The Merciless Laird (Preview)

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Chapter One

Autumn, 1232. Kinlochaline Castle…

“Did ye hear? He arrives at first light.”

Matilda stopped walking.

The words echoed in the hollow of her chest, marking the precise moment her girlhood would be traded for a Viking’s shadow.

The two maids stood just beyond the stone archway, half-hidden by the climbing ivy, their voices dropped low the way voices dropped when speaking of things they shouldn’t have.

A candle between them threw their shadows long across the garden path.

“The last one,” the second maid whispered. “The Raven of Mull. Me cousin saw him once at a gather in Oban. Said he walked into the hall and every man in it went quiet without him sayin’ a word.”

“Aye, that’s what they say about all of them.” The first maid didn’t sound convinced. “They said the same about the Serpent of Barra and look how that turned out. Married a healer and gone soft as bread.”

“This one’s different. Me cousin said his eyes,” the second maid dropped her voice further. “Black. Like there’s naethin’ kind livin’ behind them.”

“God help Lady Matilda is all I’ll say.”

“Aye. Poor lass. She’s been through enough without bein’ handed tae a Viking.”

The air turned to ice in Matilda’s lungs, as the weight of the maids’ whispers settled in her marrow.

The pity was the worst part. Not the words themselves, but the ease of them, and the way her suffering had become something other people carried lightly, a thing to be murmured over a candle and set down again.

She turned away before either of them could look up.

She moved deeper into the garden, following the gravel path by memory. The moon gave almost nothing to see by.

The candle she’d carried from the keep she kept burning, cupped in her palm against the wind, its small light enough to see by without being seen. Her feet knew every loose stone, every place where the hedge grew thick enough to swallow sound.

First light.

She pressed her fingers against the cold stone of the low wall at the garden’s edge and looked out toward the loch. Black and still beyond the outer wall. The wind off it smelled of rain that hadn’t come yet.

She had carried the knowledge like a heavy stone in her pocket for weeks, ever since her father had delivered the news with that measured brand of Highland caution.

He had said it as though bad news required careful handling before it reached her.

The last of the Pact, Matilda.

She’d been sitting by the fire in his study, embroidering something she had no interest in finishing, when he’d settled into the chair across from her with the heaviness that meant he had something difficult to say.

A good match. A strong alliance.

She’d kept her eyes on her stitching.

Ye’ll be safe on Mull, mo chridhe. Safe and well-provided fer and far from anyone who might wish ye harm.

During the conversation, he’d said safe four times. She’d noticed.

And Ivar Gunnarsson?

She’d asked, pulling a thread through linen with more care than the embroidery deserved.

Has he been told about me? About what happened?

Her father had been quiet for just a beat too long.

He kens ye are a MacInnes daughter and that ye are an honorable match.

She’d looked up then.

Faither.

He kens enough.

She’d whispered the word ‘Father’ in a fragile plea for the truth he’d been shielding from her for eight years. He only squeezed her hand, his silence confirming that for a MacInnes daughter, enough was all a Norse laird required.

He’d reached over and covered her hand with his, and she’d let him because he was her father and he was frightened for her and she understood both things, even when they made her want to scream.

She pressed her thumbnail into the mortar between two stones until she felt the bite of it.

What her father called safety, she called a different kind of cage.

The guards who followed her through the market at three paces. The door to her chamber that was never locked from the outside but somehow never felt fully open either.

The way every man in the castle looked slightly past her, as though she were made of something that might shatter if met directly.

The way conversations stopped when she entered rooms, then resumed at a different pitch. Softer. careful.

She understood why. She even understood the love behind it.

That didn’t make the walls any lower.

And now a Viking laird was coming at first light to take her to an island she’d never seen, to a keep she didn’t know, to sleep in a bed beside a man whose name the maids spoke like a warning.

Black. Like there’s naethin’ kind livin’ behind them.

She exhaled slowly.

The cold air steadied her.

She should go back inside. Her father’s standing instruction was absolute, no wandering after dark, no exceptions. She’d agreed to it years ago, when it had seemed reasonable, when she’d needed the walls as much as he’d needed to give them to her.

