Moonshadow

Chapter Seventeen

When Sophie sprinted toward Nikolas and the Hounds, he couldn’t believe it. It was every bit as insanely courageous as when she had run into the pub, and by gods, when he got his hands on her, he was going to fucking murder her for it.

“Go back!” he roared. “Go back, you crazy goddamn woman!”

But she didn’t stop. Behind her, the other men exploded out of the double doors with weapons, and they raced toward him too. They would overtake Sophie within seconds, but Nikolas didn’t know how close the Hounds were behind him, and in this instance, fractions of seconds mattered.

He spun to face the threat racing up to him. Just then, Sophie’s Glock fired, and the lead Hound, the one closest to Nikolas, dropped like a stone.

Chest heaving, he stared at it. She was as good as she had said she was. She hit what she aimed at. Even at night, in the middle of a pounding storm.

More Hounds poured out of the woods. It was too late to formulate any kind of sophisticated strategy. Gathering his Power, he flung a morningstar, straight and hard, at the second closest Hound.

Like a bolt of horizontal lightning, the morningstar split the darkness and exploded in the Hound’s broad, furry chest. The force of it lifted the Hound and spun its body in the air before it slammed into the ground. It didn’t rise again.

Not many warriors could cast a morningstar. Morningstars were one of the deadliest weapons he had at his disposal, but they were a hellish drain on his energy and they took seconds to amass. Whirling back around, he raced toward Sophie.

Now she strode forward. She didn’t run. Sighting down the length of her arm, she held the Glock in a two-handed grip and fired repeatedly at the approaching Hounds. Even as he came up to her, he was counting her bullets, and he knew the exact moment she went out.

“You’re out!” he shouted in her face. “Go back to the house!”

Unbelievably, she dug in her jeans pocket. She told him, “Just need to reload.”

He cast a quick look around. Thanks to his morningstar and her marksmanship, there were four bodies lying on the lawn, but there were at least twenty or twenty-five more Hounds racing across the lawn while his men sprinted to meet them.

Gods damn it, he needed his sword.

“Nik!” The shout came from behind him. As he looked over his shoulder, Braden tossed his sword harness at him.

Nikolas snatched it out of the air. “Get behind me,” he snapped at Sophie. “Get down, low to the ground, and stay there!”

Miraculously, this time she did as he ordered, jumping to crouch low behind him. He pulled hard on his Power to amass another morningstar and flung it at the next closest Hound. It sizzled through the air and hit the Hound broadside.

Behind him and low to the ground, the Glock spat multiple times. Sophie had finished reloading, and he remembered what she had said when she had shown how she could assemble and load a gun without looking. Because you should be able to do it in the dark, if need be.

He was so furious at her for risking her life, but at the memory of that cocky, sexy little lift of her mouth, he felt a fierce grin break over his face.

At his best, he could amass four morningstars, perhaps five, before he was tapped out. And morningstars were no good at fighting in close quarters. Around him, Braden, Gareth and Rowan were armed with guns too, and the flat, erratic percussion of their firing punctuated the ominous roll of thunder from the storm. The rest of his men slammed into combat with the Hounds, so he drew his sword and dropped the harness to the ground.

He said to Sophie, “For the love of all the gods, do as I said and get your ass back to the house. If you shut the doors, the Hounds can’t get inside. Nobody can get inside unless you let them.”

“You are such a sexist boor,” she snapped. “Look around—did any one of your men make that choice, and are you bitching at them for it?”

I’m not in love with my men. The thought sprang, sizzling and white-hot, like a morningstar in his head.

He shouted, “My men follow orders!”

“I’m a consultant!” she snapped. “Not your foot soldier. I don’t take orders from you.”

“You’re fired!” he growled.

He didn’t have time to say any more or hear if she argued. Not ten yards away, Cael was facing off against two Hounds. Moving forward rapidly, Nikolas engaged the closest Hound.

The battle turned into images he saw in microsecond snapshots. The Hound turned its slavering jaws toward him, and they feinted with each other, pacing in a circle as the driving rain made every step a hazard.

