Page 19

She scowled at the window. But then she remembered the way Evander’s warm palm felt against hers during their vows, their fingers intertwined.

That was neither here nor there. A man could be handsome and still be a menace. In her experience, the two went together more often than not. What mattered was that in three weeks, she’d be back in Muir Castle with this whole affair behind her, and no one outside these walls would ever need to know that Freya MacLeod had briefly been the Wolf’s wife.

She turned the ring on her finger. It caught the last of the light.

Three weeks, she told it. And then ye can go back where ye came from, and I’ll never have to see ye again.

Packing took the better part of a minute.

It wasn’t as if she had much to pack anyway. She wished she had, because then she would be able to postpone joining her husband for the next three weeks.

Daenae be foolish, lass. It will only be for a short time, nothin’ more.

There was nothing to worry about. A short time in her life, three weeks, over and done with before she realized it.

Freya folded her nightgown, laid it on top of the two spare shifts she’d never taken out, and drew the bag’s strings closed. That was the whole of it. Three days at MacKinnon Castle and she’d lived out of a satchel like a soldier, which said something about her, though she’d rather not think what.

The stolen plaid she left at the bottom, under everything. She wasn’t giving it back to Evander out of principle. When these silly three weeks were over, she would give it back to him with the ring. Then the two of them would go back to their separate lives just as they should.

She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the bag.

It was a sorry thing to be leaving with. When Skye had gone to Dougal, there’d been three trunks and a cart, and their mother’s silver. Emily had come to Kaden with a whole household behind her, maids and linens and a cook who wept at the sight of the kitchens.

Freya was going to the Wolf with a satchel and a stolen plaid, like a tinker’s daughter running off with a soldier. Which, she supposed, was close enough. And yet, beneath the dread, a reckless part of her was glad to be going to him.

The window showed grey morning and the hill beyond the walls, and on the hill, smoke. A great many threads of it, rising straight in the still air. She had counted them last night from Skye’s chamber and stopped at forty.

“Nae a clan,” Dougal had said. “But a war band with tents.”

And she’d agreed to sleep in the middle of it.

She pressed her hand flat against the bag as if it might steady her. It didn’t. Nothing did. So she did what she always did when there was nothing else to be done—stand up, smooth her skirts, and lift her chin.

“Ye’ve packed already.”

Skye stood in the doorway in her wrapper with the babe against her shoulder, her hair loose and her eyes shadowed, looking exactly like a woman who’d been up half the night with a newborn and the other half with a sister’s ruin.

She’d been pale since Freya had told her. She’d gone paler when Dougal had come back from the courtyard and said, quietly, that Evander’s camp on the hill was two hundred strong and every one of them armed.

“I never unpacked,” Freya said.

“Ye’re sure?”

“Skye.”

“I’m only asking. Ye’re sure? Ye’re nae in danger? He hasnae—he hasnae made ye?” Her sister’s voice wobbled. “Because Dougal says he’ll ride out. Him and Kaden both, if I send to Kaden. They’ll put a hundred men on that hill by nightfall, and ye’ll never have to⁠—”

“Skye, stop.”

Freya patted the spot beside her, and after a moment, her sister came and sat too, careful of the baby. Freya put an arm around her and felt how thin her shoulders had grown.

“I daenae think it’s such a bad thing,” she said. “That’s the truth. He kept those men off me the other night when he had no reason to. He could have let them have their sport and drunk his ale, but he didnae.”

“And now he wants ye for it.”

“He wants a wife. He was honest about that, at least. Title, protection, an heir. He laid it out like a cattle sale.”

“That’s too much, Freya.”