Bonetide

A DARK GOTHIC ROMANCE

KARINA HALLE

Copyright © 2026 by Karina Halle

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

In addition, no part of this book may be used to train artificial intelligence technologies or systems, including generative AI, machine learning, or large language models, without the express written permission of the author. The author reserves all rights under Article 4(3) of the Digital Single Market Directive 2019/790.

This book was written by a human brain, all mistakes are my own.

Cover by: Fable & Ink

Edited by: Laura Helseth and Cydney Humphrey

For Scott and the Mackenzies

Contents

Playlist

An Important Note From the Author

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Epilogue

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Also by karina halle

About the Author

Playlist

Below are some songs that I either listened to while writing or songs that encompass the vibes of the book.

“Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn” - The White Stripes

“DNA” - The Kills

“Soothe My Soul” - Depeche Mode

“Initiation” - +++(Crosses)

“Castle” - Halsey

“Loverman” - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

“Fortress” - Queens of the Stone Age

“Vivien” - +++(Crosses)

“Kraken” - Florence & The Machine

“Bells in Santa Fe” - Halsey

“Ghost Ride” - +++(Crosses)

“Don’t Say You Love Me” - Depeche Mode

“Into the Void” - NIN

“Before We Drown” - Depeche Mode

“Drag Me Under” - Sleep Token

“La Mer” - NIN

An Important Note From the Author

Bonetide is a dark gothic romance that’s tinged with horror that might make you squeamish and uncomfortable. While this book starts off almost like a cozy gothic mystery, it does pivot later into darker territory. Which also gets a little weird. If you’re here for the cozy, know that it doesn’t stay cozy. If you’re here for the dark romance and horror, know that it’s coming. Bonetide contains the following content that might be triggering to some readers: graphic violence and gore, profanity, explicit on-page sex, dub con, breath play, blood play, power imbalance, inappropriate use of food-grade oil, and cannibalism (of sorts).

Also, please note that while Iris has ADHD and is autistic like I am, not all of her experiences can be applicable to every neurodiverse person. Likewise, though I had two sensitivity readers with fibromyalgia read the book, Iris’s experience with fibromyalgia may not resonate with every person who has the condition.

Prologue

She comes in the late afternoon, in a dark jacket too thin for the weather, dragging a suitcase that catches every uneven stone on the path. She’s not alone, she has the solicitor with her—a portly man who smiles too much. It’s a smile that most give around these parts, nervous and wary, as if they believe all the sordid tales that abound in this region but don’t want others to know.

I’m used to those looks and those smiles.

They no longer bother me, if they ever did.

I’ve been waiting such a long time.

Neither of them can see me. I’m across the water—half in shadow—and she’s still looking at the cottage as if she can’t believe her eyes, perhaps thinking it’s bigger or smaller, more well-kept or less well-kept than she thought. Her hair is darker and longer than her great-aunt’s was, her face shaped like a doll, but there is something of the old woman in the line of her jaw. A stubbornness. A way of standing as if she is alone in the world and has decided that is fine.

I knew Eufemia Galloway for a long time. I know that jaw.

The new one, the one the people in town called Iris when I was last eavesdropping, sets her suitcase on the step and looks behind her at the solicitor. He had been standing there staring at the loch with a look on his face one can only describe as frozen, his mind perhaps torturing him with stories of the drowned wives. Then he snaps to it and hands Iris a key which she accepts with some reverence. It makes me glad to see that she already respects the cottage.

She fits the old key into the lock. She has to lean her weight into it. The door has always been stiff. Then she is inside, and I lose her to the windows for a while, only her shape moving room to room as she opens curtains and cupboards, learning the bones of the place that is now hers.

She comes back out at dusk—the solicitor long gone—and stands at the edge of the water with her arms wrapped around herself.

Now I let her see me.

Not all of me, though—not at first. Just enough that I’m a mere shape across the bay where there was nothing before. A stillness in the dark that her eye catches and holds. I watch her register me. I watch her go very, very still in the way a rabbit does when they know they’re being watched; that primal instinct that knows before the mind does.

Like the rabbit, she does not run unless she has to. I won’t give her a reason yet.

I want her in a way that will terrify her. I want my mouth on the soft place beneath her ear where the pulse runs close to the skin. I want to know what sounds she makes when she is afraid, and what sounds she makes when she is not. I want her on her knees in the salt grass with her hands fisted in my shirt, telling me to stay. I want—and this is the older want, the patient one, the one I have nursed through every long winter on this loch—to take her apart slowly, in the way only she will let me.

There is time for all of it.

There is so much time now that she is here.

Because no matter what happens, she won’t leave this place.

The wind shifts, bringing salt and bone and something that is not yet rot. She lifts her face into it, breathing deep. Becoming one with this land. Becoming…open.

But I won’t go to her tonight.

Tonight I only want her to feel me from afar. To carry the feeling inside with her when she goes inside and locks the door behind her. To lie awake in her aunt’s bed wondering if she dreamed me.

But she will not have dreamed me.

For I have come for her.

Chapter

One

There’s a naked man watching me.

At first, I didn’t know what the hell I was looking at. The way the light slants as it passes over Beinn Bhàn—at least I think that’s the name of the mountain to my left; they all sound the same so far—has been playing tricks on my eyes since the evening I first got here just four days ago.

I thought maybe it was a piece of driftwood beached on the shore at an awkward angle, but then it moved ever so slightly. What I thought was the end was indeed someone’s head, and what I thought was a sturdy branch was, well…I’m staring at a penis.

Now that I see it, there’s no mistaking what it is. My first thought is that this man is incredibly well-endowed if I can see his dick from across the loch, even if this particular bay is 200 meters at its widest. My second thought is, uh, what the fuck? Is he skinny dipping, or what’s going on here?

I expect the naked man to enter the water but he doesn’t. Instead, he eventually stops staring at me—as if I’m the problem for interrupting his naked time—and turns walking around a rocky outcrop until he disappears. The last thing I see is his white ass, which, even though he’s too far away to make out any details, I can tell he does squats.

Maybe he lives in the castle, I think to myself. There’s what looks to be a crumbling castle of sorts across the water, I can see just the tip of it from behind the small hill and tops of the stunted pine. I can see even more if I walk to where the bay opens up to Loch Torridon. It looks like something out of a Gothic romance novel.

Then again, so does my entire situation.

I sit down on the back step with my coffee, which has gone lukewarm in the time it took me to identify a stranger’s penis from across a body of water this is what my life is now, and I stare at the place where he was. The shore is empty, just dark gentle waves lapping against the pebble and stone. It was like he was never there.

I tell myself I imagined him. Wouldn’t be the first time my overactive imagination reared its crazy head.

But I didn’t imagine him, because I already drew him.

The sketchbook is open in my lap. I started this morning trying to get the line of the heather blooming right on the slope across the loch. I’m a freelance botanical illustrator I know, I know, I’m just rolling in the dough, which is partly why a year in a stone cottage on the west coast of Scotland—with the chance of it becoming mine—sounded less like a sentence, and more like a rope thrown to a drowning woman. Somewhere between the heather and the third cup of coffee, I’d put my pencil down and looked up, and there he was in all his horse-cock glory.

I look at the page now. Okay, so I have not drawn the man. I’m not that quick. But I’ve drawn the area of where he was, the rocks and the line of the shore and a long pale absence in the middle of it where my eye kept going.

I close the sketchbook.

I’m thirty years old, and four days into the rest of my life.

And the welcome wagon, apparently, is a man with no clothes on.

The cottage is small and stone, and sits about thirty meters back from the high-tide line. My great-aunt Effie lived here for sixty years and, before her, so did three Galloway women I know almost nothing about. I know almost nothing about Effie either. I met her exactly once, when I was twelve, on one of the trips my dad made to the coast of his childhood and brought me along on. My mother never came on those trips, something about how Scotland was too cold (we lived in Colorado, so I have no idea why that was her specific excuse, but she is a woman full of excuses, to be sure).

Anyway, I remember a small woman with thick grey hair and watchful eyes and an herb garden that smelled like something magical. I remember her looking at me for a long time at the kitchen table and asking me questions that didn’t sound like questions a great-aunt should be asking a twelve-year-old. I remember liking her a lot. There weren’t that many people I liked—especially when they fell into the “old people” and “family” categories that younger me felt drawn to—but I had liked Aunt Effie.

And then I didn’t see her again. My dad died when I was eighteen, and the trips stopped; Effie sent a card the year I got married and, strangely enough, last year when I got divorced, but that was as much contact we’d had (to be clear, it wasn’t a “Congrats on your divorce” card, it was more of a vague postcard from Scotland that said she was thinking of me and hoped I was well). When the email came from her solicitor, I had to think about it for a moment. Effie Galloway. The cottage was to be left to me and me alone, but only if certain conditions were met.

The conditions were thus: I had to live there for one year. Continuously, with brief allowances for travel, properly notified to the executor. At the end of the year the property would be mine along with what little estate she left.

It took me forty-eight hours to say yes.

I had many different reasons for agreeing to it. The version I told my brother Andrew is that I needed somewhere to land after the divorce, which was true, albeit simple-sounding. The version I told his wife—and my best friend Maddie— at her kitchen table at two in the morning the night before I flew out, was the longer one. I have been sleeping in other people’s houses for a year. I have not had a place that was mine since I moved out of the house I shared with Ryan. My freelance work is shrinking faster than I can keep up with thank you, shitty AI art. My body hurts most days and the cold months are coming—Chicago cold is different from Scotland cold, as far as I’ve heard—and Andrew and Maddie’s basement has done its job for as long as anyone could expect, and I needed to be somewhere where my exhaustion and failures weren’t taking up space in someone else’s life.

And, although I didn’t say this part out loud, even to Maddie, Effie chose me. Out of every Galloway in her bloodline, that woman I met once when I was twelve put my name in her will. I have no idea why. I don’t know what she saw in me, especially at such a young age, or what she remembered of me, or what had made her decide. But she did, and the cottage is the only thing in my life right now that has been offered rather than survived, so I was not going to say no to it.

Though, to be honest, the fact that there are conditions in place—such as staying here for one year—is more than a little strange. It reminds me of those old spooky shows where the tenant has to survive a night in a haunted house in order to inherit it. Luckily, I’m a little strange and spooky myself, and even though I’ve only been here four days, as far as I can tell the cottage isn’t haunted. It’s just a little drafty, and the things scratching at the windows at night are just the climbing roses moving in the ever-present breeze. I think.

So here I am. Four days into the rest of my life and looking at a stranger’s dick across a loch in Wester Ross.

My therapist would have something to say about all of this, but I don’t have to see her for at least a year, so…

The cottage is called Tigh-na-Mara, House by the Sea in Gaelic, which I have been pronouncing wrong every time I’ve tried to say it out loud. It sits low on a rocky spit on the south shore of Loch Torridon, looking west across a small bay to a second spit where the castle crouches half-hidden behind its own outcrops. The road in is a single-track branch off the A896 that branches off again onto this small peninsula, gives up halfway and turns to gravel, then to ruts.

The nearest village is Shieldaig, cute as a button, in one direction, and the other direction is Torridon Village. In between is the castle-like Torridon Hotel which is maybe the closest bastion of civilization to me and that’s still a good fifteen minutes away by car. Effie chose her remoteness on purpose. So did the three Galloway women before her. I’m starting to suspect this is a Galloway thing.

Despite the remoteness, however, the cottage has everything a newly-divorced gal could need. There’s a quaint kitchen with a wood-burning stove, open shelving piled high with wooden bowls and mismatching porcelain mugs and a deep stone sink. Paintings of the sea and ships give it a nautical flair—every now and then there’s a portrait of flowers that gives me the itch to paint, and the worn oak table and two chairs is exactly the place to do that.

Then there is a sitting room with two cushy armchairs, a fireplace, and a window that faces the water with gauzy curtains that billow in dramatically. A cold-as-hell-even-with-the-heat-blaring bathroom has both a soaking tub and a tiny shower with plumbing that shakes and shimmies when you use it. A small guest bedroom upstairs under the eaves, low-beamed, where I have already hit my head twice, and a locked closet that I don’t have a key for. The main bedroom is downstairs. A little sparse, with just the bed—a very comfortable queen, thank you, Effie!—, a side table, and an ornately-carved wardrobe in the corner that looks like a man standing in the middle of the night, but it’s workable. It just needs some art on the walls. I can tell there were a few paintings there at one point thanks to their outlines, but, for whatever reason, Effie removed them before she died.

Speaking of more strange things, there is an iron horseshoe nailed over the bedroom door, points up.

There is another over the front door, smaller, older, and one on the back door as well.

There is also coarse salt in every windowsill, a thin, neat line that’s gathered a little dust. She must have done it just before she’d left for good.

There is also a single rowan tree near the front door, mature, planted deliberately a long time ago. There are dried herbs hanging from the rafters in the kitchen, some I recognize, and some I don’t. There is an herb garden out back beside the roses, the mint run wild as it’s prone to do, but otherwise it’s in good condition.

Now, I don’t remember my father ever mentioning his aunt was a witchy person, but being as I am a somewhat witchy person myself, these things stand out. Perhaps that’s why I inherited the cottage, though I wasn’t really into that stuff at twelve. In fact, it was a botanical folklore book that my father picked up for me somewhere during that trip here that got me interested in plants to begin with.

The thought of him makes my heart both swell and constrict. It’s funny how fresh grief can feel while at the same time it’s been your shadow for over a decade.

I sigh, put the sketchbook down on the kitchen table, and make a list—because making lists is one of the few neurotypical things that actually works on me. I want to leave the cottage today for reasons that are not entirely about groceries.

Bread.

Oat Milk.

Find out who the hell my naked neighbor in the castle is.

The drive into Shieldaig is twenty minutes of a single-track road that bends around the hills like it was laid down by someone who hated cars. I take it slow. The rental car has a wonky alignment, and the road climbs and dips around boulders like a rollercoaster. I’ll eventually have to fork out some dough to buy a car since I can’t afford to rent one for an entire year, I just don’t know if what I get is going to be any better than this hunk of junk.

Shieldaig, when I get to it, is a single curve of road, a picturesque pier, a handful of stone cottages that wear the weather like a second coat, and a restaurant called Gille Brighde I haven’t been brave enough to try—it seems the type of place where you have to eat haggis or else. The post office is in the front room of someone’s house, while the shop is in another. The shopkeeper is a woman called Mhairi, who, I have decided, based on two visits and approximately ninety seconds of total interaction, is going to be the person I orient around in the village.

She’s behind the counter when I come in, late fifties or early sixties, dark hair pulled back, sleeves rolled to her elbows, hands red from the cold of the chest freezer she’s just been reaching into.

“There she is,” she says, smiling. “Are you all settled in?”

“Well,” I say. “Mostly.”

“Mostly is about as much as anyone gets out this way.”

I gather a few things—bread, milk, a wedge of sharp cheese, a packet of biscuits I don’t need but have a funny name, a can of bean soup for the kind of evening I can already feel coming on—and bring them up to the counter. The shop smells like cured meat and woodsmoke and something herbal, courtesy of a small posy of dried lavender by the till.

“Mhairi,” I say carefully while she’s ringing me up, hoping I’m pronouncing her name right. “Can I ask you something?”

“You can ask,” she replies mildly.

“There’s what looks like an old castle across the bay from mine. Big one, I think. It’s hard to tell. Tall, anyway.”

Her hands don’t stop moving, but she takes a breath that’s a beat too long before she answers.

“Aye, I know the one.”

“Who lives there?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody?”

“That’s what they say,” she says as she weighs the cheese. She glances up, one eye squinting at me. “Why’re you asking?”

“I saw someone over there this morning. On the shore.”

“On the shore, you say?” Another squint, this one loaded with meaning.

“Yes. Not the loch itself, but on the other side of that small bay by the cottage.”

“Could’ve been a hill-walker. People do come round, end of the season.”

“I guess,” I concede, and I can hear myself deciding not to mention the part where the walker was naked. Old me would have been quick to blurt that out, but new me doesn’t want to offend the only person I’ve had conversations with since I got here.

Mhairi gives me one slow nod and bags my groceries. She slides them across the counter. And then, just as I’m reaching for the handles, she puts her hand lightly on top of mine. Her skin is warm; for a moment I wonder if I’ve caught a chill.

“Iris,” she begins, my name sounding delightful with her accent. “Your aunt was a good woman.”

“Thank you,” I reply, though I feel silly accepting that compliment on Effie’s behalf.

“She kept herself to herself. Out there.”

“I can tell.”

“There’s wisdom in that.”

And at that, she lifts her hand. It’s not a threat or a warning, but it is something. I find myself standing in the shop with my groceries hanging from one fist, trying to figure out what she meant.

“Drive safe back, hen,” she commands. “The light can go early when the clouds come down.”

I look out the window. The sky has gone the color of old pewter while I’ve been in the shop, though it is barely past four in the afternoon.

“Thanks, Mhairi.”

“Mind how you go.”

I drive home with the heater on high and the radio off. I don’t normally drive without some sort of music that quiets my thoughts, but the silence feels like the appropriate response to whatever just happened. I want to be able to hear myself think.

Mhairi knows something, I can tell. Why else would she have gone cagey? She knows something about that castle across the loch, and she chose not to tell me. Why? Am I too new, not yet a resident who is privy to local lore? Do I have to prove myself by doing something silly, like living in my aunt’s cottage for a year?

The road bends around the lower slopes and the loch comes up on my right, slate-dark in the failing light. The mountains across the water are losing their edges, and the clouds have come down low. It’s so wonderfully moody, so unmistakably The Highlands, that I wish I brought my paints with me so I could capture the scene.

Then, as I turn down my road and pass through the copse of Caledonian pine trees, I see it.

See him.

This time, he’s in the water.

Not on the far shore. Not across the bay. In the water, ten meters off the road, swimming a slow, even stroke parallel to my car.

I hit the brake harder than I mean to. The car lurches. The groceries tip in the passenger seat and the milk thumps against the door.

He stops swimming.

He treads water. I can see the small movement of his shoulders, the dark shape of his head above the surface. Then he turns to face the road.

To face me.

I can’t see his eyes from here thanks to the light, but I can feel them.

We stay like that for what is probably three seconds but feels like considerably longer, my foot still pressed heavily on the break. He’s not moving except to keep his head above the water, which he is doing efficiently, as if he knows exactly how much effort it costs him and won’t spend a calorie more.

Then he lifts one hand out of the water.

Not a wave. Nothing that friendly. He just lifts it, palm out, like he’s marking the spot. Like he’s saying here I am.

Hill-walker, my ass.

I take my foot off the brake.

The car rolls forward.

I drive the rest of the road with both hands on the wheel, my grip tighter. I’m not sure what it is about this naked swimming man that has me so on edge, but I’m strangely unnerved. Guess it comes with the territory when you’re a single woman living alone in an isolated cottage in a foreign country.

When I get inside the feeling lingers, so I quickly lock the front door behind me. Then I lock the back door, which I didn’t bother with earlier. I mean, what’s someone going to steal? A blue tin of sewing supplies?

I hang my coat, put the kettle on, then sit at the kitchen table.

The sketchbook is where I left it, still open. I look at it in the low light from the kitchen lamp.

I flip to a fresh page.

I draw him from memory.

I draw him as he was in the morning, on the far shore, distant and pale and unbothered. I draw the line of his shoulders. The hang of his arms. The angle of his head. I don’t usually draw figures—my work is botanical, the careful, particular spread of a petal, the veins of a leaf—but I have been trained, and the proportions are something I should be able to do without thinking. I draw for maybe ten minutes, then I sit back.

