Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Alba did not sleep.
She lay in the narrow, unfamiliar bed of her second-best chamber—her own main chambers having been taken over by a man with far less right to it than he believed—and stared up at the dark wooden ceiling, listening to the heavy, rhythmic thud of MacGregor boots on her stone floors until well past midnight.
When the sprawling castle finally quieted into a tense stillness, she was still awake, running the same desperate calculation over and over in her mind like a jagged stone turning in a river, wearing itself smooth without actually going anywhere.
Seven days.
She was still running the numbers when the pale, gray light of early morning pushed under the heavy oak door, and Philomena, her maid, arrived, her dark eyes already bright with a fierce outrage before she had fully crossed the threshold.
“They moved the linen press,” Philomena announced, her voice trembling with indignation.
“Me Lady, they moved it. Three enormous men with the combined intelligence of a single goat between them decided that the corridor where the linen press has stood for twenty years was a more appropriate location for a weapons rack.”
She set down the heavy water basin onto the washstand with a sharp firmness that stopped just short of a slam. “I told them to move it back. Do ye ken what they did?”
“I can guess.”
“They laughed.” Philomena pulled the thick wool curtain back from the narrow window with feeling. “Laughed, me Lady! As though I were jokin’! As though I were the unreasonable one.”
Alba sat up, tossing back the heavy blankets, her neck throbbing. Outside the window, the Highland sky stretched as a flat, colorless white.
“We need a plan,” Alba said, swinging her legs out of bed.
Philomena immediately turned away from the window, one of the traits Alba valued most about her maid. She was quick, sharp, and fiercely loyal. “What kind of plan?”
“The kind that will give us our home back.” Alba reached for the water basin and splashed freezing water over her face, the sudden cold sharpening her focus.
“He’s given me seven days to decide. Marriage or leave.
” She dried her hands on a rough cloth and looked Philomena directly in the eye. “I intend to use all seven.”
Philomena’s eyes narrowed. “What do we do first?”
“First,” Alba said, reaching for the green wool of her dress, “we get through breakfast without me committin’ a crime.”
She managed that. Barely.
The Great Hall was thick with the smell of woodsmoke and unfamiliar cooking, which was disorienting enough on its own.
But it was the layout of the long oak tables that made her freeze in the arched doorway.
Her tables, shifted two full feet to the left to make room for a rough planning board one of the MacGregor men had leaned against the far wall, covered in hand-drawn strategic maps and route markings in charcoal.
Her Hall. Her tables. Someone else’s bloody war.
She stood stiffly in the kitchen doorway, holding a wooden cup of cold porridge, swallowing her pride, and told herself this was a strategic retreat, not a defeat.
She was still telling herself that when she entered the stone corridor a few minutes later and saw four large MacGregor guards carrying heavy crates straight through her home.
“What exactly,” she said, her voice coming out with the dangerous, quiet softness that Philomena had once described as the calm before a landslide, “do ye think ye’re doin’?”
The men stopped instantly. One of them blinked at her. Before any of them could awkwardly answer, Sebastian’s veteran man-at-arms stepped forward from the rear of the procession.
Hamish.
She had learned his name already, the one with the graying hair at his temples and the watchful, calculating eyes that missed considerably less than they appeared to.
“Movin’ the remainin’ supplies inside, me Lady,” he said. Pleasantly. Which was somehow infinitely worse than a sneer.
“Into me kitchens.”
“Into the Laird’s kitchens, aye.”
The words landed with the specific, lethal precision of a blade finding the narrow gap in an armor. Not the kitchens. Not even our kitchens.
The Laird’s kitchens.
As though the permanent transfer of ownership was already complete, already settled, already a thing so blindingly obvious it required no further discussion.
Alba looked hard at the crates. Then at Hamish. Then, at the familiar corridor that led to her kitchen, in her Castle, on land that bore her name by ancient Highland law, a signed contract and three grueling years of her own blood and exhaustion.
“Move them to the south storeroom,” she ordered firmly. “The kitchens are for food preparation, nae storage. If ye stack supplies in there, ye block the hearth and the cook cannae manage the fires properly. Ye’ll have cold meals and spoiled stores before December.”
Hamish looked at her for a long moment. Something shifted significantly in his weathered expression, not quite reassessment, but very adjacent to it. “Aye, me Lady,” he said, dipping his head.
The men turned on their heels, shifting the heavy crates toward the south storeroom. Alba walked on before anyone could see the small, grim satisfaction dancing on her face.
She sensed him before she even saw him. She detected the crisp outdoors—cold winter air, fresh sawdust, and the unmistakable, masculine atmosphere that seemed to follow Sebastian MacGregor naturally.
She pushed through the heavy kitchen door into the open courtyard, and there he was, as if he had always belonged there, as if the castle had been intentionally built around him rather than violently taken over by him.
He stood near one of the ancient oaks along the southern wall with his linen shirt sleeves rolled up to his broad elbows despite the biting cold, bent over a rough trestle table someone had dragged outside, studying maps with one of his captains.
The repairs to the outer wall were already aggressively underway behind him.
Wooden scaffolding was going up, stones were being mortared, and two men on high ladders were working on the massive gap near the East Tower that Alba had been petitioning the stubborn Clan Council to address for the better part of a year without any result.
Now, the stone was being laid right before her eyes.
A sharp, traitorous prickle of relief bloomed in her chest, and she crushed it instantly.
Her jaw locked so tightly it ached. She forced her gaze away from the workers, refusing to let her eyes linger on the repair, refusing to give him the satisfaction of noticing.
If he thought a few loads of mortar and some timber could earn her gratitude for invading her home, he was even more of a fool than she believed.
“If ye’re tryin’ to drive me out,” she said, stopping abruptly beside the table, “ye’ll need to try harder than rearrangin’ me kitchens.”
