Page 51 of A Highland Healer Captured
Skylar gentled. “Watch him now. If his breath goes fast again, call. If he sweats, good— Just keep the cloths cool.”
Zander’s hand flexed once at his side, a muscle seeking a sword that wasn’t there. “Where?”
“Me chamber,” Skylar said. “Yers has ears.”
He didn’t argue. He stepped close enough to brush the boy’s hair back once—only once—and then followed Skylar into the corridor, his silence a weapon more dangerous than any he wore.
In her room, the candle caught quickly. Skylar shut the door and leaned a moment against it, feeling her heart finally demand the breath she’d denied it. Zander stayed standing. He always seemed too large for any indoor space; now he felt too quiet for one, too. He looked like a man who had swallowed the world.
“Say it,” he said.
Skylar had the words gathered neatly on her tongue. Each one arranged with a healer’s care, the way she laid tinctures on a tray so none would spill or sour, when Zander cut across her with a single, low “Wait, daenae… I cannae...”
It wasn’t loud.
It was the kind of plea that seemed to make the air tighten as if the room itself obeyed him. He stood in the small space between her bed and the shuttered window, too large for the chamber, too restless for the quiet.
The candle threw an amber shine across his cheekbone, and the rest of his face was shadow and strain.
“Daenae,” he said again, and this time the sound frayed. “I cannae listen to ye say he’s—” The word wouldn’t come, so he made another, more physical sentence: his fist shot out and slammed into the stone beside the door.
The sound snapped through her chest like a bowstring. Stone did not move; the laird’s knuckles did. Skin split in two sharp lines and blood welled, swift and dark, then sluiced over the ridge of his hand and tracked down his wrist.
“Saints,” Skylar breathed, already moving.
Not because he was laird. Because he was human and bleeding and she was what she was.
Her palm closed around his forearm, heat under skin and muscle like a rope drawn taut, and she tugged him toward the table where her small stack of linens waited.
“Sit, Zander. Sit,” she ordered, the way she would scold a shepherd who’d elbowed a stall door in anger and paid with his skin.
He sat because he didn’t seem to know what else to do with his body.
“I cannae listen to ye say it,” he repeated, softer, staring at the blood like it had betrayed him. “That he’s— That I’ll lose him?—”
“Ye willnae because I willnae,” she snapped, and the bite of her voice startled both of them. It steadied her, too.
She caught his torn hand in both of hers and rinsed it with the last of her water, thumb sure as she teased grit from the cuts. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t look away, either. He watched her work the way a man watches a blade he’ll have to use.
“Zander,” she said, deliberately choosing his name. She wrapped a strip of linen once, twice, anchoring it with a deft twist. “Ye’re going to listen to me. Carefully. Nae because I want to hurt ye. But because truth keeps children alive.”
His jaw flexed. Fury and fear moved under his skin like storm light. “Then say it,” he ground out, voice low.
“Grayson was poisoned. Has beencontinuallypoisoned, I believe.”
There: the word, clean and terrible and useful. She didn’t flinch from it. She watched it land on him, watched the way his pupils thinned, the breath leave his chest in a hard, quiet rush.
“What?” he managed, as she worked the knot tight.
“Slowly,” she went on, pulling the beads wrapped in the cloth from her pocket and showing him. “Over weeks. Maybe months… I’m nae sure if this is the main cause for his illness these years past, though. Small doses that didn’t match the coughs. It’s why none of my work has helped him. Today— the dose was too much. His body told me what it could. We answered as best we could. Now we have to wait.”
He didn’t speak.
He folded his bandaged hand into a fist and opened it again, once, as if testing how much of himself was left. When he looked up, she saw the change in his eyes. Not tears. Not the glazed shine of a man slipping. A terrible clarity: the laird focused to a point. If he’d drawn steel it would have looked as unavoidable as that.
She hated it, she realized. Not the strength. She had no quarrel with a man strong enough to hold walls. But the death that had just lit behind his gaze.
She loathed that someone had put it there by touching a child’s cup. She loathed that the world kept drawing men like him to edges where the only language left was ruin.