The drawing is quite good, if I do say so myself, considering he’s not a flower. I have caught the stillness of him, the way he was watching me, his whole posture on edge. A chill runs through me, for he reminds me a bit of a predator about to pounce.

But there’s something off about the figure on the page and it takes me way too long to realize what it is.

I’ve drawn him exactly as I saw him.

And while I remember the feel of his eyes, I can’t, for the life of me, remember his face.

Chapter

Two

Iwake up sore.

The good news is that I expected to wake up sore. Yesterday was the kind of day that pays interest, and my body has been keeping accounts on me for the last three years, if not more. The bad news is that I did not expect to wake up sore and halfway across the bed with all my limbs in different time zones, because the dream I was having involved a man I haven’t met treading water and looking up at me, and apparently that was enough to spread me out like I was waiting to get railed by a ghost.

Christ, I think I need to get laid. It’s been way too long. Not only had I not slept with anyone since the divorce, we’d stopped having sex at least a year before I found out Ryan was cheating on me. You’d think that would have been a sign…

I make my mind stop thinking about Ryan—it’s taken time to perfect this—and lie there for a minute. The light coming through the bedroom window is the soft yellow-gold of a Scottish morning that is going to be lovely until the next storm rolls in off the Atlantic, which the weather app on my phone tells me is sometime around dinner time. Outside, gulls are arguing somewhere over the bay, their cries loud and piercing. The cottage has gone the kind of quiet that has its own texture, all peat smoke and old stone, with the low constant shush of water against the rocks not far below.

I sit up the way you sit up when you have fibromyalgia and you’ve slept wrong. Slowly, respectfully—just in case you anger the pain gods—and with a brief internal renegotiation of what the day is going to ask of me. My hips are stiff. My hands are stiff. My jaw, for some reason, is also stiff (was I giving blow jobs in my dreams?). I manage to do some stretches my physical therapist taught me when I was twenty-seven and brand-new to the diagnosis, and I think, as I do every morning, that I should be more grateful to him and curse him a little less. Still, the curses come.

The pill organizer is on the kitchen shelf where I left it. Duloxetine. Low-dose amitriptyline left over from last week’s bad nights. The vitamin D my doctor made me promise to take when I told her I was moving to a country that has, in her words, three weeks of summer if you’re lucky (jokes on her, I have seen the sun at least twice since I’ve been here). The pills go down with a glass of water from the kitchen tap, which tastes faintly of iron and stone, and I cinch the heating pad around my shoulders, feeling like a pack mule when I do so.

The kettle goes on. The wood-burning stove is cold, the embers from last night gone to ash, and I carefully crouch and clear it and lay new kindling and strike a long match. This ritual of lighting it, combined with the comforting smell of the smoke, finds the place behind my sternum that has been holding tight for four days and loosens it, just a little. I open the back door for a moment to let the air in. The bay is silver and very calm, the heather on the slope across the loch is purple as a bruise in the early light, and a small swarm of midges find me almost immediately, so I shut the door again.

I contemplate locking the door for a moment but in the light of day, it seems silly. It’s just a perfectly ordinary morning on the rocky south shore of a sea-loch in Wester Ross, and the only reason it feels like anything else is that I’m still half-thinking about a man I’ll probably never see again.

Who I drew last night.

Whose face I can’t remember; whose gaze I can still feel.

I push that out of my head, put a slice of bread in the toaster, and drink my coffee standing up at the window, watching the water, mesmerized by the way the light glints on it. I wrack my brain for what that phenomenon is called. By the time the toaster pops, making me jump out of my skin, I’ve decided on the very scientific term, “sun-sparkles.”

The slow mornings here are by far more enjoyable than the mornings I had at Andrew and Maddie’s place where I always felt like I was in the way, because, I mean I was. Here, I can take my time and luxuriate for as long as I want.

Which is part of the problem because it’s day five now, and I’ve been pretending that this has been a vacation when really it’s the start of the rest of my life, which means I need to get to work, which means I need to create an area in the cottage for me to work, which means I’ve got some sorting to do as my life starts to amalgamate with Effie’s.

Which means finally acknowledging the small wooden door under the stairs.

It’s tucked into the corner of the sitting room beside the fireplace, painted the same deep cream as the wall, set so flush you wouldn’t notice it unless you were looking. The hinges have been painted over more than once until it looks like caterpillars are trying to push through from the other side.

I walk over to it and do nothing but stare for a moment. There is something about hidden doors and small places in old buildings that give me the heebie jeebies. I’m sure there’s nothing inside except for brooms or something but all I can imagine are spiders and other creepy crawlies. For a plant girl, I’ve got an irrational dislike of bugs.

Still, I can’t make this my own place until I know every inch. I sigh and stare at it some more. The latch is iron, looped through a black iron eye, and it’s old enough that opening it requires a small negotiation rather than a turn of the wrist. I work the loop free with my fingertips, and the door swings inward with a long low creak that I feel in my teeth. The smell that comes out is a mixture of camphor and dust and old wool and the particular dry-sweet note of paper that has been sitting in the dark for a long time. What was that smell called again? Lignin?

I take the flashlight from the drawer by the kitchen door, afraid for a moment when I turn my back to the darkness, then turn it on, hoping to catch any menacing insects in the act.

The space inside is the height of my shoulder, sloping down with the line of the stairs, and there’s just enough room to crouch in. The floorboards are bare and cool. A pair of old rubber boots lean against one wall like they’ve been waiting for someone. A broken tea set. A folded piece of oilcloth. A spool of grey twine, mostly unwound. Yes, some brooms too. And in the back, against the lowest part of the slope, under a sheet that has gone yellow at the edges, the shape the size of a steamer trunk.

I duck warily, careful not to get my hair caught in any cobwebs, then get my hands under the handles. The weight surprises me and I have to brace my shoulder against the inside of the doorway and lean back into my hips, and even then, the trunk only comes out in slow stages, dragging on the boards. By the time I’ve got it through the doorway and into the sitting room, my hands are shaking the way they do when I’ve asked too much of them, and I have to sit down for a minute with my back against the armchair to wait for my body to stop yelling at me.

I take in the chest. The brass hardware on the trunk has gone green and the leather straps are cracked. There’s a label tied to the lock with kitchen twine that says, in neat handwriting, Iris.

Seeing my name where it’s not expected is jarring and a tiny thrill runs through me. I don’t know when Effie would have done this—before she went to the hospital or back when she decided this cottage was to be mine—but it’s been waiting for me.

I move the trunk into the kitchen because the kitchen has the best light. I make a fresh cup of tea, then pull a chair up and open the lid.

The hinges sigh. The smell is stronger up close, camphor and the chalky scent of paper that’s been pressed against itself for years. The first thing I see is paper in many forms. Letters tied in bundles with kitchen twine bows, a romantic look of a bygone era. Notebooks, dozens of them, some with cracked oilcloth covers, some leather, some plain spiral-bound pads from the seventies. Loose sketches on heavier paper. Pressed flowers between sheets of waxed paper, the ghost of their color still showing through. A small wooden box that rattles when I lift it. And, lying flat on top of everything, a leather-bound sketchbook.

I open the sketchbook and sit there for a long moment with my hand on the page, letting myself feel what I’m feeling, which is the strange, slightly embarrassing recognition of someone else’s work as kin to my own. The line is the same line. The discipline is the same discipline. Effie painted the way I did, with a watercolor wash laid down first and the ink work over the top, and her plants are accurate the way mine are accurate—every leaf-margin counted, every venation correct, every flower drawn from at least three angles on the same page so the structure can be understood.

I had no idea she did this.

I had no idea anyone in my family did this except me.

I think about my dad, because my brain will not be stopped from thinking about him in a moment like this. He didn’t tell me. One would think he would have mentioned that this artistic leaning runs in the family. I don’t know whether it’s because he didn’t know, didn’t think to, or because he chose not to, but I can’t ask him now and I hate that.

I close the sketchbook gently and put it aside. I’ll look at it properly later.

The notebooks are mostly mundane on the surface. Plant lists by month. Weather notations. A diary of sorts that runs in fits and starts across decades. The sketches are gorgeous and I set them aside to study later because they’re going to teach me things about this landscape no one else can. I’m halfway through a notebook from the eighties when something falls out of the back of it and lands on the kitchen floor.

A single sheet of paper, folded twice.

I pick it up, unfold it, and, for whatever reason, the back of my neck goes cold.

It’s a list of names.

The writing at the top of the page seems very old, carefully drawn in copperplate, the kind someone learned at a school desk a century ago. Below it, in handwriting I now recognize as Effie’s, the list continues. Some are first names only. Some are full names. Each is paired with a date; written in the small precise way you’d write dates in a ledger.

The earliest is from 1843.

The most recent is from 2025.

I count. There are forty-seven names.

The list isn’t in any obvious order. Some of them seem local: MacLeod, Ross, Cameron—Scottish names. But some aren’t. A Bridget Halloran. A Pavlina Kowalski. Maybe it’s a record of relatives, a family tree, or a list of people Effie knew? Then again, 1843 to 2025 is a hundred and eighty-two years, which is longer than any one person can have known anyone.

I put the list down on the table, pondering it.

Underneath the list, slipped between two notebooks, I find a loose sheet of cartridge paper.

Effie, I’m assuming, has drawn a horse on it.

The horse is pale grey and standing on a rocky shore. The water at its hooves is dark. Its mane is wet, hanging in heavy ropes. Somehow, she has captured the sense of the horse being absolutely still. Not just that she’s capturing a moment in time and freezing it forever, but that the horse itself is frozen in place.

There is no caption on the front. I turn it over.

In the same careful handwriting that wrote the list, my great-aunt has written: Came at low tide. Did not invite.

I read it again. Did not invite onto her property? Into the cottage? Into a horse-related arrangement of some kind? I set the drawing down on the table beside the list, face up, so the horse and the names are looking at me at the same time. I don’t know what I’m looking at. And for some reason, I’m pretty sure that I don’t want to know.

I’m so lost in the names and the uninvited horse that I almost miss the letter.

It’s tucked into the front of the same notebook the list fell out of, folded once, addressed again to me in Effie’s handwriting. The paper is heavy and cream and smells faintly of lavender. I open it.

Iris.

The salt is not for damp. Regardless, refresh it monthly and after the rain. Do not remove the horseshoes or the rowan tree.

Whatever he says he is, whatever he asks of you, do not let him in.

I knew when you were twelve.

I do hope you have a happy life here in some way.

I’m sorry.

Effie.

And that’s all.

What the actual fuck?

I read it over and over, then I finally have to put the nonsense down and get up and walk to the window. The bay is still quiet. The heather across the loch is doing the absurdly photogenic thing it does when light slants on it from the right angle, and the rowan tree by the front step is shifting in a wind I can’t feel through the wall. I come back to the table and read the letter a third time.

Don’t let him in.

Who is him? The neighbor? That’s obviously where my mind is going, I mean who else is there out here? If there were some other neighbors with a sheep farm, I wouldn’t just assume, but because it’s this skinny-dipping swimmer just across the bay in a castle that the shopkeeper said nobody lives in, I’m inclined to think he’s him.

Of course, I have no real reasoning for that, other than my imagination does what it wants.

Then there’s the next bit…

I knew when you were twelve.

Which was when I was here last. My memories of the trip with my father were more of the driving down one-land roads in the middle of nowhere that were clogged with sheep, gawking at old ruins, trying not to unconsciously mimic the strong accents—something I still struggle with, sorry to every Scottish person—not so much of this cottage or my aunt. We had talked—I still don’t remember the details—at the kitchen table, which must have been this kitchen table though everything looks so different from reality when you’re a kid

Anyway, she knew what when I was twelve? That I would inherit this place one day? Was she already making the plans back then, and why? At age twelve all I cared about was Paramore and Camp Rock and updating my travels on my MySpace.

I fold the letter back into the notebook and eye the salt on the shelf. There are two kinds: one in a shaker that I used profusely the other morning on my eggs while wishing I had hot sauce, and the other in a dark glass jar with a spoon, mixed with some herbs. I thought about using that one on my eggs too but since I couldn’t identify the dried greenery, I decided not to risk it.

Feeling like I’m being watched by Effie’s ghost, I do the kitchen window first. The salt makes a soft hiss as it goes onto the wood of the sill, and I draw a thin neat line of it along the inside edge on top of the old salt that was left there. The smell that comes off it is clean and mineral, like the inside of an oyster shell. The herbs, which I can now identify as thyme, add a sharp edge to the scent.

Then I do the rest of the windows in the cottage. By the time I’ve done them all, the cottage smells faintly like a beach—but what doesn’t around here—and the light coming through every window is broken into a faint white line at the bottom of the frame, thicker and fresher than the one laid before.

I know I should feel silly about all of this, but instead I feel faintly reverent and proud of myself, like I did something good. As a self-identified witch, I pull the occasional Tarot card, carry crystals with me, and, on the day I arrived, I may have lit a dried rosemary and mugwort bundle I brought from home to smudge the place. So, sprinkling some extra salt lines around the windows isn’t too far from my wheelhouse. At the very least I feel I honored her wishes, as vague and cryptic as they were.

With that done, I make a simple sandwich of cream cheese and cucumbers, one of my comfort foods when I’m lazy, then sit in the armchair by the front window with one of Effie’s botanical sketchbooks open on my lap. I let myself enjoy her work. I can’t help but marvel at how close our art is, and I wonder if she was able to make a living from it like I am—not that I can call it much of a living these days. If it wasn’t for some of the money I got from the divorce settlement, plus leftover inheritance from my father I had the good mind to keep in a separate account from Ryan’s, I would really be screwed. At least with this whole situation, I’ll be saving on rent for the next year.

And possibly forever.

The light through the window goes to a deeper gold as the afternoon stretches, and the storm I was promised by the weather app rolls in around four, the way it said it would. Rain hammers the slate roof for an hour, making everything epically dramatic outside, and warm and cozy inside. I don’t move from the chair, my fibro especially annoying when the barometric pressure drops. Instead, I fall asleep for a few hours, as my body loves to do when it has zero expectations placed on it. And for once in my life, I let myself just rest, guilt-free.

By the time the storm eases, the bay is steaming faintly, and the sky has gone the color of pewter. There’s a silver light over the water that any landscape painter would lie down in front of a truck for. I watch it; think about going outside with my paints and capturing it.

Instead I choose comfort and sit with the sketchbook on my knee until the light starts to fail, which, in late August, at this latitude, takes its time about it. The sun goes down somewhere behind the mountain at my back. The bay holds its glow for another hour. Around eight-thirty, the rowan tree at the step has turned to a black silhouette against the last of the western sky, and the heather across the loch has lost its purple to the shadow. I’m just about to get up and turn on the lights when a knock sounds at the door, making me cry out softly.

Jesus Cripes!

I go still and listen, waiting for more. I’m starting to think it was part of my imagination or maybe the climbing roses thudding against a pane, when it sounds again.

Knock, knock, knock.

It’s the kind of knock you’d give a stranger’s door at half past eight when you’re not entirely sure they’re home and you don’t want to startle them. Three knocks, evenly spaced, light.

Then a pause.

Then nothing.

I can hear the wind shifting, and, beyond that, the long slow shush of the loch against the rocks. The cottage holds its breath just as I do.

The knock comes again.

Three knocks, lighter this time, like they’re reconsidering.

Slowly I creep through the sitting room and into the small front hall, where the air is colder than the rest of the cottage and I stop a foot from the door.

I am wearing leggings and a flannel shirt I stole from my brother, and my hair is in a knot at the back of my head that I’m pretty sure has gone sideways, so it’s not like I don’t look acceptable, but at the same time I’m not sure I want to look acceptable for whoever is out there.

You know who you want it to be, I think but quickly bat that thought away.

I put my hand flat on the wood. The grain of the door is rough under my palm, the old paint thick and slightly tacky in the cool of the evening. I can feel a faint draft seeping through where the wood has shrunk away from the frame and wish to god there was a damn peephole.

“Who is it?” I ask, my voice rising unnaturally high at the end.

“You don’t know me,” a man says. His voice is low, almost baritone, with a smoothness to it, a touch of Highland cadence underneath. “I came to apologize.”

Apologize? I scan my foggy brain trying to remember if anyone had slighted me since I got here, and other than an errant shaggy cow I encountered leaving the property on my second day, I can’t think of anything.

“I’m sorry, who are you?”

I hear a huff of amusement. “I startled you on the road, I think. Earlier.”

Oh.

Oh.

“You were the man in the loch.”

“I was.”

“Swimming.”

“Aye. It’s what people do in lochs.”

But do they?

“Naked? Is this is a Highlander tradition?” Though I wince as I say the words because I feel one shouldn’t say the word “naked” with a stranger, especially one standing outside your door at sundown.

A pause. “No. Not usually,” he admits.

“Did you swim here now?”

Oh god, is he naked out there?

“I drove.”

“And you live…where, the other side of the bay?”

“Aye.”

“Do you live in that castle?”

“I do.”

“That’s a long way around for somebody who could just swim it.”

“I’ve done enough swimming lately.”

“Right,” I say slowly. “And you drove over to apologize for that?”

“I drove over to introduce myself and apologize at the same time.”

“Alright. So…what’s your name?”

You know, introduce yourself…

“Alasdair.”

Though I’d never heard that name before, there was something familiar about it. It was also very poetic and mysterious and suited him immensely.

“Alasdair what?” I pry.

A pause. “Just Alasdair tonight.”

Tonight? Now I laugh. “That’s not how introductions usually go.”

“I’m aware. But it’s the name I would prefer to give you, if you don’t mind.”

I mean, I did kind of mind this stranger outside my door not giving me his full name, but something told me I shouldn’t push it. There’s something about the way he’s talking that feels surreal, let alone the fact that we’re having a whole conversation through a closed door.

Don’t let him in.

“You said you live at the castle.” I redirected, trying to ground myself against the peculiar feeling.

“I’m staying there.”

“Someone told me it has been empty for years.”

“Who told you that?”

“The shopkeeper.”

“Mhairi?”

Ah, well at least he seems to know her.

“Yeah.”

“She was not wrong.”

“Okaaaay. Then how⁠—”

“Listen,” he interrupts softly, in a way that makes my breath hitch. “You don’t have to fear me. I’m not going to ask you to open the door. I came over to say that I was sorry I startled you on the road, and that if you ever needed anything, I’m right there as your new neighbor. I’d advise against swimming, but you can always drive or walk over.”

That strange feeling from earlier starts tugging at my ankles as if a heady fog is coming in from under the doorframe and wrapping around me. I’m starting to feel as if I’m not entirely sober and I’m moments away from opening the door and getting a good look at the guy I’m talking to. Probably a bad idea since he just said, you don’t have to fear me unprompted. Because who the hell does that?

I lean against the door, giving into the fatigue. I’m about to take a step back when I hear the sound of his weight shifting. He has not been against the door. He has been a foot or so back from it, with the considerate distance of someone who does not want to seem to be looming, someone who knocks politely and steps back to give someone room to answer.

But now, now, he comes closer. I hear him, the small soft sound of fabric and breath against the wood, and I freeze where I am.

“Goodnight, Iris,” he murmurs.

His voice is very quiet, and very close.

Then he is gone.

I hear his footsteps on the stone path and on the gravel where the path meets the moor, and then I expect to hear a car door slamming shut or the crunch of tires on the shoddy driveway, but I don’t hear any of that.

I don’t hear anything at all.