Naturally, Sophie hadn’t gone back to the house. Instead, she calmly walked up behind the Hound while its attention was fixed on him. As he watched in incredulity, she tapped it on the haunch.

He thought he was beside himself before. This time he nearly levitated out of his body.

“What the fuck are you doing now!” he roared.

The Hound spun to face her, then kept turning. It looked skyward, then down at the ground, and turned around the other way, head tilted.

“Confusion spell,” Sophie told Nikolas breathlessly. “He’ll do that for hours. I’ve got one left.”

Even as he lifted his sword to behead the creature, Nikolas filled his lungs to lambast her with everything he had. Then he paused. “It’ll be like this for hours?”

“Yep.” Lifting the Glock, she shot one-handed at the second Hound that Cael was fighting. It was a headshot, clean and true. The Hound was dead before it hit the ground.

She was so limited and fragile. She wasn’t nearly as fast as his men and not half as big or strong as the Hounds, yet in spite of that, she was one of the most dangerous fighters on the field that night, and he adored her for it.

“Keep an eye on it,” he said, watching Cael salute her and race off to engage another Hound. “I want to question it if I can. If you have to, shoot it in the head.”

“Got it,” she said. While she kept her attention fixed on the incapacitated Hound, she quickly reloaded.

Abruptly, rage surged over him in a scalding wave again. He snarled, “Now you take my orders?”

She speared him with a brief, sparkling glance. “I accept your suggestions. You can stick your orders up your ass.”

He would not laugh. Not while he was this furious. Spinning, he leaped into battle, amassing another morningstar to fling at a Hound that tried to flee the field.

It was a sloppy, ugly battle. Nikolas was able to amass two more morningstars before he tapped out. Aiming the last one strategically, he was able to take down two Hounds at once, and then he had to rely upon swordwork. Never moving too far away from Sophie, he kept on the defensive in a broad circle around her.

Within a half an hour, the battle was over. As Nikolas drew his sword from the throat of his last kill, he surveyed the field. A full thirty bodies littered the ground. When the Hounds had first appeared, the numbers had been decidedly against them, but now almost all of them lay dead, strewn across the clearing. Some of the bodies had already shifted back into human form.

They had gotten so damn lucky. If Sophie hadn’t acted so quickly and been such a good shot, if Nikolas hadn’t been able to amass the morningstars, if the other three men hadn’t been armed with guns and silver bullets, this battle could have gone entirely the other way.

The sound of shouting had him spinning on his heel.

Sophie and Rhys confronted each other over the body of a dead Hound. She was swearing, sounding as furious as Nikolas had ever heard her. “What the hell is the matter with you? I told you to back off and leave it alone! I had it under control!”

Rhys advanced, moving his body like a weapon until they were face-to-face. He backhanded her in the chest, pushing her back as he shouted hoarsely over her, “You don’t fucking tell me what to do, woman! He was an enemy! I cut him down like the murderous dog he was!”

Nikolas lunged over and slammed into Rhys so violently the other man skidded on the wet grass and went down on his ass. Breathing hard, Nikolas brought the tip of his sword to Rhys’s throat.

“She was doing what I told her to do,” he growled. “I wanted to question that Hound.”

“I tried to tell him that, but he wouldn’t listen!” Sophie exclaimed as she reached Nikolas’s side.

Rhys’s face distorted with rage. “You get a piece of tail, and now you’re holding your fucking sword to my throat? Is that the kind of commander you really are?”

Ice took over Nikolas’s molten rage.

“Yes.” His voice turned stone cold. He pressed forward until the tip pressed against the skin at Rhys’s throat. “That’s the kind of commander I am. You touch her again like that, and I will cut your fucking hands off.”

Beside him, Sophie had gone still. Nikolas grew aware that the other men had joined them and were bearing silent witness to the confrontation.

