O’Douglas.
Hunter.
The borders.
The storm was still coming.
Maxwell lay there, holding his sleeping wife, torn between the warmth in his arms and the cold certainty in his gut that whatever peace they had found last night would not last.
He pressed his forehead briefly to her hair, breathing her in, and vowed silently that no matter what came, he would not let it take her.
Even if he had already lost more control than he dared admit.
23
“Frederick should be warned.”
Ariella looked up from the ledger she had been pretending to read. She had been staring at the same column of figures for long enough that even Isla would have noticed, had her maid been present. The ink swam. The numbers meant nothing. They were only an excuse to sit with her hands busy while her mind ran in circles.
Maxwell stood across the solar, broad shoulders filling the doorway as if the room had been made too small for him. He was already half turned toward the corridor, one hand resting on the doorframe, as though this conversation were only a pause between orders.
“Warned of what?” Ariella asked, because she had learned that questions made him stop, if only for a moment.
He paused, just long enough to answer properly, and no longer. “Of the likelihood that O’Douglas will nae limit himself to one front.”
Her fingers tightened on the edge of the ledger. She forced her voice to remain steady. “Ye believe he may strike Frederick’s lands as well?”
“I believe Lyall O’Douglas is nae a man who wastes opportunity,” Maxwell said. “If he moves, he will try to stretch defenses thin. He will look for the place where it is weakest.”
Ariella swallowed. The words should have felt like strategy alone. They did not. She could hear what lay beneath them, the quiet certainty that war did not care for borders drawn on a map, and that O’Douglas did not care for rules of honor.
“And ye are sending word,” she said.
“Aye.” He nodded once. “I thought ye might wish to add yer own.”
The offer was reasonable. Considerate, even.
It did not feel like kindness.
It felt like something he had forced himself to remember. Like a duty, checked off and set aside so he could return to more pressing matters. Either way, she would be glad to write to Frederick.
Ariella rose slowly, smoothing her skirts as if her hands needed something to do besides reach for him. He was close enough that she could see the faint shadow of fatigue beneath his eyes, the tension in his jaw that never truly left him these days. He smelled of smoke and cold air and steel.
And memory.
The memory of a night that still lived under her skin.
She thought of his hands, the way his voice had sounded low in the dark, the weight of him beside her in sleep. She remembered waking with him, how safe she had felt, how foolishly happy.
Now he looked at her as if he were looking past her.
“I will write,” she said, because she refused to be a child in the corner of her own life. “Thank ye for telling me.”
He inclined his head. “Good.”
That was all.
He did not step closer.