And I don’t want to open my door to check.

So, I stand in my front hall.

I put my back against the door, and slide down it slowly, because my body refuses to do things any other way, until I am sitting on the floor with my legs out in front of me.

I realize I never told him my name but, somehow, he knew it anyway.

Chapter

Three

Iwake up thinking about him.

Honestly, it’s embarrassing.

I had the kind of night where I was both unbelievably tired and unable to sleep, where my body was lead-heavy on the mattress, but my brain kept replaying the way he said my name. Goodnight, Iris. In the dark, lying in bed with the duvet pulled up to my chin, I held the words on my tongue and turned them over and tried to figure out what about them made my body do what it was doing, which was the kind of low, warm pulse I haven’t felt since well before the divorce. I haven’t even slept with anyone since then, but that also includes myself. The dust on those particular shelves is impressive, to say the least.

When I wake up at dawn the next morning—too early thanks to lingering jet lag—and see grey, pearlescent half-light coming through the bedroom window. I’m sore in the usual places and a few unusual ones, so I try to replay the events of last night, try to get a read on him and figure shit out.

My new neighbor is a man named Alasdair who came to my door in the dark and wouldn’t give me his last name. He’s a man Mhairi pretended not to know of but actually does, which means there’s context here I’m not privy to. He’s also, by his own account, the only other resident on this bay who shouldn’t exist, because Mhairi told me the castle’s been empty for years.

Not to mention Effie had written not to let him in. Of course, she didn’t say who the “him” was, but regardless, I should be more freaked out than fucking horny.

The fact that I’m not is a thing I’ll need to think about later, when I’ve had coffee. I think I need a whole vat in order to get my fuzzy cotton-ball brain into working order.

I climb out of bed, slip on my robe and slippers, and pad toward the back door, opening it to let in the fresh morning air. The bay is gone, or, rather, the bay is still there, but it’s been swallowed. The water close to the rocks is visible, dark and slow, but everything past about ten meters out is pale grey and indistinct. The mountains across the loch are completely gone, as is the castle on the spit. The whole opposite shore has folded itself into the fog as if it was never there to begin with. As if I dreamed the whole place.

The cottage is wrapped in damp; the kind my bones aren’t a fan of. The air smells like wet stone and salt and the particular green smell of bracken when the night has been long and wet. Somewhere a curlew is crying, the call so liquid and lonesome it makes my heart twinge with sadness.

I make myself coffee and drink it while leaning against the frame, looking at the fog of nothing and reveling in it. The cottage has the kind of silence that has its own weight. I can hear the faint slap of water against rock below me and, very far off, the muffled lowing of a sheep. The world has narrowed to about thirty feet in every direction.

It occurs to me that this is a fantastically moody day to put on my boots and go for a walk.

The other thing that occurs to me is that I’m going to do that walk on my own—or, perhaps, soon-to-be own—property, where I can see the cottage at all times, because I’m not stupid, either.

I pull on my hiking boots and warm clothes, grab my sketchbook and a pencil, and head out first to the boat shed, which I’ve only looked inside briefly when the solicitor gave me the tour on the first day.

The boat shed sits about fifty feet from the cottage, down a slope of tussock and gravel toward the water. Walking down to it through the pale wet grass, I notice it the way I haven’t before, the slate roof gone soft with lichen, the stone walls hugged by a tangle of late honeysuckle, the whole structure looking like something that grew out of the ground rather than something built. The door is wooden, weathered, fastened with a wrought-iron latch the same blackened color as the horseshoes on my cottage doors, but there is no horseshoe above the door.

I don’t open it but I stand in front of it for a moment and think this could be a studio. I imagine a workbench under one of the windows. I imagine drying flowers from the rafters. I imagine the smell of turpentine and lavender and the even light a north-facing window would give me in the afternoons. It’s too bad there’s no electrical hookup, but maybe I could get a portable heater for the colder days. I doubt Amazon delivers out here—another inconvenience I’ll have to get used to—but perhaps I could pick one up in Fort William or Inverness, when I feel like driving a couple of hours.

It’s a project for sure, the first of many.

The plants around the shed are hanging on past their reasonable bloom time because I was told July was unseasonably warm. There’s yarrow growing in a clump beside the door, white flat-topped clusters going slightly brown at the edges—Achillea millefolium, called milfoil by people who don’t know any better. My dad called it the soldier’s herb and told me Achilles stanched the wounds of his men with it (depending on which translation of Homer you trust). I crouch and crush a leaf between my fingers and breathe in. Bitter, peppery, faintly medicinal.

There’s also self-heal—Prunella vulgaris, small violet-purple flowers in a tight cylindrical head—growing in the shorter grass toward the path. Knapweed in a stand of tall stalks. A few late thistles, some starkly pink and purple while others are going to seed, the silken white of their seedheads soft as cobweb in the still air. Sea pinks past their flowering, the dried magenta heads still rattling on the rocks closer to the shore.

These aren’t just plants, these are cunning-folk plants, the kind that the wise and revered herbalists (or folk healers) of the village would use to solve problems. Every plant has been placed here for a reason or, more likely, every plant has been allowed to grow here for a reason. Effie didn’t pull what she didn’t need to, that much I can tell. And while she never said outright in any of her writing that she considered herself as one of the cunning-folk, I knew she was.

I straighten up, feel my hips complain, and turn to look up the slope toward the road.

There’s a copse of trees on the higher ground, a small stand of stunted Scots pine and birch and, at the edge, a hawthorn or two, sitting where my property bends toward the single-track road that brought me here. It’s the only patch of real cover on the spit. A botanical illustrator’s instinct says that’s where the interesting plants are, because anywhere else on this spit is exposed to wind and salt, and the things growing in the woods will be a different ecology entirely.

This morning the copse is barely visible with the fog having settled into the trees. The trunks are dark verticals against the pale grey, and the spaces between them are darker still, the kind of dark that swallows the eye. I can’t see more than a few meters in. The trees aren’t moving. Nothing is moving. The whole forest has the stillness of a held breath.

I want to go in.

This is the part of me that’s spent fifteen years being a botanical illustrator, that excited thrill of discovering something new. Unexplored ground in a foggy morning is exactly the conditions under which the best fieldwork happens. It’s like the plants you find on a clear day are pretty but common plants, but the plants you find on a damp, still, foggy morning are mystical. They’re old plants, woodland plants, plants that don’t tolerate a lot of light. There could be wood sorrel in there. There could be whitlow grass. There could be the kind of mossy, lichenous, cold-loving growth a coastal Highland copse holds in pockets the rest of the world doesn’t get.

I stand at the edge of the slope and look at the trees in anticipation.

The trees don’t look back, exactly. They’re just trees, after all. I’m not a person who anthropomorphizes vegetation, except occasionally when drinking. But I have a thing—a small, possibly silly thing—that I trust about the way certain places feel when I’m alone in them. And the woods this morning, is a no in my body. The same no I get when I’m standing at the entrance to an empty parking garage at night.

So I don’t go in. Not today. Maybe tomorrow.

Besides, the fog is bad, my fibro is grumpy, and I don’t have my full kit and shouldn’t be doing botanical fieldwork without my pressing materials anyway. I turn around and walk back to the cottage, and only when I’m at the back door with my hand on the latch do I realize I haven’t looked back at the woods since I turned.

I feel a slow prickle at my neck, that terrible urge we get to look at things like car crashes and roadkill. Like there’s something horrible there, watching from the trees. But I don’t look back. I open the door, go inside, and close it behind me, leaning against it for a second before I get on with the rest of my day.

By two in the afternoon, however, I’ve given up on working.

I tried. I set up at the kitchen table with the sketchbook and the watercolors and a small jar of the heather I cut from the slope yesterday before the fog rolled in. I’ve been drawing and think I’m doing a good job of it, but my mind is elsewhere.

Across the bay.

I put the pencil down and push the sketchbook away as if I’m pushing him away.

I think I need to socialize with people other than my naked neighbor.

I’ve decided to visit the Torridon Hotel, the closest building of note to me. It’s supposed to be a four-star country house with a long gravel drive and a view of Upper Loch Torridon. I have the kind of cash for one drink and a small dinner if I order carefully, which will be a small miracle if I can pull it off. Me and budgeting have never ever mixed well—another reason Ryan and I fought all the time—but I have vowed this year to make every damn dollar count.

I pull on my good wool sweater, the burgundy one that doesn’t smell like a basement, and I get in the car.

The drive itself is an event. The single-track wraps around the foot of the mountain across the head of the loch, and even in the fog you can feel the scale of what’s around you, the way the hills hug you and the mountains rise dramatically and the dark water carves a boundary around you as if trying to pin you in place. I take it slowly, and luckily there are no cars coming the other way that make me panic whether I’m driving on the right side of the road or not.

The pub at the Torridon is dark wood, good vintage lamps and the kind of fireplace that’s, in late August, doing a small token fire because the management has correctly identified that the tourists want one. The bar smells of peat and good whisky and something braised. I order a pint of the local ale, a bowl of Cullen skink because the name sounds funny—I imagine it’s a dish the Cullens would have made their non-vampire guests—and a chunk of bread, and sit at the corner of the bar with a paperback I picked up at the airport that I keep reading the same couple of pages of.

There are eight or nine people in the place. Two hill-walkers in technical gear at a corner table, and a couple in their seventies sharing a plate of haggis fritters (yum). Three locals at the far end of the bar, two men and a woman, all roughly fifty or sixty, all settled in the way of people who’ve been at this bar for a good long while and intend to stay for longer. There’s something about that that I admire, maybe even envy.

I drink my beer and eat my creamy fish soup and half-listen to the ambience around me.

It takes about ten minutes for the conversation at the locals’ end to drift somewhere useful. The man in the middle, ginger-bearded, in a cream fisherman’s jumper, says something about “the Mackenzie lass” and the woman beside him says “Aye, two weeks now,” and the third man, older and quieter, makes a faint gruff sound.

The hill-walkers, who’ve been quiet at their table, hear it too. “Sorry,” the woman hill-walker says, leaning toward the bar. “Are you talking about that woman who went missing?”

The three locals look at each other. The ginger-bearded man takes a careful pull of his pint. “Aye,” he says. “Walked from her cottage to her sister’s, never got there. Two weeks last Sunday.”

“Where was this, near here?”

“Down near Applecross.”

“That’s the third one, isn’t it?” the male hill-walker says.

A silence at the locals’ end of the bar that’s not awkward but is deliberate. The older quieter man finally says, “Aye, the third. All vanished this summer.”

“All women?” the female hill-walker asks nervously.

“All women.”

“Tourists or locals?”

“Mix of both it seems.”

“The polis any nearer?” the older man wonders, to the room more than to anyone specifically.

“The polis,” the ginger-bearded man begins, “are doing what they do. Which is bugger-all. Seems to think all the ladies were too capricious and decided to start their lives over elsewhere.”

“Well, they don’t have any evidence that something bad happened to them,” offers the bartender, giving them a reproachful look that says don’t scare the fucking tourists. He’s a blond man in his thirties with the kind of soft Highland accent I could listen to all day.

The woman among them, who’s been quiet, picks up her pint and says, in a tone that’s half-joke and half-not, “Well, aside from the liver.”

“The liver?” the male hill-walker exclaims. “What liver?”

“Oh, they found a liver on the shore of Applecross Bay. A human liver by the looks of it. Not sure what came of it though.”

“What came of it was that it belonged to a deer,” the bartender admonished her. “None of this human remains nonsense.”

The older man laughs, but only a little. “You want nonsense, then don’t mention the wives.”

The bartender lets out a tired sigh and goes back to cleaning glasses while shaking his head.

“The wives?” the female hill-walker inquires.

“Och, it’s an old story.” The woman waves her hand. “They’ll tell you in any pub on the coast. The drowned wives wait at the edge of the water at dusk and pull the swimmers down. Don’t go in the loch alone, and certainly don’t go in after dark. They’ll have you.”

The ginger-bearded man shakes his head slightly. The older man stares into his pint.

“And that’s what you think happened to the Mackenzie woman?” The female hill-walker’s tone is incredulous, but it’s clear she is trying to be respectful at the same time.

“That’s what my granny would have said,” the woman replies, and she’s still smiling but it’s more careful now. “My granny said this loch’s had a tenant or two since before her granny. Lots of folk gone missing over the years if you go back, usually by the shore but sometimes in the trees by the water as well. Three over the summer is a lot more than normal, but it’s not unusual. We’d be a sight more worried if it wasn’t happening.”

Great.

The older quieter man clears his throat, finally, and says, in a voice that’s not unkind but is final, “Mary, that’s enough. Missing women are one thing, but the stories are another.”

The conversation closes. The hill-walkers exchange a look that dismisses it as colorful local folklore, and go back to their plates. The locals settle into a quieter register about something else, fishing licenses and trout, I think. I don’t know, I’m not listening anymore. I eat my soup with gusto it’s actually quite tasty if you don’t mind skink and think about those three missing women and who could have taken them. Because, even as witchy as I am, I know there’s no such thing as ghosts that kill people. Haunt people, yes, but actively murder them? No.

And now I’m thinking about the man at my door last night who wouldn’t give me a last name.

What if the man at my door is the reason those women are gone? The man staying in a crumbling old castle that’s supposed to be empty?

The thought is so cold it sobers me up. Which is a pity because I was enjoying the buzz.

I pay the bill. The bartender glances at the credit card and then at me. “Galloway,” he says, mildly, then looks at me closer. “You’re the niece. You’re the one staying out at Effie’s place.”

Am I locally famous, or what?

“That’s me. You knew her?”

The locals at the far end of the bar have all looked over. The woman, Mary, raises her glass an inch in something that might be a toast.

“Sure did. She was a good woman, your aunt,” the older quiet man murmurs.

“Thank you,” I say. I’m getting better at saying this. “She was.”

“Knew the loch better than most,” he states. “People would come to her with all sorts of problems and she’d solve them. No matter how outlandish they seemed.”

I don’t know what that means but I give him a half-smile and tip twenty percent because the North American way of doing things has been ingrained in me, then I gather my paperback and coat and I leave.

The fog has thickened in the time I was inside. My car looks like an angel has been weeping over it.

The drive back to the cottage is slow going. The single-track is wet, the visibility bad, and I’m taking it with my headlights on full, watching for sheep and the occasional hill-walker who hasn’t read the signs about reflective gear. The fog has gone the color of pearl and it’s darker, though dusk is hours away. The mountains and loch are still swallowed up. I have the road and the verge and a few meters of bracken beyond it, and that’s it.

It’s spooky as fuck.

Then, ahead of me I see a man walking on the side of the road.

His back is to me, and I see him only because my headlights catch the pale of his shirt against the dark of the ferns and the wet road. He’s in dark trousers and a white shirt that’s wet through, sticking to his back, and his hair is dark and wet against his collar. He’s walking with the kind of even, unhurried pace of a man who hasn’t noticed a car coming up behind him. I can’t even tell you what his face looks like and I’m only looking at him from behind, yet I know it’s him.

I should drive past him at full speed because the man on the road might be the man who’s been murdering women in these parts, and stopping for him is the dumbest thing I could do. And yet my foot is coming off the gas because even though my aunt’s words flash through my head—don’t let him in—and even though I just heard about a possible serial killer, there’s a terribly unwise and reckless part of me that wants to roll down the window and say his name.

Alasdair.

I give my head a shake, trying to clear the fog that feels less like my usual fibro brain and more like the weather that snuck into my bones. I drive past him at five miles an hour, and as the car passes him, he doesn’t turn his head. He doesn’t lift a hand. He doesn’t seem to register me or the car at all.

Probably better that way.

I watch him in the rearview as my speed picks up. He’s still walking, head down now, his dark hair shadowing his face. The fog closes around him. Within a hundred meters, I can’t see him anymore.

I drive home with both hands on the wheel, white-knuckled.

I lock the front door behind me. I double check the lock on the back door. Then I stand in the middle of the kitchen for a beat, trying to ground myself.

The cottage holds its breath with me.

Then the cottage exhales.

There’s a single soft sound from upstairs.

I freeze in place, holding my breath, my eyes seeking the ceiling.

What the fuck was that?

I wait for it to come again.

And it does.

Three steps.

Footsteps, or what would be footsteps if the cottage had anyone else in it. Slow, light, the kind of step a person takes when they are trying not to be heard. Across the guest bedroom floor…

Then it stops.

I do. Not. Breathe.

The cottage settles around me into its ordinary silence. The fridge hums. A bird outside calls once and stops. The rowan at the front step taps the window in the wind.

I immediately reason with myself, tell myself the cottage is old. Wood expands and contracts. Hinges sigh. Old houses make sounds people who have never lived in old houses don’t understand.

It’s just settling. Old houses settle.

And yet I’m having a hard time listening to reason.

I take Effie’s pen-knife from the kitchen drawer because I am not going up the stairs without something in my hand. I unfold it. The blade is short. It is more for opening letters than for anything else, but I could get a good stab out of it. The eyes, I’ll make sure to aim for the eyes.

I climb the stairs, the steps creaking loudly, which would make it impossible for me to ambush anyone up there.

Not that I plan on ambushing anyone. The knife is for defensive stabbing purposes only. I don’t even know why I’m going up there. I should probably run out of the house, though I’m afraid if I do that, I’ll have to live out one of the scariest scenes from The Amityville Horror, running onto the driveway and looking back at the upstairs window to find a giant pig with red eyes staring at me.

Somehow, despite the fear gripping my throat, I get to the second floor and see the guest bedroom door is ajar. I’m pretty sure I left it closed because I was worried about drafts and it making the door bang around, but maybe I didn’t close it properly. In fact, it is a bit breezy out, maybe what I heard was the door banging around a few times.

I take in a deep, shaking breath and push the door the rest of the way open with the back of my hand.

The room is empty.

The low rafters are above me and I duck instinctively, the way I have learned to duck since I cracked my head on them. The single bed is against the far wall under the small window. The pale quilt is smoothed flat.

But there’s something on top of it.

Something small and white…

I creep forward a step.

Is that a…?

I stop and gasp.

There’s a fucking jawbone on the bed.

It’s the shape of a canine’s lower jaw, the small sharp teeth still in it, dark at the roots. Probably a fox. Set on the bed like it’s been positioned there with intent. Centered. The teeth pointing toward the door.

Toward me.

I do not move for a long time.

I stand in the doorway with the knife in my hand and the smell of the old room in my nose and the jaw on the pillow watching me with its small dark teeth. The part of me that wanted to call this the cottage settling has gone really fucking quiet.

Why is there a jawbone here? Is a good question.

When did it get here? That’s an even better one.

Was it always here? The solicitor never showed me the upstairs; I went in after he left. I discovered that closet that takes up the back quarter room was locked, but I was only looking at this place in dim evening light. And after I hit my head the second time, I decided to get out before I maimed myself again. It’s completely possible that the jawbone was here before and I didn’t see it, especially as it somewhat matches the bedspread.

Effie must have left it for me. That’s the only rational explanation.

But that brings me back to the first question: why would she do that?

I don’t know, why did she give the cottage to you only on the grounds that you have to stay here for one year? I think to myself. Why write you a note telling you not to let someone in and that she knew something when you were twelve that you didn’t?

Effie not making sense is something coming from all directions these days.

I chalk it up to some of my great-aunt nonsense—because I have to if I want to get any sleep—and leave the room, closing the door well behind me.

Later that night I lie in bed, staring up at the ceiling as if daring to hear footsteps again.

The cottage is quiet, for now.

