“I cannae keep pretending I’m fine,” she said, the words scraping out of her. “I cannae keep standing beside ye like this is only politics. Only duty. Only the king’s nonsense.”
Harald’s shoulders went still, the way a man stills when he hears a bowstring tighten. “What happened taenight?”
Enya drew a breath that felt like swallowing fire. She needed him to understand the girl she was before he saw the traitor she had become. “Me maither died when she had me.”
The words dropped into the room and stayed there, heavy and cold.
Harald didn't flinch. He didn't offer the hollow sympathies she had heard a thousand times. He only watched her, eyes fixed, giving her no escape and no interruption.
“They told me it was the birth,” she whispered, her throat tightening until it hurt to speak. “Blood and fever and God’s will. But what they really meant... was me.” Her voice tried to turn sharp, to find the old armor of her anger, but it broke at the edges. “They looked at me mismatched eyes and decided they had an answer fer why a good woman died and a demon child lived. They decided I waswrong. That everything I touched was cursed.”
Harald’s fingers flexed once at his side, his knuckles popping in the quiet room. He stayed silent.
“I grew up wi’ people lowering their voices when I walked past,” Enya went on, each sentence dragging something out of her she had kept buried for years. “Women making the sign o’ the cross when I appeared. Men looking away quickly, like me face could infect them. Every time a suitor was mentioned, it became a bargain. How much land tae take the cursed girl? How much gold tae ignore her after?”
She heard her own breath hitch—a ragged, ugly sound—and hated herself for it.
“Me faither,” she said, and that word hurt most of all, because she still loved him with a loyalty that had nowhere to go. “He tried. He truly did. He used tae tell me I was beautiful, that me eyes were a miracle, that me maither would have loved me.” Her mouth twisted in a bitter, jagged line. “But he also… he also left me alone too often with people who hated me. He wanted peace in the clan, and the easiest way tae get it was tae let them whisper and let me endure. He let me become a sacrifice fer the quiet o’ the clan.”
Harald’s gaze softened by a fraction, a shift so small she might have imagined it if she hadn’t been starving for a look like that her entire life. He looked at her not as a problem to be solved, but as a person who had been shattered and put back together with shaking hands.
The disappointment she felt in Finley was a cold void, but the look in Harald's eyes was a different kind of pain—the pain of being seen.
Enya’s hands trembled. She pressed them together harder. “Then he died.”
Harald’s jaw tightened, the movement restrained.
In the silence of the room, Enya realized with a terrifying jolt how afraid she was oflosinghim. The feelings she had been trying to bury—the way his presence calmed the storm in her blood, the way he looked at her eyes without flinching—rushed over her in a suffocating wave.
She didn't want to be his enemy. She wanted to belong there, in that room, with that man.
“A Norse raid,” Enya said, voice dropping to a whisper. “Nay banners, nay honor, only smoke and bodies and men screaming.I was fifteen and I watched me faither’s men carry him back intae the hall, and me braither…” she choked on the name. “Finley looked at me like he was seeing the curse made flesh. The braither who had cared for me and protected me as a bairn.”
Harald’s eyes flickered, a muscle jumping near his cheek. He didn't pull away. If anything, he seemed to lean into her pain, absorbing it.
Enya forced herself to keep going, the words tumbling out before her courage failed. “Finley became laird and he became… harder. Nae cruel in the way folk mean when they talk about cruel men. He never hit me. He never shouted unless I pushed him. He just… stopped being a braither.” Her laugh came out jagged, bitter. “He speaks tae me like I’m a problem. A weakness. A piece tae be moved in the board o’ his politics.”
Harald watched her, his silence a heavy, holy thing.
“And this marriage?” he said at last. His voice was so quiet it barely disturbed the air.
Enya’s stomach twisted into a cold, hard knot. She felt the truth clawing at her throat. The letter. The child. The clearing in the woods.
I was just there, Harald. I was just talking tae the man who wants tae destroy ye.
The honesty was right there, a heartbeat away from her lips. It would be so clean to tell him. It would be so honest.
She looked up at him and saw the way his attention never wavered. She saw the restraint in his stillness, the terrifyingly beautiful care in the way he stood his ground. He had listenedto her shame without judgment. He had made her feel like a woman instead of a demon.
Fear flooded her—a cold, paralyzing tide.
If she told him the truth now, the light in his eyes would go out. He would see the traitor instead of the woman. He would send her away, or worse, he would look at her with the same dead contempt Finley used. She realized, with a soul-crushing certainty, that she couldn't survive him hating her.
“This marriage terrifies me,” she said instead, the word barely audible.
Harald stepped closer. He moved slowly and carefully, like a man approaching a wounded animal that might bite or bolt. He didn't stop until the heat from his body reached her, until she could smell the iron and salt and woodsmoke that was him. His voice was a low vibration that thrummed in her very bones.
“Why are ye afraid, Enya? Is it the vows... or is it me?”