But that had been a long time ago.

She stayed where she was.

Beyond the boundary of the low wall, the loch lay in a state of unnatural stillness, a mirror of black glass waiting for the storm she could already feel building in the atmosphere.

Somewhere in the hedgerow, a bird shifted and resettled with a soft complaint of wings. The torches along the battlements burned steady.

No wind yet, though she could feel the pressure of it building.

In the morning, a man would arrive who would have legal claim over every choice she made for the rest of her life.

A sound from behind the far hedge made her turn.

Nothing. A cat, perhaps, or the wind picking up. She turned back to the loch and watched it for a moment.

Somewhere past it was the sea, and past the sea, an island, and a keep full of people who had never heard of her and did not yet have opinions about what she could and couldn’t endure.

The thought was, unexpectedly, almost interesting.

She was still turning it over when the stillness came.

Not a sound. Not movement. The bird in the hedge had gone quiet. The gravel wasn’t shifting.

Something or someone was watching her.

Matilda went still.

Her eyes moved first, sweeping left to right along the line of the hedgerow without turning her head.

She’d learned how to look without looking, how to read a space without advertising that she was doing it. Nothing visible.

The torches along the wall behaved normally. The maids were gone, their candle extinguished, their voices long swallowed by the keep.

But something was watching her.

A tightening at the back of her neck. A shift in her own breathing.

Her body had been quietly cataloguing threat for eight years whether she asked it to or not. It was rarely wrong.

She turned toward the inner corridor.

The bell split the air.

One long strike, then two short, then the pattern breaking apart into something continuous and urgent.

Shouting erupted from the courtyard.

Steel rang against stone. Torches blazed along the battlements, two becoming six, six becoming ten, and men moved through the shadows between the columns.

A figure lunged from behind the hedgerow to her left.

Matilda was already turning. Already moving.

His hand caught her arm and she pulled with the grab rather than against it, one sharp rotation that broke his grip and cost him his balance.

Then she was through the archway and into the corridor beyond, her breath even, her mind calculating.

Narrowest passage, more than one exit, keep moving.

Behind her, steel rang against steel.

She didn’t stop.

The castle was under attack.

Chapter Two

“Stay down or get out of me way.”

The voice came from the courtyard, low, unhurried, almost bored, cutting clean through the noise of steel and shouting.

Matilda stopped at the corridor’s edge and looked out.

The yard was torchlit and full of violence.

Six men she didn’t recognize. No MacInnes colors, no markings she knew, moving through her father’s guards with a deliberateness that turned her stomach. This wasn’t a raid. Someone had counted the guard rotations and chosen the night on purpose.

The night before the Raven arrives.

But it was the warrior in the center of it all that stopped her feet.

He was fighting two men at once and appeared to find this mildly inconvenient at most. No rage, no urgency, no wasted movement, just a cold and systematic efficiency that made the two men attacking him look clumsy by comparison.

He struck the first and was already turning to the second before the first had finished falling.

The torchlight caught him full for a moment. Broad through the shoulder, dark cloak, something carved and unhurried about his face.

Matilda realized her mouth was open.

She shut it.

She’d seen men fight her entire life. She’d watched her father’s guards drill in this same yard every morning from her window above. She knew what fighting looked like, or she’d thought she knew what fighting looked like, but this was something she didn’t have a word for.

It was almost like watching someone think. Quick and quiet and absolutely certain of itself.

She couldn’t look away.

In the middle of an attack, with her father’s men dying in the yard, she was standing completely still. That was what he had done — made everything else stop mattering.

Which was exactly why she didn’t hear the man behind her until his arm was already across her chest.

The grip was hard and purposeful and dragged her backward toward the shadowed wall before she could get her feet under her.

She twisted, kicked backward, caught something solid with her heel, heard a grunt, but his grip only tightened and she felt the wall connect with her shoulder and then the ground connect with her knee and pain flared white and sharp up her leg.

She didn’t scream.

She opened her mouth to, and then the man was simply gone.

Not stumbling, not retreating, gone, with a speed that took her a full second to account for.