Chapter

Four

The flowers don’t care that I had a shitty sleep.

This is one of the things I love about my job. They aren’t customers or colleagues you have to wipe your bleary eyes and plaster a smile on for. They just grow until I come along and cut their stems (respectfully) and give them a new form of existence.

It’s mid-morning, and the fog has mercifully lifted. Not that I don’t love the drama and mystery of fog but out here where I’m isolated and already on edge about my neighbor, plus the talks of drowned wives and missing women, and don’t let him in, and finding a jawbone—it turns out I don’t need that much drama and mystery in my life.

This morning the world has gone to a flat, even grey, the kind of light that begs for watercolors—no harsh shadows, no glare, every color reading exactly as it is. The bay is a sheet of slate. The mountains across the loch have come back in velvet sienna and moss. The castle tower on the opposite spit is a dark smudge against the sky. Not that I’ve looked at it all that much, I swear.

I have decided to make this a working day. I have a deadline for an upcoming wildflower pocketbook—pencil sketches of thirty species by the end of next month—and the woman they hired is currently sitting with a cup of cooling coffee and a half-pulled-together brain because she barely slept last night.

I’m wearing the pair of Effie’s Wellington boots I found in the crawlspace under the stairs and have decided to make my own. They’re a size too big and they’re broken in within an inch of their life. Though it’s still August, the weather is barely what I would call summer. So, I’ve got on thick grey tights to take the rub out of the boots and guard me from the morning chill, and a plaid wool skirt I packed because Maddie said I couldn’t traipse around the Scottish Highlands without one. My cream wool sweater has gone slightly felted from use, so I pair it with a long-sleeved shirt underneath because my body likes the warmth of wool, but my skin despises the prickly texture. My hair is pulled to the side in two long braids and there’s a wicker basket on my arm for collecting flowers. I look like a stock photo for charming American girl moves to Highland cottage to find herself and possibly love. I look so on-brand I could be sponsored.

Most of the plants I want are in the lower meadow between the cottage and the boat shed, where the ground is soft; hardy cream-colored mountain avens, the puffy red heads of rose root, the ubiquitous gorse with its yellow flowers. I work through it slowly. I cut. I lay things in the basket carefully so the heads don’t crush.

While I work, I think about the doctrine of signatures.

This is the part of botany I learned from my dad and never quite let go of, even though it’s mostly considered medieval nonsense now. The idea is that God—or, depending on who’s writing, nature—gave plants visual clues to what they were good for. A walnut looks like a brain, so it’s good for brain ailments. Lungwort has spotted leaves like lung tissue, so it’s good for lung complaints. Eyebright has a small dark spot at the center of each flower, like a pupil, so it’s good for the eyes. And so on.

The doctrine is, scientifically, garbage. The plants don’t signal their uses. A plant has whatever chemistry it has, and any visual resemblance to a human organ is a coincidence we’ve made meaning out of like we tend to do with everything.

But—and this is what kept my dad teaching it, and what keeps me thinking about it—some of the plants do work for what their signatures suggest. Eyebright, it turns out, has compounds that genuinely soothe inflamed eyes. Lungwort has saponins that ease respiratory irritation. The doctrine got there by the wrong route, but it got there in the end. What that says about how human knowledge accumulates, well, that’s something I might get into after a few glasses of whisky. But I think about it every time I’m cutting flowers. It would be lovely if the plants were trying to tell us something. It would be lovely if anything were trying to tell us something about anything. I could go for a fuckton of answers to my life right now, including if I will ever stop feeling like I made a mess of my life before I was thirty? Still haven’t figured out that one; yet another reason why I spontaneously re-rooted my life and ended up here, attempting to start over.

I crouch to cut a stem of meadowsweet and feel my hips inform me, again, that I will be paying for last night’s nervous-pacing-then-poor-sleeping. The portable heating pad is back at the cottage. I should have brought it but I’m too stubborn to go back for it.

I work my way up the slope.

The ground gets squelchier as I go. The grass thins, and there are patches of bog cotton in the wetter dips. I am very glad to have Effie’s wellies because by the time I’m halfway up the slope, I’m stepping in soft places that would have soaked through anything else. The boots make the most satisfying sucking sound when I lift them out of the wet ground. I’m not above the small pleasure of a really good squelch.

I glance up as the bog slopes upward toward the trees. I’m not going into the woods. I made my deal with the woods yesterday, and the deal stands. But the thicket at the edge of the woods is fair game, that low, scrubby band where the moor gives way to the trees, a couple of meters of hawthorn and stunted birch and gorse, the kind of edge habitat where interesting plants grow. Edges are where everything happens, ecologically. Two systems meeting, a third thing emerging.

The thicket runs in a rough line along the base of the woods, parallel to the road. I work my way into it, ducking under hawthorn, my braids catching on twigs and pulling a few strands loose. The light in here is different—dappled, even with the overcast—and a few degrees colder. The air smells of wet leaf and earth and the green astringent smell of crushed ferns. Somewhere up the road I can hear the faint baa of a sheep, distantly. The world is very quiet and cocooning.

I find what I am looking for almost immediately: a patch of lady’s mantle holding water in its pleated leaves the way it always does. There’s also a clump of wood sorrel underneath the hawthorn, the small, three-lobed leaves like clover, the white flowers veined in pink. Oxalis acetosella. My dad used to crush a leaf and have me chew it: tart, lemony, faintly metallic. That, he’d say, is the taste of every wood in Britain.

I pick a leaf but don’t chew it. Instead, I press it into the basket between two stems of meadowsweet to flatten it later.

I move further into the thicket, past dark purple and blue foxgloves that are persistent despite the approaching autumn. The basket is filling up nicely. I’m thinking I might have enough for the day’s pressings already, that I can pack up and head back to the cottage for the heating pad and a pot of tea, when I hear water.

Not the loch. The loch is below and behind me. This is closer. A small running sound, ahead and slightly to the left.

I push through a stand of hawthorn, sweater snagging, and there it is, a small burn a couple of feet wide, running down from the woods and across the boundary between the thicket and the open slope. It’s dark with peat and moves quickly. It looks like it can’t be more than a foot deep, but it’s deeper than it looks because I know the hard way that the peat hides the bottom.

I stand at its edge, basket on my arm, looking at it.

A wave of unease runs over me.

I don’t know why, exactly. The burn is small and pleasantly babbling. I have crossed a hundred streams like this in my life. But standing here with my basket full of flowers and my oversized boots and the morning around me, I have the distinct sense that I shouldn’t cross it (which is silly).

Actually no, I know why I have that feeling. The drowned women in the pub story. I’m thinking about them now, even though I told myself I wouldn’t. They wait at the edge of the water at dusk. They pull the swimmers down. Don’t go in the loch alone.

But this isn’t the loch. This is a little stream that probably starts as snowmelt up on the mountain and runs down to the bay. Surely the drowned women don’t have access to a tributary. Surely the rules of folklore include some kind of plumbing diagram. Wives confined to main body of water, no jurisdiction over inlets. Could they pop up in any standing water, in puddles…oh god, in the toilet?

I’m scaring myself. I am scaring myself before anything has actually happened, which is a Galloway specialty. My dad had it too. He could spook himself out of a perfectly ordinary walk by thinking too hard about the wrong thing at the wrong hour.

And, judging by the salt and horseshoes and rowan tree and maybe that fox’s jawbone, I’d say my great-aunt had it too.

I step over the water. I don’t even break stride.

Nothing happens.

But the unease doesn’t entirely leave me. I’m now aware of every small sound in the thicket. The cluck of a wren in the bush. A drip of water from leaves still wet with overnight rain, kept cold by the mountain’s shadow. The wet shift of my own boots in the leaf litter. The wind that’s just a very faint stir of the upper branches.

Then I notice the bones.

I’d been seeing them without really seeing them as is usually the case with me: small grey-white shapes among the moss and ferns, scattered along the base of the trees. I thought they were rocks at first, but they aren’t.

Of course they aren’t.

There are three or four small leg bones and a couple of vertebrae, white with some pink flesh still on them, lying on a flat slab of stone.

Probably a deer that died here a while ago, maybe a sick sheep that got separated from its flock and was finished by something with teeth or beaks—pine martens, foxes, eagles. I’ve seen worse on hikes back in Colorado.

But still, not only is there still some disgusting meat on them, the bones are placed. That’s the weird thing. They aren’t scattered the way bones get scattered when scavengers work a body. They are in a small clear arc on the flat stone, as if someone had picked them up and laid them out.

Could have been Effie, I tell myself. Seems like something she’d do at this point.

But at the same time, no. It couldn’t have been Effie. The fox’s jawbone was old and clean and placed on the bed a long time ago. This skeleton is fresh, maybe from the last few days. My great-aunt has been dead a long time now.

I stand looking at the stone. The basket is suddenly heavy on my arm. The thicket has gone, not silent exactly, but quieter.

And just like that, I’ve had enough of this area.

I turn, carefully, and start back the way I came. I tell myself I’m being silly. If not Effie, the bones could have been placed by a child, a hiker, perhaps a particularly artistic corvid? And that tight pressure in my chest, that unease, well that’s because I’m overtired and overwhelmed, that’s all.

I tell myself this and I walk faster, and I’m almost back to the stream when I hear it.

A sound behind me in the thicket.

Not a footstep, exactly. More like…pressure. The slow shifting of weight on wet ground. Like someone moving carefully and trying not to, a physicality caught mid-motion.

I freeze.

I listen.

The thicket has gone fully silent now. The wren is gone. The drip is gone. I barely hear the stream. There is just my own breathing, very loud in my own ears, and the slow shifting somewhere behind me in the trees.

I do not turn around.

I have read a lot of horror novels in my life and they are unanimous on this point: you do not turn around. If you do, that’s when you see that red-eyed pig thing in the window.

I take a step forward. The boots make their squelch, suddenly extra loud. The shifting behind me does not match my pace. It’s slower. It’s continuous.

It’s stalking.

Oh god.

My heart starts to feel too big for my chest as I try to control my breathing. I take another step. Another. I am almost at the stream.

If I can get over the burn, out of the thicket, and into the open ground, I will be fine. This is not a logical thought of course. This is folklore-thought. If I cross the running water, I will be safe.

I cross the burn at a stride, now out of the thicket. The slope opens in front of me, the cottage two hundred meters down, the boat shed below it, the bay below that.

I run.

I absolutely should never run. My hips are tight and my body has not done a sprint in years despite the fact that I know I need to work out regularly, and I’m wearing Wellingtons that fit like a child wearing her father’s shoes.

But I run anyway.

The boots are a catastrophe. I am galumphing down the slope like a Clydesdale in a hurry, gait askew, every step landing with a wet thud, my basket bouncing on my arm, flowers spilling. I see a splash of yellow as gorse hits the ground. I see the foxgloves go. I don’t stop; I don’t look back. I make it perhaps fifty meters before I lose the basket entirely, tipping off my arm and the rest of the flowers go, scattered across the grass, the wicker bouncing once and rolling into a tussock. But I keep running. By the time I reach the cottage, I’m shaking from head to toe. My breath is sawing in my chest; my right boot has come half off my heel.

I get to the door and hurry inside. I slam it shut and lock it. I stand there panting, my palm against the door, and listen for whatever was pursuing me out there.

I listen for a long time.

But I hear nothing.

Nothing, and then, from a distance, a wren starts singing again, somewhere up in the thicket, and the world resumes.

I sit down on the floor, because my legs are not going to hold me. I pull off the wellies. My right ankle is rubbed raw where the boot came loose. My tights are torn. There are twigs in my hair. The basket and most of the morning’s work are scattered in a long line up the slope behind me.

I’ll go back for the basket later. Probably. Maybe.

I don’t move from the floor for a while, leaning against the solid door.

I am still on the floor when the knock comes.

Knock, knock, knock.

Three even raps on the front door that reverberate against my spine.

A scream strangles in my throat, my fingers curling into my sleeves.

I don’t get up. I don’t think I even can get up at this point. I’m sitting on the floor in a torn pair of tights with my heart hammering and a cold sweat down my back, and I know there’s a man at my front door, and the man at my front door is the man who has just been moving through the thicket behind me. I’m sure of it, as sure as I’ve been of anything.

The man from the castle had been chasing me, he chased me all the way here and⁠—

The knock comes again. Lighter this time.

Then his voice.

“Iris? It’s Alasdair. Your neighbor. Are you all right?”

I close my eyes. Oh god. It really is him.

“I was driving past on the road…I saw you running. I wanted to make sure you weren’t hurt.”

I don’t say anything.

“Iris?” His voice is quieter. “I’ll go if you want me to. I just needed to know you were all right.”

Something tells me not to answer him. I keep my breathing as quiet as I can, I count the seconds in my head. After a long pause, I hear his footsteps move away from the front step, down the stone path, on the gravel.

Then nothing.

I count to a hundred. Slowly. Mississippi style. Then I get up slowly, my hips and shins already screaming at me for attempting to run in wellies, and creep to the front window to look out.

The path is empty. The road beyond it is empty. There’s no car, no man.

I open the door and step outside, just to the threshold, and look at the gravel.

There are no tire tracks.

The road in to my cottage is unpaved for the last quarter-mile. It rained overnight. Anything that drove down it in the last two days would have left tracks. I can see the marks of my car’s tires from yesterday. I can see a single scuff where I walked out to the bins this morning. There’s no sign of anyone ese.

I stand on my doorstep looking at the empty road, and I remember, distinctly, that I never heard a car.

I close the door and lock it, then go back to the kitchen. I sit down at the table and try to think. I’m a single woman new to the area living alone in an isolated cottage. I’m exactly the type of person to go missing in any parts, let alone these parts.

I reach over to the junk drawer and pull out the information pack that the solicitor gave me on the first day and scan through it until I see the number I want: non-emergency police.

Sergeant MacRae arrives in just under an hour, which is impressive given that he had to come from Lochcarron. He’s a big man, fifties, reddish sandy-hair going to grey, the kind of physical solidity that Highland country sergeants seem to be issued at the academy. He drinks the tea I make him and doesn’t complain when I add too much milk. He listens carefully. He doesn’t write anything down at first, just lets me talk. When I’m done, he nods slowly.

“And this man…” he says. “The same one who came to the door last night?”

“Same one. Or, I think same one. I haven’t seen his face. He said his name was Alasdair. He said he was staying at the castle.”

MacRae frowns slightly. “Across the bay on that spit right there, that castle you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Aye. Right.”

He doesn’t elaborate. He gets up. I follow him outside. He walks the property, from the slope behind the cottage, all the way up to the thicket, and into it for a few minutes. I stay at the front door, arms crossed against the afternoon breeze, holding my breath until suddenly I’m gasping, hoping he’ll walk right out of it soon. What if he doesn’t? What if I’ve led him right into the arms of the serial killer?

But he comes back down the slope eventually, my basket in one large hand and a few of the dropped flowers gathered into it. He hands the basket to me. That was kind of him.

“Anything?” I ask, taking it and giving the flowers a quick glance. Only a few foxgloves are bruised, but those are a dime a dozen here.

“Nothing fresh. Not that I can see. The ground in the thicket’s churned up, but that could be by deer as much as anything. There’s a deer track runs through there. Some of them get to be pretty big out here.”

“There were bones.”

“Aye. Saw them.”

“Yeah, but they were placed there.”

He looks at me for a long second. “Lass, bones get moved by everything that moves through these woods. Foxes. Pine martens. Bairns sometimes.”

“What the hell is a bairn?”

He frowns like I’m stupid. “Bairns!” He emphasizes, as if saying it louder will help me understand. “A babe. A child. Such as one belonging to a hiker or hill-walker. Tourists who don’t let the whole “free use” philosophy go to waste. I wouldn’t read too much into the bones.”

I nod, though I don’t believe him. I don’t think he believes himself, entirely, but I let it go. Last thing I need is for him to start using other Scottish words I don’t understand.

He comes back into the kitchen with me and we stand there, and he looks at the windowsill behind the sink, where the salt is in its thin neat line.

“This your work,” he begins, nodding at the salt, “or your aunt’s?”

“My aunt’s.”

“I thought so. I’d keep it up, if I were you. Just in case.”

“Just in case of what?”

A small, dry, crooked smile that does not reach his eyes. “Well. You don’t want the old woman’s ghost to haunt you, do you?”

I don’t know. Frankly I have a lot of questions for Aunt Effie at the moment.

He gives me his card and tells me to call him directly if anything else happens, day or night. He tells me he’ll have a quiet word at the village shop and ask Mhairi if she’s seen any strangers lingering around longer than usual. He tells me to lock the doors at night. He tells me, almost as an afterthought, that there’s no record of anyone living at the castle across the bay since 1987, but he’s heard talk over the years, and wouldn’t be surprised if someone had been “kipping there” off and on. Old places attract that sort. History has a hold on people.

I stand in the doorway and watch his car go down the road disappearing around the forested bend toward the A896. The track he leaves is clear and obvious in the soft ground.

I close the door, lock it, then sit down at the kitchen table with the basket of recovered flowers in front of me. I begin sorting them, because my hands need something to do. Some have wilted, but most are usable. I’ll press what I can. Tomorrow is another day, after all, and the season still has more blooms to give.

And lord knows what else.

Later that afternoon, I’m at the front window with a cup of tea when I see him.

He is on the red sandstone rocks of his spit across the bay, fully dressed in black pants and a white shirt. His hair is dark and shiny, probably wet. He just stands there, staring at my cottage. His face seems even more obscure than ever, but like before, I can feel his eyes.

Eventually I close the curtain. For some reason it takes effort, like there’s a part of me—that wild and reckless and untrustworthy part—that wants me to keep it open, wants him to keep watching me all night. In some ways I recognize that part, it’s that barbed wire of impulsiveness that runs through me, the very same that caused me to uproot my life on a whim. But on the other hand, it feels like something else, something more, like I’m not in control of my own mind, as ridiculous as that sounds.

I let myself feel his gaze on the back of my hand on the fabric before I take in a deep breath and pull the curtain the rest of the way.

Chapter

Five

I’ve decided I deserve a bath after all the commotion. I get the water nice and hot, the pipes moaning and shaking as I do, as if I’m sharing this cottage with a horny couple, then shake in some of the thyme salt. I know it’s meant for the windowsills, but having it in the water can’t hurt. If anything, maybe it will ease my aching muscles. I have a bunch of bath stuff coming in a box that Maddie said she shipped for me, stuff I couldn’t fit on the plane, but who knows when that will show up at my door.

Once it’s ready, I step inside, nearly eating shit as my foot slips. No wonder Effie had to add the shower, I think. I can’t imagine doing this old and arthritic.

I manage to steady myself then carefully lower myself into the water.

It feels heavenly. I make a note of things that might make the space feel more like mine—whether I last a year or not, I have to start thinking of this place as mine for now or it will never feel like home—such as getting a couple of house plants, maybe installing wood shelving along the wall for fancy salt jars and dried flowers and candles to give it that fashionably-rustic look, when suddenly the skin at the back of my neck begins to prickle.

The bathwater turns ice cold.

Someone is watching me.

Right now.

I can feel it. Feel them.

Feel eyes at the window behind me.

I suck in my breath, pins and needles igniting my nerves and cascading down my back in shivers.

Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look, I tell myself.

But I have to.

I quickly whirl around in the bathtub, water splashing, expecting to see someone standing at the window. But I don’t. There are only patches of rich blue sky coming in through the clouds, that dusky color it gets as it heads toward evening.

