Page 78 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

The parlor went as still as a mouse hiding from a cat.

Magnus did not move. Every instinct screamed at him that he should step between Rosaline and Samuel to protect her from the three years of pain she had endured. But he did not. He stood by her shoulder and kept his mouth shut and his hands loose.

This moment was hers. This moment had always been hers, and the one thing he could do for her was to let her have it.

He had spent months teaching her to command a room back when it had been a game for them, a lesson traded for a bargain. Now, he realized he had taught her nothing at all.

It had been inside of her all this time, banked under three years of her brother’s boot and a lifetime of her father’s disinterest. It had only been waiting for the moment she finally decided that the cost of her silence had grown greater than the cost of speech.

He stood and watched her set fire to the thing that had caged her. He had never been so proud of another living soul, nor so certain of what he felt for her.

“You call it an advantage,” she said, taking a step toward Samuel. Her voice was cool and collected, and the most frightening thing in the room. “Everything you sacrificed to give me? You gave me nothing, Samuel. You took. You took every choice I might have made and chose for me. You took my days and filled them with your errands. You took my nights and filled them with dread. You watched me hour after hour and called it caring. You dressed up your cruelty and called it your duty, and your control as love.

“I flinched every time you told me I was ungrateful. When I bent to your will, you told me it was not enough. It was never about our sisters’ futures. It was your need that I stay small, afraid, and under your thumb. You need someone beneath you to feel large, and you picked me because our mother had just died and I was young, and there was no one left to tell you no.

“In all these years, you have never asked me how I was. Not once on my worst days, not on the anniversary of our mother’s death, nor on any of the hundreds of mornings I came down to your table with my eyes swollen from crying. Crying that you could not be bothered to hear through the wall. It never occurred to you that I had feelings at all. That I could feel grief, or happiness, or anything at all. Because to you, I am a tool, and a tool does not have feelings. A tool is a useful thing, and that is what I was to you. Well, I am not your tool anymore.”

Samuel sputtered and then straightened. “You forget yourself.” His eyes had gone wide over his bloody hand. “You dare talk back to me in my own home! You dare talk back to me in this⁠—”

“You destroyed this home with your cruelty,” Rosaline went on as if he hadn’t spoken. The words landed like a stone in still waters, and the ripples spread through the entire cold house. “There is no home here, Samuel. There has not been one since Mother died. There is nothing but a beautiful stone building full of rules and your fear and your two sisters growing up and learning to be small the way you taught me.

“I have carried the guilt of leaving them since my wedding, but I am not carrying your cruelty anymore. That, I am setting down tonight. It ends. However I have to make it end, it ends. And if you think your broken nose is the worst thing that awaits you, should you ever raise your voice to Beatrice or Ivy again, then you have not been paying attention this evening.”

Samuel stared at her, his mouth gaping like a carp out of water. And then, because he really was a coward, he pushed off the chair and snarled something about lunacy and ingratitude and the men he would be speaking to as he made his way out of the parlor.

Magnus caught him by his collar before he could make his escape. He turned him and held him at arm’s length, as if taking stock of a side of beef and deciding what to keep.

“Nay, ye’re nae leavin’ yet.” His voice had dropped to a low growl that would have made harder men go still. “Me wife is speakin’ to ye. Ye’ll stand, and ye’ll listen to the end of it, or I’ll break somethin’ of yers that mends a deal slower than a nose. D’ye understand me, Darton?”

Samuel’s eyes flicked from Magnus’s face to the blood on the floor. Then they moved to the split knuckles on the hand tight around his collar. He nodded, fast and almost frantic, before his mouth had caught up.

“Yes. Yes. Let go of me⁠—”

“In a moment.” Magnus did not let go. “First, ye’ll make me a promise, and ye’ll keep it, because I am a patient man, Darton. I have just spent sixteen years provin’ exactly how patient I am. Ye’ll be a better braither than ye’ve ever been. Ye’ll be kind to yer sisters, or ye’ll be silent, and silent will do if kind is past ye. And ye’ll ken, every hour of every day for the rest of yer life, that I am watchin’. I’ve friends in high places now, and higher ones after tonight. There is no room in England ye can be cruel in that I’ll nae hear of it. One word. One cruel word to me wife or yer sisters, and I’ll come back and finish what I started on yer face this evenin’. I’ll take the tongue that spoke it to finish ye off. Are we agreed?”

“Agreed. Agreed, God, yes⁠—”

“Say it.”

“I will be—” Samuel’s voice cracked, and Magnus could see that he hated it. “I will be a better brother. I swear it. Let me go.”

Magnus looked at him a moment longer, taking his measure, finding him exactly as small as he had always suspected. Then he opened his hand.

Samuel staggered backward, caught himself, and pressed his sleeve to his bleeding nose. Then, he ran, actually ran, out of his own parlor and into the hall. He shouted hoarsely for his coat, his carriage, and a physician. The front door banged open, and the house he had ruled by fear for three years spat him out into the cold.

The silence that ensued was thick.

Magnus stood in the middle of the parlor. The hand he had hit Oldbrook and then Samuel with was throbbing at his side, but he regretted none of it.

He slowly noticed the wound in his side again, the warmth of the fire, and Beatrice standing wide-eyed by the door with an expression of delighted respect she was clearly trying to decide whether to be ashamed of. And he became aware of the small pale face on the stairs.

Ivy stood halfway down the stairs in her nightgown, with both hands wrapped around the banister, having seen God only knew how much. Her eyes were huge in the lamplight and stared not at the blood, not at the door her brother had fled through, but at Rosaline, standing tall and unbroken in the middle of the wreckage.

Beatrice moved at once.

“Come on, darling.” She gently gathered the little girl up off the stairs and tucked her small, dark head against her shoulder. “You have seen quite enough for one night, and if you are very good, I will tell you the parts you missed, suitably embellished.”

At the bend, she paused and looked back. Her sharp eyes flicked from her sister to Magnus and back again, warming briefly.