Nikolas bared his teeth in savage, naked aggression. “That goes for every one of you as well. This woman has risked her safety and her life for us. While you were scrambling for your weapons, she was the first one on the field tonight. We are guests in her house, and you will respect her expertise. And if I find out that one of you has verbally or physically threatened her in any way, I don’t care how long we have fought together, I will end you. Is that clear?”

Rowan stepped forward to put his hand on Nikolas’s taut forearm. “You’re right, Nik,” he said, his voice clear and calm. “That’s not who we are. Rhys was just being an unbelievably massive ass, weren’t you, Rhys? You didn’t actually mean to strike our friend, host, and ally. And I’ll bet you’re counting the seconds until you can say you’re sorry. Right?”

“Right,” Rhys said, his wary attention trained on Nikolas. He made no move to try to stand or ease away from Nikolas’s sword but instead remained sprawled half prone on the ground, his weight resting back on both hands. He looked at Sophie. “I apologize. I can’t believe I hit you. I’ve never done anything like that before. It must have been the heat of the battle.”

“Sure, it’s okay,” Sophie said easily. As Nikolas glanced at her, water dripped down her calm face. She smiled. “Battle fever can make the best of us do crazy things. No harm done this time. Just don’t do it again, or you can forget about what Nik will do to you. I’ll smack you into next week myself.”

Expectedly, Braden started to chuckle. “I heard the truth in that statement.”

Others started to laugh, and the tension eased. Rowan’s grip tightened on Nikolas’s arm until he forced his rigid muscles to relax. Taking a step back, he bent to clean the length of his bloody blade on the grass, then found his sword harness. Despite the discomfort of donning it while wet, he sheathed the sword and shrugged the harness into place.

He asked, “Did we get them all?”

“No way to tell,” Cael replied. “Maybe. We got all the ones that charged, and you took out the one that tried to leave the field. There could have been others holding back, in the woods, but they would have charged too, unless they had other orders.”

And Rhys killed the one that might have told us that, Nikolas thought. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sophie offer a hand to Rhys to help him up. After a second’s hesitation, Rhys accepted it. It was a nice, diplomatic touch. A savage, barely controlled part of him wanted to knock their hands apart.

He watched closely until they stopped touching. Then he said, “I guess it doesn’t matter. None of these Hounds will be returning, which is a message in itself.” He told Sophie grimly, “I’m afraid all our hard work at misdirection has gone down the drain.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Sounding tired, she swiped at her dripping nose. “Misdirection was a long shot anyway.” She added telepathically, They showed up here awfully quick after Robin’s storm started though. Do you think Morgan knew I was lying after all?

Nikolas said, No. If Morgan believed you were lying, he would have come here himself, and he wouldn’t have waited. Or he wouldn’t have let you go in the first place.

She heaved a sigh, which turned into a cough. It must have been Robin’s storm that brought them then.

Although he didn’t say so, he disagreed. The puck might be a great many things, but he was neither naive nor stupid. A storm of this magnitude spanned miles, and Robin would never have made the manor house the center of it.

And Morgan hadn’t witnessed the deep emotional bond Sophie and Robin had developed. He had believed Sophie when she had claimed the dog had disappeared, so he wouldn’t have leaped immediately to searching for Robin here. He might have checked out the property as part of an overall search strategy, but there would have been no specific sense of urgency in doing so.

No, there was only one logical reason Nikolas could think of for a fighting force of thirty Hounds to show up on Sophie’s doorstep not an hour after the men’s arrival.

Betrayal. They were not supposed to live through this fight.

He watched Rhys closely for the next several minutes, but as the tension faded from the group, the other man appeared to relax gradually. He even stepped forward to mutter something at Sophie, which caused her to laugh.

Moving quickly, the men stacked the bodies of the Hounds together close to the tree line. As they worked, a single headlight of a motorcycle appeared. Gawain and Ashe had returned.

Sophie and Rowan went to greet them and explain what happened, and within moments Ashe had joined the rest of the group to help, while Gawain ran his bike into the manor house.

