Page 49 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

The name settled in Magnus’s chest heavy and cold. He had trained himself over thirteen years not to flinch at it. He had not trained himself to feel nothing.

“He vanished,” he said, more to himself than to Duncan. “After. He didnae stay to see what he’d made of us. He simply vanished and let us bury what was left.”

“Aye.”

“Thirteen years, and nae a word. Nae a sighting. Nae so much as a rumor worth chasin’.” Magnus’s jaw worked. “And now, the moment I take a wife, he surfaces to ask about the date of the handfasting.”

Duncan did not answer that. He did not need to. They had both lived the same thirteen years, both carried the same silence that had followed the fire. The silence of a man who had orchestrated a massacre and then disappeared into the embers, leaving nothing behind for either of them to aim their grief at but silence. No trial. No reckoning. Only ash and a boy of sixteen learning to be a laird over the graves of everyone who should have taught him how.

They had survived only because they had been away. Training, the pair of them, three valleys over, learning swordsmanship from a master neither of them had wanted to leave home for. Magnus had spent every day since wondering what might have changed if he had stayed.

“If it’s a trap,” Duncan said slowly, “it’s a strange one. Announcin’ himself before he springs it.”

“He’s nae announcin’ himself. He’s testin’ the ground.” Magnus’s eyes moved over the paddock without seeing it, calculating the roads into Ben Cruachan instead; the ridgelines that overlooked them, the places a man might watch from without being seen. “He wants to ken when we’ll be occupied. Distracted. Every guard’s attention on the weddin’ instead of the border.”

“Ye think he means to strike durin’ the handfasting itself.”

“I think,” Magnus said, “that a man who waited thirteen years to move isnae the sort to move carelessly. If he’s askin’ about the date, it’s because the date matters to whatever he’s plannin’.”

Duncan exhaled, long and slow, and leaned back against the fence rail. “What do we do?”

Magnus turned the question over in his mind, sorting it into pieces small enough to be solved one at a time. This was not grief. He had buried that feeling thirteen years ago deep enough that it rarely surfaced except in unguarded moments. This was a threat, and threats had a shape.

Shapes could be managed.

“Double the patrols,” he instructed. “Every boundary, startin’ tonight. I want men on the western ridge, in particular. That’s the approach with the best cover, and it’s the one Tam’s already flagged a rider on.”

“Ye think it’s connected.”

“I’d rather assume it’s connected and be wrong, than assume it isnae and prove meself a fool with a burnt hall for the second time in me life.”

Duncan did not argue against that.

“No one rides alone after dusk,” Magnus continued. “Nae the shepherds, nae the stable lads, nae the men fetchin’ water from the loch. If O’Brien’s watchin’, I willnae hand him an easy target simply because a man wanted to walk the last mile home by himself.”

“And the handfasting?”

Magnus was quiet for a moment. This was the harder question, the one that mattered more than patrols and boundary lines, because it touched the one thing in this entire calculation he had no intention of treating as a piece to be moved and sacrificed like any other.

“We proceed,” he said finally. “I’ll nae give him the satisfaction of thinkin’ he’s stopped somethin’ with a rumor and a question. But we double the guard within the walls that day, nae just the boundary. Every entrance watched. Every stranger accounted for before they’re within a hundred yards of the Great Hall.”

“And Elspeth?”

The name landed differently than the rest of the conversation had, and Magnus felt something in his chest tighten.

“She kens nothin’ of this,” he said.

Duncan’s eyebrows rose. “Ye mean to keep her in the dark.”

“I mean to keep her safe.” Magnus’s voice came out harder than he had intended, and he made himself soften it, though the certainty underneath it did not soften with it. “If she kens O’Brien’s name, she’ll ask questions. She’ll want to understand it, the whole of it, and there’s nae a version of that conversation that doesnae end with her lookin’ at me differently.”

“She’s nae a fragile woman, Magnus. Ye’ve seen that yerself, plain as I have.”

“I ken that.”

Magnus looked out over the paddock, at the low stone walls he had rebuilt with his own hands, at the smoke rising steadily from the kitchen chimney, at all of it. The whole slow, stubborn thirteen years of rebuilding something out of what O’Brien had left behind.

“It isnae her strength I’m protectin’. It’s her peace. She’s had precious little of it, by her own account, and I’ll nae be the one who hands her a threat to carry alongside everythin’ else she’s already carryin’, when there’s nothin’ she can do with the knowledge but worry.”