Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Finn hadn't slept and lay in his chamber, listening to the storm and replaying calculations from the council, like scouts and watch rotations.
The southern pass. A fortnight, he'd told her.
He turned the word over like a stone in his palm, wondering if he'd lied about a fortnight.
Suddenly, a scream tore through the corridor before he fully reacted.
He was out of bed, grabbing his broadsword, and running to her door, feet slapping cold stone, in what felt like an eternity.
The door gave way beneath his shoulder without slowing him down.
"Where is he?" The words tore out of him rough and low, already scanning the room, the window, the shadowed corners. "Did someone breach the…"
There was no one. Only Claire, upright in the bed with the blankets twisted violently around her legs, her chest heaving, her hands fisted so tight in the linen that her knuckles had gone bloodless. Her eyes found him and did not seem to see him at all.
The sword suddenly felt like a foolish, useless thing in his hand.
"There is nay one," she gasped, pulling her knees to her chest, curling into herself the way a wounded animal curls, protecting whatever soft part remained. "It was only a dream, Finn. I'm sorry to have woken ye."
He set the blade down against the wall, and the clang of it hitting stone seemed obscenely loud in the aftermath of her scream. He crossed to the bed slowly this time, the way he might approach a spooked horse, and lowered himself onto the edge of the mattress.
"I heard ye scream, lass," he said. "It sounded like ye were dyin'."
"It was only me own mind." Her voice was hollow, scraped thin. She was fighting something behind her eyes; he could see it, some old iron discipline clamping down hard on whatever wanted to break free, and losing.
"Ye dinnae have to do that," he said quietly.
"Do what?"
"Fight it so hard. The cryin'." He nodded at her white-knuckled grip on the sheets. "I willnae think less of ye for it."
Something in her seemed to give way at that, some final wall crumbling, and the tears came in earnest, silent and furious, as though she resented every single one of them. He reached for her before he'd decided to, his palm finding her jaw, his thumb tracing slow circles against her damp skin.
"They were draggin' me," she whispered. "Same as the road. Same as the raiders."
"They're dead, Claire." He kept his voice low, level, the same voice he used to steady a green recruit before his first skirmish. "I killed every last one of them myself. Nay man will ever lay a hand on ye while I draw breath."
"I despise this." She scrubbed furiously at her wet cheeks with the back of one hand. "Feelin' so completely terrified. I ought to be stronger than this."
"Fear doesnae make ye weak," he said. "It keeps ye alive. Means yer mind's workin' exactly as it should. Ye saw horrors, lass. Ye dinnae just fold those away like an old letter and forget where ye put them ."
She leaned into his hand, just slightly, and he felt the small movement land somewhere deep in his chest, somewhere he'd stopped letting things land years ago.
"My mind feels like it's shatterin'," she confessed. "Every time I close me eyes I'm back on that muddy road. And every time I open them, I'm here, packin' me trunks to be sent to me cousins."
His jaw tightened. Guilt sat heavy and sour in his gut, but he kept his hand where it was.
"The MacSween lands are well defended," he said, though the words came out rougher than he intended. "Leo will keep ye safe from all of this. It's the only road I ken that leads ye anywhere but the blood."
"I'm nae talkin' about the war." She shook her head, and a strand of dark hair fell loose against her cheek. He wanted, absurdly, to tuck it back. "I'm talkin' about me life. I'm terrified because me life doesnae belong to me."
"What do ye mean, lass?"
"I mean I've never made a single choice for myself." The words came faster now, a dam finally giving. "My father decided who I was, who I smiled at, who I was traded to. He treated me as a political asset, nae a daughter."
"He wanted a strong alliance," Finn said, though even to his own ears it sounded hollow.
"He wanted power." Her hands fisted tighter in the sheets. "And now ye're decidin' me fate too. Ye've decided I'm a liability. I'm a parcel bein' passed from one powerful man to the next, and I've nay say at all in where I breathe or where I sleep. Is that nae the same cage me father built?"
He had no answer for that. He sat with it instead, letting the accusation settle where it landed, because she wasn't wrong, and he'd never been a man who could lie well to a woman looking at him like she needed the truth more than comfort.
"I'm sorry," she mumbled, pulling her knees tighter. "I'm bein' ungrateful. Ye've a whole clan to protect, and I'm cryin' over a carriage ride."
"Ye're nae bein' ungrateful." He dropped his hand from her cheek to rest it on the mattress between them, needing somewhere else to put it before it did something reckless. "Ye're bein' honest. That's a rare enough thing in this castle."
"Everyone tells ye the truth. Ye're the Laird."
