Page 79 of Owned by the Scarred Laird

He did not move. He kept his chin tucked low near her hair, where the scent of salt had tangled with the faint, sweet trace of the lavender soap she used in the keep. “The sea?”

“Aye.” A small, sharp breath rattled in her throat. “When I was a girl, in the winters at the estate, the frost would get so thick inside the scullery that me knuckles would split open over the stone. I spent hours scrubbin’ those floors. Me knees flat on the flagstones until they were numb, pushin’ the gray lye water back and forth.”

She paused, her fingers tightening fractionally on his sleeves. “I used to close me eyes and imagine the sea. I had never seen a map of it. I only kent that it was vast, and cold, and that somewhere out past the hills, there must exist a place where life felt bigger than just survivin’ the day.”

Edward listened, his mind tracking the image with a slow, puzzling friction.

He had seen her only as she arrived, composed, clean, a lady with quiet manners who was learning how to handle a horse and settle a nursery. To think of her small hands raw from lye, her spine bent under the weight of someone else’s house, sent a strange, cold current straight down his back.

“I thought if I could just reach it,” she continued, her voice dropping into a register that made his chest ache, “if I could stand where the land ended, the world would stop feelin’ like a cage. Me mother told me it was a foolish thing to dream of. She told me the sea was only water, and water could drown a person just as easily as the mud.”

“She was a practical woman,” Edward muttered, though the words felt flat, empty of the conviction they usually carried.

“She was a terrified woman,” Chloe corrected gently.

She removed her hands from his sleeves and slowly turned within his arms, her boots grinding into the wet sand until she faced him. She had to look up, her chin held high, her dark hair whipping across her brow in tangled ribbons.

“Me father told me himself, on the ride to the kirk. Wanted a male child. Threatened to kill me when I was born, and I was hidden away from me family. I was raised by our maid. I daenae regret it; she taught me a lot. Me mother spent most of her life probably regrettin’ her decisions to hide me away. It was a desperate sort of protection.”

The surf slammed into the basalt behind them, a sharp, concussive boom that seemed to punctuate her words. Her eyes remained fixed on his, clear and entirely devoid of the self-pity he detested in other people.

“And then she took the fever and died,” she said. “Confessed before she died. I was found like a stray calf. Traded into a marriage to settle me father’s debt.”

The story landed between them.

Edward felt a sudden, fierce surge of anger ignite deep beneath his ribs. A raw, helpless heat that had nothing to do with the clan, or the winter grain, or the borders of the lands. It was an old, feral wrath, a black iron spike driving upward into his throat. He wanted to find the man who had made her hurt.

But beneath that anger, deeper still, was a mirror. The wounds she was describing had names he had spent fourteen years refusing to utter, names he had buried under three feet of solid limestone and the daily grind of duty.

“Fathers,” Edward said, the words slipping past his teeth before he could call them back. His voice was lower than the sea, gravel-rough and harsh. “They have a particular way of lookin’ at a child. As though we are nothin’ but clay to be broken and rebuilt until we fit the shape of their own failures.”

Chloe’s gaze softened, her eyes tracking the rigid line of his jaw, the hard, defensive set of his shoulders that had returned the instant she began to speak. “Edward?”

He looked out over her head, his eyes fixing on the white line of the horizon where the dark clouds were beginning to bruise the sky.

“There was a field,” he said, his voice stumbling over the terrain of the sentence, the rhythm awkward and unpracticed. “The one we went to yesterday. That was where I usually hid from me father. He believed… He had a firm conviction that pain was the only true language a boy could understand. The only tool sharp enough to shape a son into a laird.”

The words felt massive and threatening, like loose boulders shifting on a steep hill. He felt cold sweat break along his hairline. He was about to tell her. He was about to open the door he had spent his entire adulthood shielding with iron bars.

His breath hitched. Words trapped behind his teeth, as the sudden, terrifying realization of how close he was to the edge made his heart pound against his ribs. He could not do it. He could not hand her the key to the cellar.

Chloe reached up. Her movement was deliberate, unhurried, giving him every opportunity to pull back, but he stayed perfectly still as her fingertips brushed the rough wool of his lapel. She did not press for the rest of the story. She did not ask him to finish the broken line.

“Some memories…” she said, her voice a quiet anchor against the wind. “Deserve nothin’ more than to be left behind in the dirt, Edward. We think we must carry them because they made us, but they only remain with us for as long as we keep our hands clenched around them. People, even the ones who hurt us, only stay in the room for as long as we refuse to close the door.”

He looked down at her face, his throat tight, his chest burning with a truth that was far more terrible than anything she had imagined.

What he could not tell her was that it was not his father’s cruel memory that haunted the dark corners of his study. It was not the leather strap, or the long hours in the cold, or the biting shame of an eleven-year-old boy left alone in the dark.

It was the moment he had ended it.

He could still feel the specific, heavy balance of the iron in his palms. He could still hear the wet, heavy thud of it striking the side of his father’s head in the middle of the night, the sudden, terrible silence that had taken the room afterward, and the way the old man’s eyes had stayed wide and staring at the ceiling while the blood pooled black in the rushes.

He had told no one what happened in that room, and no one had asked too closely. The old Laird had been feared by his own household long before Edward ever raised a hand to him, and not a soul under that roof seemed inclined to mourn him properly.

The truth about that day spread anyway in a keep full of servants who'd heard the old Laird's temper through the walls for years, unconfirmed and unkillable, and Edward took the seat behind the desk the very next morning without a single tear.

That was the blood at the foundation of the architecture. That was the monster that lived behind the closed door.