Now that Gawain had returned and could help to keep an eye on Sophie, Nikolas felt a hypervigilant part of him relax slightly, and he could turn his full attention to the task at hand. Once all the bodies had been collected, the others stepped back several meters. While they kept watch, he knelt to put his hands on the ground once again.

It had been a long damn day with a hellish ending, and he was not only tired, he was still tapped out from amassing morningstars. But this one task had little to do with wielding his Power and more to do with asking the Earth to wield hers.

Reaching deep, he made the connection with the rich, abundant land magic all around him and asked it to take the bodies of the men. This type of asking never moved quickly, but after a few moments, the ground rippled gently and the bodies sank below the turf. When they had completely disappeared, he thanked the magic and let it go, then stood.

The first thing he did was look for Sophie. She stood by Gawain at the back of the group. At some point while Nikolas had been working, the puck had appeared, still wearing the form of a monkey. Robin sat on Sophie’s hip like a toddler, his skinny, hairy arms around her neck.

No one offered to say any words at the Hounds’ grave. They got the respect of a burial, but they would not get prayers from the Dark Court.

“That’s it,” Nikolas said, wiping his hands on his sodden pants. “We’re done. Let’s get inside.”

The others didn’t hesitate. They jogged to the house, and as soon as everybody was inside, Nikolas and Gawain closed the iron-bound oak doors while everyone else watched in the dim glow thrown from the fire across the hall and the single lit oil lantern someone had set on top of a case of canned beans.

The sound of the doors closing seemed very loud in the silence. Nikolas turned to find them all watching him. Sophie hugged the monkey. Everyone wore the same, sober expression he felt on his face.

Nikolas thought, none of us know if or when those doors will open again.

And one of us is a traitor.

“We’ve thrown the dice,” he said. “Now we pray the gamble pays off.”

Gawain clapped his hands. “In the meantime, we’ve got work to do. Let’s dry off and get changed. Nikolas cleared the chimney so we can build up the fire to take the chill out of the hall. We can sort out the majority of this mess tomorrow, but let’s at least get things shifted so we can have enough clear floor space to make bed pallets for the night. And I don’t know about any of you, but I could use a late supper after all that work.”

While Gawain issued orders, Nikolas turned his attention to Sophie. Dripping wet like the rest of them, she was visibly shivering, and her face was completely colorless. Searching the immediate area, he found the blanket she had left crumpled on the doorstep and enveloped both her and the puck in it.

His hands were reluctant to leave her. He clamped his fists in the blanket and drew her close. She didn’t resist him. Neither did Robin, as the puck turned his face away and laid it on her shoulder.

“You looked spent hours ago, and a lot has happened since then,” Nikolas muttered. “Let’s get you out of these wet clothes. Then will you please sit by the fire and warm up?”

Her teeth chattered. “I would l-love nothing more than to fall asleep by the fire, but Nik, we haven’t found the privies yet.”

He told her, “The men can piss in a jar for one night.”

She glowered at him. “I c-can’t.”

Unexpectedly, amusement welled up inside. Tucking the blanket higher around her neck, he said, “We’ll set up a chamber pot for you and a blanket for privacy. We can locate the privies in the morning.”

“Nikolas Sevigny, I am not going to pee in a chamber pot while I’m in the same room as the rest of you. Just wipe that concept out of your head.” She sniffed and rubbed her nose on the blanket. “I’ll feel better when I’m warm and dry. It’s not going to hurt if we look around a little bit.”

Heaving a sigh, he conceded. “All right, but only after we change into dry clothes.”

They changed quickly. First Nikolas held up a blanket in one of the two corners closest to the fire so that she could strip out of her wet clothes in relative privacy. When she was freshly dressed in jeans, a sweater, and her black boots, he changed too. Thanks to Sophie washing his clothes, he had exactly four changes of clothes with him from his go-bag. In many ways, no matter how much or little time it took, this was going to be a long siege.

While he dragged on clean clothes and settled the damp sword harness into place between his shoulders, he said to Gawain, “We’re going on a brief exploration, hopefully to find privies and a viable source of water without encountering a major shift between here and there.” Switching to telepathy, he added, When you set up pallets for tonight, be sure to put hers close by the fire, between yours and mine. She feels the cold more than we do, and we’re not leaving her unguarded for a moment.

