Chapter 17
Her head kept spinning long after Murdoch had released her arm and stepped back into the solar, leaving her standing alone on the balcony with the wind clawing at her skirts and the image of Locke bound to that post burning itself permanently behind her eyes.
Or he dies.
Merith pressed her palms flat against the cold stone railing. Below, the courtyard continued its indifferent business. Guards crossing, stable boys hauling water, the ordinary machinery of the castle grinding onward as though nothing in the world had just shattered.
Only Locke remained still amid all of it. His head had dropped again, chin toward his chest.
She made herself breathe.
She had known, somewhere in the quiet hours between midnight and dawn, that it would come to this. That Murdoch would not simply accept her refusal and release them both with graceful dignity.
She had known it from the moment she found the ledger, from the moment she sat in that cold cell with Lucas and heard the steadiness in his voice. She had known it, and still some foolish part of her had hoped she was wrong.
She was not wrong.
Murdoch reappeared in the doorway behind her. He had recovered his composure with unnerving speed, smoothing the fury back behind polished courtesy as easily as drawing on a glove.
“Come inside,” he said pleasantly. “We have arrangements tae discuss.”
Merith turned. She had made her decision sometime during the long silent walk back from Lucas’s cell, before she had even found Murdoch in his solar. She had not known it consciously then, but she understood it now.
There were things she could endure. There were things she could survive. And then there was Shona… who was still upstairs… with the ledger.
“Aye,” Merith said quietly. “We do.”
She followed him inside.
They brought her to Locke an hour later.
The great hall had been stripped of its usual warmth.
Only a banked fire burned in the hearth, and the morning chill crept through the stone unopposed.
The long feasting table had been pushed aside, leaving the center of the room bare.
It was as though Murdoch had arranged the space specifically to emphasize what could be witnessed there.
Two of his guards flanked the doorway. Two more stood along the far wall.
Locke stood at the center of it all, wrists bound in front of him with a length of rope. The bruise along his jaw had deepened to a deep blue-purple in the short time since she had seen him from the balcony. A thin cut above his left eye had been left to bleed freely.
He looked up the moment she entered.
Murdoch positioned himself several feet away with his arms folded and his gaze moving between them like a man watching a game he was confident of winning.
“Go on, then,” he said mildly.
Merith did not look at him. She kept her eyes on Locke as she crossed the hall, her hands clasped together in front of her to keep them from trembling. She stopped at a distance close enough to speak quietly, but not close enough to touch.
His blue eyes searched her face.
“Merith.” Her name in his voice still sounded different than it did in anyone else’s. As though he treated it as something that could break. “What has he said tae ye?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she replied.
“It matters a great deal—”
“Locke.” She said it firmly, and he fell silent.
Behind her, she could feel Murdoch watching with cold interest, and she was grateful for the steadiness in her own voice when she continued.
“I have made my decision,” she told him.
A fear he was trying to contain showed up on his face. “What decision?”
She forced herself to hold his gaze. Her voice, when it emerged, cracked slightly on the first word, but she pressed forward.
“I have agreed to honor the arrangement. The wedding will proceed.” Her throat tightened. “Tomorrow morning.”
The silence that followed was excruciating.
Locke stared at her. He shook his head once, very slowly, the way a man might when he has heard something he refuses to accept.
“Nay.” The word was barely above a whisper. “Nay, dinnae do this.”
“It’s decided,” she said.
“Merith.” He stepped toward her, and the guard nearest him moved instinctively, but Locke ignored him, leaning forward as far as the slack in the rope allowed. He got close enough that she could see every detail of the bruise along his temple. “Listen tae me. Whatever he’s threatened—”
“He has not threatened anything.” The lie was smooth. She almost believed it herself. “I made a choice.”
“That isnae a choice.” His voice broke on the last word. “That is a cage.”
Tears rose without warning and she blinked hard against them, refusing to let them fall.
Not in front of Murdoch.
She kept her gaze level and her chin up and willed herself to become the composed, obedient woman she had spent nineteen years pretending to be, because just this once she needed that performance to hold.
“I will be fine,” she said softly.
“Ye will not be fine.” Locke’s voice was raw. “Ye dinnae know what he is.”
“I know exactly what he is.”
The admission silenced him. And in that silence, Merith allowed herself one small thing. She looked at him and let the warmth she had been trying to suppress for days show plainly in her expression before she drew it carefully back.
“As long as my maid stays with me,” she continued, and her voice was steady again, “I will have all I need.”
Locke blinked. Something moved across his face. Confusion first, and then something else entirely. His gaze sharpened with the sudden focused attention of a man who has just heard a message underneath the words.
He studied her, and she held his gaze, and she prayed with everything she had that he was as quick as she believed him to be.
Shona. The ledger. Find us.
His eyes did not leave hers. “Merith—”
“Enough.” Murdoch stepped forward, his patience apparently satisfied, and clapped his hands together once with the crisp finality of a man concluding a transaction. “The ledger. Where is it?”
Locke’s jaw tightened. For a long moment he said nothing. Then he looked toward the far wall where his satchel had been deposited beside the door. “There.”