There was a sound she didn’t want to name and then a second man came from her left and was dealt with in the same unhurried, final way. Then the warrior was standing in front of her, not even breathing hard, looking down at her with black eyes that caught the torchlight and gave very little back.

She looked up at him.

He looked down at her.

“Can ye walk?” he said.

She blinked. Her knee was screaming. “Aye.”

“Then walk.”

He took her arm. Not roughly, but with the absolute certainty of someone who wasn’t planning to be argued with, and moved her forward into the narrow corridor off the far side of the yard.

A storage room. She registered the shape of it, the low ceiling, the dark, and felt the first warning tightening in her chest before he’d even pulled the door shut behind them.

The latch dropped. The footsteps outside thundered past. And the darkness pressed in from every angle at once.

Matilda’s breathing changed.

She couldn’t stop it. She never could, not in the first seconds, not when the walls were this close and the light was this gone

Her hands found the nearest surface and pressed flat against it, and she counted the way she’d taught herself to count, one and two and three.

“Hey.”

The door cracked open.

Two inches, maybe three, but enough. Torchlight spilled across the floor in a thin orange stripe, and the darkness stopped being absolute, and her lungs remembered what they were for.

She exhaled.

The warrior stood with one hand on the door and his back against the frame, on the far side of the small space

“Better?” he said.

“I’m fine.”

He looked at her the way people looked at things they didn’t entirely believe. “Yer hands are flat on the wall.”

She moved her hands. “I said I’m fine.”

A beat. He let it go. “Yer leg.”

“What about it?”

“Ye went down hard on it. How are ye?”

“I’m fine.” She tested her weight on it carefully, kept her expression neutral when it protested. “It’s naething.”

He didn’t argue.

He looked at her face instead. Not the way men usually looked at her face, with that careful softness she’d learned to dread. But directly, assessingly, the way you looked at something you were trying to get accurate information from.

“Are ye hurt anywhere else?”

“Nay.”

“Did they touch ye before I reached ye?”

“His arm was across me chest. That’s all.”

He nodded once and looked back at the door, already done with it. Outside, the sounds were shifting, the sharp violence of the first wave giving way to the ragged noise of retreat, her father’s guards calling patterns to each other across the yard.

She looked at him properly for the first time.

She’d expected older. The way he’d moved through that courtyard belonged to a man who had been doing it for decades.

He was sharp-jawed, lean, with light brown hair pushed back from his face and eyes that were very dark and very still and currently examining the door crack with the focused attention of someone running calculations.

“Who are ye?” she said.

“Nae important right now.”

“Ye are in me home and just saved me life. I think I’ll decide what’s important.”

His eyes moved to her face, briefly, and a for only a moment, he seemed almost amused. “Do ye now.”

“Ye’re nae one of me father’s men.” She kept her voice even. “Ye’re nae Highland. Yer speech is,” she stopped. Looked at him again. The cloak. The way he’d moved. The complete absence of anything resembling deference. “Ye’re Norse?”

He said nothing.

“Ye’re Norse,” she said again, and this time it wasn’t a question.

“I told ye.” He straightened from the door frame, and the small space got smaller. “Nae important right now. What’s important is that there are still men in this castle who came here taenight fer a reason, and standin’ in a storage room discussing me origins willnae help us.”

“Ye said willnae.” She looked at him steadily. “That’s a Scottish construction. Ye’ve spent time here. Enough tae pick up the speech.”

He stopped. From the way his body stiffened, she knew not many people spoke to him in that way.

The silence lasted exactly three seconds.

“Ye’re very calm fer someone whose castle is under attack,” he said.

“I’m furious,” she retorted. “I’m simply also curious.” She held his gaze. Something crossed his face that was a mix of amusement and some respect. It was also the look of a man recalculating.

“Who are ye?”

His response did not come immediately, and she had the unsettling impression that he was deciding something. Not about whether to tell her, but about something else entirely.

Then the sounds outside shifted again. Closer. Purposeful.

“Later,” he said, and his hand closed around her arm. It was not rough, yet his grip was certain in a way that her body recognized as different before she’d finished deciding how she felt about it.

“Right now we need tae move. Fast.”

She moved. She told herself it was because he was right about the timing.