You bet, Gawain said without a flicker in his expression. Aloud, he replied, “We’ll have hot soup and bread waiting for you when you return.”

“Thanks.” Sophie was still shivering when Nikolas turned to her, and she had wrapped the blanket around her again, but there was more color in her face. “Where’s Robin?”

She shrugged. “Hiding in the shadows. Pilfering the food. Your guess is as good as mine. He took off when I changed clothes.” She gave him the ghost of a tired grin. “He’s a bit prudish, I think.”

Nikolas dismissed Robin from his mind. The puck could look after himself, and he had a talent for disappearing when he wanted to. He took one of the nearby oil lanterns and lit it. “Ready?”

“Yeah.” She looked at the chaos around them. “Wait, did we get chalk or paint?”

Gawain said, “I saw that box. Hold on a second.” He rummaged between two stacks and lifted up a hand-labeled cardboard box. “Here it is—both chalk and paint and paper for drawing maps.”

Sophie peered inside and pulled out a plastic package filled with white chalk. “This will do for tonight. If we find any shifts, we can mark them more permanently tomorrow.”

Nikolas approved of that plan. He said, “Follow me.”

As tired as she looked, her expression was alive with interest. She fell into step beside him as he led her toward the huge fireplace. “Why are we going into the corner—oh!”

Her exclamation came as he took her hand and led her into the deep shadow at the side of the huge hearth. Only when they came close did the light from the oil lantern reveal a dark, narrow hall, cleverly designed to remain hidden by the massive bulk of the fireplace.

He grinned at the look in her wide eyes. “I found it when I was clearing the chimney. It’s not quite a hidden passageway, but it’s close. Servants would have used this, probably to carry food and drink to the high table and important guests, so it should lead back to the kitchen, buttery, and pantry.”

“And hopefully a water source,” she said.

“Exactly. Also, this house is big enough, I have my fingers crossed for an inner courtyard.”

The sounds of the men working faded as they went down the dark, narrow hall until black silence pressed at them on all sides. They could walk abreast of each other, but Nikolas’s sleeve brushed the wall on his side, and he could see that Sophie didn’t have much room on hers either.

She whispered gleefully, “This is creepy as hell.”

“It is, a bit.” Smiling slightly, he laced his fingers through hers. “Are you sensing any shifts?”

She shook her head. “Not at the moment. I’ll be sure to tell you when I do.” Her eyes gleamed as she glanced behind them. She shifted to telepathy. The man who tries to strangle me. You suspect Rhys, don’t you?

His brief amusement faded. He has pressed me for details at suspicious times. I look back at things he’s said and how I’ve sensed a certain antipathy in him from time to time. He knew about Gawain scenting Robin and me going to investigate Old Friars Lane. And tonight, not an hour after the men arrived, we got attacked by a large pack of Hounds. When we might have gotten information from the one you had spelled, he killed it. It’s all circumstantial, and none of it is definitive, but yes, I do suspect him.

She squeezed his fingers. I’m so sorry.

The warmth of her hand in his was a comfort he hadn’t expected to relish. He squeezed her fingers in reply. Thank you.

As they talked, they came to a heavy door, and he handed her the oil lantern before he set to pushing it open. The wood was swollen into place, and the hinges were rusty, so he had to throw his whole weight into the operation. The door screeched loudly as it finally gave and split into two pieces. The wood had rotted at the core.

He stumbled forward outside into the cool, wet night. Behind him, Sophie laughed and cheered. “You were right—there’s an inner courtyard!”

As he righted himself, she held the oil lantern high. It was impossible to see everything in the insufficient illumination, but he got the impression of tangled, overgrown greenery, knee-high grass, benches, and even a few fruit trees, all bordered by stone colonnades. It wasn’t by any means as grand as some courtyards he had seen, but still, it was a nice, spacious place.

