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"Ye're certain of that," she said.

"I'll show ye the key myself."

He hadn't meant it to sound like a vow. It came out like one anyway, and he watched her hear it that way too, watched something flicker and get put away before she could let him see what it was.

He turned before he could examine why that bothered him. The innkeeper was a broad, tired-eyed man named Grubb who knew Marcas by sight and had the sense not to ask questions about the woman travel-stained and pale beside him, or about the armed men filling his yard, or about why a MacKinnon laird had arrived at second dark with a woman nobody in Struan knew anything about.

"The room over the kitchen," Marcas said. "It has a bolt."

"Aye, laird." Grubb's eyes went to Neilina and back, careful. "Supper?"

"Whatever's hot. Bread, and something for the horses." Marcas set coin on the counter, more than the room was worth, which was its own kind of message. "I'll bring the tray up myself."

Grubb's brows went up a fraction…lairds did not carry trays…and he said nothing about that either, which was the other reason Marcas used this inn.

He turned and found Neilina watching him.

She had positioned herself with her back near the wall and the door in clear sight, the way she'd stood in MacRath's courtyard taking inventory of guards she thought he hadn't noticed her counting. She was doing it now, here, in a common room with a fire and a sleeping dog and nothing more dangerous in it than a tired innkeeper. Measuring the distance to the door. Measuring him.

She doesnae stop, he thought, and felt something in his chest that was not quite admiration and not quite frustration and mostly both at once. Even half-dead on her feet, she's still counting exits.

He found, uncomfortably, that he liked it.

"Yer room's ready," he said. "I'll bring food up directly."

"I can eat here."

"Ye can." He held her gaze. "Or ye can eat somewhere ye're nae the only woman in a room full of my men and Grubb's regulars, with a door ye can bolt after."

She considered that with the flat, assessing look she'd been giving him since the postern gate, the one that made him feel catalogued rather than looked at, and he found that he didn't mind it nearly as much as he ought to.

"Fine," she said finally. "Show me the room."

The chamber over the kitchen was small and warm, heat coming up through the floorboards from the ovens below, a narrow bed against one wall and a shuttered window against the other. He'd chosen it on purpose. Warm rooms made people sleep. He needed her to sleep.

She crossed to the window first, not the bed, and checked the shutter, and he watched her find the drop to the yard with her eyes and calculate it, and felt a fresh, unwelcome jolt of admiration.

She's going tae try again, he thought. Of course she is. She hasnae had a single hour today where someone didnae take a choice away from her, and I'm the latest man tae do it.

He didn't say any of that. He set about starting the small fire instead, it gave his hands something to do other than what they wanted, which was to reach for her wrist and feel whether her pulse had settled since the courtyard.

"Ye needn't play servant," she said, watching him crouch at the hearth.

"I've built a fire before, Neilina."

"I imagine ye've done many things before that ye dinnae generally do in front of yer prisoners."

He glanced up at that. The firelight caught her face, the sharp line of her jaw, the dark hair coming loose from its braid, and grey eyes that missed nothing even now. She looked younger and more tired than the composure she was working so hard to hold.

She was not soft. He had noticed that at the postern gate and it had not stopped being true since, she was long-limbed and capable and held herself like a woman who had never once been permitted to be careless, and there was a scrape along her collarbone from the stone of MacRath's courtyard that made something in him go quiet and furious in equal measure every time his eyes found it.

She was, he thought, a great deal more than he had expected.

"Ye're nae my prisoner," he said.

"I'm nae permitted tae leave."

"Ye're nae permitted tae leave alone, in the dark, on roads ye dinnae know, with Cailleach MacRath's men somewhere on the road behind us." He straightened, dusted his hands. "That's a different thing than a prisoner, whatever it feels like from where ye're standing."