Then they deepen.
The melody stumbles, recovers, fractures again.Dissonance creeps in, sharp and unapologetic, and Callum’s chest tightens because he recognizes that sound.It’s the sound of someone refusing to smooth the edges of their pain for anyone else’s comfort.
He closes his eyes.
He has heard Keir play like this.
Not in public.Never in front of an audience.Only late at night, when the house was quiet, and the whisky was untouched because Keir needed his hands steady.That was when the music came out like this, angry, broken, demanding to be heard.
But Keir’s daughter commanded the piano like a captain commanding a ship.
Callum swallowed hard.
Damn her.
Damn her for sounding like him.Damn her for being so good that he’s drawn inside her pain.
The door creaks faintly as Callum slips inside the room, but Isla doesn’t stop.She doesn’t even falter.The music swells, growing more confident, more insistent, as if she’s decided something mid-phrase and refuses to let go of it.
Callum presses his palm flat against the wall.
This is the woman who will take the castle from him.He’s drawn to her, and the realization burns, sharp and infuriating.
The thought lands heavy and bitter.
Ninety days.
That’s what the solicitor said, reading the will in a voice so neutral, it felt like an insult.Ninety days for Isla MacLaren to live here, to breathe the air, to let the place work its way into her bones.Ninety days before everything Callum has protected, repaired, and held together with his bare hands could be gone.
And yet?—
He listens.
And something inside him fractures anyway.
The piano shifts into a new movement.The anger doesn’t disappear, but it changes shape.Becomes something steadier.Purposeful.Like a vow set to rhythm.
Callum’s throat tightens.
Earlier, without her knowledge, he’d seen her, standing in the sitting room, spine straight, chin lifted, defiance simmering just beneath the surface.He’d known then that whatever battle she’d just fought with her mother hadn’t ended cleanly.He’d seen it in her eyes.The way control had been ripped away and replaced with something sharper.
Freedom.
The music reflects it now.
She’s not playing for applause.She’s not playing for legacy.She’s playing like someone reclaiming a part of themselves that was never meant to be borrowed, cultivated, or approved.
Callum exhales slowly.The music reminds him of how he felt the day he left the boys’ school: raw, unmoored, and carrying freedom that felt too much like betrayal.How the castle had welcomed him with open arms and memories of his father.
This castle was never just stone and mortar to him.It was survival.It was proof that someone wanted him when no one else did.Keir had dragged him out of a hell Callum barely talks about anymore, out of the school, out of the fights, out of the spiral he’d been headed toward.
“This place is yours,” Keir had said once, slurring slightly, hand heavy on Callum’s shoulder.“One day.”
Not written.Not promised in ink.
But meant.
And now Isla sits at the piano like she was born to it, like she belongs here in a way Callum never quite allowed himself to believe he did.