He let out a short, humorless breath. "Most men only tell me what they think I want to hear, or what keeps their heads on their shoulders. D'ye ken why I keep ye close, Claire? Truly?"
"Because of the contract," she whispered. "The gold."
"The contract's just ink." He turned his body toward her fully, pulling one leg up onto the bed, crossing his scarred forearms loosely.
"I keep ye close because ye're the only soul in this keep who looks at me like a man, nae a monument to be worshipped or a monster to be feared.
That's a dangerous thing for a Laird to have around. "
She went still, watching him with an intensity that made him want to look away and made it impossible to.
"Ye think ye're the only one trapped by what's expected of ye?" he asked.
"Ye're the Laird," she said, confusion threading through her voice. "Ye command everythin'. Life, death, the whole of these lands."
The first grey light of dawn had begun creeping through the shutters, softer than either of them expected after such a storm.
Finn drew back the heavy drapes instead of lighting another candle, and the two of them ended up at the narrow window overlooking the kitchen garden, watching mist curl low over the frost-silvered rows of herbs.
He laughed, short and jagged, a sound with no real humor in it. "I command the stone walls. I dinnae command me own life. I was one-and-twenty when me father died in the mud beside me."
She sucked in a breath. "One-and-twenty?"
"Aye." He stared past her, into the dark corner of the room, into a memory he rarely let himself walk back into.
"The council shoved his iron ring onto me finger before his blood had even gone cold.
I was a boy, Claire. I wanted to grieve him.
I wanted to take a horse into the hills and scream till me lungs bled.
I wanted to be anythin' but the Devil of the North. "
"I dinnae ken," she said softly, and he heard her voice ache for the boy he'd been, the one nobody else in this castle had ever bothered to mourn.
"I stopped laughin' that day," he continued, the words coming rougher now, dragged up from somewhere he kept locked. "Stopped drinkin' ale with me friends of an evenin'. Every choice I've made since that afternoon has belonged to the clan. Even me own marriage contract."
She stared at him, and he watched the understanding move through her, the way she seemed to finally see the iron beneath the armor rather than just the armor itself.
"I sold me name to buy grain for me people," he admitted, holding her gaze. "Traded me own future to keep their bellies full through the winter. So daenae tell me ye're the only one who feels like a parcel bein' traded off, lass."
"I'm so sorry, Finn." Her fingers found his wrist, light and hesitant. "We're both prisoners. Just kept in different rooms."
"I dinnae want yer pity." He turned his hand over beneath hers, tangling his rough fingers loosely with her smaller ones, more out of instinct than decision.
"I want ye to understand why I mean to send ye away.
It's nae because I want ye gone, Claire.
It's because I mean to keep ye alive long enough to have a choice in any of this at all.
Wed or nae, I willnae have ye caught in the middle of a war that isnae yers to fight. "
The wind threw a fresh gust of rain against the window, hard enough to rattle the glass in its frame. Neither of them looked toward it.
"Ye should sleep," he said finally, when the silence had stretched long enough that he no longer trusted himself inside it. "The storm will pass by mornin'."
"Stay," she said. It wasn't quite a question.
He should have said no. He knew it even as he stayed exactly where he was, his fingers still loosely tangled with hers, the storm doing its worst against the shutters.
He shifted instead, easing back until he was propped against the carved headboard, and she curled toward him without seeming to decide to, her cheek finding his shoulder, her breathing slowly losing its ragged edge.
"Ye're a stubborn, impossible woman," he murmured into her hair.
"And ye're a terrible liar," she mumbled back, already half gone to sleep, her hand coming to rest flat over the steady drum of his heart.
He didn't argue the point. He let his fingers move slowly through her dark curls instead, watching the fire gutter low in the hearth, listening to her breathing even out beneath the storm's steady assault on the glass.
He thought of her in the great hall, weeks past, fiddle tucked beneath her chin, laughing at something Molly had said, unguarded for the length of a single reel.
He had stood in the doorway that night longer than he'd ever admit and watched her the way a starving man watches through a window at a feast he isn't permitted to enter.
She deserved that. The laughing. The unguarded ease of it. A life where no man came bleeding through her gates, where no council debated her worth like cattle at market, where the only screaming she ever heard again was her own joy at some foolish thing.
He could not give her that here. Not while enemies gathered on the southern pass, not while half his council still did not know the truth of the contract, not while every soul in these Highlands now knows the Devil of the North had a weakness with dark curls and grey eyes and a spine of pure iron beneath the silk.
Her breathing settled fully into sleep, slow and even against his chest. He stayed exactly as he was, arm curled protectively around her, watching the fire burn down to embers, and did not close his eyes once through the whole of that long, storm-battered night.