Beside him, Aingeal watched him.
He could rise now, Reginald thought. He could speak and split the moment open. He could name himself Reginald FitzUrse and watch hope turn to scandal in a single breath. He could flee before dawn and leave this place to untangle the ruin he had made.
Instead, because he could not yet bear to be himself, he lifted the cup slowly and made the motion look like composure rather than surrender.
The hall mistook it for assent and cheered louder.
He drank. The wine passed over his tongue and down his throat, but he did not taste it. His chest had gone tight. In that moment, he understood the full cruelty of what he had done.
He had not only taken shelter in another man’s name. He had stepped into a life already waiting to be lived. A life that now reached for him with hands he had never invited and could not easily cast aside.
For the first time since Canterbury, Reginald understood something worse than memory.
Deception could bind a man more tightly than guilt.
Chapter six
Reginald felt the celebration long after he left it. Music still struck behind his eyes as he moved through the corridor, pipes shrill and wild in memory, drums beating hard enough that the stone itself seemed to carry the pulse.
Every cheer had sounded as though it belonged to him. Every raised cup had felt like accusation dressed in approval.
He was a fraud seated in another man’s place, wearing another man’s future while the castle blessed him for it.
He had left the dais with practiced calm. No one stopped him. Why would they? He was the honored bridegroom.
Beyond the Great Hall, the noise thinned by degrees. First echo. Then vibration. Then only a pulse inside his skull. Torchlight guttered low in the sconces. Shadows drew long fingers across the walls. With every step, the air cooled.
Leave.
The thought rose clean and hard. He could saddle a horse before dawn. Ride south. Abandon the name before it finished burying him. He had survived worse than flight. He knew how to vanish.
Yet, his feet did not turn toward the outer ward. They carried him deeper into the castle.
Marriage pressed in on him from every side. How could he stand before an altar and call himself husband when the man who had a right to that place lay beneath cold earth? How long before someone asked about lands he had never seen through Donal O’Raida’s eyes? How long before one wrong detail split the lie open?
And beneath all that, Aingeal.
She had not looked at him like a woman dazzled by a match. She had looked at him as if he were something meant to hold. A pillar. A shield. A strength she had not chosen but might be forced to trust.
That unsettled him more than desire ever could.
The smell of the feast faded. Beeswax and old incense met him instead, faint and sweet, threaded with the memory of smoke. Ahead, the chapel door stood half in shadow, its carved knotwork worn smooth by years of hands.
He stopped with his palm flat against the wood.
What could God offer him now? What had God ever offered him?
He opened the door.
The chapel was small, nothing like Canterbury. A low vaulted ceiling. Pale stone. A narrow lancet window casting a blade of moonlight across the floor. Candles burned before painted saints whose gold halos caught the trembling light and made their eyes seem almost alive.
Watching.
The door closed softly behind him. Silence fell over the room with such force it felt less like peace than judgment.
He had not stood alone in a chapel since…
The thought struck like a blow.