Sebastian glanced up from his charcoal-marked maps. His expression was entirely calm, which she was rapidly learning to deeply distrust. “I am organizin’ the winter stores.”
“In me home.”
“Our home, currently.” He looked right back down at the parchment. “Permanently, if ye make the sensible choice.”
Alba stared at the side of his face.
He did not look up. His gaze stayed on the parchment, and his charcoal stick moved in a slow, deliberate line as if she were just another element of the weather. Present, noted, and completely beneath interruption.
Her fingernails bit into her palms through the leather of her gloves.
“Ye’re nae even goin’ to answer me,” she said.
“I answered ye.” He turned the map slightly, studying its southern edge. “Ye didnae like the answer.”
She stepped closer to the table, close enough that he would have to acknowledge her or make a deliberate choice not to. “The legality of this occupation is…”
“Highland law.” He looked up then, finally, and the absolute unhurried steadiness in his dark blue eyes was worse than any argument he could have made. “Same as yers. Ye ken that already.”
She did. That was the particular poison of it.
I have nowhere else to go.
The thought hit her hard and was completely unwelcome.
Her cousin, Margaret MacKenzie would take her under her wing, but Margaret’s protection meant Fergus MacKenzie’s name, and his name carried obligations she wanted to avoid.
Three years of independence, hard-earned, did not end just to trade one man’s control for another’s.
“Then I will find somewhere else to go,” she said, and heard the words come out sharper than she intended, because they were hollow and she suspected he could hear it just as clearly as she could.
Sebastian straightened up to his full, towering height. He looked at her properly for the first time since she had approached the table, and there was something in his gaze. Some brief, careful, intensely focused attention in his dark blue eyes that made her want to step back and look away.
She did not flinch.
“Ye’ve nowhere to go,” he said. He did not say it unkindly, which somehow made the truth of it almost worse. “And we both ken it.”
“Ye daenae ken anythin’ about me.”
“I ken ye rode out alone to meet merchants in a treacherous Highland storm rather than wait safely for them to come to ye,” he countered, rolling one edge of the map down and setting a heavy stone on it to keep the wind from catching it.
“I ken yer man-at-arms follows ye without question, and yer guards would have taken a sword through the chest for ye on that road. I ken yer people stop what they’re doin’ the moment ye speak, and they daenae do it out of fear. ”
He looked at her steadily, his voice dropping. “And I ken that a woman who built all of that from nothin’ isnae goin’ to walk away from it because she’s too proud to be practical.”
The bustling courtyard continued to move around them. Hammers struck rhythmically on stone. Men called out to each other over the wooden scaffolding. The ordinary sounds of a world that had not noticed anything unusual were happening right in the middle of it.
Alba felt his words settle somewhere deep inside her, someplace she had not permitted them to go.
“Flattery isnae the same as a good argument,” she said, her voice tight.
“It wasnae flattery.” He looked back down at the maps. “It was an assessment.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Flattery is when ye tell someone what they want to hear.” He made a sharp mark on the map with the flat of his thumb. “I didnae do that.”
She believed him, which was thoroughly aggravating.
“I want access to the east wing accounts,” she demanded, shifting the subject to solid ground. “If yer men are reorganizin’ stores, I need to ken what’s been moved where, or the winter inventory willnae balance, and we’ll run short of food before March.”
Sebastian was quiet for a moment, calculating. “Hamish has the accountin’ ledgers.”
“Then tell Hamish to bring them to me study.” She paused, letting the silence hang. Then, with biting precision: “Me study.”
One corner of his mouth shifted slightly. Not a full smile, but something that was completely aware of itself. “I will tell him.”
She turned on her heel to leave.
“Lady MacLaren.”
She stopped dead without turning around. The back of her neck felt the intense weight of his attention like a sudden change in temperature.
“The gap in the East Tower wall,” he said, his voice carrying over the wind. “How long has it been there?”
Her jaw tightened. “Fourteen months.”
“I will have it closed by Thursday.”
She said nothing in response. She walked straight back toward the keep without looking at him again, refusing to give him the satisfaction of adjusting her pace.
Behind her, she could feel his eyes watching her every step, so she kept her back perfectly straight, her chin level, and her hands loose at her sides all the way across the cobbles.
Inside the darkened stone doorway, Philomena was waiting.
“Well?” she asked eagerly.
"He agreed to close the tower gap," Alba said, peeling off her gloves finger by finger. "Before he'd even walked the full grounds."
"That's good, aye?"
"He also told me calmly that I have nowhere else to go and that I ken it as well as he does." Alba's mouth thinned.
Philomena winced sympathetically.
"And he wasnae wrong," Alba added, which was somehow the worst part of it. "I couldnae even properly argue with him."
"So he's..."
"Insufferable," Alba said flatly, already climbing.
“Interesting,” Philomena observed, almost to herself, a note of begrudging respect in her tone.
“Daenae,” Alba warned.
“I am only sayin’, me Lady.”
“Philomena.”
Her maid pressed her lips together securely. They walked in heavy silence for three more steps up the winding stone staircase.
“He has very good arms,” Philomena noted quietly.
Alba raised her brow, glaring at Philomena, clearly surprised at her remark.
“I will replace ye,” Alba said without missing a beat. “Happily and entirely without guilt.”
But despite her irritation, she was already thinking about the crumbling gap in the tower wall, promised to be closed before Thursday, and about the way he had said 'assessment' instead of 'flattery' without so much as blinking.
She thought of the seven days she had left to find a plan actually worth the name.
She climbed the final steps to her study, sat down at her oak desk, and pulled the household ledgers toward her.
Seven days.
She had rebuilt an entire clan’s broken trade system from rubble in less time than that. She opened the first ledger, dipped her quill in ink, and began.