This is what it feels like before the door closes.
She knew this feeling. She had stood in enough doorways.
She had just never minded it this much before.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The map had been on the desk since morning. Anthony's gaze was fixed on the vellum, his brow furrowed in a deep, permanent line.
He stood with both hands flat on the table, weight forward, eyes on the northern ridge markings Fergus had added in the small hours. The wood of the desk creaked under the sudden pressure of his palms. Fresh ink, still slightly raised if you ran your thumb across it, which he had done three times already without registering he was doing it. He felt the slight, tacky resistance against his skin, a tactile reminder of the border that refused to stay quiet.
"How many riders?" he said. His voice was a low, gravelly sound that seemed to come from the back of his throat.
"Six seen. Could be more beyond the tree line." Fergus stood opposite, arms at his sides, the stance he used when he was delivering information he didn't like and had decided to deliverstraight regardless. Fergus's shoulders were square, his face a mask of disciplined neutrality. "They stayed north of the boundary marker. Didnae cross."
"They never cross." Anthony straightened, his spine popping with the movement. "They watch. MacLeod has been watchin' this ridge for two years. It's a message, nae an incursion." He felt a cold, familiar tightness in his chest at the mention of the name.
"Aye." Fergus looked at the map. Then at Anthony. The older man's eyes searched Anthony's face, looking for the reaction he knew was coming. "The message has a new rider this time."
Anthony waited. He went perfectly still, his breath hitching in his lungs.
Fergus's jaw shifted once. The silence in the room became brittle. "Folk say Moira, Lady MacLeod, rides with them now."
The fire in the grate popped. A log settled. The sudden noise made Anthony flinch, though he hid it by looking away.
Anthony looked at the map. The lines blurred for a moment before his vision snapped back into a hard, cold focus.
The northern ridge. The tree line. The boundary marker that had stood since his grandfather's time, the stone column carved with the McArthur mark that meanthere and no further.
She is watchin' that line.
He could almost feel the phantom weight of the cold stone against his back.
He had stood at that marker at twenty years old with his father beside him and been told what it meant to hold a border. Not just with walls and men, but with the weight of the name behind it, the accumulated fact of everyone who had held it before you.
He remembered the pride that had swelled in him then. It had felt like certainty. It had felt like enough.
It had nae been enough.
He had believed that, then. Now, the memory tasted like ash in the back of his mouth.
He looked at the ridge line on the map. At the notation Fergus had made in small, careful script: six riders, dawn, north face. Then beneath it, in smaller letters still, as if Fergus had debated whether to write it at all: one woman. dark horse.
Six years.
He'd thought that particular door was closed.
His heart hammered a slow, heavy rhythm against his ribs. He put his thumb over the second notation. The ink was dry now, but he pressed down as if he could smudge the words out of existence.
"Folk say many things," he said. He tried to keep his voice level, but a sharp edge of bitterness cut through the tone.
Fergus nodded once. He didn't miss the tension in the Laird's hand. "Shall I send men to the ridge?"
"Keep the current patrol rotation. Daenae change the pattern." Anthony moved his thumb from the notation, revealing the words again. "If she wants to watch the boundary, let her watch. The boundary hasnae moved."
"And if she crosses it?" Fergus asked, his voice quiet but persistent.
Anthony looked at the door. His eyes were dark, a storm brewing behind the iris. "She willnae."