I make a mental note to close the curtains next time. Sure, one wouldn’t expect to need privacy out here in the middle of nowhere, but then again, I’ve had more than a few visitors already.

Once I catch my breath, I decide bath time is over. The water isn’t as cold as I thought, but it’s tepid at the very least, and no longer enjoyable. I get out carefully so I don’t end up in a naked heap on the floor, quickly close the curtains, and then hop in the shower to wash my hair and scrub off the bathwater.

By the time I’ve slipped into my comfy clothes—a bralette, a burgundy sweater and sweatpants—and dried my hair, I feel a lot better, and the creepiness of bathtime seems like a distant memory.

Now would be a good time to figure out how to relax.

Effie didn’t have a television set in the house—though the solicitor told me the hookup for cable was there, or I could do what everyone else does and just use the internet to stream things—but my mind is too scattered to attempt to read that airport paperback. I sit down in the armchair in the sitting room for a moment and flip through a stack of aging magazines, mainly Town & Country from the ‘90s, before picking up my phone and going online. I scroll idly through my social media accounts, all neglected since the divorce. I married Ryan young, but we started dating in high school, so a lot of my friends came through that relationship. When our marriage ended and Ryan was proven to be a cheating rat bastard, it turned out those friends were fair-weather and sided with the rat bastard. Call me petty but I blocked them all, one by one.

Of course, I’ve never been quick to make friends in general—something about being both neurodivergent and having a chronic illness makes people put you in either the “no-fun” or “too much” zones—so I haven’t really filled my well in the time since. Even as I scroll through my feeds, there’s a lot of accounts, but few people I actually know well. There’s Maddie, of course, and my brother, I guess. There’s Trisha, whose couch I stayed on for a month before her boyfriend started hitting on me and I left. I probably should have told Trisha, but she knew I wasn’t a fan of his to begin with—and with good reason! And Kayleigh from college who would have let me stay in her basement suite with her and her wonderful wife Callie (yes, their names get confusing) except the landlord wouldn’t let that happen, and he was looking for any excuse to evict them.

I keep scrolling until I see my mother on Rosemary Beach with my stepfather Frank, smiling at the camera like nothing is ever amiss, as if her daughter hasn’t been in Scotland for a week now with nary a call or a text or email to check in on her.

I close the app and decide that I need to do something.

Back in the kitchen, I eye the gauzy light that glows against the drawn curtains. Seems a shame to hide from golden hour.

I open them, expecting to see Alasdair across the bay, but there’s no one. A light breeze has picked up, shaking the herb garden and roses and causing ripples across the loch that looks like it’s been layered with metallic amber paint. Above, the clouds clear fast and the sun heads down toward the horizon behind the castle tower.

I let the light fill the kitchen, then sit at the table and look through the flowers I sorted earlier, picking out which ones to use for my sketches and which ones to use for my flower pressings. Back in the States, I’d use the pressings for resin art and bookmarks and the kind of artsy things I can supplement my income with on Etsy, but I haven’t figured out if I’ll continue my shop here. But the good thing about flower pressings is that they don’t go bad.

I’ve taken out a strand of thistle, the mauve petals bruised from this morning, ready to start sketching it, wilting and all, when I grasp it wrong, and one of the spikes drives into my thumb.

“You fucker,” I swear. You’d think I would be used to getting pricked and poked by flowers, but I’m not, and I swear they’re always out to get me. Sure, this morning I said flowers don’t care if you haven’t slept, but maybe they care a little about being cut, and this is their last form of revenge.

I also said I don’t anthropomorphize vegetation, but here we are.

I head to the sink to wash the blood off my thumb when I get that feeling again. My skin on my spine tickles, the hairs on my arm raising even under my sweater.

I’m being watched again.

You’re being paranoid, I tell myself.

I quickly rinse off my thumb, the blood splashing brightly in the sink, then whirl around.

There’s a motherfucking face at the window.

I open my mouth to scream but the sound catches and kind of gurgles. It’s enough that the face moves back and morphs from what looked like some evil sort of leering to one that’s sincerely apologetic.

And incredibly, ridiculously handsome.

“I’m so sorry,” he says through the window. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Okay, so how about not appearing at people’s windows then?” I cry out, my heart still in my throat.

“I tried knocking but there was no answer.”

“So you decided to snoop around the back?”

“I was going to swim back home and…” he trails off and shrugs. Gives me a sheepish look that borders on a smile.

And that’s when I find myself pushing past all the ludicrous, creepy nonsense, and actually take in the man’s face for once.

As I said: incredibly, ridiculously handsome. So much so that had I known this was what he looked like from the start, maybe I would have actually answered the door. And yet, there is still part of me that knows the good-looking ones are often the most dangerous.

Don’t let him in, don’t let him in.

He’s tall, which I’d already guessed from across the bay, but I hadn’t quite reckoned with what tall looks like from three-feet away through a windowpane. He has to be six-two at least. His hair is black and damp, falling almost to his shoulders, pushed back from his face the way a man pushes hair back when he’s just come up from water. There’s a few days of stubble on his jaw, the kind that suggests he doesn’t bother either way. His features are too symmetrical for someone’s country neighbor, unless one lives near Milan or Manhattan, the cheekbones a little high, the mouth a little full, the bone structure of him so clean it has the quality of something carved from stone.

But it’s the eyes that get me. They’re a pale ice-blue and they have a directness that doesn’t quite match the rest of his polite restraint. They aren’t the eyes of a man in his late thirties or forties, though that’s the age I’d peg him at. I don’t know whose eyes they are, exactly. But they’re looking at me like they have been waiting a long time to do so.

I swallow hard and glance past him at the golden light lighting up the loch in glimmering patches.

“I realize we’ve never seen each other face-to-face,” he says smoothly. “So, I’d like to formally introduce myself now. I’m your neighbor, Alasdair, from across the way.”

And you’re also the most gorgeous man I have ever seen, and I want to climb you like a monkey at a jungle gym.

“Iris Galloway,” I announce, feeling my tongue-tied a little now. Normally I’d ramble on and say something awkward and stupid, but I feel I can’t even find the words in his presence, even with the window pane between us.

I know I’m nothing to sneeze at, as my mother used to say. When I was a child, she dragged me off to John Casablancas modeling school hoping I would make her proud, but when I turned into a teenager, her willowy French side subsided and my father’s stocky Scottish side started coming through. I no longer qualified as underfed; ergo I couldn’t model. But even though I’m not in great shape and parts of me have gone soft due to my lifestyle, I still have my height (5’9”), thick brown hair with natural reddish highlights, and a face people have described as being “doll-like,” which I think means I look innocent…until they realize my big brown eyes are usually staring daggers at you and my pouty lips are forever twisted into a sneer. If anyone were to ever invent a Resting Bitch Face doll, however, I think they could model her on me.

“I’m sorry again for just coming up like this and giving you a startle,” he goes on. “I assure you, I’m not naked.”

I move a little closer to him to get a better view, as if to see if he’s telling the truth or not. I can only see him from the chest up and he’s shirtless—his pecs and shoulders are as sculpted as his face, which tracks—but I don’t dare look further down.

“I’ll have to take your word on that.” Meaning, I’m not getting any closer. “So, what can I help you with?” At least I’m talking again.

He doesn’t answer right away. He just looks at me through the window with the same easy stillness he seems to carry with him. There’s something about it that bothers me, tickles a fearful place deep inside, and I don’t know why.

“I heard the police were here today,” he finally says.

I blink at him. “How would you⁠—”

“—Mhairi,” he interjects. “I stopped by the village.”

Is she the village switchboard or something in a great game of telephone? The cop tells Mhairi, Mhairi tells Alasdair, Alasdair tells me…

“And you came over to…”

“To say it wasn’t me. In the woods.”

“You came all the way over here to tell me that?”

“Aye. I’d rather you weren’t afraid of me,” he replies, but he doesn’t elaborate.

I’m not sure what to do with that, what to do with any of this conversation I’m having with this man through the window, but the words in my aunt’s letter keep haunting me.

“What if I am, though,” I say, my voice going quieter than I want it to. “Afraid of you.”

I don’t even know why I’ve said these fears out loud, that is something I would normally keep to myself. I don’t like the idea of anyone knowing I’m afraid of them, especially a stranger. It’s far too vulnerable for my liking.

“Then I’d mind,” he admits softly.

“That’s not a reason for me not to be afraid, though.”

Meaning, maybe throw me a few bones, tell me something that would make me think otherwise, you know, the way a normal person would? His demeanor is definitely not doing the “might be a serial killer” rumor any favors.

“No,” he eventually says. “But I’m patient.”

Apparently so. Also, another odd fucking thing to say.

He’s still looking at me through the window. I look at the sunset, because looking at his face has started to feel like a thing I’ll pay for later, but I can’t keep my eyes off him for long. Most people, in my experience, fidget when they’re holding a stranger’s eye too long. They shift. They glance. They fill the silence. He doesn’t do any of that. He stands at my window and just stares at me and lets me look right back at him.

And honestly, it’s easy to do.

What a beautiful, beautiful man.

I scratch my neck and his gaze goes to my hand. The look lingers a beat longer than it should.

“You’re bleeding.”

His voice has changed. Lower. Quieter.

I look down and see that the blood from the angry thistle has seeped down into my sleeve. At least it matches my sweater.

“Yeah, it’s the dangerous part of my job,” I say, gesturing to the table strewn with paper and flowers. I briefly put my thumb in my mouth, sucking back the iron. “I should get hazard pay.”

A dark, perfectly arched brow raises. “Hazard pay?”

“I suppose you might not have that in Scotland,” I muse.

“You aren’t truly Scottish if the landscape hasn’t tried to maim you in some way,” he jokes, but his eyes haven’t quite left my mouth from when my thumb was in it, and the noticing of that is a small drop straight down the inside of me, the warmth spreading at my core.

Oh hell no. What is my body doing?

He shifts his weight, his chin lifting so that his gaze can settle for a moment on the sketchbook on the kitchen table behind me.

“So that’s your job? Drawing?”

“Mostly.”

“Drawing what?” His eyes come back to mine. They have a quality, in this light, of being slightly too aware. “Just flowers?”

“This and that.”

He doesn’t follow up. He doesn’t have to. There was a certain tone to that question. How he could possibly know I’ve drawn him I don’t know, but I suppose if I was a man with the body of a god and I walked around naked, I’d assume someone was drawing me too.

I should ask him to leave. I mean, we’re talking through the window. The sensible move at this point is well nice to meet you, thank you, goodnight, I’m going to lock my back door and go and be unsettled in private.

The other sensible move is to ask him if he wants to come in. Out of politeness. Out of the social pressure any American woman of my class and upbringing has been raised to feel, that says the man at the door has come over in the rapidly cooling air, and is being civil, and the least you could do is offer him a cup of tea. The man swam the way here, did he not?

But I don’t say that. Because the police were here today. Because Effie wrote don’t let him in, and whether or not she meant this particular man, I’m not going to ignore the woman who lived here for sixty years and warded her windows with salt. I don’t know this man from Adam, and that matters more than the fact that I want to invite him in.

Because, oh, I do. I want to invite him in.

The wanting is the thing that decides it for me. I know what I’d do if I had this man on the inside of my windows. I haven’t slept with anyone in a year—and this is not a man in any of the categories I have for men—and I’m not, at least not tonight, going to find out what happens if I let him past the salt.

“And what do you do over there, in the castle?” I ask, feeling the need to keep talking, to break the strange silence that’s befallen us.

“I could ask you the same about this cottage.”

“But I’m asking you.”

A hint of a smile. “I read. I walk. I swim, as you know.”

“That’s it?”

“Mostly, I wait.”

He says it hesitantly, like he wasn’t sure he should say it out loud. It’s enough that I don’t ask him to clarify, because part of me knows when to leave a thing alone. It’s not a big part of me, but it’s there. Sometimes.

“And what do you do for work?” I go on.

“This and that,” he repeats what I said earlier.

“Family money, then.”

A small pause. “I had a great deal of it once. I’ve learned to make it last.”

“And you’ve been here a long time, I gather?”

“Yes.” He pauses, his brows coming down. “I won’t lie to you, Iris.” He uses my name the way he used it the first time, all gruff and low and smooth all at once. “But I’m not going to tell you everything tonight.”

“Uh, okay. That’s a hell of a thing to say.”

“Aye.”

He doesn’t make excuses for it. He doesn’t say anything that might explain why his conversational skills are upside down and sideways.

I stare at him, trying to figure him out. The sun has dropped another inch behind the castle and the light through the window has gone from gold to a deeper, more burnt-honey color, and the breeze has picked up enough that I can hear it moving through the herbs in the kitchen garden behind him.

“You knew Effie then.” I think of her letter, of her words, her warning.

“I did.”

“Did you know her well?”

“Well enough.”

“What does ‘well enough’ mean?”

“It means I knew her for a long time. We weren’t friends, but we had an understanding.”

“What kind of understanding?”

A thoughtful look crosses his face. “She kept her wards up. I respected them. She was superstitious to the bone, kept to herself, kept her doors locked, kept salt at the windows. There are people in this country who still live that way. I’m from the kind of family that knew not to take offense.”

The kitchen has gone properly dim behind me. The salt line on the sill is a thin pale ridge in the failing light. He said wards without any irony or contempt for an elderly woman’s irrational behavior.

“All right then,” I say, because I’m not sure what else there is to say. I don’t dare mention the letter, I feel that’s a dangerous admission itself.

Meanwhile, Alasdair has stopped being lit by the gold of the sun, and started being lit by the bluer, colder light of dusk. The planes of his face have shifted in a way I’m finding it hard to keep looking at directly. He’s starting to look less like a man and more like something else. Something…ancient.

“I think you’re going to love living here, just as she did,” he adds. “The loch goes phosphorescent some evenings, in late summer, any day now. When the plankton bloom. A hand trailed through the water comes back blue.”

As blue as your eyes?

“Sounds magical.”

“It’s nature, not magic.” He gives me a stern look, as if he thinks I might be as superstitious as Effie.

The breeze drops. The kitchen behind me has gone fully dim. I’ll have to turn on a lamp soon, but I don’t want to let him out of my sight. The doors are locked and I can’t imagine this very still, seemingly polite if not strange man, breaking in and doing me any harm, even though there is a small knot of dread in my stomach that does say, in a quiet voice, he could very well do me harm, and might even like it.

“It’s late,” he suddenly announces.

He doesn’t follow it up. He doesn’t say I should go or I should let you get some sleep. He lets the statement sit between us like a hand laid on the table, palm up. The wait is the thing he’s offering.

I almost say you don’t have to go.

I feel the words rise in my throat, distinct, fully formed, you don’t have to go, and I close my mouth around them and swallow them back. I can feel him watching me not say them.

He doesn’t look away.

“Goodnight, Iris.”

“Goodnight.” Alasdair, I think, but for some reason I don’t want to say his name.

He nods, once, very slightly, and steps back from the window.

He doesn’t walk away in the direction of the road.

He walks toward the bay.

I watch him go, seeing for real now that he is indeed wearing a pair of black pants and wasn’t naked after all. He moves down the slope behind the cottage, past the gardens, all the way to the rocks at the waterline. He pauses there for a second.

Then he’s gone.

Not into the water exactly, I don’t think I see him go, he’s just no longer there, the rocks dark and empty against the failing sky.

I blink and stand at the kitchen window for a long time after, watching the place where he was.

Then he surfaces halfway across the bay, turns in the water to face me, raising his hand in gesture, then does a quick and easy crawl the rest of the way.

I close the curtain. Double check all the doors are locked.

Then I pick up the phone.

Chapter

Six

The phone rings four times before Maddie picks up.

“You’re alive!” she exclaims.

“Barely,” I grumble, adjusting myself in the armchair, my legs still hurting from the panicked sprint this morning.

“Hang on,” Maddie says. There’s a clatter of dishes in the background, a thump of small feet, my niece’s voice raised in operatic injury. “Rosey, go ask Daddy. Aunt Iris is on the phone and Aunt Iris has been missing for six days. Six. Days. Go bother him.” The thump of small feet gets quieter as they run off.

“So, how are the kids?” I ask lightly.

“Don’t do that. Don’t open with the kids. You only ask about the kids when you’re about to bury something. What is it? Why haven’t you called?”

“I’ve texted,” I protest. “Several times. I’ve sent you pics.”

“Yes, but I know you and you said you would call and you didn’t and now you are, which means something propelled you to talk to me and I need to know what it is.”

“Nothing.”

“Iris. I can hear it in your voice.”

“I’m fine.”

“Iris.”

I close my eyes. My head goes back against the chair. The conversation through the window plays itself behind my eyelids on a loop that won’t turn off.

I would mind if you were afraid of me.

“You see, there’s this guy,” I begin carefully, wondering how on earth I’m going to explain any of this. “A man.”

“A man, not a guy? Is there a difference?”

I chuckle. “If you saw him, you’d say yes. There is a difference.”

A pause. “Oh. I see. You’re calling about a man then…well, fuck, it’s about time, Iris.”

I sigh, running my hand over my face. “No, no. It’s not like that. I don’t really know him. He’s just…”

“A man you’re interested in? A man you’ve already fucked?”

“No!” I exclaim. “I haven’t fucked him.”

“Then you’re just interested in him.”

“Maybe? More like this man is interesting.”

And that’s putting it mildly.

“Hmmm. Well, I guess that’s a start since you rarely find anyone interesting. So, where is this interesting man-not-guy, then?”

“In a castle across the bay, probably,” I reply flippantly, and the second the sentence is out of my mouth, I hear how it sounds.

“…I’m sorry. What? A castle?”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds.”

“I’m not sure what it sounds like. What do you mean a castle? Like…he’s a prince? Or a king? Braveheart?”

I let out a slightly hysterical laugh. I have to admit, it feels good, even if I do sound unhinged.

“Sorry,” Maddie says. “My knowledge of Scotland is thanks to Braveheart and Outlander. Tell me more.”

So I tell her about the naked man on the rocks days ago. About drawing the shape of him from memory, and finding I couldn’t remember his face. About the swimmer in the loch on the drive back from the village. The conversation overheard in the pub. About the man on the road in the fog. About the knock at the door that same night, his voice through the door, his refusal to give me a last name. The way he said Goodnight, Iris.

I tell her about the thicket this morning. The bones. The thing that wasn’t a footstep behind me. Running in wellies. The police.

But…I leave out one thing.

I leave out that he came to my back window tonight with wet hair gleaming black and the gold light on his jaw, and that I stood inside with my thumb in my mouth and looked at him as long as I could bear to without looking away. I leave out that I almost said you don’t have to go and how badly I wanted to say it.

“Iris. Holy shit.”

“I know. I know, I’m a hot mess.”

“Iris, when I said living at the cottage could be good for you, I did not mean open the door at night to the local neighborhood nudist who won’t give you a surname and is possibly a murderer.”

“Except that I didn’t open the door,” I point out defensively.

“But you’re going to.”

“I’m not going to.”

I also didn’t mention the letter I found from Effie. Why let her worry about me even more?

“Right.”

“Maddie—”

“You only use this voice when you have decided something already and I know what you’ve decided about the beautiful naked man-not-guy.”

“Alasdair,” I whisper.

“Right. Alasdair. God, what a fucking name, huh?”

“What voice am I using?” I wonder, mildly curious.

“That same one you used when you said you were moving to Scotland, the one that tells me your reckless impulsiveness has burst forth and taken the wheel. Listen. I’m not your mother. No one is, thank god. I’m not going to tell you what to do, because you don’t take that well. In fact, your pathological avoidance thing or whatever makes you do the opposite—and frankly the only reason I survive you—is that I have stopped trying. But you called me, late your time, about a man—and not just any man, but a naked swimmer who lives in a castle, and that means I get one piece of advice. Are you ready?”

