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“I do not expect forgiveness,” she whispered.

Gavan’s mouth tightened. “You will not get it.”

Sorcha dropped her gaze, suddenly focusing on the oil that had spilled on the floor. “I should clean that.”

Gavan’s gaze followed hers, then returned to her face.

“Nay,” he said curtly. “Not tonight.”

Sorcha stared at him.

Gavan looked away first. “You are exhausted,” he said, as if that was an order rather than an observation. “Go back to bed.”

Sorcha hesitated.

“Go,” he repeated.

Sorcha picked up her discarded linen, then obeyed, moving towards her door with stiff steps. At the threshold, she paused and turned back.

Gavan stood alone again in the corridor, liniment bottle in his left hand, his right arm held close. His posture was rigid; his chin lifted. Pride rebuilt around him like armour.

Sorcha’s heart twisted.

Quietly, she said, “Good night, my laird.”

Gavan did not answer at first; then, in a voice so low she almost thought she imagined it, he said, “Good night, Sorcha.”

Chapter Eight

Gavan Munro woke before dawn, not to the ache in his shoulder—he had grown accustomed to that—but to an unfamiliar weight pressing on his chest. He lay still, staring at the rough timber of the ceiling above him, trying to name the thing that made his breath shallow and his jaw ache as if he had clenched it all night.

Pain, he told himself, yet he knew that was not entirely true. It was regret.

He should not have let Sorcha tend to his wound. Not because she was unworthy. It was because it had forced him to acknowledge what he did not want to acknowledge—his own weakness, and worse, the sight of someone else’s.

Gavan turned onto his back and closed his eyes, which was a mistake. For in that moment, he saw her bruises in his mind’s eye and could not help but remember her own pain when she pressed liniment into his shoulder; when her voice stayed calm, even while her hands trembled; when she looked away from his gaze, rather than challenge him.

He had made her scrub floors until her skin split. He had seen her hands raw, seen her tiredness, and had refused to care. A man like that might call himself strong or disciplined. Reality would call him a beast, or someone who denied his own soul.

That was not who Gavan wanted to be. He swallowed roughly and rose from the bed. The corridors were cold, but the chill did not bite him as it should have. He walked with his good arm pressed to his side, the injured one hanging timidly against his ribs as though trying to shy away from its own memory. When he reached the back room where Sorcha slept, he paused.

The door was ajar. He peered through the gap and saw her lying there with her thin blanket cocooned about her shoulders. Her breath was even, and her hands beneath the cloth wrappings curled towards her chest. In the dim grey light before sunrise, she looked smaller than he had remembered; worn, weary, but impossible to dismiss.

Weakness. He had always thought weakness was something others possessed. Something to be commanded away. But now he saw it for what it truly was—vulnerability laid bare, not as an insult, but as a kind of truth.

He remembered the look in her eyes last night; not fear exactly, but something sharper. Recognition of pain she knew in her own body. Recognition of him. He had looked at her only as an enemy, a cheat, as trouble. But in her face, in the way her jaw tightened when she breathed, in the quiet steadiness with which she spoke, even though her hands trembled, he had seen something he did not expect. Another wounded soul. A soul that did not ask for comfort and yet deserved some.

Gavan exhaled a breath he did not realise he had been holding. The soft sound must have alerted her to his presence because she stirred and opened her eyes. Gavan did not look away.

Sorcha sat up, her gaze cautious, wary. “Did I oversleep?”

Gavan stood in the doorway, boots planted as though he meant to argue, but his words did not sharpen. “I—” he began, then stopped. He was unused to speaking without the armour of command. “I do not expect . . . I have no aptitude for words I do not need for war,” he said after a moment. “You will not scrub floors today.”

Sorcha blinked.

“I will have you sort through the attic after you have prepared for the day and eaten your breakfast,” he continued, his voice gruff. “There are linens, old cloth, blankets, even some furniture that might be of use in the house. It is warm enough there, and a better use of your strength than scrubbing another cold stone hearth. I will show you how to go about the sorting.”

She said nothing at first, only watched him.