The words kept hitting, like a blacksmith's hammer striking an anvil.
Again. Again. Again.
Margaret closed her eyes, her long lashes dark against her pale cheeks. For a terrible, bleeding moment, she saw him as he had been less than an hour ago in the silver moonlight. Warm and heavy against her. His bare skin smooth beneath her palms. The possessive, demanding bruise of his mouth on hers.
She remembered the rough, raw honesty in his gravelly voice when he spoke of his childhood, his stolen birthright, and the heavy obligations he carried inside himself as if they were wounds stitched shut too quickly with coarse thread.
She had thought—God help her, she had truly thought something had finally broken open between them. She had believed they were finally standing on the same side of the wall.
Lilly whimpered softly against her shoulder, a tiny, distressed sound that shattered the memory.
Margaret snapped her eyes open. The child's little fingers had tangled desperately into the fine linen near her collarbone, holding on with a sleep-heavy, instinctive terror.
Margaret gently rubbed a trembling hand over the baby's back, her movements automatic, driven by a deep, protective instinct unrelated to her own agonizing pain.
"There now, me lamb," she whispered. Her own voice sounded entirely foreign to her ears. Thin. Distant. It wasn't broken, but it was dangerously close to the edge of a precipice.
Around her, the courtyard still churned in a hazy blur. Men carried supplies through the south gates; older kitchen maids shouted orders over the din; gray ash drifted faintly on the wind from the western hills, settling like snow on the flagstones. And somehow, standing directly in the center of all that frantic noise, Margaret felt abruptly and completely alone.
It wasn't because Fergus had ridden headfirst toward danger. She was a daughter of the Lowlands, but she had been raised to understand the harsh, unyielding nature of duty. She had always understood what a man must do to protect his name and his land.
What hollowed her out from the inside, leaving her chest cold and empty, was the terrible, undeniable realization that even after tonight—after every quiet moment built slowly and carefully between these ancient stone walls, after the winter nights, after Lilly's first laughs—Fergus would always reach for distance the exact instant fear touched him. He would always see weakness in her. He would always push her away first to preserve his armor.
As though loving her, as though needing her even a fraction, would utterly destroy the soldier he had built himself to be.
Margaret swallowed hard, a painful lump throat-dry and burning.
No.
Not this time.
She had survived the humiliation of her wedding night, left behind like an unwanted piece of furniture. She had survived long months of waiting, wondering if she was entirely unlovable. She had survived the brutal process of learning how to belong to Clan MacKenzie without ever being chosen by its Laird. But she would not survive spending the rest of her life begging a man to see that standing beside him in the dark was not the same thing as dragging him down into the mud.
Something inside her soul settled then.
She turned on her heel and walked back into the keep, her spine turning to iron.
The great hall reeked heavily of peat smoke, damp wool, and hurried panic. Servants hurried through the wide space in every direction, carrying bundles of blankets and iron lanterns. No one stopped her. Most, caught up in the threat of the fire, hardly noticed the Lady of the castle at all.
Margaret climbed the steep spiral stairs steadily, her bare feet numb against the stone. One step. Then another.
Lilly had fallen asleep peacefully now, utterly worn out from her fit of coughing and crying, her warm little body heavy and relaxed against Margaret's shoulder. That familiar, gentle weightnearly broke her defenses. She briefly pressed her lips to the child's soft, copper curls, inhaling the scent of milk and lavender before continuing down the dark corridor toward Isobel's chamber.
The heavy oak door stood half open.
Isobel was inside, her face pale under her dark hair, securing a thick wool cloak around her shoulders as one of the younger maids fetched extra blankets from a nearby chest. She looked up immediately when the floorboards creaked.
And she stopped dead.
"Margaret," Isobel breathed, letting the cloak drop from her fingers.
Margaret stepped inside and shut the door quietly behind her, cutting off the noise of the hallway. "I cannae stay, Isobel."
The words came out perfectly calm, level as a frozen lake. That eerie composure frightened her far more than if she had broken apart and screamed.
Isobel went rigid. The young maid glanced uncertainly between the two noblewomen before slipping silently from the room, keeping her head down as she closed the heavy door behind her.
For a long, agonizing moment, neither woman spoke. The peat fire crackled softly in the hearth, throwing long, dancingshadows across the tapestries. Lilly stirred slightly in Margaret's arms, exhaling a soft breath against her neck. Outside, somewhere far below, another chorus of frantic shouts echoed across the yard.