His catlike eyes adjusted to the lighting, and he pointed across the courtyard. “There are your privy chambers, and in the opposite corner, there is my well. This house is part wealthy family home and part fortress. I suspected they would have wanted to keep their water supply guarded and to have privy chambers safe from outside interference. Nobody would want to get attacked while in such a vulnerable position. The kitchen, buttery, and pantry will be somewhere over there, by the well.”

“This is fantastic.” Her eyes shone.

He smiled. “If you need to relieve yourself, you’d better go behind one of the trees for now. Tomorrow we can make sure the structure of the privy chambers is safe and inspect the well.”

“Actually, erm.” She gave him a sidelong smile and slipped her hand out of his. She tossed her blanket into his arms. “I’ll be right back.”

“Take your time.” He waited while she took care of her private business, content to study his surroundings.

The courtyard felt full of ghosts from the past. He could see the reason for everything they had done. The benches had been positioned so they would get the most shade from the fruit trees. The well had been covered before the household had left. It must have been an instinctive decision, in case they ever chose to return again.

The moon hung high overhead, lightly veiled in shadowed clouds. On the other side of the front doors, this night was the third night of the full moon cycle, but here, in this place, the moon was half-full. The sight was another reminder that they were not in alignment with the land outside the house, which was both comforting and disturbing at once.

She returned quickly, reclaimed her blanket, and pointed back the way she had gone. “There’s a shift over there.”

He looked in that direction. “You didn’t cross it?”

“Oh, no.” She shuddered. “The last thing anybody needs is for me to disappear for two weeks while I’m going to the bathroom.”

“You’re damn right.” Setting aside the lantern, he drew her into his arms. She leaned into his embrace and tucked her face into his neck. Rubbing his cheek against her damp hair, he muttered, “You still make me crazy.”

Crazy with desire. Crazy with a tangled mess of so many other emotions he didn’t know how to track them all or sort through them. She flung him hurtling along a manic symphony of reaction. Interacting with Sophie was like trying to herd twenty cats at once.

“I make you crazy?” Dropping the blanket, she slipped her arms around his waist. She whispered, “I lost ten years of my life when I saw those Hounds racing after you. It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen, Nik.”

He felt her body shudder against his. Remembering his own rapid, violent array of emotions as he watched her run toward him, he pressed his mouth to the thin, fine skin at her temple and told her, “You’re still fired. I mean it, Sophie. I won’t work with someone who disregards my orders so blatantly.”

“Pfft,” she said. “I don’t need your stupid consulting job. You can keep your money and your high-handed, arrogant assumption that you get to order me around however you like. I’m going to still do what I want and act as I think best. I meant what I said too—I’m not one of your foot soldiers. Screw you.”

As she told him off, she rubbed his back, the touch soothing and arousing at once.

“You are a truly horrible woman,” he growled. He slid the tips of his fingers underneath the edges of her sweater, connecting with the warm skin at her torso. The need to kiss her, to feel her full mouth pliant and moving under his, was pounding in his head. “Screwing sounds better and better all the time.”

“And I can’t believe you’re such an asshole.” She crooned the words, almost as if they made her happy.

He tilted her face up. “Sophie,” he whispered. “I’m no good for you. My life is desperate and violent all the time, not just tonight, and now you’ve gotten trapped in a conflict you can’t leave.”

“Oh Nik,” she murmured, stroking his hair. “It really is impossible for you to grasp that I am fully capable of making all my own choices. I am fully autonomous in my own right. I’m not going to agree with you all the time, and I’m not going to take your orders. I am my own sovereign state, and I’m standing right here in front of you because I want to be here. I’m beyond being insulted by you. Right now I’m just weary. If you can’t respect me enough to accept that, I don’t know what the hell we’re doing.”

As she talked, she slipped out of his arms and turned away. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her back. “If I didn’t respect you, I wouldn’t be standing here right now,” he growled. “Do you want to know the truth? You scared me tonight. I watched you running straight into danger, and I thought my heart was going to burst out of my chest. And when you don’t take orders, and when you act like a loose cannon, I don’t know how to plan my actions around you. That’s what orders and acting like a cohesive fighting unit are for.”

