Page 96 of Fierce Highland Magic

I didn't know why.

I didn't know what giving it back would do.

I didn't know if it would work.

The not-knowing was unbearable. My whole life had been built on knowing first, on pricing before feeling, on never letting myself want something until I understood exactly what losing it would cost. And here I was, standing in the Heart-Lantern with nothing left except a pin I couldn't calculate and a man who had stopped trying to pay.

Ailith's hand stayed extended.

"You don't have to decide right now," she said. "Take your time. The market has waited a century for someone like you. It can wait a few more minutes while you think it through."

That was the trap. Thinking it through. The more I thought, the more I calculated, the more I tried to understand what the gift would buy me—the more the market could price it.

I looked at Rowan.

He didn't speak. Didn't deflect. Didn't make a joke to turn the moment away from its edge. He just stood there, stripped down to something I'd never seen from him before—the man underneath the charm, underneath the penance, underneath a century of paying for everyone else.

He had stopped. For me, he had stopped.

And I—

I didn't want the Accord restored. That wasn't why my hand was shaking.

I didn't want to save the market. That wasn't why my chest hurt.

I wanted him. I wanted him whole and free and standing in whatever light came after this. I wanted to give him back the thing his sister had left behind, not because it would fix anything, not because it would balance any ledger, but because it was his.

Just his.

The calculation dissolved. There was nothing to price. There was only a woman holding something that belonged to someone else, and the simple fact of wanting to return it.

"This was your sister's." My voice came out steady. Flat. The voice of someone reading a fact off a balance sheet. "This is yours. No price."

I held the pin out.

Not to Ailith. To Rowan.

The silence that followed lingered.

He didn't move. His hands stayed at his sides, and I could read the struggle in every line of him—the century-old instinct to answer a gift with a larger gift, to outpay, to refuse being given to because receiving felt like taking. His jaw worked. His shoulders pulled tight. He was fighting the same battle I'd just fought, the same pattern carved so deep it didn't need permission to run.

I waited.

The light thinned toward colorless around us. Ailith's hand was still extended, her offer still open, and somewhere underneath my feet the market was listening for the transaction that would let it price this moment.

There was no transaction. Just a pin held in the air between two people who had both been wrong about the same thing in opposite directions.

Rowan's hand lifted. The motion of someone reaching for something they were afraid to touch, something they'd convinced themselves they had no right to hold.

His fingers closed around the pin.

He didn't give anything back.

The pause stretched. One breath. Two. I waited for him to offer something in return—his name, his standing, whatever he thought would balance the ledger. The instinct was there, visible in the way his mouth opened and then closed again. He was fighting it. Fighting the urge to outspend, to make the gift into a debt he could pay down.

He held the pin. Just held it.

The moment was so small it almost wasn't a moment at all—a man receiving a gift and not immediately trying to pay for it. But I understood what it cost him.