Page 76 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

Magnus crushed it and felt the bones grind. The knife clattered onto the stone, and he kicked it away. Then he grabbed Oldbrook by the front of his fine coat and hit him, just once, but with sixteen years of pain and ruin behind his fist.

The old man’s head snapped back and struck the pillar with a crack. Then he crumpled to the floor and did not get up.

The warehouse went still.

Magnus stood over him, swaying. He pressed one hand to the knife wound along his ribs, trying to suck in air. His skull hurt. His side burned. The blood trickled slowly between his fingers. It wasn’t much, but it would have been fatal if the blade had twisted an inch the other way.

He heard boots, many boots, coming fast across the stone floor. They came in through the wide doorway with their own lanterns swinging. There were six of them, their red waistcoats plain even in the dim light. The man at the front had a warrant in one hand and a pistol in the other. He stopped short at the sight of the two of them: Magnus standing there bleeding and the Earl slumped against the pillar.

“Your Grace.” He took in the scene—the fallen pistol, the knife, the blood. “You cut it close. We heard the shot.”

“Aye.” Magnus’s voice sounded distant. “So I did.”

“Is that him?” The man was already moving, his colleagues spreading out. One crouched by the Earl, while another lifted the knife carefully by its handle. “Oldbrook?”

“That’s him. He came armed. He confessed to everythin’ before he tried to open me up. There’s a letter yonder in his own hand that’ll bury him deeper than hell.” Magnus let go of his ribs long enough to point. “The forgery. Take it, but guard it with yer lives. It’s sixteen years of a good man’s name.”

The Runners lifted Oldbrook between them. He came round as they cuffed his hands. He spotted Magnus across the warehouse, and for a moment, his smile came back, ghastly and automatic, the last reflex of a lifetime of it.

“You will regret this,” he threatened, his voice thick. “You have no idea who I am. What we are. You have made enemies tonight that will⁠—”

“Take him out,” Magnus said, tired, “before I forget you are watchin’.”

The Runners dragged Oldbrook out into the cold drizzle. He was the man who had murdered Magnus’s father with paper and a reptilian smile. The man Magnus had hunted across a kingdom for half his life was now walking away in shackles.

He waited for it. The rush of satisfaction. The peace. The weight set down at last.

It did not come.

He had built his entire self around the expectation of this hour, the way a house was built around its hearth. Now the hour was here, but the hearth was cold. There was no father waiting on the far side of it to be proud of him. There was no boy on a staircase made whole. There was only a tired man of thirty-two in a cold warehouse, with another man’s blood and his own drying together on his hands. There was only a vast, ringing silence where years of purpose had stood a moment ago.

He looked down at his hands. Blood slicked his knuckles, and all he could think was how close death had come. An inch, perhaps less. Another moment, and he might have died on that floor, with Oldbrook still beyond justice and his father’s name still tarnished.

Worse, he would have taken something else into the dark with him. The one truth that mattered beyond any of it. The words pride and grief and cowardice had kept locked behind his teeth.

I love ye, Rosaline.

He had never said it. Not on their wedding night, not in the gray hour of any morning since, not when she stood in his study white-faced and begged him not to go north.

Three words, and he had let them sit in his mouth like stones because saying them aloud would have meant admitting he had something left to lose.

He had a wife.

He had a wife three miles west of here, in a house he had made cold. A wife who had chosen him once with her brother’s hand around her wrist. Who had said, Then we will find them, and meant it. She had understood him better than he understood himself and begged him not to die.

And he had let her walk out a door believing she had lost him to a ghost.

Magnus had nearly made a widow of her. He had nearly made her worst fear true and left her nothing but a grave to visit and a marriage that ended in a hallway with a stiff bow.

He thought of the fear on her face the night he had told her about Edinburgh. The fear he had been too self-righteous and too blind to honor.

She had not been trying to unman him. She had been trying to keep him alive. She had seen where his recklessness might lead, and she had begged him to stop. And he, in his blindness, had called listening to her cowardice.

Now he knew better. She had never been the coward.

For too long, Magnus had lived for the dead. He would not do it anymore.

He pressed his coat harder against his side and turned his back to the warehouse. Oldbrook was in shackles. His father would have justice. The vengeance that had governed so much of his life was finished.