He had made her afraid. That had been the whole point of it. The night at the house, the locked room, the darkness he'd left her in. The knowledge of what he could do had been the point. Not the doing of it. Theknowing. He'd wanted her to carry the shape of him like a stone in her pocket, every day, everywhere she went, for the rest of her life.
But she waslaughing.
His hand tightened on the cup.
He turned his attention to the dais, where Gunnarsson had moved to stand before the royal observers. There was something in the Norseman's manner––measured, deliberate, the quality of a man arriving at the moment he'd been building toward––that drew Callum's attention with the cold, practical clarity of a man who had been in enough bad situations to recognize one assembling.
His three men near the grain stores were watching him. He didn't look at them.
Nae yet.
He looked at Matilda instead, because she was the thing that needed looking at, because the fury that had been building in him since he'd watched her walk through that gate with another man's hand in hers needed somewhere to go.
She stood near the edge of the crowd now, close to the inner passage entrance, watching Gunnarsson address the gathered islanders and the Crown's observers.
She'd been part of the room.
That landed in him with a force that surprised him. He'd spent weeks building a case against the Raven. The sabotage of the harbor, the cultivated rumors, the quiet campaign to make Gunnarsson look unstable and ungovernable, and the womanhe'd been using as the lever had been in the room where the counterstrategy was built the whole time.
He thought about what Gunnarsson might have assembled. The documents Callum had been careful with, the messengers he'd used, the payment chains he'd kept separated by three layers of intermediary.
He'd been thorough.
I’m always thorough.
But she'd been in the room, and Gunnarsson was standing before the Crown's men.
The cold thing in his chest sharpened into something specific and urgent.
Whatever was about to happen on that dais was the end of the careful version of this. He'd known it might come to this. He'd positioned accordingly. Six men, three locations, the lower passage entrance where the torches were thin and the darkness pooled.
He looked at Matilda one more time.
She had turned slightly, as if she'd felt the weight of attention, and for a moment her gaze moved along the wall where he stood. He was very still, a shadow against the stone, and her eyes passed over him without stopping.
She didn't see him.
But he saw her put her hand on something at her left hip. A small, habitual motion, checking for something, the way soldiers checked their weapons before an engagement. The way someone did it when it had become reflex.
He stood very still.
She'd been armed. Deliberately, specifically, by a man who'd anticipated the night going wrong and had prepared her for it.
His expression didn't change.
He turned his gaze back to the dais, where Gunnarsson had begun to speak, and where Torvald had moved to a position beside the Crown's observers with a sealed document case under his arm, and where the guards along the wall had shifted, almost imperceptibly, into postures that were no longer ceremonial.
The trap closed in his mind like a door.
Slowly, and then all at once.
He looked at his three men by the grain stores. They were watching him. Waiting.
He looked at the dais. At Gunnarsson. At the document case. At Henry's careful, neutral face, already shifting with the beginning of interest.
He looked at Matilda, her hand still resting at her hip, her eyes on her husband, her shoulders level and calm.
He lifted his cup and drank what was in it after all, the liquid bitter on his tongue. He set it on the ledge beside him and pulled his hood down so that his face was in full shadow.