“No.” I sigh heavily.

“Tough tits. Here it is: get out of the house. Drive into a town. Go to a pub. Talk to humans whose names you know in full. Do not let yourself get laid by your only neighbor. Especially not this neighbor. Even if he is, and I’m quoting your voice here, unreasonably hot.”

“I never said that.”

“Oh, yes, you did. You said it three different times in three different ways.”

I sigh again and sink back further into the chair.

“He’s very tall,” I whine, miserable. She knows I love them tall.

“Of course he is.”

“His eyes are gorgeous.”

“Ted Bundy had nice eyes too.”

“His hair is⁠—”

“Stop talking. Listen to yourself. You called the police about him this afternoon. The police.”

“I called the police because I thought he was chasing me in the woods. I thought he was the serial killer.”

“Iris! You still don’t know that he isn’t!”

“I know.”

She lets out the loudest, most disgruntled sigh, so loud that I hear Andrew in the other room ask if she’s okay.

Her voice is now a vicious hush. “You called the police about him this afternoon, you think he might have murdered some women, and now you’re waxing poetic to me, cataloging his eyes.”

“I like cataloging things.”

She lets out a long breath on the other end. I hear my niece shriek, then laugh in the background, and then Andrew is laughing too. For a moment I feel a sharp pang of homesickness. I never felt at home at their house, but they were family and they loved me. Suddenly I feel very, very alone and very far away and I’m wondering if that reckless impulsiveness might have led me to yet another mistake.

“Okay,” she says eventually. “I’m glad you got to talk to me, but I want you to hear me in return. Three things: one, lock everything every night. Two, you go to the village or the hotel, and you talk to people who are not him. Go get yourself fucking laid—I don’t care who by, but it has to be anyone but a serial killer. Tonight, you do not let him in. Tomorrow, you do not let him in. I don’t care how many times he knocks at your door or waves his dick around from across the bay. He stays the fuck outside the cottage until you have a clearer head about whatever is going on out there.”

It’s almost as if Maddie knows about Effie’s warning. Perhaps Effie herself is speaking through her in one of those weird channeling ways.

“And three?” I prompt warily.

“This is the one I want you to actually hear: I want you to think about why your body wants you to open a door it shouldn’t open.”

I don’t say anything.

“You hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“I’m serious, Iris. This is a very specific kind of stupid for you. This is post-Ryan stupid. This is a body that hasn’t been fucked, let alone touched, stupid. This is the stupid of a woman who has not been wanted properly in a long time and is being offered⁠—”

“He’s not⁠—”

“He is. He is offering something, and whatever it is, your body, your hormones, are reading it as being wanted. And your body is going to put you on its side every time. So I am asking you to let me be on the other side for a minute. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay. Good.”

A pause.

“I miss you,” she says, quieter now. “I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m worried for you all alone out there. I know your brother is too. And I’m going to let you go to bed, because you sound like you’re either about to fall asleep or about to do something stupid, and I’m going to choose to believe the first one.”

“Don’t worry, I’m going to bed, and I’m not doing anything stupid. I promise.”

She sighs. “Alright. Well, lock those doors again and text me when you wake up, even if I’m asleep. Okay?”

“Goodnight, Maddie.”

I sit in the chair for a long time after she hangs up. The salt at the window is the color of bone in the dim light.

Maddie is correct about one thing.

I am going to open the door.

Not tonight. Not tomorrow.

But eventually, I will. I have made stupid decisions before and this will be no different.

And it will be my downfall.

I sleep like shit, quelle surprise! But at least the tossing and turning lets me sleep in a little longer than normal, my jet lag having finally succumbed to this time zone.

I drink my coffee on the back step in Effie’s old wax jacket and watch birds flitter atop the bay, identifying the unfamiliar calls with my Merlin Bird ID app. The castle across the water sits where it sat yesterday, broken and silent against the slope. No light in any window. No man on any rock. Just red sandstone, and gull-cry, and the long, slow shush of the water.

I have made myself a list of productive things in the notebook by the kettle, because productive things are what I do when I am trying not to think about something specific: Sort out the trunk and learn more about Effie. Press the foxgloves before they get any sadder. Beware the thistle (it’s out to get you).

The foxgloves get pressed. The thistle gets tossed. The trunk takes me two hours because I keep being distracted by Effie’s old field sketches—there’s a single page of seaweed studies that is so good that I swear my allegiance to the sea if I can, one day, draw like that—and by mid-afternoon, I have unearthed three notebooks I have not yet opened, a tin of pen nibs from the 1970s, a pretty packet of pressed violets between waxed paper, and, at the very bottom, a heavy thing wrapped in oilcloth that turns out to be a pair of—huzzah!—binoculars.

They are the kind of binoculars a serious person owns. Brass and leather, worn to the same warm honey as the kitchen cabinets, the leather strap salt-stiff but not cracked. The rubber eyecups have the faint paler indentations of someone’s regular use. Two patches where Effie held them to her, decade after decade.

I set them on the kitchen table and look at them, wondering about what she would be watching from the windows.

Or who she would be watching.

I decide not to answer that, pick the binoculars up, and take them outside.

I awkwardly bring them to my eyes and the world telescopes. The lenses are good enough that I can see a single curlew picking its way along the far shore as cleanly as if it were on my step. I track along the shoreline, taking in the seaweed on the red-and-brown rocks, then the lichen above that, and the heather above that.

And then I am looking at the castle.

The first glimpses of the curtain wall, the dusky rust color of the rock beneath it. A slit window in the stone, dark. Another window, narrow and tall, also dark. A higher opening with no glass in it at all, framing only sky. Just how crumbling is this castle? If he lives there, there must be parts of it that have been refurbished.

I sweep the parapet. The arched doorway with no door in it. The grass coming through where flagstones used to be.

I don’t see a soul, except a few wood pigeons taking flight.

Should I feel a little guilty about spying on my neighbor? Yeah. Maybe. But hell, it’s not like he hasn’t been doing something similar to me.

I lower the binoculars and get on with my afternoon. I do my laundry in the cramped closet where the washing machine shares space with a coatrack. I make a terribly dry tuna sandwich along with half a can of tomato soup, jotting down more things to get from the store that are ADHD zero-executive function friendly, even if unhealthy—kids’ cereal, minute rice, biscuits? Suddenly I can’t recall what food is.

Continuing my adventures into wholesome domesticity, I put my washing out on the laundry line, the sun breaking through the clouds enough that I think they might actually dry. I work on a sketch of the bog asphodel I cut from the verge a few days ago, sitting in its jam jar on the windowsill. As I draw, the afternoon moves on, light sliding slow across the kitchen floor and into amber as the sun goes down behind the spit. The midges come up off the bracken in clouds. The wind drops.

At nearly eight, at about the same time he came by last night, I pick up the binoculars again.

I lift them to my face. The world telescopes.

The world brings him to me.

And there he is.

He’s on the rocks of his spit where the water meets the stone, and he’s fucking naked. The same way he was naked days ago in the morning when I thought I was looking at a piece of driftwood I pat myself on the back for not making a joke about his wood.

He’s facing the shore across the loch proper, body tilted slightly away from me. The light is painting gold across the long line of him, picking out the shoulders and the chest and the long flat stomach and the dark hair at the center of him. He’s standing very still in the way I’ve come to notice.

“Are you even real?” I whisper to myself.

I lower the binoculars an inch.

I tell myself I’m going to put them down and walk away from the window and stop being a Peeping Tom.

Instead, I lift the binoculars again. I mean, I am a botanical illustrator after all. I look at things and observe them for a living. Looking is not a crime.

And so, I look.

I can see, now, what I could not see across two hundred meters of open water with my own eyes. How sculpted his muscles are, his body lean but strong, but the kind of strong that comes from lifting things naturally, not spending hours at the gym. I find myself studying the scar on his ribs, low on the left side, a clean white line about as long as my thumb. The scattering of chest hair, the dark line of hair from his navel to his cock. The cock, which is…damn.

Fully hard.

He is standing on the shore at dusk, naked and hard as the rocks around him.

I make a sound that borders on pathetic.

The binoculars shake. I steady them with both hands. The world wobbles and comes back into him, and I’m still looking, because at no point in the last few days has any part of this cottage felt like a place where I was supposed to be doing anything reasonable.

God damn, I knew that cock was going to be trouble when I could sense its size even before the binoculars could see it.

He shifts his weight to one foot, slow, taking a commanding stance. Lifts one hand. The hand goes to his chest, flat-palmed, and slides down. Slow.

Across the stomach.

Lower.

And then he takes himself in his hand.

Oh.

Oh god.

Oh.

I do not move and I don’t look away. I don’t even think I’m breathing, at least not like a normal person with autonomous body functions. I have to remind myself to take in shallow pulls of air, which is hard enough because all I can think about is the fact that he’s holding his motherfucking cock, and I can’t look away.

You have to though, I tell myself. You’re being a terrible pervert. This is wrong. You’re watching your neighbor with his cock in his hands.

But…he can’t know I’m watching, can he?

He’s two hundred meters away, and the light is failing, and the kitchen window is small, and there is no possible way he can know that I’m standing inside with these newfound binoculars and have been at this glass for nearly a minute now, watching him touch himself.

And, more than that, he’s out here in the open like this.

Does he…want me to look?

As if in answer, he starts to stroke.

Slow. The kind of stroke a man does when he has all the time in the world. His chin is up, eyes closed. His mouth—and this is the part I am going to lose sleep over—is slightly open.

I should put the binoculars down.

Instead, my hand goes to the waistband of my leggings, and the world whittles down to just a few things. There’s just my hand, and the angle of his shoulders, and the shape of his mouth, and the way his hand is moving on himself in a rhythm I am already breathing to.

I push my fingers between my legs and I am embarrassingly wet.

A small rough noise comes out of my mouth.

The binoculars knock against the pane, and the world wobbles, and his hand is still moving, and his head is still up, and the gold has bled out of the light around him. He is standing in a colder, bluer dusk that makes his body look carved from stone, coldness suiting him more than warmth.

I find the rhythm I know.

It takes me less than a minute. I’ve barely touched myself lately. My body has been holding over a year of slow, ungrieved want, and I feel it’s finally waking up, dust flying off the shelves.

I come with one hand in my leggings, and the other holding the binoculars to my face, my hands shaking, my vision blurred. The orgasm moves through me in a vicious wave that starts in my hips and goes up through my stomach and out into my hands, and I let out a garbled cry.

I manage to keep the binoculars at my eyes through it all, and I’m still looking when his head moves.

He lifts his face the rest of the way up and now he’s looking directly at me. Across the dimming water, through a kitchen window I told myself he couldn’t possibly see through, and past the binoculars I told myself he couldn’t possibly know I was holding.

He is looking at me.

And he is smiling.

It is a slow, startlingly sinister smile, the kind that arrives on a face that has known the whole time and is only now letting itself be seen. There’s nothing apologetic in it. Nothing of the man who said he was sorry to scare me. He’s not sorry now, he is anything but. And somehow has just heard a woman come, hidden in her own cottage across the bay.

He does not stop stroking.

He holds my eyes.

And then he comes, mouth parted, lips wet, neck corded, with the dusk bluing around him, and his hand on himself, and his eyes on mine.

I drop the binoculars.

They hit the floor hard with a thunk and I cry out. I’m shaking and wild and I don’t know what to do with myself.

I quickly close the curtain, then wash my hands at the sink, the cold water running over my fingers, piling on the soap and scrubbing them clean, like I can wash away what just happened.

I pick up the binoculars, relieved to see they aren’t damaged, then check all the doors are locked and I hurry to bed, as if going to bed early like a good girl is going to change the fact that I’ve been a very bad girl indeed.

I lie on my back in the room with the wardrobe that looks like a man when it’s the middle of the night, and I think of him on the rocks. I think of him smiling at me through the dusk. I think, in the slow ambient terror that is going to be my new bedfellow for the rest of this year, he saw me. He wanted me to see, and knew I wanted to see.

He now knows that about me, and how I wish that was something I could quickly undo.

I roll onto my side under Effie’s quilt and face the wardrobe. The horseshoe over the bedroom door is the color of dried blood in the low light. The salt at the sill is a thin pale ridge. The wards Effie left me are in place. The doors are locked.

He will not come in.

He cannot come in.

I won’t let him.

I say this to myself like a prayer. I close my eyes, and, somewhere deep inside, that terrible feeling that one day soon I’ll do the very thing I’m not supposed to do blooms.

Chapter

Seven

Iwake up to a quiet body.

It’s a small miracle. My hips don’t hurt. My jaw isn’t clenched. The deep ache that lives between my shoulder blades has, for the first time in I don’t know how long, taken the morning off.

I lie on my back and listen to a gull arguing with something outside and that’s when it hits me.

Oh. I see.

So the secret to a decent night’s sleep was, apparently, ruining myself thoroughly in front of a kitchen window at dusk. Of all the things to learn about my body in my thirties.

A wry small thought arrives in my head: Ryan never did this for me. I push it away. Ryan and the orgasm gap between us was never worth a conversation, at least not when he had a say in it. He had over a decade to figure my body out and used a couple of minutes, but I refuse to think about my ex-husband or my failed marriage and lackluster sex life for more than a minute today.

Today I have a heater to buy.

The boat shed’s going to be cold by October, that much I know. Hell, it’s probably cold already since summer in the Highlands has, so far, been more of a suggestion than anything. I’d been putting off the trip to Fort William like I put everything off that I need to do. I told myself I needed some time to get my bearings and figure out what I needed to buy, what’s missing from the cottage, etc., before taking the two-hour journey to the nearest big town.

But now it’s no longer something I need to do, but want to do. I want to be somewhere else. Somewhere away from here. Somewhere with parking lots. Somewhere with people who don’t know my name and don’t whisper it through the fucking door.

I get ready with purpose, put on jeans—instead of pants with an elastic waistband—a cozy cardigan, and my boots, then I get in the car.

The drive south is the kind of drive that reminds me why I wanted to move out here in the first place.

The cloud burns off in the first hour. The road slips out of the fern-laden coast and into a country of long pale lochs and bare, scoured mountains, where the rock comes through the heather like bones through skin. I crack the windows. The wind smells of grass and water and woodsmoke from a place I can’t see. I drive past flocks of baa-ing sheep, past a single white house at the head of a glen with no road to it, past a stand of birches the color of cotton candy in the new sun.

By the time I cross into Lochaber, the sky has gone wide and properly blue. I’ve got my cardigan pushed to the elbows. The radio finds a station out of Inverness playing something tinny and cheerful, and I sing along badly to whatever I can catch the chorus of. The mountains here are bigger and emptier, the kind of country where the road feels apologetic for being there at all, like humans bravely dared to mark it. I haven’t thought about Alasdair at all. It’s its own small victory.

Fort William is bigger than I expected—which shows just how isolated I’ve been—and the carpark for the big supermarket at the edge of town is the closest thing to a sensory assault I’ve had in a week. I get a propane heater, the kind hunters use in unheated cabins, along with a spare bottle for it.

Then I tackle groceries, going down my half-finished list. Frozen pizza. Two bags of crisps in flavors I can’t quite trust like shrimp and curry chicken but sound like a good experiment. A box of cereal with a hare on it but looks like it has tiny marshmallows, so that’s a win. Microwave rice. A bag of small clementines I’ll eat enthusiastically for a few days and then forget about until they go fuzzy in the bowl. Pre-cut cheese. Pre-cut anything, really. A jar of pesto, because pesto plus pasta—and chunks of halloumi—is a meal I can put together quickly, providing I set a million timers for the pasta so I don’t let it turn into a mushy mess.

The pretty girl at the till with wild blue hair and a septum ring scans my haul, notes that I’m a tourist by my accent, and, given my grocery haul, gives me a small kind smile that says I am not going to ask about your life. I take it because I swear I’m this close to oversharing what happened last night with a total stranger. God, I really need to talk to someone. I’d give Maddie another call but I feel I need to make her proud before I do and telling her that I got off while secretly watching my naked neighbor masturbate is not a thing I’m proud of.

The drive back is the same drive in reverse, but a different country entirely. The clouds are gone. The lochs have switched from slate to a hard, glittering blue. The mountains across them are clearly mountains now and not the suggestions they were this morning. I pass a man on a bicycle in shorts, which in Scotland is the equivalent of seeing someone in a swimsuit. Somewhere south of Lochcarron I have to pull onto the roadside to shrug my cardigan off because the car has gone genuinely warm.

I drive the last half-hour in my T-shirt with the windows down, the wild wind in my face, and the sun making everything kind.

I pull up to the cottage with the sweater on the passenger seat and my arms bare. The bay is a sheet of beaten silver. The rowan at the front step is rustling in a small warm wind. The cottage looks almost like a postcard of a cottage rather than the cottage itself, and, for the first time since I got here, I can’t help but think how lucky I am to be here at all. It’s amazing what summer weather can do to one’s soul.

I bring the heater in first, planning to haul it to the shed later. Then the groceries, in three trips—I wanted to do one trip like you wouldn’t believe, but my body simply won’t let me do that anymore. The kitchen smells like warm bread by the time I’m done because I’ve left the door open and the sun has reached the woodsmoke in the curtains and let it loose. The cheese and milk go in the fridge. The cereal and crisps go on the shelf. The clementines go in the bowl, because that’s where clementines go to die.

I put the kettle on to make myself a cozy cup of tea with loads of oat milk and sugar, my afternoon treat. Then I remember the laundry.

I left my clothes and some sheets on the line yesterday before the binoculars happened and forgot about them in the catastrophe of myself. The line is strung between the cottage and a rough wooden post that points beyond the herb garden. The sheets have been getting sun and breeze for twenty-four hours straight. They will be the cleanest sheets in the Highlands.

I take the wicker basket from the mudroom and walk out into the back garden, humming a song that was on the radio earlier. The mint has the sun full on it and the smell of it is everywhere. I duck under the line. The first sheet comes off the pegs easily. I fold it against my chest, warm and stiff, and breathe in the scent of the detergent, like a I’m in a commercial. Once again, I’m delighting in romanticizing my new life, even if I’m not even close to being a domestic goddess. I just play one on TV.

I reach for the second sheet, and, as I do so, glance at the ground.

At the strange shadow beneath the sheet.

I lower my hands and crouch down to look at the hem.

There are a pair of legs underneath it. Black trousers. Dark boots.

I stand up slowly. My mouth goes bone dry. I’ve got one hand on the corner of the sheet and the other on the line-pole, and a part of me thinks, Iris, what you are about to do is the most stupid thing a woman in a horror movie ever does. Then I do it anyway, because it’s sunny, because the bay is bright, because I’d rather know than not.

I pull the sheet down off the pegs.

He’s standing right there.

Alasdair. In daylight. In dark trousers and a plain grey dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, his hair dry for once and falling dark to his jaw, his hands at his sides like he’s been waiting and trying not to look it. The sun is full on him in a way the dusk last night was not. He is, in this light, less impossibly beautiful and more⁠—

—more human.

Which is its own kind of problem because why would I ever think he was anything but?

“I was at the front,” he says by way of explanation. “You didn’t answer. I came round.”

I blink at him, my pulse hammering along in my throat.

“I called out. Twice. I’d half-decided the cottage was empty, and then I—” He glances at the line, at the sheet now in my arms. “—well, you came out. Seemed worse to slink off then.”

