Page 51

Mabel rinsed the cloth and began cleaning the surrounding skin with meticulous care. As the blood washed away, the true canvas of his body was revealed.

Her hands slowed.

He was covered in scars. They crisscrossed his torso in a chaotic, brutal map of violence. There were pale, jagged lines from old sword strikes, puckered marks that looked like arrow wounds, and thick, uneven burns over his left shoulder. He had spent his entire adult life throwing himself between his people and the edge of a blade.

Without thinking, driven by a profound, aching sorrow for the pain he had endured, Mabel reached up.

Her fingertips bypassed the fresh wound on his ribs. She lightly traced a thick, silvery scar that stretched diagonally just beneath his collarbone. The skin was rough and raised under her gentle touch.

Caelan stopped breathing.

“How many battles have ye survived?” Mabel asked, her voice dropping to a soft, fragile whisper.

Caelan stared down at her, his eyes dark and dilated in the firelight. He did not pull away from her touch. He seemed paralyzed by it, staring at her small hand resting against his skin as if it were a miracle.

“Enough to know they are never worth winning,” Caelan answered. The words were quiet, hollowed out by a deep, ancient grief.

Mabel looked up into his face. “Who gave ye this one?”

He swallowed hard, the movement tracking along his strong throat. “A MacLeod swordsman. During the first border war. The same battle that took me father.”

Mabel’s hand stilled. She knew the stories, the whispers Morag had shared in the kitchens, but hearing the raw truth from his own lips was different. “What happened?”

Caelan looked away, staring blindly into the flames of the hearth. The shadows danced across the jagged scar on his cheek.

“I was young,” Caelan began, his voice a strained, gravelly rasp. “I believed I was invincible. Me father placed me on the right flank, ordered me to hold the line no matter what. But the fighting grew heavy. I saw one of me friends, a lad I had grown up with, take a spear to the leg. He went down. The enemy was moving in to finish him.”

Mabel kept her hand resting lightly on his collarbone, offering a silent anchor.

“I broke rank,” Caelan confessed, the guilt pouring out of him like poison draining from a wound. “I stepped out of the line to drag him back. It took only a few seconds. But in those seconds, the line folded. The MacLeods poured through the gap I left. They flanked the center.” He paused, his chest heaving with a harsh breath. “They reached me father.”

Mabel’s heart broke for him. The weight he carried suddenly made perfect sense. He didn’t just feel responsible for his clan; he felt responsible for the very tragedy that had made him laird.

“It wasnae yer fault, Caelan,” Mabel said fiercely. “Ye were saving a friend’s life.”

“I traded one life for fifty,” Caelan corrected, his eyes snapping back to hers, blazing with a dark, bitter self-loathing. “Me father died because I let me heart dictate me actions instead of me duty. That is why I buried it. That is why I became the Black Laird. Because mercy on a battlefield only digs more graves.”

He looked at her, his expression raw and stripped of its usual terrifying mask. He was showing her the monster, explaining exactly why he had built the cage he lived in.

“Ye are nae a monster,” Mabel whispered.

She reached for the small jar of yarrow salve Isla had left on the desk. Returning her attention to the fresh cut on his ribs, she smoothed the potent, earthy-smelling ointment over the wound. Caelan’s muscles jumped beneath her fingers, but he remained perfectly still, watching her face with an intensity that made her skin prickle.

She took the clean linen strips and carefully wrapped them around his torso. She had to lean close to pass the bandage behind his back, her cheek brushing against his warm shoulder. She felt the heavy, erratic thud of his heart against her ribs.

When she pulled the final knot tight, securing the bandage, she did not step back.

She remained kneeling beside his chair. Her hand drifted upward, coming to rest flat against the center of his chest, directly over his heart. Beneath her palm, the powerful, rapid rhythm hammered against his ribs like a war drum.

Mabel lifted her gaze.

Their eyes met, and the air vanished.

The distance she had fought so ruthlessly to maintain over the last few weeks simply collapsed. There were no political alliances in this room. There were no spies, no councils, no Fergus Comyn. There was only the heat of the fire, the smell of yarrow and rain, and the undeniable, gravitational pull binding them together.

Caelan looked at her mouth, a muscle ticking wildly along his jaw. He looked like a man standing on the edge of a precipice, fighting a desperate, losing battle against the urge to jump.

Slowly, his large hand lifted from the arm of the chair.