So, it had worked. Suspicion had followed. The decree had arrived.
And then the gathering had been announced, and he'd understood that Gunnarsson had found a way to use the threat as a stage.
He didn't know how. He didn't know what the Norseman had assembled or how clean the chain of evidence was. What he knew was that the window was closing, and that the one remaining move was the kind that couldn't be taken back once it was made.
I’m at peace with that.
He scanned the crowd, methodical and cold.
He'd brought six men inside the walls. Three were near the grain stores on the east side, where the darkness pooled most thickly between the torches. Two were near the main hall entrance. One stood at the inner gate, where the lower passage ran between the storage rooms and the yard. Six was enough. He'd done more with less in the shadows of the mainland.
His gaze moved back to the dais and finally found Gunnarsson.
The Raven was easy to locate. Tall, dark-cloaked, positioned at the head of the space. He was speaking with his second-in-command, the broad-shouldered one.
Callum had collected details on all of them. It was what you did when you were planning a surgical strike.
The conversation had the quality of men confirming a plan rather than making one.
Something has already been decided.
That alone made him look more carefully at the guards.
He looked at them now with the attention he should perhaps have applied earlier. There were more than there should have been for a gathering of this nature, and they were positioned oddly. They weren't at the gates and dais in the visible, ceremonial posture of men providing a show of order. They were at intervals along the walls, near the passage entrances, tucked into the shadows behind the food tables.
Then the crowd shifted near the gate, and he saw her.
She was walking through the arch with Gunnarsson's hand in hers.
Her hand was in his, fingers laced, and she was the one on the outside. The one visible to the crowd, the one receiving the nods of islanders as she passed, returning them with the easeof a woman who had stopped requiring permission to inhabit a space.
He looked at her face.
He had carried an image of Matilda MacInnes for eight years. The one from the night he'd taken her from her father's house. The pale, controlled stillness of her, the way she'd looked at him with a terror she was too proud to display, the specific quality of her fear.
He'd carried it because it had always been the clearest evidence of his own power. She had been afraid of him. Whatever her father's men had managed by rescuing her, they hadn't managed to give her back who she'd been before she understood what he was capable of.
He'd assumed that fear had simply transferred. To Gunnarsson, to Mull, to the Norse keep she'd been delivered to like a peace offering. He'd assumed she was there the same way she'd been everywhere else, surviving, enduring, waiting.
She was not.
She stopped near the dais and said something to Gunnarsson, and he bent his dark head toward her to hear it. Whatever she said made something shift at the corner of his mouth. A… smile.
Gunnarsson looked at her the way a man looked at something he'd decided to keep.
Callum watched her laugh.
Not the careful, social laughter of a woman managing a room. Something real, short and surprised. Her head tilted and her shoulders dropped with the motion, and then she looked back at the crowd.
He felt a cold thread through is chest.
He'd expected to see a woman held in place by fear and necessity, and he was looking at a woman who had walked into a crowd full of strangers and was entirely at ease in it.
He'd expected to see what he'd always seen, Matilda MacInnes surviving.
He was looking at something he didn't have a word for. Something that sat in his chest like an insult that hadn't yet found its form.
She should have been afraid.