us who attacked you want the warring between the Mackenzies and the Munros to continue until we crush them. We thought perhaps if we took away something the Munro claimed was his, we might yet prevail.”
“I am his, now.” Destiny’s words reverberated through the dank cell. “And as his wife and his ally, we have no choice but to try to find a sort of peace.”
The prisoner laughed. “The Mackenzies will never accept your marriage to the Munro to end our feud. There will be more blood. I promise you.”
A single shiver traced the length of Destiny’s spine at his words.
“That is enough,” Cameron said, stepping forward, his voice hard.
Destiny ignored him. “None of us can predict the future. But for now, at least protect your own life by taking nourishment so you can heal.” Her gaze settled on a small table outside the cell where a cup of broth sat.
Someone had obviously brought it down here for the prisoner to consume.
“I am certain your mother would not want to see you die in this way. Do you not wish to see your mother again?”
The prisoner’s brow furrowed. “I do,” he said with hesitation.
“Then drink some broth to prove it,” she challenged.
Destiny fetched broth and knelt by the cell again.
She reached through the bars. When she lifted the spoon to the prisoner’s lips, Cameron’s gaze was on her, steady, intent, searching rather than condemning.
She felt the weight of it all the same. He watched as if trying to unravel her purpose, to make sense of the care she offered and the resolve behind it.
She ignored the flutter in her stomach, ignored the unsettling thought that his silence might not come from anger at her tending an enemy, but possibly from a need to understand why she chose compassion at all.
Why she offered it so freely to a man who had tried to harm her.
When the prisoner finally drank the last of the broth, relief washed over Destiny, warm and steady.
She eased back, hands trembling slightly from the effort, and allowed herself one quiet breath before she went to get him a blanket. “To keep you warm.”
After the man accepted the blanket, using his one good arm to spread it across his body, she lifted her gaze to Cameron. His arms were folded across his chest, his jaw set, yet it was the uncertainty in his expression that unsettled her most. Not anger. Not accusation. Puzzlement.
“You give comfort to an enemy,” he said, his voice was low, steady. “Tell me why.”
It was not a rebuke. Destiny felt that at once. It was the question of a man trying, in his own restrained way, to understand a wife who did not fit the shape he had expected.
She swallowed. “Because compassion costs me nothing,” she said quietly. “And because pain does not cease to matter simply because it belongs to an enemy. I could not stand by and watch him suffer from hunger or cold.”
Silence stretched between them. Cameron studied her as though she were unfamiliar ground, something both dangerous and compelling.
He searched her face, and Destiny sensed the moment his certainty ebbed, not about the world, but about her.
She was not what he had prepared himself for.
Not compliant. Not fearful. Perhaps not even sensible, by his reckoning.
Yet something in his expression softened, the hard edge of judgement easing into wary respect.
At last, he released a breath, slow and tired, as though setting down a weight he had not realised he carried.
He gave a single nod, not approval, but recognition. “Come,” he said quietly. “The day grows long.”
He stepped back from the cell door, allowing her to pass first. As they ascended the stairs together, their footsteps echoed in the dim passageway. She kept her gaze ahead, though awareness of him brushed over her like a warm current, steady and undeniable.
She told herself it was only the strain of the morning, only the closeness of danger, only the uncertainty of this new life. But as her heart beat faster in her chest, she knew the truth with an unsettling clarity.
Something between them had shifted. Not anger. Not resentment. Something far more complicated. Something she was not at all certain she was ready to feel.