Page 137

James points at Ellen, and his hand is shaking so badly that I think it may be from the effort of not killing. “Look at her.”

Patrick does.

“How can you stand to call yerself a father?”

And for the first time since arriving, he looks like a man ashamed of himself.

Róisín is beside Ellen now, one arm round her waist, and she lets Patrick have it like a fury out of old tales.

“And while you’re at it, perhaps ya might open yer damned eyes to what feckless lout has been doing to his own wife.”

Patrick’s anger slips fully the moment he looks at Aileen.

She hasn’t moved far from the spot where Ewan dropped her. She’s standing with both hands clasped before her, eyes wet and terrified, gaze fixed nowhere, and body braced for the next blow.

It says enough.

Still Ewan snarls, “She’s my wife. What passes between us is not yer concern.”

“The hell it’s not,” I say.

He looks at me, and I let him see precisely what I think of him.

Ewan wavers where he stands, mad to lay hands on anyone within reach. “To hell with all of you. She’s my wife, and if she means to deny me a son, I’ll⁠—”

He never finishes.

He looks at Aileen as he says it, and whatever is in his face makes her recoil one full step. This is how a child comes to dread his own father. How terror is planted in a house and watered till it grows in every corner. How a woman comes to move about her own home like a guest afraid of overstaying.

As Aileen shrinks into herself, Alex moves.

He has been quiet all this while, arms folded, saying little, but there are some men whose silence is a greater menace than another man’s shouting. Alex meets the bastard in three long strides.

Before Ewan can so much as spit a curse, Alex has a fistful of his shirt in one hand and the dagger from his back in the other.

Then he puts it to Ewan’s throat.

Alex’s face is like winter moors—stripped bare, emptied of everything but the quiet promise of pain.

“Hear me now,” he says.

The softness of it’s dreadful.

“If I hear that you’ve raised a hand to her again, I will come to your house, open your throat from ear to ear, and leave you for the birds to pick apart.”

Ewan swallows.

The blade nicks the skin at the hollow of his throat.

A bright thread of blood wells up and runs.

Alex leans in a little more, enough that Ewan feels the promise of him.

“Do you understand me?”

Ewan’s breath comes fast and shallow. His bravado has gone somewhere else now, burned off at last in the face of a man who is not shouting, not bluffing, and not in the least uncertain of himself.

“Aye,” he spits.