“Even if it gets you killed?”
“Even then.”
She looked at him, at the uncomplicated certainty in his face, and felt the familiar internal argument flare and then, strangely, subside. She had stopped being surprised by him, she realized. She had started simply believing him, and she wasn’t sure when that had happened, and she wasn’t sure what to do about it.
“You’re an idiot,” she said.
“Probably.”
“A noble idiot.”
“I’ll take that.”
They stood close. Closer, she noticed, than they’d been since the river. The room had contracted somehow in the last minute, or she had stopped maintaining her careful margin without meaning to. She could see the tiredness around his eyes, the week of it written into every line of his face, and underneath that something that had been there since the cave and hadn’t left.
He looked at her the way he had in the water. As though she were something he’d established a prior claim on, somewhere below the level of conscious decision.
She thought, with sudden clarity,I could step toward him.
The thought arrived not as a temptation to be considered and dismissed but as a simple recognition of what was available. She could close the small remaining distance between them. He would not reach for her first; she understood that about him now, that he would hold himself back with both hands before he let himself reach for her without permission. But if she moved, he would not retreat.
She understood, in the same moment, that she wanted to. Not from gratitude, not from proximity or loneliness or the distorted arithmetic of captivity. She wanted to because of the cave and the river and fourteen conversations conducted in whispers and firelight, and because he had turned his hand over in the dark and held hers and not asked for anything else.
She was still deciding when the door opened.
The innkeeper entered carrying towels and a basin of hot water, her eyes moving between them with a knowing practicality that suggested she had walked in on worse.
“For washing,” she said, setting them down. “The other room’s ready when you want it, my lord.”
Oliver’s face remained composed. “Thank you.”
When the innkeeper left, Megan turned back to the window. The moment had passed. She was aware of it passing and not with relief, but with the particular register of a loss, small and sharp and noted.
“You should rest,” Oliver said. He had moved toward the door. “Stay in here with Webb tonight. Lock the door. Don’t open it for anyone but me or the innkeeper.”
She turned. “Oliver.”
He paused in the doorway.
“Thank you,” she said. “For everything.”
Something moved across his face. He nodded once and left.
Megan lay in the dark for two hours and did not sleep.
She heard the village settle. She heard Webb’s steady breathing and the occasional creak of the inn, and outside thedistant sound of wind picking up again across the rooftops. She lay on her side with the small kitchen knife close to her hand, not because she’d decided to use it in the way she’d used it to comfort herself in Penharrow’s house, but because the weight of it had always made her feel less like a person who had no options.
She was thinking about Penharrow’s men in the village. She was thinking about the three of them in this inn, exhausted and undermanned, one day from safety. She was thinking about the door.
She was also thinking about the window. About the step she had not taken.
She pressed her palm flat against her sternum and stared at the ceiling, and when another hour had passed and her mind had not quieted, she got up.
She didn’t think about it carefully. She crossed the hall.
Oliver was behind the door before she’d finished opening it, the barrel of his pistol at her temple. In the half-second before he recognized her, she felt his absolute readiness, the total absence of hesitation, and then it was gone, his hand dropped, he pulled her inside with one smooth motion and locked the door behind her.
“Are you all right? Is Webb?—”
