Page 54 of The Shape of Silence

Avery could scarcely believe his arrogance, as he seemed to think she would simply allow this because he smiled at her and made light of it.

“Get out,” she said.

He continued talking.

“Out.”

Still half-smiling, he set the crock down at last and spread his hands as though trying to calm her, though whether he apologized or explained himself she could not say—and frankly, it didn’t matter.

And still, he didn’t know enough to leave!

Avery crossed the space between them and grabbed onto his arm, meaning to drag him out of her house.

“Out!”

To her continued amazement, he laughed and wrenched his arm free, moving a bit away from the shelves, but still not out the door.

Frustrated beyond measure, Avery slammed both her hands into his chest. The movement lacked all grace or technique. He outweighed her badly and stumbled more from surprise than force, his hip knocking against the table hard enough to rattle the bowls resting atop it.

Heat flooded her face so fiercely she thought she might burst apart from it. Charlie was barking now, trying to stand between them. Avery continued to try to move him toward the door. He wasn’t moving fast enough for her, and damn him, he was laughing outright now.

Which only enraged her further so that she shoved him again, harder this time, two hands at his back.

“Get. Out.”

She moved him this time, enough that he tripped over the small lip in the ground at the threshold, and rather went flying out into the yard. She followed, wanting him far away, and pushed him again.

“Keep going! Don’t you ever come in my house again!” Tears welled in her eyes, her rage beyond anything she’d ever known.

He half-turned while she shoved again. Her left hand missed him so that she nearly crashed into him. She was peripherally aware that they had an audience—her shouting likely having done that—and when she smacked at his arm, she saw his expression shift from careless amusement to something uglier, irritation and wounded pride rising hard and fast in its place now that a woman smaller than him had driven him bodily from the house before half the army.

Fury and indignation carried her straight through whatever caution ought perhaps to have taken hold. She shoved him again instead, both palms striking hard against his chest while Charlie barked and jumped furiously at her side and the soldier staggered another step backward into the clearing.

“You have no right to trespass!” she screamed at him, rising on her toes, getting up in his face, her pointing finger an inch from his chin. She didn’t care that tears spilled or that her voice cracked. “That’s my house!” She poked her finger into his chest. “That’s my stuff!”

In the midst of her outrage, she hadn’t paid enough attention to his growing anger and so was mightily surprised when he lifted his hand as if he would hit her.

Avery snarled at him, almost daring him, at the same time a roar erupted behind her. Several actually. She recognized Alasdair and Finlay’s voices among them, shouting a warning to the man.

But those were only shouts. The roar belonged to some primal animal, the sound so deafening it widened Avery’s eyes and spun her around, half expecting a new threat. Even Charlie’s barking cut off mid-frenzy as every living soul within earshot seemed to go still at once.

And then Morggán rode into the clearing on a huge black beast.

Avery had never seen him look as he did now before this moment.

Rage transformed him so completely that for one disorienting instant he did not at all resemble the man who had laid his hands over hers the night before asking softly whether she had grown weary of being alone. His face was as hard as carved stone, every trace of warmth obliterated beneath a fury so absolute that men stepped instinctively from the path of his horse before he even reached them. The atmosphere of the clearing itself seemed to shift around him as he thundered forward, soldiers falling silent and motionless in his wake while his gaze fixed wholly and violently upon the red-haired soldier standing beside Avery.

Tormod and Donnchadh and several other returning soldiers rode hard behind him, weaving through the camp nearly as fast, though neither carried the terrifying singular focus that Morggán did.

Morggán swung down from the saddle in one fluid movement before the horse had fully stopped.

He covered the distance between himself and the soldier in less than five furious strides, without so much as a glance toward Avery.

The red-haired soldier had frozen outright now, all color drained from his face. He was still in the process of lowering his raised hand—with excruciating slowness, as though the motion itself might somehow go unnoticed if he managed it carefully enough.

Morggán crashed into him before the man could speak a single word.

His fist tangled violently into the soldier’s shirtfront while sheer force drove the younger man stumbling backward several steps across the clearing.