The word landed between them, heavy as stone.
Marriage meant permanence. Being seen.
And God help her, some part of her wanted it.
Yet the wanting terrified her more than any musket or bayonet ever had.
Her breath hitched, sharp and sudden. Tears burned her eyes. She turned away, scrubbing at her face with the heel of her hand.
“I always charge ahead,” she muttered. “I always think later. And now—now, I’ve stopped.”
Behind her, Harris said nothing.
When she finally turned back—
He had not followed. Had not reached.
Rather, he stood still, watching her with a quiet she’d never seen on him before.
“Come with me,” he said at last. It was not a command, but an invitation.
She hesitated. “Where?”
He gestured toward the rise ahead, where the basalt spires cut the sky, black, ancient, immovable.
“Up there.”
Something in his voice—steady, resolved—made her nod.
The climb was slow, the path slick and narrow, and Fiona’s skirts kept catching on stone. Harris matched her pace without comment, never touching her elbow, never urging her on. He walked beside her.
The Old Man of Storr loomed as they climbed, scarred bycenturies of wind and rain, indifferent to kings and causes alike.
They stopped at a natural shelf of stone worn smooth by time.
“Do ye ken how old this is?” Harris asked quietly.
She shook her head.
“Older than the clans,” he breathed. “Older than the Crown that’s huntin’ me now.” He rested his hand against the rock. “This place remembers truth longer than men do.”
He turned to her then.
“I’ve buried men better than me,” he went on. “Every day I wake still breathin’, I wonder why it wasn’t me instead. If loving you makes me careless, if it puts you in danger, I’ll never forgive myself.”
He took a breath, steadying himself as his voice wavered.
“That’s why I need you to hear this.”
Slowly, deliberately, Harris Mackenzie went to his knees before her.
Not theatrics.
A soldier’s motion.
Deliberate.
Final.
