Oliver spent an hour preparing for departure. He distributed the last of their food without ceremony, giving the larger portions to her and Webb despite their protests, in the manner of a man who considers the argument already settled. He checked his pistols, checked the horses, checked the ground ahead with the focused calm of someone who has decided on his next step and is simply executing it.
She watched him and thought about what he’d said in the dark.
I want you.Said plainly, without artifice, alongside everything else, as though it were simply one more honest thing he owed her.
She put it away again. Carefully. In the same place she’d put the other things.
When they finally set out, leading the horses through the deep snow, Megan walked beside Oliver and didn’t speak, and he didn’t press her to, and the silence between them differed from the silence of a week ago. It had a texture now. A history.
She wasn’t sure what to do with that.
But she was, for the first time in longer than she could account for, something close to glad to be alive.
CHAPTER 10
They reached the village as afternoon shadows lengthened across the snow.
Llanrhyd was barely more than a cluster of stone houses around a church and an inn, but after a week in the wilderness it looked like paradise. Oliver led them directly to the inn, The Quick Fox according to a weathered sign that creaked in the wind. Inside was warmth. Light. The smell of roasting meat that made Megan’s stomach clench with sudden, desperate hunger.
The innkeeper was a stout woman in her fifties who took one look at them and her expression shifted from wariness to practical sympathy.
“Rooms?” she asked in accented English.
“Two rooms, a meal, and someone to tend the horses.” Oliver set coins on the counter, more than necessary, enough to buy discretion.
Within minutes they’d been installed in two small but clean rooms. Webb collapsed onto the bed in the first room, the fight entirely gone out of him.
“Don’t fall asleep yet,” Megan said. “I want to clean thewound once more now we have proper supplies. Eat something first.”
“Thank you, Megan.” He looked up at her with the particular exhaustion of a man who has been holding himself upright on determination alone. “I owe you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You rescued me. I’m merely returning the favor.” She glanced at Oliver. “You look like you’re about to collapse too. Go eat. You’re no good to anyone if you faint from hunger.”
He nodded and headed downstairs.
Megan worked quietly, cleaning Webb’s shoulder with hot water and the herbs she’d been conserving and rebinding it with fresh cloth from the innkeeper’s supply. Webb bore it without complaint, ate the bread and cold meat she pressed on him, and was asleep before she’d finished tidying. She sat for a moment watching his chest rise and fall, that old reflex of checking that a person was still breathing, and then went to find Oliver.
She heard his voice from the top of the stairs before she reached the common room, low and careful, speaking with the innkeeper. When she came down he was already moving toward her with food.
“Penharrow’s men are here,” he said quietly. “Searching the village.”
Megan went still.
“Three of them. The innkeeper sent them away.” He set the food on the small table near the window of Webb’s room, and she sat and began to eat, because her body needed it regardless of what her mind was doing. “We should leave tonight, but the horses need rest.”
“We all need to rest.”
“I know.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Which means we’re trapped. If we stay, they might find us. If we leave, we might fall from exhaustion before we clear the valley.”
Megan set down her bread and crossed to the window.Below, the village street was quiet in the fading light, snow still thick on the rooftops, a few figures moving at a distance. She scanned them out of habit, looking for the particular quality of purposeful stillness that she’d learned meant men who were watching rather than simply living.
“It’s me they want,” she said. “Not you. Not Webb. If I left alone?—”
“No.”
“Oliver—”
He crossed to her and turned her to face him. “I didn’t pull you out of that river to let you walk back into Penharrow’s hands. We stay together.”
