The impact drove the breath from Marcus’s lungs. Harold’s weight struck him full, and together they crashed to the floor. Marcus twisted, striving to master the fall, but Harold’s head caught the edge of the stone foundation with a crack that reverberated through the mill—abrupt, final.
Silence followed. One beat, then another. Harold did not stir.
Marcus lay stunned, one arm curled beneath him, the other rigid at his side. Dust drifted in the thickened air. Slowly, he raised his head and saw Harold’s eyes, wide and unseeing, fixed upon the rafters above. A dark stain spread at his temple, pooling against the stone.
It was over.
The breath came back to him in a rush, and he forced himself upright, every muscle trembling from the blow. Heturned. Catherine stood a few yards away, the broken cogwheel she had wielded lying discarded at her feet. Her shoulders drooped, weariness etched into every line of her frame, her hair fallen loose about her disordered gown.
“Catherine,” he said, his voice breaking at last with the fear and love he had scarcely dared confess, even to himself, until this moment.
She took a half-step forward, then faltered. Marcus reached her in two strides.
She yielded into his arms without protest. He caught her, wrapped himself about her, drew her close against his chest and held her as tightly as he dared. Her body trembled. She buried her face at his shoulder, her hands gripping his coat with startling strength despite her frailty. He sank with her to his knees, pressing his cheek to her loosened hair as the clamour of the world seemed to fall away.
She is shaking, but she is whole,he thought, clinging to the certainty of it.She is alive. She is in my arms and safe once more.Nothing else mattered—not the letters, not the missing artefacts, not the long hours of suspicion and consuming fear. She had never betrayed him. She had never fled. She had met danger with brilliance, with fire, with unyielding courage—and now she was where she belonged.
He pressed a kiss to her tangled hair, voice raw against her ear.
“I knew,” he whispered. “I saw that wretched note and feared I had doubted you—yet what I truly feared was that you might not be alive when I reached you.”
Her arms tightened about him. She lifted her face from his shoulder just enough for him to see her eyes; they brimmed with tears, but her gaze remained steady.
“I thought I would die,” she murmured. “And the worst was that you might never know how wholly you had won my heart.”
Marcus’ breath caught. He did not ask her to repeat it; the look in his eyes answered for him. He drew her closer until their foreheads touched, and for a long, suspended instant, they merely breathed together.
Catherine swallowed and let the tears fall.
“I love you,” she said at last. “Not from gratitude or desperation, nor from relief. I love you for your kindness, for your patience, for every time you looked at me and saw more than duty or convenience. I love you, Marcus.”
For a few moments, he could not speak. He brushed his thumb across her cheek with a sort of reverent astonishment, then cupped her face in both hands and kissed her—first upon the brow, then, slowly and tenderly, upon the lips—in the quiet awe of a man who had found his true companion on the far side of chaos.
When he pulled back, his voice was steadier.
“You have been braver than any soldier I have ever read of,” he said. “Facing that man without any fear or cowering… Catherine, I have never admired anyone more in my life.”
She let out a small, relieved laugh and leaned her forehead to his.
“I was terrified,” she admitted. “But I kept thinking of you—of how you stood by me in the study, of the trust you gave me with your work and your name. And though I told myself I would rather you never risk yourself for me, still I could not help but believe you would come. Had I not believed it, I should not have endured.”
He drew her close again. Her weight settled fully against him, her breathing gradually slowing.
Outside, footsteps sounded, moving carefully across the courtyard, voices rising in hushed urgency. But they were distant now, irrelevant. Only this moment mattered, and the truth of their feelings.
He kissed her again, softly this time, lips brushing hers in quiet gratitude. In faith, absolute.
Alexander gave a final terse instruction to one of the constable’s assistants, his voice low but firm.
The younger man nodded and moved quickly to the mill’s entrance; notebook clutched in hand. The constable himself knelt just beyond the shaft of broken light, inspecting what remained of Harold’s satchel with its contents strewn among crushed straw and the fragments of torn correspondence.
Harold’s body had been arranged with some degree of dignity. But no sympathetic words followed. There was only the occasional rustle of paper or the methodical scratch of a pencil as facts were recorded for the magistrate’s review.
Marcus stood at the edge of the wreckage, Catherine steady beneath his arm. Harold seemed diminished now—neither dangerous nor brilliant, only broken. The blood at his temple had dried; one shoe lay missing, cast aside in the struggle. The blade he had once brandished was secured in a constable’s case, labelled and set down. The mask of scholarship had slipped away entirely.
Where once there had been citation and charm, there was now only a smuggler’s ledger, secreted in the lining of his coat—a list of names and coded initials, mapping transactions across counties Marcus had never imagined bound by more than parish records or common trade.
Alexander approached then, his expression grave but composed.
