Kate was coming up the side aisle on their grandmother’s arm.
Kate. On her own two feet, in a gown of green, her dark hair dressed, and her chin up, and a fragile, terrible bravery in every slow step she took. She had not left her room in half a year. She had not gone willingly into a crowd, into noise, into the whole staring weight of the clan, since the night Magnus broke her apart. And now here she was, crossing a crowded kirk to stand up for her brother’s wedding, white about the mouth and shaking, but there nonetheless.
A fault line opened clean down the middle of Ragnall’s chest.
“Kate,” he said when she reached him, and his voice came out wrong, rough and unmade. “Ye shouldnae. The crowd… it’s too much. Ye daenae have to?—”
“Wheesht.” She reached up and touched two fingers to the scar at the edge of his face, the one her dead lover had carved there, with a tenderness that nearly undid him. “I wouldnae miss me braither’s weddin’ for all the world and half of heaven besides. Yer bride is beautiful, Ragnall.”
“And trouble,” he said, because he had no other words that would hold.
Kate’s smile trembled and held. “Aye. That’s the best kind. Ye were always drawn to the ones with teeth.”
Maisie, on her other side, made a sound that was a half-laugh, half-sob. “Get him wed and quick,” she said to the priest, fierce and teary-eyed, “before the great daftie thinks better of it and we have to start the whole business all over again.”
And then the music changed.
The piper at the back of the kirk took up the slow, sweet marriage tune, the one that had played for every Crawford bride and groom for two hundred years, and the great doors swung wide on the gray morning light.
Ragnall turned to look at his bride, and the world simply stopped.
He had seen the gown. He had stood close enough to her the night before to feel the heat radiating from her skin through thefabric, had nearly lost his immortal soul over her in it not twelve hours ago. He had believed himself prepared for it.
He was not prepared.
She walked down the aisle on no one’s arm because she would take no one’s arm. Because she was Olivia of Clan Blythe, and she would walk to her own surrender on her own two feet or not at all.
The loch-blue gown moved like water about her. Her red hair was bound with white heather, and a fierce curl had already escaped to rest against her white throat. She held a bunch of roses in both hands and held her head up like a queen walking to a scaffold.
She did not look at anyone, left or right, nor at anything at all.
Until she looked at him.
Her eyes met his across the crowded kirk—blue, furious, frightened, and bright. For a suspended moment, neither of them so much as breathed. Every soul in that cold stone room seemed to vanish into nothingness. There were only the two of them—enemy and enemy, old wound and old wound—looking at each other as if they were the only two people God had ever bothered to make.
There she is. God forgive me. There’s me whole undoin’, walkin’ toward me in a blue gown, and I’d burn this kirk and meself inside it before I’d ever let a soul in it lay a hand on her.
She reached him. She stopped an arm’s length off, near enough that he could see the pulse going wild at the base of her throat, and lifted her chin that last stubborn inch and looked him dead in the eye.
“Ye’re shakin’, me Laird,” she said, very soft, for him alone.
“Aye,” Ragnall said. “I ken it.”
Her breath caught, just slightly.
The priest cleared his throat and opened his book. And the strangest thought came to Ragnall then, standing there with his hands unsteady and his sister weeping quietly at his back and his whole armored heart cracked wide open behind his ribs.
It was not a thought a man was meant to have at the start of a marriage of pure cold convenience.
I am in a great deal of trouble. And I daenae think there’s a blade in all the Highlands that can cut me free of it.
CHAPTER 13
Afterward,Olivia would remember the wedding itself only in pieces, bright and broken, like a dropped mirror.
The cold of the kirk flags stabbing up through her thin slippers. The priest’s voice rolling the old, grave words out over the pair of them. The rough warm weight of a length of Cairn plaid as it was wound around her wrist and Ragnall’s, binding her hand to his, the knot drawn snug by the priest’s steady fingers while the whole clan held its breath.
“With this cord I bind ye,” the priest intoned, “hand to hand, hearth to hearth, clan to clan. What the cord joins, let nay man and nay grievance and nay grave put asunder.”