“So you stood behind my laundry?”

“Yes.”

“A man hiding behind my laundry. Which is worse than slinking off.”

He has the grace to look briefly embarrassed. “When you put it that way.”

A breath comes out of me that’s halfway to a laugh. “Jesus Cripes.”

This man lacks more social skills than I do.

We stare at each other for a moment, at an impasse of sorts. The sheet is in my arms, smelling of sun and grass and Effie’s detergent, and it seems so damn wholesome compared to this darkly handsome, possibly dangerous man standing across from me.

The same man who…

Images flood my brain at the most inappropriate moment. Last night. The window. The binoculars. The smile. That fucking smile, the one the wolf might give before it devours the lamb.

I can tell he’s not going to mention it, and I’m certainly not in hell going to mention it. Which means it’s permeating the space around us until there is nothing else.

“Was there something you needed?” I inquire, my voice coming out steadier than I feel.

“No,” he replies plainly. “I was out walking. I thought I’d come by and see how you’re doing.”

“Walking…”

“Aye. It’s a thing people do.”

“From the castle.”

“And around the bay.”

“That’s not a short walk.”

He looks up briefly at the sky, squinting at it, and I take a moment to study his jawline and the fullness of his mouth. “It’s a fine afternoon for it, isn’t it?”

He says it like someone who’s prepared to stand in a back garden and discuss the weather for as long as I want him to. I look past him at the bay. The water is a hard blue under the sun, making it look like an ordinary loch and not whatever else it is at dusk, a place of dark thoughts and drowned wives.

I should send him home. The polite version, the one with a smile and a well, okay, thanks for stopping in. He’d take it. He’d go. He’s already shown me he can be told; I don’t even have to be rude about it.

Instead, I shift the sheet against my chest and hear myself say, “I just got back from Fort William. I bought a heater for the shed.” I say this as if he knows what I’m talking about, as if he cares.

“The shed?”

“Yes. The boatshed.” I nod at it though his eyes stay fixed on mine. “I’m setting it up as a studio. For my art.”

“Sounds like a good idea as any.”

Another long beat, the tension between us not dissipating, and yet I am somewhat determined to make it go away, make him finally seem normal.

“Want to help me drag a bench around?” I ask, before I can think about it.

A small, easy smile. “Aye. I can drag a bench.”

“Good.”

I drop the rest of the laundry in the basket without folding it, leave the basket in the mudroom, and walk down the slope to the shed. He follows a careful step or two behind, which is somehow both respectful, as if he’s giving me space, and unnerving because he’s become just this powerful, strange, overwhelming presence at my back. I have to fight the urge to keep turning around and make sure he’s not about to pounce on me or something.

As if you’d mind, I chide myself. Probably need a good pouncing.

I ignore my brain and stop in front of the shed. The wrought-iron latch sticks, and the door needs a shoulder to open. I have to back up and let him try when I can’t shift it. He puts his shoulder to the wood. The door creaks open like the cottage when I first arrived.

Don’t let him in, Effie had written. But she didn’t mean the shed, and maybe she didn’t even mean him.

“You’ll need to put some oil on those hinges,” he suggests, stepping aside to let me enter first.

Inside, the air is cool with the iron-rich smell of seaweed. There are two windows, small and high, one north-facing toward the loch, the other facing west to the bay. The light through it is the soft even light I’d been hoping for. There’s a workbench, a low stone shelf along the back wall, a stack of empty wooden fish-crates Effie must have collected over the years, a long-handled push-broom in the corner, two coils of rope on a peg, and a flat slab of slate the size of a small table propped against the wall.

“You’ll want the bench under that window,” he says, pointing to the west one that faces the bay—and the castle. “The light will hold there till almost six in summer. Less in winter.”

He’s right. I originally thought I’d have it under the north window to get that even light, but perhaps at this latitude you have to be a little greedy.

“And the slate.” He goes to the slab. “Set it on the crates, it’ll do as a second surface. You can press flowers under it without the weight of a real press.”

I watch him for a beat. He’s gone to the slate and lifts it as if it weighs nothing at all and continues to look around, already calculating the rest of my space.

“You seem to know what’s best for me,” I comment. My way of pointing out that he’s in my shed and future art studio commanding it like he owns the place.

“I do,” he declares, his nostrils flaring slightly. I should be annoyed at his confidence and pushiness but somehow, I’m not. It’s like I knew he would say that.

Then, as if remembering he has manners in one of his pockets, he nods at the workbench. “Would you like me to move that?”

I tell him I do, because even though he’s bossy, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

I drag the workbench over to the west window with his help. The bench is heavy oak, worn to a shine in places, and when we set it down under the window, his hand is closer to mine than it has been since he arrived.

“Do you want the heater in the corner or under the bench?” he asks, voice lower now that he’s closer to me.

“Under, but to the side. Less risk of knocking it over and starting a fire.”

“Sensible.”

“Sometimes I am,” I joke wryly, managing to stop myself from going down a self-deprecating spiral as I’m prone to do.

He sets it up while I open the wooden supply box I brought down from the kitchen, with my pencils and pens and the small jar of brushes I’ve been hauling around from place to place. He comes over once the heater’s settled.

“This your kit?”

“In all its glory.”

He picks up one of the brushes. An old sable, bristles thin and pointed, the wood worn smooth where my thumb sits. He turns it in his fingers. He has the kind of hands that move carefully—long fingers, broad palms, knuckles that look like he’s broken them and they’ve healed. They’re good fucking hands. Skilled hands.

He holds the brush out to me.

I reach for it.

Our fingers meet at the wooden handle.

His skin is cool. Not cold. Just cool, the way the stone walls of an old church are cool in summer. Refreshing. A respite. And the brush is between us for a second, his fingers and mine on the handle, and the shock that goes up my arm has nothing to do with static, and everything to do with the line of his knuckle resting beside my thumb.

My breath hitches and I pull my hand back. The brush stays with him. He stares at me curiously.

“Sorry,” I say, too quickly, and now I’m fumbling, blood up in my face, and I reach again and the brush goes back to me. “Sorry, I…”

“Iris.”

He says my name quietly. I stop talking, as if I’ve been conditioned to.

He’s not smiling. He’s just looking at me, those glacial blues searching my face as if he’s expecting to find something.

“Go on,” he urges. “Show me what else you’ve got.”

I take the reprieve for what it is, my heart galloping a million miles a minute. I narrate too much, as per usual. I tell him about the inks, the watercolors, the small Japanese pen with the nib that makes the line I use for venation. He listens intently the entire time, as if everything I’m saying is fascinating to him.

When I’ve run out of things in the box, like a glorified show and tell, he picks up one of the foxgloves I’ve been pressing and holds it gently between two fingers.

“What’s the Latin?”

“Digitalis purpurea,” I answer without skipping a beat.

“And what does it do?”

Is he testing me on something I’m extremely knowledgeable in?

How did he know that was my kink?

“Depends on the dose. It’s heart medicine when done properly,” I continue. “You know, by actual chemists. The old name was folk’s glove—fairies’ fingers. Although whether the fairies got their hands stuck in the bell shape or whether the flower was theirs to begin with depends on who’s telling the story. In the old days the leaves were used for dropsy, and they killed as many people as they cured. Nowadays people know that foxgloves are poisonous. Even cows seem to know that.”

“Aye,” he says, as if remembering something specific. “There was a woman in the village south of here who knew the right dose for it. Saved a few lives.”

“When was this?”

“Before the road came in.”

I look at him, wondering when that was. He doesn’t return the look. He sets the foxglove gently back in the press.

“Beautiful, but with the disposition to be dangerous,” he murmurs, then glances at me. “Think I might have to call you foxglove.”

Please do, I think pathetically as my cheeks go bright red.

“There’s eyebright on your spit.” He turns back to the bench. “On the moor side, the way to the road. The small one. White flower, yellow throat.”

“Euphrasia.”

“Aye. The old name was the herb for the eye.”

“The doctrine of signatures!” I can’t help myself, he opened the door and I’m waltzing right in. “It looks like an eye, so it’s good for the eye. Pliny said so.”

“Pliny was a fool with a good library.”

I laugh before I can stop myself. He almost smiles. My god, I’m practically giddy. Aside from my father and a few folks at college, I don’t think I’ve ever used Pliny—as in Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist who all of botany owes a great debt to—in a real conversation before.

“A good-hearted fool, perhaps,” I tell him. “Did you know he died while trying to rescue villagers from the Mount Vesuvius eruption?”

From the quirk of his lips, I can tell he already knew that, but he says, “As I said, a fool.”

“Anyway,” I go on, “I think Effie grew it. Or did she let it grow in? I can’t tell where Effie’s garden ends, and the moor begins.”

“She let it grow in.” His hand is flat on the bench. “She used it for headaches, mostly. Some of the women on the coast still do. There’s an old way of brewing it—you steep it cold, never boiled. The heat takes the medicine out.”

He moves past me to the back wall, and the air shifts cool against my arm where he passes. He smells like the country—the salt water of the loch, the smoke of peat, maybe a bit of sandalwood. Whatever it is, it’s distinctive and lovely.

“You’ll want eye-bolts up there.” He’s looking at the rafters. “For drying a proper line.”

“I’ll look around the cottage for some; there’s a lot of stuff in there.”

He reaches up to indicate the spot, and his shirt pulls tight across his back and shoulders in a way that makes me gawk. I quickly look down at the bench, as if it’s suddenly fascinating.

“And leave the door propped after you’ve worked,” he says, lowering his arm. “An hour or so. The damp gets in and won’t get out otherwise. It’s the way the buildings are here, they all bend to the weather’s ways sooner or later.”

I bend to pick up a length of cord he’s left coiled on the floor, and when I straighten, he’s closer than he was. Not crowding me. Just closer. Half a step into the space my body had thought was mine. I don’t step back. I probably should, but I don’t. He’s looking at the rafters and then at me and then at the rafters again.

“You’re going to need a stool.” He eyes me up and down.

“A stool?” I whisper, aware of how close he is.

“For the rafters. You’re tall, but you’re not quite tall enough.”

“Oh.” I clear my throat. “Right.”

He moves away. The air goes warmer where he was, and the warmth feels almost like a loss.

We work. He shows me where the iron will hold a nail and where it won’t. He hands me things—the hammer, a length of cord, a small block of wood to wedge under the bench’s short leg. Every time his hand comes near mine, he doesn’t quite touch me, and the distance feels strangely like torture.

When the racks are done, he steps back and looks at the shed the way a person looks at a job that’s finished, brushing his hands together.

“That’ll do,” he announces.

He turns toward the door. He stops at the frame with one hand on the wood, the sun coming in across the bay and outlining him.

“You’ll want the place to yourself now,” he says, glancing at me over his shoulder.

“You don’t have to go,” I blurt out.

He turns slightly and looks at me, almost in surprise.

“Iris…”

“Yeah?”

“I think it’s best I don’t come to your cottage again. Not unless you ask me to.”

I stare at him for a moment, feeling slightly off-balance, like everything in the shed has been skewed a couple of degrees. In all the strange things this strange man has said, this one might just take the cake.

“Okay. Well, how can I ask you to if I don’t see you?”

“You’ll come find me when you’re ready.”

“Ready for what?”

He looks at me for a long moment, a strange intensity passing over his face like a cloud.

“You’ll know, Foxglove.”

Then he turns and walks out of the shed, heading toward the road. I’m left in my new studio with my hands on the workbench and the heater humming softly under it and the smell of grass and salt coming in through the open door and I honestly couldn’t tell you what the fuck just happened.

He said I’ll know. Know what exactly, I’m not sure. Ready for what, I don’t know that either.

But it seems I’ll find out soon.

Chapter

Eight

I’ve been at the kitchen window for an hour; the coffee in my hand has gone cold twice. The castle is across the bay in the grey morning. Half-ruined, half not. The same view I’ve had for ten days now, except today it has hooks in me.

I’m proud of what I was able to accomplish yesterday, though. I pulled up my big girl panties and finished up in the boat shed. I cut meadowsweet from the slope and pressed it. I made a passable still life of the rowboat half-hauled on the rocks below the cottage, the kind of painting Effie would have done, and I’ve decided I want it in the kitchen if I can stand to look at it after I’ve framed it—I often can’t.

I also refrained from searching for Alasdair. And by refrain, I mean I only looked twice, and I didn’t even use my binoculars.

I didn’t see him, for what it’s worth. He told me he wouldn’t come, and he didn’t, not even on the shore with his dick out.

I thought that would be a good thing.

But…that was yesterday.

Today, the castle is calling me. There is no other word for it. It’s a thin thread behind my ribs that has been there since I opened my eyes and gotten worse in the hour I’ve been drinking cold coffee and staring at it, feeling it tug.

That said, I’m not actually going to see him. I’m going to go look at the castle, the actual castle, up close, in daylight, and confirm that the man who appeared behind my bedsheets wasn’t lying about where he lives. The cottage is mine for a year, the castle is across the bay, and I deserve to know the geography of my own situation, and who my neighbors really are. Mhairi says it’s empty; so had MacRae. Alasdair says it isn’t. At least one of them is wrong, and I’m a person who likes to settle these things and know who the lying liar pants is.

Also, if a man is murdering women along this coast, and that man is my neighbor, it would be useful to know whether his house has a basement. Do castles have basements? Maybe dungeons.

I shake my head, not wanting my brain to traipse down that figurative dark alley.

The fog came back overnight which doesn’t help with the vibes. The bay has gone soft at its edges, the mountains across Loch Torridon swallowed entirely, the castle visible only in pieces, a tower top here, a section of curtain wall there, the rest swallowed up in pale wet air. The kind of morning that would be ridiculous to drive in. Too dangerous, in fact, the single-track being what it is, and me being the driver that I am who tends to panic and forget what side of the road I’m supposed to be on.

So I’ll walk.

I pull on my wellies, Effie’s wax jacket, and a wool hat that smells like the mudroom. I bring my sketchbook because the sketchbook is my cover story—both to anyone who might see me and, mostly, to me because I’m really good at convincing myself. I bring secateurs because if I see something worth cutting on the roadside, I’d be a fool not to. I lock the back door. I lock the front door. I check the back door again because it pays to be a paranoid bitch these days.

Then I set out.

My driveway is long in itself and I take it slowly because I’m in no hurry and because the verges are giving me things. Knapweed in a stand of tall stalks, the flower-heads furred and purple. Devil’s-bit scabious in three different blues. I cut what I want and tuck the stems into the canvas bag. The fog catches in my hair and on the wool of my hat and makes a fine wet glaze on the wax jacket. Somewhere out of sight a sheep complains, and another sheep complains back, the sound traveling weirdly through the wet air so that I can’t tell which side of the road they’re on.

The road feels good in my body. My hips loosen after the first quarter-mile. My back stops doing the small grinding thing. I’d forgotten this, that walking, the right kind of walking, on the right ground, at the right pace, is one of the few activities my body tolerates.

We’ll see what it has to say on the way back.

The road comes up through the fog. I turn west over a cattle-grate. The castle’s access road is supposed to be about a mile and a half along this stretch, branching off to the right, so I walk slowly and watch for any signs.

Then I see it—small, scoured, half-grown over with hawthorn and giant rhododendrons, their flowers long dropped. Caisteal Eachainn, it reads, and then Category A Listed Building. Heritage Scotland. No access beyond this point without permission.

I think my neighbor and I are past the point of permission.

I turn down the access road and it narrows immediately. The hawthorn and rhododendron, obviously planted by people a long time ago, closes overhead, and the road becomes more track than road, the broken stone of the surface having gone soft with moss. Ferns on both sides, taller than my waist and already going copper at the edges, reach for me like greedy fingers. The fog is thicker here, the trees closer, the world reduced to maybe thirty feet of visible path.

Somewhere ahead the trees thin, the forest slowly giving way to space and light.

That’s when I see something.

A flash of white through the trees on my left, in a small clearing maybe twenty feet off the road.

My first thought, embarrassingly, is woman in white, because that’s what folklore puts in a foggy wood on a Highland morning, and my brain is suggestible. One of the drowned wives is coming for me, finding her way on land from a stream.

Then the white resolves itself into something more concrete: A neck. A back. A flank.

A horse.

It’s just a horse.

Which kinda seems peculiar in its own way. I’m used to seeing horses in fields, not hidden by trees in a forest.

It’s standing in the clearing perfectly still, its head turned toward the track, watching me. White, more dapple grey-white really, with a long mane streaked with pewter, hanging in heavy wet ropes against its neck as if the fog has soaked it through. It’s substantial through the chest and has slight feathering at the hocks. I’m guessing a Highland pony, or something like that…bigger than a Highland, smaller than a Percheron, the kind of horse you see in old paintings. What can I say, the horse girl to plant girl pipeline is a real one.

There is something off about it though. Its eyes are dark, almost too dark.

And I don’t know what I mean by that, because most horse eyes are dark by nature. But these are dark the way the loch is dark—the dark of something that has no bottom—and they are looking at me with rapt attention.

Horses are prey animals, and they’re almost always watching you, especially if you’re a stranger encroaching on their land. But I don’t get that feeling of wariness from this horse. Not from its gaze, the way it’s so sharply focused on me with those too dark, too deep, too large eyes. It reminds me more of an elk or a bull; something that’s prepared to defend itself if needed. It wants to do the chasing, not the other way around.

I take a slow step away to the far side of the road.

The horse does not move. It does not flick its ears. It stands so still that I’m starting to wonder if it’s some sort of illusion, not really there at all.

I lift my hand.

“Hello,” I say, feeling ridiculous. “I’m not here to harm you.”

Are you here to harm me?

The horse watches me wave but it doesn’t move. The only thing it does is blink.

I lower my hand, and I keep walking, and I don’t dare look back until I have gone another twenty feet. When I do look back, the clearing has filled with fog and there is no horse in it, but I can’t tell if the horse has moved into the trees, or if the fog has come down, or if I invented something that wasn’t there.

I keep going until the trees thin out some more and the world opens, and suddenly the castle is in front of me.

Oh my god.

The fog is acting like a set designer as the castle rises out of the wet grey, its curtain wall the same color as the rock it sits on, the line between geology and architecture almost gone. The seaward sides drop away to the bay, the water down there hidden by the fog so the castle looks like it ends in cloud. The ditch on the landward side is grown thick with bracken and gorse, a green moat instead of a stone one, the collapsed timbers of what was once a drawbridge sticking out at angles through the growth.

It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, a perfect mix of grandeur and decay that makes my heart beat aflutter.

I don’t know what I expected, really. A ruin, I guess. Something dignified and sad, as seen in a Heritage Scotland photograph. Not this, though. Not this slow, grand thing half-eaten by its own coast, half-still-standing. Wild roses have climbed all the way up the curtain wall on the landward side, their last late blooms bright against the grey. Foxgloves grow in the joints of the stone. Yellow lichens flame on every south-facing surface. Honeysuckle has rooted in a high arrow-slit and is hanging in a long curtain of green and cream down the wall that smells heavenly from here.

I have to make myself remember why I came.

I came to confirm that someone lives here.

That part is going to be easy. Even from where I’m standing at the broken edge of the moat, even with most of the castle obscured by fog, I can see the difference between the parts that have surrendered and the parts that haven’t. The east range to my left is half-fallen, roofless, gone to grass. The west range past it is a single low broken line of stone. But the north range, the largest, three stories, set against the open bay behind it, has windows that are glazed. The slates on the western half of its roof are sound. Someone has kept this castle alive in one wing, and let the rest go, and the going has been slow enough to look like part of the design.

