Aingeal stepped beside him. Neither touched. The space between them no longer felt like a wall. More like a threshold.
“I do not want gratitude from you for loving you despite what you have done,” she said.
He turned his head then. The rain ran down the hard line of his face. He looked exhausted. Bruised. Stripped bare in a way no battle had ever managed to make him. But his eyes were steady on hers. “No,” he said. “I would never ask that of you.”
“I want truth. Every day. Even when it costs. Especially when it costs.”
Reginald looked at her as if she had given him a command he would spend the rest of his life learning to obey rightly. “You will have it,” he promised.
She turned fully toward him now. There were so many things still broken. And yet Reginald stood before her, alive because he had chosen to live through the day and answer for it.
Not die. Not flee.
Answer.
“You frightened me today,” he admitted.
Her gaze sharpened. “On the wall?”
A shadow crossed his face. “When Mael Ruadh went for you, I was too far.” The words came low. Roughened.
Aingeal stilled.
Reginald looked away, toward the rain, but the motion did not hide what moved through him. “I saw him reach the stair. I saw you alone at the top of it, and for one breath, I was back in every moment I have ever come too late to stop what my own choices set in motion.” His hand tightened against the stone column. “I have known fear in battle. Any man who claims otherwise is either a liar or a fool. But this was different.”
He looked back at her then, and the nakedness in his face struck her harder than any polished vow could have done.
“I was afraid of losing you.”
The rain whispered beyond the arch.
Aingeal could not speak.
Reginald drew one unsteady breath. “Not because I thought I had a right to you. Not because I believed loving you had earnedme anything. But because the world had only just given me something I treasured, and I saw him raise steel against it.” His voice roughened further. “Against you.”
Aingeal’s throat tightened. She remembered Mael Ruadh coming up the stair. The wet stone beneath her boots. The crack of the spear. The open drop behind her. Reginald’s face when he reached them, with death waiting in his hand. “You did reach me,” she said.
“Nearly too late.”
“But not too late.”
“No.” His mouth tightened. “Not this time.”
The last words opened a deeper ache between them.
Aingeal knew what he meant. Canterbury. Donal. All the places where action had become harm, where choice had come too late, where mercy had not entered soon enough.
She stepped closer. “You chose.”
His eyes moved over her face. “Because of you.”
“No.” The word came soft, but firm.
He stilled.
“You chose because you are becoming a man who can,” she said. “Do not give that to me. I will not be another shield for you.”
Something in him seemed to absorb the blow and the mercy both. Then he nodded once. “You are right.”