Her eyes flashed with shadowed fire. “All that would be true, and I could take it, except you ordered me back to the house like I was a delinquent child. Maybe I could accept your orders if you treated me like you treat your other men.”

“You’re not my other men!” he roared furiously. “I’m not in love with any of them!”

She froze, then whispered, “What?”

“I said I’m not in love with any of them!” he snapped. All but flinging her wrist away from him, he pivoted away to pace. “Everything about you drives me insane. We have been arguing and sniping at each other from the moment we met. But then I started to like you. You’re courageous, funny and generous, and more beautiful than any woman has any right to be, and when we first made love…” He stopped pacing to run his hands through his hair as he tried to gather his thoughts.

“Made love?” she murmured.

“Made love,” he repeated fiercely, turning to glare at her as if she might try to take the experience away from him. “When we first made love, I felt something I had never felt before. Instincts that I didn’t even know I had. I’m part Wyr, and I felt the drive to mate with you. So I left because that’s not what we said we were going to do that night. It was supposed to be an interlude of pleasure, nothing more. But then I couldn’t keep my damn hands off you. I still can’t.”

In the golden slant of light shining from the oil lantern, he could see the shock in her face. Her lips parted as if she would say something, but he couldn’t bear to hear it.

“Don’t worry,” he said bitterly. “I’ve thought it through. I’m not Wyr enough for the mating urge to kill me. You’re under no obligation to be concerned about it.”

She wrapped her arms around herself. “So you’re not forced by the Wyr mating instinct to do something you’re not willing to do. You sound as if you don’t welcome it at all.”

“Everything I first said to you is still true.” Unable to look at her any longer and fight the pounding urge to take her back in his arms, he turned his back. “I’m in the middle of fighting a war, and I still don’t have anything to offer a lover—no safety, no home, not even the promise of my time and attention.”

Her breathing sounded harsh in the still of the courtyard. “Well, I guess we know where we stand now. You know what’s funny? I fell in love with you too, you jackass. Your commitment, your bravery, even your imperious attitude. It hurt when you walked out so quickly after we barely finished making love, but I went with it. You asked me to trust you when you said you had good reasons for walking away, and I went with that too. In fact, I’ve gone with all of it—the danger, the uncertainty, the fighting, and just so you know, your finer sensibilities for why you shouldn’t take a lover are outdated and delusional, because we’re probably not getting out of this house again alive. But you know what I can’t go with?”

He looked over his shoulder at her. “What?”

“I can’t go with how unwelcome all this is to you. How unwelcome I am to you. I can accept everything about you, even your worst, most imperious, biggest asshole moments. But you can’t accept me and who I am. You can’t accept the fact of me in your life, for however long or short that life ends up being. You can’t accept the fact that I might accept everything about your life, how restrictive it is and how dangerous—that I have the power and the ability to make that choice rationally and accept the consequences, whatever they may be.” Pausing, she dug the heels of her hands into her eyes before continuing raggedly, “So you may say you’re in love with me, but you’re not in love with me the same way that I am in love with you. We’re using the same words, but we are not having the same experience, and I’m… I’m not going with this any longer.”

As she said the last words, a footstep sounded in the hall behind her. Before Nikolas had consciously thought about it, he had drawn his sword and leaped to her side.

Gawain stepped out of the hall, into the light. The other man took in the scene at a quick glance—their tension, Nikolas’s drawn sword. He cleared his throat. “Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to let you know there’s a hot supper when you’re ready.”

Sophie wiped her face as she turned to Gawain. “That sounds good.”

“We’re not done talking yet,” Nikolas said harshly.

She didn’t look in Nikolas’s direction. “Yes, we are,” she said. “We’re done.”

Bending to gather up her blanket, she stepped into the hall. After a brief hesitation, Gawain followed, leaving Nikolas standing alone in an overgrown courtyard filled with ghosts.