Page 98 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

“He has people who follow him.” O’Brien stood up and moved toward her. She held herself still as he crouched in front of her, close enough that she could see the deep lines around his eyes. Not a young man’s fury, but something older. “Do ye ken what his father did?”

“I ken what ye did,” Elspeth said. “Ye burned a home with a family inside it.”

Something crossed his face and was gone. He tilted his head.

“Useless man. Weak. Made me father lose our lands. Stood by while me family starved and scattered. The Wallaces kept their hills, and we buried our name.” He said it the way a man recited a thing he’d said to himself every morning for years.

“I took me revenge. Left nae a thing of them standing. The boy…” He paused, something shifting behind his eyes. “I didnae expect him to live. He was away training. He was supposed to return to ash and give up.” His jaw tightened. “He didnae give up.”

“Nay,” Elspeth said. “He didnae.”

“Thirteen years.” O’Brien stood up abruptly and moved back to the window, hands folded behind his back. “I watched him rebuild it stone by stone. Fence by fence. I watched him bring his people back, plant his fields, fill his hall. Smile as though they deserved another chance.”

He turned. “They didnae. I will never forgive them. I will never stop until Wallace means nothing. Until Ben Cruachan burns to the ground. Until he understands what it feels like to lose everyone.” His voice had gone flat, devoid of everything except the thing that had been driving him for thirteen years.

He crossed the room in three strides and crouched in front of her again, and his eyes were not the eyes of an angry man. They were the eyes of a man who had already decided.

“And now he’s given me exactly what I need.”

Elspeth met his gaze squarely. “Then ye ken nothing about Magnus.”

“I ken everything about him.” O’Brien reached out and lifted her chin with two fingers, studying her face. She pulled back. He let her. “I watched him these weeks. The way he watches ye when he thinks no one else is watching him.”

He stood up and moved to the window again, adjusting his gloves one finger at a time. “He allowed himself a weakness. He always was going to. Men like him always do, in the end, and then I have to find it and press.” He glanced back at her. “And here ye are.”

Elspeth’s thumbnail hit the third loop and felt it give, just slightly.

“Ye’ve made one mistake,” she said.

O’Brien paused at the window, not turning fully. “Have I?”

“Ye think Magnus is the same man he was thirteen years ago.” She kept her voice even, her hands in her lap. “Ye think because ye broke him once, he’ll break again.” She watched his shoulders. “He rebuilt a clan from nothing. He survived grief and loneliness and thirteen years of a debt he could have spent in fury but didnae, because his people needed a laird more than he needed revenge.”

She let that sink in. “And now he has people who will stand beside him, whether he asks them to or nae. A cousin who has never left his side. A laird who rode three days to be at his handfasting. A household that would walk into fire for him.”

O’Brien turned then, and his expression had gone flat in a different way than before. Not the settled flatness of the speech he’d given himself every morning, but something tighter.

“We’ll see,” he said.

Elspeth looked back at the window. The fires on the hills were small from here, small enough that she could tell they were doing exactly what he’d said—creating noise, drawing eyes, pulling people toward walls rather than toward her. He’d planned it carefully. She understood that.

She also understood that she’d been working at the rope for twenty minutes and had found three loops and a fraying edge near the knot, and that the two men by the door had stopped watching her sometime in the last five minutes in favor of watching O’Brien.

She looked at the fire he’d built badly in the hearth. It had caught now, low and uneven, the wood stacked wrong, the embers spreading outward across the stone rather than drawing up. She looked at the distance between where she was sitting and the hearth.

She looked at her hands.

Magnus is coming.

She knew it the way she knew the sound of his boots in the corridor, the creak of the third step, the way he cleared his throat when he’d said something softer than he’d meant to.

He was coming because he was Magnus Wallace and she was his, and he had buried his family once already and would not do it again.

That thought, which should have steadied her, lodged somewhere beneath her ribs and pressed.

He was going to walk through that door alone.

Then I had better be ready when he does.