Page 70 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

She had loved someone who was always going to leave.

She pressed her forehead against the cold glass. Below, in the drive, a groom was walking a horse in slow circles to keep it warm. She watched it and did not let herself think about what a saddled horse in that drive would mean one of these mornings, and soon.

She heard him once that afternoon. She had gone down for a book, certain of the hour, certain he was shut in the study with his maps and his ruin. She was three steps from the bottom of the stairs when the study door opened, and Magnus stepped out into the hall.

They both stopped.

He looked terrible. That was the first thing, the unfair thing. That even now, even furious and broken and four days into the cold, her first response to the sight of him was to catalog the wreckage and want to mend it.

He had not shaved. There were shadows under his eyes the color of old bruises, and the particular stillness of a man holding himself carefully upright. She knew that stillness. She had seen it in her own father, and it told her that he had been drinking and was not entirely done.

Neither of them said a word.

There was so much to say that it canceled itself out and left nothing that could be safely spoken. They stood ten feet apart in the hall of the house they had been so briefly happy in and looked at each other, and the silence stretched until it had a shape and a weight of its own.

She saw him draw in a breath once, as though to speak. She saw him decide against it.

Some contrary, wretched, unkillable part of her wanted him to try anyway, wanted him to cross the ten feet and say the thing that would let her stop being right. But he did not, because he was as proud, as stubborn, and as ruined by it as she was.

After a moment, he inclined his head to her, stiff and formal with a stranger’s courtesy, then turned and walked away.

She stood there until she heard the study door close again. Then she went back up without the book, shut her own door, pressed the back of her hand hard against her mouth, and did not make a sound, because she had promised herself in her brother’s house that she would never again let anyone hear her weep, and she meant to keep at least that one small vow to herself, whatever else she had failed to keep.

“You look,” Leo remarked, “like something the river gave up.”

Magnus did not lift his head from the back of the chair. “Then we match the day. Sit down or daenae, Leo, but shut the door either way. Ye’re lettin’ the cold in.”

“The cold is the least of what has got into this house.” Leo shut the door and crossed the study. He stood over him with an expression Magnus did not care for at all because it had no wit in it. “Halliday sent for me. Did you know that? Your butler. A man who has served three dukes and would sooner be flayed than presume wrote to me saying that he was worried about you and he would like me to come. That is how far past the ordinary this has gone.”

“Halliday oversteps.”

“Halliday adores you, you great fool. They all do, God knows why.” Leo picked up the decanter from the desk, considered its depleted state, and set it down again out of reach. “It is barely past noon.”

“And?”

“And the last time I called, this was the warmest house in London. Your wife was laughing at you across the room, and you were watching her like a man who had been handed something he did not believe he could keep.”

He pulled the other chair around and sat close, refusing to be waved off. “Now, she has not left her rooms in four days, the servants are creeping about like it’s a house of mourning, and you are drinking yourself blind before the church bells have finished ringing. So, as the only person in your life rude enough to say it to your face, what have you done, Magnus?”

“I’ve done nothin’ but what I’ve meant to do since I was fifteen years old.” Magnus reached for the glass.

Leo moved it.

Magnus looked at him with a flat, cold warning that had made harder men step back. But Leo, damn him, did not move.

“Deane’s given me the way to Edinburgh,” Magnus said. “The depositions. The proof against Oldbrook and the circle of men behind him. All of it is sittin’ in a strongroom in the north, waitin’ for me to come and take it. I ride within the week. And when I’m back, I’ll lay it before the men who can undo what was done and finish the thing me faither died for.” He grabbed the glass at last, on the second reach. “Rosaline would rather I let it lie. We disagreed. That’s all.”

“That is not all of it, and we both know it.” Leo’s voice had gone quiet. “You are not drinking because you disagreed about a journey. You are drinking because she asked you to choose, and you chose, and it was not her.” He let that sit for a moment. “I have known you for three years, and I have watched you want that woman since before you would admit her name to yourself. And now you have got her, married her, made her love you, and you are about to ride north and hand yourself to the same men who murdered your father, and call it honor. Has it occurred to you, even once, that you are about to do to her precisely what was done to you? Leave a person you love alone in the world with nothing but a grave to visit?”

Magnus slammed the glass down on the desk harder than he meant. “Stop talkin’.”

“I will not, actually.”

“Leo.” He was on his feet immediately, and the room tilted gently and settled. “Ye’re me friend. The only one I’ve got worth the name. So, hear me out when I tell ye this is the one thing ye daenae get to touch. Me faither’s name hangs on this. Seventeen years hang on this. I’ll nae have it weighed against anything. It’s nae a thing to be traded. It’s the spine of me. Pull it, and there’s no man left standin’, only the drink, the wantin’, a name in the mud, and that’s nae a husband worth stayin’ for.”

He turned to the window and stared at the drive below. “Go home, Leo. Ye cannae fix this. There’s nothin’ here to fix. There’s only a thing that has to be done and a man who has to do it. Everyone else can stand clear or be sorry.”

The silence behind him stretched long enough that he thought Leo had gone.