"Matilda," he said. It sounded like a greeting between old friends.
She tightened her grip on the dagger until her knuckles were white.
"Ye look well," he said, moving forward. Slowly. Watching her hand. "Better than I expected, given the company ye've been keeping."
He stopped just outside the range of her blade, tilting his head with a sickening familiarity.
She said nothing. She couldn't afford the breath.
"He's trained ye," Callum mused. "Armed ye. Made ye feel as though ye're something other than what ye are." He took a step. "Ye're nae. Ye're the same lass I took from her faither's garden, and ye ken it. Yer hands are shaking."
Dinnae let him get tae ye, Matilda.
"Aye," she whispered, her voice a low, cold rasp. "They are."
She didn't move the dagger. "And yet," she said.
Steel rang at the passage entrance behind him, the unmistakable, heavy strike of a blade against stone.
Callum heard it. She watched the shift in his eyes, the tiny fraction of attention that pulled backward to the threat.
In that heartbeat of distraction, Matilda stepped forward. She drove the dagger upward, beneath his ribs, with everything she had.
His arm came around with a brutal, reflexive force, knocking her back against the stone wall. She hit the rock hard, the dagger spinning from her hand. Pain flared through her shoulder, hot and blinding, as she began to slide down the stone.
Then the smoke parted completely, and Ivar Gunnarsson came through it like a god of war.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
He saw Callum before Callum saw him.
The smoke was a living thing, thick enough to move through in heavy, rolling layers. Thinner near the stone flags of the floor, dense and acrid at shoulder height.
Ivar came through the passage low and fast, his boots silent on the masonry. He took in the full picture before he'd even finished his third stride. Matilda was a pale shadow against the wall, sliding downward, her shoulder taking the brutal impact of the stone.
Callum was already pivoting toward the sound of his entry, his blade half-raised. On the ground between them, a man lay sprawled, Matilda’s work, no longer a concern in the tally of the living.
He crossed the distance with the lethal grace of a predator.
Callum turned fully, and they stood four feet apart.
Ivar looked at his face, really looked at it, with the stripping attention he gave enemies he was about to unmake. He saw the truth he'd been hunting for a long time. It wasn't the cold strategy of a rival. It wasn't the high-stakes politics of a man who wanted the King’s Pact broken for profit.
It was obsession.
The specific, consuming kind that had nothing to do with reason and everything to do with the deranged belief that possession was a form of ownership that survived even the most absolute denial.
"Gunnarsson," Callum spat. The name sounded like a curse in the stifling air.
"Aye," Ivar said. His voice was a flat line of iron.
He stepped forward.
Callum was good. That was the thing about dangerous men. They were usually good, or they didn't last long enough to become a threat worth naming. He moved with practiced ease in the confined space, using the narrowness of the stone passage to limit Ivar's angles, keeping his blade up and his footwork tight. He had fought in close quarters before; he knew how to use the walls as a second shield.
He also knew he was losin––and bleeding, Ivar noticed––and that realization was making him reckless.
"She was meant tae be mine," Callum said.