Murdoch nodded to one of his men. The guard retrieved the satchel and brought it forward. Murdoch did not open it. He arrogantly carried it directly to the hearth and cast it in. A victorious smirk stretched across his handsome face.
The leather caught quickly, curling and darkening at the edges. The smell of burning parchment filled the room.
Merith watched it burn.
She kept her expression still, as though the sight of it destroyed something irreplaceable inside her, which it would have, had Shona not already been three floors above them with the real ledger folded beneath her shawl and a route out of the castle memorized since yesterday afternoon.
Locke had taught Merith to understand the difference between the thing that matters and the thing that merely appears to. She had put that lesson to use.
The satchel continued to burn. Murdoch watched the fire with visible satisfaction, and Merith watched Murdoch, and said nothing at all.
Then the guards came for her.
Two of them, gentle enough in the way of men who had been given instructions not to harm the laird’s future wife, but firm enough to make the direction of things perfectly clear.
Merith straightened her spine. She turned to face Locke one final time.
He was watching her with an expression she had never seen on him before. Not the easy charm. Not the careful distance. Not even the desperation of a few moments ago.
It was something that looked very much like a man memorizing a face.
“Merith.” Her name again. Just her name.
“Locke.” She said it back the same way, and she let herself mean it completely. Then the guards moved, and she walked with them to the door.
She did not allow herself to look back, because if she looked back she would not be able to keep walking.
Behind her, she heard him call her name once more. Louder this time, cracking across the stone hall like a shot, and the sound of it followed her into the corridor and up the stairs and all the way to the chambers where Shona was waiting.
When their eyes met, the maid nodded once. No words necessary.
It was done.
They dressed Merith as a bride.
Shona worked in silence, and the silence was a mercy.
The gown was ivory wool trimmed with pale blue ribbon, simpler than Merith had once imagined such a garment might be and heavier in every way that mattered.
She stood still while Shona braided her dark blonde hair back from her face, weaving a ribbon through it, her expression distant and careful and utterly unreadable to anyone who might enter the room uninvited.
“You will be fine, my lady. All will be fine,” her maid murmured.
Merith met Shona’s eyes in the mirror propped against the wall. There was no false comfort in the maid’s expression. That was one of the things Merith had always valued most about her.
“Aye.” Merith looked at her own reflection for a moment. The pale face and the ivory gown that did not belong to her future but perhaps to her courage.
Shona squeezed her shoulder once and then stepped back and smoothed her own skirts.
The walk to the chapel felt endless.
Every stone corridor seemed longer than it had ever been before, the sound of her own footsteps echoing back at her with an almost mocking patience.
The castle had dressed itself for the occasion. Candles in the wall sconces, dried heather tied at doorways, the small, strange courtesies that a household performed for events that did not ask whether anyone within it wished for them.
The chapel doors stood open when she arrived.
Murdoch waited at the far end of the aisle, turned to face her with his hands clasped behind his back and his dark eyes entirely composed. Composed, and victorious, and utterly confident in the way of a man who had arranged the world precisely as he intended it and expected no further resistance.
He had dressed well. Of course he had. Even now, he performed.
Merith walked and each step was heavier than the last.
She had moved past fear sometime in the deep hours before dawn, when she had understood what she was willing to do. What she was willing to endure, and for how long, and until what moment.
The priest stood at the altar, elderly and uncomfortable. He was very carefully not meeting her eyes.
Murdoch’s gaze moved over her slowly as she reached the front of the chapel, and the satisfaction in his expression made her stomach turn. He said nothing. He simply waited.
The ceremony began. She heard the priest’s words from a distance, as though they traveled through water before reaching her.
The candles guttered in a draft from the high windows. Merith fixed her gaze on the altar and breathed, counting the seconds.
Murdoch spoke his vows with the smooth precision of a man reciting something memorized long ago. His voice filled the chapel easily.
Then the priest turned to her.
“And do ye, Merith Donalson—”
She could not speak.
The words simply were not there. She opened her mouth and found nothing, only the image of Locke’s face in the Great Hall, saying her name the way he said it.
Her silence stretched. One second. Two. Five.
The priest hesitated. He glanced toward her with something that might, in another man, have been relief. “My Laird, the Lady—”
Murdoch’s hand closed around her arm. The grip was not violent, but there was no gentleness in it either. There was only possession, pressure, and a very clear message delivered through his fingers. “Say the words, Merith,” he growled in her ear.
Yet his voice, when he spoke to the priest, was pleasant and level. “Continue.”
The priest swallowed and Merith closed her eyes. She had to hold on.
And then the doors of the chapel burst open.
The sound of them striking the stone walls filled every corner of the room at once. A thunderous crack that shook the candle flames and brought every head turning in an instant.
Cold Highland air rushed in from outside. Voices followed it. There were running footsteps and the unmistakable collision of bodies and iron.
Murdoch’s grip on her arm went rigid and Merith opened her eyes.
Standing in the blown-open doorway, with dust on his coat and blood on his knuckles and his dark auburn curls wild from running, was Locke Reid.
At his back, filling the entrance of the chapel like a wave finally breaking after a very long journey across open water, came the Black Ledger Society.