She had not stepped back.
He was aware of that with a precision that had nothing to do with strategy. Not the way he was aware of a man holding ground in a yard, not the clean tactical fact of it. Something rawer.
She had stood in the wreckage of that roar with her chin level and her hands flat on the table edge, and looked at him without flinching, and he could feel his own heartbeat in places he had no business feeling it.
He looked at the window. At the frost. At anything that was not her face.
Fox put his chin on his paws and closed his eyes, as if the matter were already settled.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The word had barely finished echoing when his chest cracked open. He felt the air leave his lungs in a sharp, staggering rush, as if the stone walls themselves had finally closed in.
He hadn't planned it. His hands, flat on the table, began to tremble, and he curled his fingers into the wood until the splinters bit into his skin.
He had not stood in this room at any point in the last six years and thought,Today I will say it. The very idea had been a ghost he'd spent half a decade outrunning.
He had stood in this room at various points over those years and thought the opposite.
Never, to nay one, nae like this.
The vow had been a cold, hard knot in his stomach that he never expected to unravel.
That had held until thirty seconds ago when she'd looked at him with her chin up and her hands flat on the table and said,Ye cannae fix what ye willnae look at. The words hit him with the force of a physical blow, shattering the last of his carefully built defenses.
Something in him had simply run out of wall. He felt the structural integrity of his silence give way, a slow, grinding collapse.
"Me parents are gone," he said, "because I killed them." The admission was a jagged, ugly thing, leaving the copper taste of blood in the back of his throat.
She went still. He saw her shoulders lock, her breath hitching as the silence in the room became absolute.
"Me brother. His wife." He looked at the window. The grey square of sky. The frost on the sill. The pale light caught the sudden wetness in his eyes, though he blinked it back with a ferocity that made his head ache. "James's lungs. All of it. One decision. Mine." He felt the weight of the statement settle into his marrow, cold and immutable.
His voice came out low and hollow, the voice he heard sometimes at three in the morning in a different form. The one that went through that corridor again, that felt the smoke hit his lungs, that heard his mother say the wind's shifting and felt his own hand pull free of hers. He could almost smell it now—the acrid, choking scent of burning timber and wet wool.
"I was to be his man-at-arms. Me brother was Laird in waitin'. I was to be the best soldier this clan had ever produced." He turned. Looked at her directly. His jaw was tight, his pulse thrumming visibly in the hollow of his throat. "And I believed it. I was twenty-four, and I believed it completely." The memory of that arrogance was a bitter, stinging heat behind his eyes.
She was watching him. Both hands still on the table edge. She hadn't moved. Her green eyes were wide, absorbing the wreck of him with a terrifying, quiet focus.
"The fire came at night. The lower wing. We had a chance to stop it. I've thought about that chance every day for six years, and I ken we had it, a real one, if we'd pulled the men back when there was still time. But I was arrogant." He let out a short, harsh breath that was almost a sob.
He looked at his hands. The faint shine of old burn scars across the knuckles, the leather gloves that hadn't been enough. The scars looked white and angry in the dim light of the brazier. "Me mother stood in that courtyard and told me the wind was turnin'. She was raised by a healer. She knew how to read what others ignored. She said it plainly." He pressed his thumb across the scars. The skin there was tight and numb, a permanent map of his failure. "I pulled me arm free and walked away."
The fire in the brazier gave a small sound. Neither of them moved. The soft hiss of the peat was the only thing filling the void between them.
"The wind turned. The fire took the lower wing. I went back in anyway. I got them out, most of them, Margaret, me father, me brother with the boy in his arms. But the smoke had already done what it did. Me father went first. Ewan and Margaret held on three weeks. Me mother," He stopped. His throat closed up, the air scratching like thorns as he tried to speak. "She followed me inside. She knew there was nothin' she could do. She came in after me."
He looked at the window again. His eyes traced the patterns of the frost, desperate for something solid to hold onto.
"She held on until spring. I had the best care brought that I could find and I sat with her and watched it finish her anyway." His jaw moved. He felt the rhythmic grind of his teeth, a dull ache in his skull. "She had followed me inside. Despite knowin'. She came in after me." The repetition was a penance, a mantra of his own making.
The room was very quiet. He could hear the flutter of her pulse from across the stone floor.
"After." He said the word the way you said something that still had weight after six years of carrying it. "The alliances broke. The arrangements." A short pause. He swallowed hard, his hands clenching into fists. "There was a betrothal. A woman. Her father had arranged it when I was the second son with a future and an unmarked face and a family intact behind me." The phantom weight of a ring he never gave felt heavy on his finger.
He touched the scar at his jaw without appearing to register that he was doing it. One finger, brief, the automatic gesture of a man who had been doing it for six years without deciding to. The skin there was raised and ridged, a constant reminder of the price of his pride.
"He sent word of difficulties. Complications." The corner of his mouth pulled in a way that had nothing to do with a smile. It was a grimace of pure, concentrated pain. "She was wed to MacLeod before autumn."
