Page 59 of The Laird who Craved her

Claire heard it from her window before anyone told her plainly, the shouting in the bailey, torches bobbing wild through the dark, the particular clang of the smithy door being thrown open at an hour when it should have been locked and cold.

By the time Molly reached her chamber, breathless, still knotting her own shawl, the worst of it had already passed through the servants' hall twice over.

"Fergus took an arrow through the shoulder," Molly said, eyes wide in the candlelight. "Nearly dinnae make it back through the gate. They say the ambush was waitin' for them, mistress. Exactly where they'd be, exactly when."

"Waiting," Claire repeated. "How would anyone know where a night patrol rides?"

"That's the whole trouble of it," Molly said grimly. "Nobody kens the routes but the Laird and his captains. Which means somebody inside these walls is sendin' word out through them."

Claire sat with that long after Molly had gone to help with the wounded, turning the word over in her mind.Someone inside.Not a rider intercepted on the road, not a scout who'd talked under torture. Someone who slept under this roof, ate at these tables, and carried MacRae secrets out through the gate like a thief carrying silver in his boots.

She thought of the grain stores that had come up short twice this month, blamed on rot, on rats, on nothing anyone had bothered to properly explain. She thought of Ewan's arrival, timed so neatly to the exact week rumor had started climbing the glens. She thought, uselessly, of every face she'd passed in the corridors since the storm began, wondering which of them smiled at her while carrying a knife behind their back.

She did not see Finn at all that night. She told herself she wasn't looking for him, and knew, even as she told herself that, that it was a lie of the same quality asI am not cold.

It was well past the second bell when she finally went looking, unable to sleep, unable to sit still in a chamber that felt more like a cage with every hour that passed. She found Douglas first, grim-faced and pacing outside the solar, and one look at him told her everything she needed to know before he opened his mouth.

"I wouldnae go in there, me lady."

"Is he hurt?"

"Nae in the body." Douglas rubbed a hand over his jaw, exhaustion carved deep into every line of his face. "Fergus has served him since they were boys thievin' apples together. He's takin' it hard."

She should have listened. She thought about it, standing there with her hand already on the door, weighing Douglas's warning against the low, terrible silence coming from the other side of the wood. In the end it wasn't courage that decided her, only the plain fact that she couldn't stand outside a door knowing he was breaking apart alone behind it.

She pushed it open just as the whiskey cup left his hand.

It struck the stone wall above the hearth and shattered, glass and amber liquid scattering across the map table, across the parchment, across the floor in a wide, glittering arc. Finn stood in the middle of the wreckage with his chest heaving, one hand braced against the mantel, blood welling dark and steady from a split across his knuckles where he must have struck the stone first, before he'd ever reached for the cup.

"Get out," he said, without turning.

She didn't move.

"I said get out, Claire." His voice cracked down the middle of the command, the iron control that usually held it together simply gone, worn through like rope frayed past its last strand. "I am nae fit for company tonight."

"I ken." She shut the door quietly behind her instead of leaving through it.

He turned then, and the look on his face stopped whatever else she'd meant to say. It wasn't the cold fury from the corridor, wasn't the banked heat from the training yard. This was something rawer, something that had clearly been building far longer than tonight, cracking through a dam he'd spent a decade reinforcing.

"Fergus nearly died tonight because I couldnae keep me own walls secure," he said. "There's a rot inside this keep, and I cannae find where it lives, and every day I fail to find it, another good man bleeds out on a dark road because of me failure."

"It isn't yer failure…"

"It is precisely me failure." He crossed to the window, dragging the back of his uninjured hand across his mouth. "I am the Laird. Every soul inside these walls breathes because I keep them breathin'. And I cannae even tell ye who among them is sellin' our lives to our enemies for silver."

She crossed the room before she'd decided to, the broken glass crunching faintly under her slippers, and reached for his bleeding hand.

He went still at the contact, the way a wild thing goes still when it cannot decide whether to bolt or let itself be touched.

"Sit," she said quietly.

"Claire…"

"Sit, Finn." She tugged, gently, and after a long moment he let her guide him down into the chair by the hearth, his large frame folding into it with the particular stiffness of a man unused to being managed by anyone at all.

She found a strip of clean linen among the map table's clutter and a basin of water Mrs. Campbell always kept filled near the fire for exactly such nights as this. She knelt in front of him and took his hand in both of hers, and began, without asking permission again, to clean the blood from his split knuckles.

He watched her in silence. She could feel the intensity of his stare on the crown of her bent head, could feel the tension in the hand she held, coiled tight even now, even wounded.