I pick my way down into the ditch. The bracken has grown enough that I can almost step from one tussock to the next without losing my footing, and the collapsed drawbridge makes a kind of half-ramp at the bottom. I scramble up the other side, gracelessly, with one wet hand braced on a stone. My boots find purchase on the worn-down threshold of what was once the castle gate.

I step through.

The gateway opens into the courtyard, and the courtyard is what undoes me.

It’s open to the sky—or what would be sky if there wasn’t a cotton puff of fog. The grand entrance hall, or whatever this was, is gone, no roof or floor and what’s left is a rectangle of cracked flagstones with grass and nettles coming up between them. Ivy thicker than my wrist climbs every surface that will hold it. A small elder tree has rooted in one of the upper window arches and is growing horizontally out of the wall, ten feet above the ground. Somewhere a robin is singing, while the fog comes down through the open roof in slow drifts. The whole courtyard smells like wet stone and something green, almost honeyed.

I stand in the middle of it with my bag of cuttings and my sketchbook and feel like I’m lost to time. I forget for a long second that I’m here for a reason.

Alasdair lives here. It doesn’t look like anyone could live here in this Grimm fairy tale, but he does.

And I am here to see him in it, even if I don’t knock.

I take a deep breath to steady myself and cross the courtyard quietly, the way you’d cross a church with reverence and a bit of fear of being smote. The north range door is there, heavy, dark wood, set under a low pointed arch, but I ignore it and walk along the wall to where the first of the glazed windows is, low enough that I can see in if I stand close.

I peer inside carefully, the glass old, slightly warped, but clean.

The room inside is grand.

Stone walls hung with tapestries, faded, but the colors still readable, deep red and gold and a green like the moss on the stones outside. A great hearth on the far wall, dark, no fire in it. A long table with candles burning in a brass candelabra. A chandelier overhead, the candles in it lit as well, throwing a low warm gold across the room. Leather chairs. A wall of books. A wall of more books. A heavy desk angled toward the hearth.

And in one of the leather chairs, his back to the window, his back to me, sits Alasdair.

He’s reading.

I can see only the line of his shoulders, the dark of his head against the leather, the long fall of his arm with a book held open across his knee. He’s wearing what I think is a dark sweater, sleeves pushed up. His other hand is at his temple, fingers in his hair, the gesture of a man who has been reading for a long time.

So he wasn’t lying after all. The shopkeeper and the cop were wrong in some shape or form, or maybe it’s a grey area where he’s not supposed to be here, but he is. What did MacRae say about “kipping?” Regardless, that’s none of my business, and the truth remains that he does live here. He’s my neighbor through and through.

You should go, I tell myself. Go before he sees you.

Instead, my body turns toward the door, as if operating on its own accord, and need starts tugging at me from deep inside.

I want to be on the other side of that glass.

I want it so badly the wanting has its own compass. I want to push the door open, and cross the stone floor, and stand behind his chair, and put my hand on the back of his neck, and feel his skin again. I want him to look up from his book and not be surprised to see me. I want to be the woman who has come to find him, the woman he expected, the woman that is ready…

My feet take one step toward the door.

My hand leaves the wall.

I’m going to knock on the door of a half-ruined castle to see a man who has come to see me more times than I can count now, and I’m going to do it because something in this courtyard wants me to…

I can’t tell if the wanting is mine or not.

Which is what finally makes me pause.

Because the wanting is not mine. Or it is, but it is not only mine. It’s like it was been placed in me long ago, by someone else, a culmination of slowly building desire.

Am I doing this because I want to?

Or because someone else does?

I take one step back.

Then another.

Then I turn, and I go through the courtyard the way I came, faster now, through the gateway, down into the ditch and up the other side, and I do not look back at the windows because I am afraid that if I look back I will see him standing at the glass instead of reading, and I am not ready for that. Not now.

The access road is gentle going up.

I walk it fast enough that my body is going to make me pay for it tomorrow.

I am almost to the main road when I see the horse again, briefly, in a different clearing on the other side of the track. White and still, watching me go.

This time I do not lift my hand.

I just keep walking.

I’m home before noon. I rinse the cut flowers, set them in a jar on the kitchen table, and stand at the back window with my hands on the sill, breathing as if I have just stepped back from an edge. I look across the bay at the castle.

The fog has lifted a little. The castle has come back out of it.

It waits for me.

Chapter

Nine

Ican’t stand being in this cottage for another day.

Two days of restless work in the studio. Two evenings of looking at the dark bay from the kitchen window and pretending I’m not looking at it, pretending I’m not searching for him. The castle is like a splinter under my skin, one I can’t get out no matter what I do.

So I walk.

I take the path behind the cottage, the one that climbs the slope through the bracken to the moor. The morning is clear and warm for once. The dew has evaporated and the bees are buzzing merrily in the heather. I’ve brought the sketchbook and the canvas bag I’ve started using for cuttings, and I’ve told myself I’m going to do my job.

I’ve told myself a lot of things.

I’m maybe half a mile up the moor, sitting on a stone with the sketchbook open on my knee, when I hear it.

The hollow tread of hooves on peat. A rhythm that isn’t the wind.

I look up.

Alasdair is coming across the moor toward me, and to my utter surprise, he’s astride a brown horse.

No saddle. No bridle. His hands rest loose on the horse’s neck like he’s resting them there, not steering. He’s in black trousers and a black shirt with the sleeves rolled, and his feet are bare. His hair is loose against his jaw.

He pulls up about ten feet from me. The horse, a stocky bay mare with a long black tail and the rough coat of something that lives outside, stands and watches me with liquid eyes. I know a good horseperson can have complete control over a horse by just steering with the calves alone but generally there is some sort of verbal command to stop and I didn’t hear him give the horse one.

“Good morning,” Alasdair says in his thick brogue. I’m suddenly very aware that I am down low and he is on a lofty perch, peering down at me.

“Good morning,” I reply as I quickly shut the sketchbook and get to my feet.

“You seemed in a hurry earlier,” he comments.

I can’t help but narrow my eyes at him. I don’t know why I have such animosity toward him this morning but I do. Maybe because it’s getting a little annoying being watched all the time.

“I had to get out of the house.”

“Aye.” His eyes flick down the slope toward my cottage, then back to me. “I thought I’d find you on this side today.”

I raise a brow, wondering what that means.

“After the other day when you went exploring,” he finishes.

Ah. So he knows I was poking around his property. Only he doesn’t seem to be bothered by the idea the way I’m bothered by him showing up around the cottage.

I ignore the comment though and gesture to the horse with my sketchbook. “Pretty well trained. No bridle.”

“She prefers it.”

“The horse does?”

“Aye. We’ve an understanding.”

The horse watches me with the deep liquid patience of an animal who’d rather be eating. Unlike the white one, this horse seems perfectly ordinary. Though the man on its back is anything but.

“Speaking of horses.” I tuck the pencil behind my ear. “I saw a white one in the trees. On the road to your castle.”

“Ah,” he says with a small nod. “I wondered if you would. Did you go near him?”

I shake my head. “No. He was off the track in a clearing. I waved at him like an idiot, of course. He just looked at me so I kept walking. Got the feeling he wasn’t that friendly.”

He looks at me for a long second.

“Your feeling was correct. He’s not friendly, and you’re not to go near him.”

“All right,” I say, though I feel that pathological avoidance thing that Maddie is always talking about rearing its ugly head, that urge to do the opposite of what I’m told to do.

He studies me, squinting for a moment, as if he can read this defiance on my face. “I mean it. He’s wild. He bites.”

I open my mouth, then close it again.

The part of me that read The Black Stallion thirty times in the third grade is sitting up in the back of my head, alert. He bites is a challenge, she’s saying. He bites is exactly the thing the hero says to the girl in the book before the girl tames the horse no one else can ride! As you can see, I have not entirely outgrown her.

The other part of me, the part that’s grown some sense in the last year since I got my ass handed to me by life, points out that wild horses in the Scottish Highlands are not Walter Farley’s wild horses, and that he bites is what people say when they’re trying not to alarm you. There’s something worse than biting.

“Okay, I get it,” I respond carefully. “I’ll stay away.”

He watches my face. I can see that whatever he sees doesn’t fully satisfy him, but he lets it pass.

“I came to ask you something,” he admits.

“You said you wouldn’t come to the cottage again,” I point out.

“And I haven’t.” He looks around. “I’m not even sure if this is Galloway property or crown land.”

I give him an expectant look. “Alright, well what did you want to ask me?”

“To come down to the rocks tonight. The flat black ones at the foot of your spit.”

“What? Why?”

“You asked me what ready meant. I’m giving you a place and a time. After dark, I’ll come up from the water. If you’re there, I’m there. If you’re not, I go home.”

“That’s the offer?”

“It’s not an offer.” His reply has all the patience in the world. “It’s a place and a time.”

“But…why the rocks?”

“Because I told you I wouldn’t come to your cottage till you asked. The rocks aren’t your cottage.”

“That seems like a loophole…”

“I’m good at those.”

Yeah, I can see that.

“Right but…” I rub my lips together, trying to figure out what to say because I’m not even sure what he’s saying. “Don’t you think you could just…try to be frank with me? Because so far, every time we’ve met, you’ve had the most cryptic, vague shit coming out of your mouth.”

His brows raise, but he doesn’t say anything. I guess I am being a bit blunt, but hell, he could use it.

“And that’s an issue for you?” he eventually asks.

I raise my shoulders and give my head a shake. “I just want to know what you want. Are you…interested in being friends? More than friends? Neighborly acquaintances? Why can’t you come to my cottage, you’re the one who makes the rules, don’t you? Why do I have to meet you at the rocks? Why are you always swimming? Really just…what do you want with me?”

The horse shifts its weight beneath him. Alasdair gives me a tiny curve of a smile.

“You want to know what I want with you?”

I give him an incredulous look. “Well, yeah?”

He looks at me for a long moment and the world seems to still. The wind has died entirely. The only sounds I hear are the faint breath of the horse, the gulls a long way off, and the dry rasp of the bracken when the air finally moves through it.

“I want to know you, Iris. As much as you’ll let me. As long as you’ll let me.” His voice has gone lower, a timbre I feel in the marrow of my bones. “Whatever you call that—between friends and more than friends—is your business. I’m not going to put a name on it for you. I came around the bay because I wanted to see you. I’m asking you to the rocks because I want you there. And I can’t come to your cottage because I made you a promise, and I’m a man who keeps his promises.”

“That’s the most you’ve said to me at once.”

“Aye.”

“And it still doesn’t quite answer the question.”

“No.” The smile comes back. Smaller. “But it’s closer than I’ve been before.”

I guess that’s progress?

“I’ll think about it,” I mutter. Because unlike him, I’m not promising anything.

“I hope you do,” he says, eyes glittering.

Then the horse turns with a snort and he rides off across the moor without looking back. His mount moves in a slow rolling canter, the kind that says it could go faster but is choosing not to. It’s one hell of a beautiful sight.

I stand there with my sketchbook, watching him go. I don’t try to draw it. I’d only make it worse.

My phone has three texts from Maddie when I get back to the kitchen.

you alive?

Iris?

has the neighbor gotten you laid yet, or are we still pretending we’re not pretending?

I write back: Not yet. Going for a drive rn.

She replies instantly: good. go far. text me later.

I put down the phone. I look at the kettle, thinking I might have a cup of tea but I’ve already had enough caffeine from the coffee this morning, and I’m out of sugar anyway.

What I want is a real stiff drink, in a room with people in it who don’t know my name, and don’t look at me the way Alasdair does. I want to get the bartender at the Torridon, who struck me as the no-nonsense kind, to tell me something about my neighbor and his castle, something Alasdair wouldn’t want me knowing.

I told Maddie I was going for a drive, so I get the car keys.

The Torridon is the same as it was the first time, with the lazy fire and a mixture of locals and tourists. The bartender glances up when I come in, and frowns in that way of faint recognition.

I pull up a seat at the bar and eye the beers on tap and the menu.

“What can I get for you?” he asks.

“Whatever’s local on tap, amber preferred, and the special for lunch.”

He fills the glass. “American, aye?”

“Aye,” I say, still feeling silly when I say it with my accent.

“I remember ya. You were the one taking over the Galloway place down the road.”

“That’s me.”

He sets the amber pint in front of me. “I’m John MacLeod. Welcome back.”

It’s a small thing—welcome back—but it does something to me. Makes me feel like I’m slowly becoming a part of the land. Either that, or it’s becoming a part of me.

He brings me a plate of haddock and chips with the kind of mushy peas that come from a can, and a lemon wedge. The haddock is good, the same fish they use in the Cullen skink (I know, I was dismayed too when I learned skink was not a fish).

After I’ve had half my pint, and the lunch rush seems to slow, I work up the courage to blurt, “Mr. MacLeod.”

“Aye? You can call me John.”

“What if I meet another John? I’ll get confused.”

“You’re sooner to meet another MacLeod.”

“Okay, well, John…you know the castle across the bay from my cottage?”

“Ob Gorm Mor.”

“Excuse me?” I ask, thinking maybe he’s had a stroke.

“Ob Gorm Mor is the name of the bay between you. Means big blue-green bay.” He doesn’t look up from the glass he’s cleaning. “And the castle is Caisteal Eachainn.”

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

“What about it?”

“Is anyone living there?”

The glass goes onto the rack. He picks up another. He takes his time.

“Officially, no. The trust that owns it considers it uninhabited.”

“And unofficially…?”

He looks at me then and I can see him trying to decide how much info to give me.

“Unofficially,” he starts, “there’s been a man in that castle, off and on, longer than I’ve worked this bar. Quiet. Doesn’t trouble anyone. Comes in here once in a while for a drink. Pays in cash. Doesn’t stay long.”

Oh, thank god—Alasdair isn’t a ghost. He exists.

“Does he have a name?”

“He’s never given me one.”

“Has anyone?”

“Lass.” MacLeod sets the glass down. “If a man comes into my pub and pays for his pint and minds himself and makes no trouble, I don’t ask after his name. That’s how this pub stays a pub. You follow?”

“Sure do,” I agree, feeling slightly reprimanded.

“Aye.”

He goes back to the glasses. I work on the chips, squirting some brown sauce on them, then dipping them in tartar. I let a beat go, and another.

“My great-aunt…” I trail off.

“Yes?”

“Did she come here much?”

He almost smiles. “Effie Galloway sat where you’re sitting once a fortnight for forty years. Half-pint of bitter, a full if she was feeling fine, a packet of crisps and a stare at the door like she was waiting for someone to walk through it.”

The chip in my hand goes cold.

“Did anyone? Come for her, that is?”

“Not while I was serving.”

That sits in me. I drink some of the pint to push it down.

“Did the man at the castle ever come in here and talk to Effie?”

He shakes his head. “Never saw them together. Man from the castle was always alone. He preferred it. So did Effie, mind you.”

Hmmm.

The door opens behind me. MacLeod glances up and his shoulders go back.

“Inspector.”

Oh god, please don’t let it be MacRae again.

The man who’s come in takes the stool four down from mine. He doesn’t look at me, but at least he’s not MacRae. The bartender pulls him something dark without being asked. Inspector, apparently, says, “Fine afternoon.”

“Same to you, Sinclair.”

“Quiet today.”

“Tuesday. Always quiet.”

A pause. The man clears his throat. “I’ve news, if you want it.”

“I never want it.”

“Aye. Well then.”

I stare down at the chips and hope he keeps talking because last time I was here I got a boatload of information and I don’t want to pass that up again. Even though that information did me more harm than good.

Sinclair lowers his voice. “Body washed up at Gairloch last night. Tide brought her in.”

My eyes widen. That’s not too far from here. Just a couple of lochs over.

“Christ.”

“Aye.”

“Same?”

“Same. We’ve a witness this time. Hill-walker through the trees up the slope. Couldn’t see clear, the light was failing, but he saw enough.”

“What did he see?”

“A woman on the shore. Screaming. And then she wasn’t on the shore anymore. He says it was a man. Dark hair. Tall. He says she was being dragged into the water.”

The fork in my hand goes very still on the plate.

“He couldn’t see her face,” Sinclair goes on, low. “He couldn’t see the man’s face either. By the time he got down to the water, the shore was empty. Blood on the rocks. A shoe.”

“Fourth this summer.”

“Fourth.”

“Christ.”

“Aye.”

A long silence. MacLeod polishes a glass that does not, by any measure, need polishing.

“They should be scared,” Sinclair says, quiet. “The women on this coast should be very scared, MacLeod, and I don’t know how to tell them that without telling them what they already know.”

“Aye.”

“You’ll spread the word?”

“As I can.”

“Without spreading panic, of course.”

“Well, that’s the trick of it.”

“Aye. That’s the trick.”

I eat one more chip I don’t taste. I push the plate forward an inch. I lift my hand for MacLeod, as if I’ve been doing this all my life, and he comes over with the tab on a small folded slip.

“Thank you, Ms. Galloway.”

“It’s just Iris,” I reply. I lay cash on the slip—too much, because I always tip too much when I’m rattled—and I sling the canvas bag over my shoulder as I stand.

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Iris.”

I turn toward the door.

Sinclair is looking at me. Not openly; just enough to see who I am.

I drive the whole way home with both hands tight on the wheel and the same sentence replays in my head.

Dark hair. Tall. Dragged into the water.

Alasdair this morning. Black trousers, black shirt, bare feet on a horse with no bridle, telling me to come down to the rocks after dark, where he’d come up out of the water to meet me.

A lot of the men on this coast have dark hair. A lot of them are tall. Sinclair said the witness couldn’t see clearly. I’m building a case out of nothing.

Except I’m not.

I know I’m not.

I get home. I lock all the doors and check the windows several times.

The light goes at nine and the bay turns slate, then to iron, then black as sin.

I sit at the kitchen window and watch the rocks at the foot of my spit go shadowy, and then darker, and then gone. I don’t walk down to them. I don’t see him come but I also don’t see him not come. The water is too dark by the time I’d have known either way.

It’s not long before I close the curtain and hope he wasn’t out there this whole time, staring at me, taking in all the fear and worry on my face.

I go to bed and fall asleep wondering whether I’ve just saved my own life or done something he won’t forgive me for.

And what I’m going to do about it.

Chapter

Ten

I’m at the kitchen table with my second coffee and a half-finished sketch of a knapweed I cut on the way back from the moor two days ago. The sketch hasn’t been going well. The petals keep coming out wrong no matter what I do, and the coffee isn’t helping.

I’m just about to go get a fresh cup when there’s a knock at my door.

Fucking hell, I think to myself, nearly jumping out of my skin. One would think that being in a cottage in the middle of nowhere would mean I wouldn’t have many visitors, but clearly that’s not the case. There’s someone knocking at my door nearly every damn day.

I stand up quietly and listen. Hear a man clear his throat from outside the door. At first, I am certain it was Alasdair, even though he promised—for reasons I can’t figure out and maybe don’t want to—he wouldn’t visit me at the cottage again, but Alasdair isn’t a man who coughs to fill the silence.

Alasdair is the silence.

I go pull back the curtain and peer through the window. There’s a cop car in my driveway, same one I saw at the Torridon Hotel a few days ago.

This can’t be good.

Automatically I think I’ve done something wrong, illegal, even, like I was caught driving on the wrong side of the road and didn’t realize it, or I didn’t know that honking at Highland cattle when they’re blocking the road is a crime.

I’m practically sweating when I open the door and see the same cop who had the conversation with the bartender.

“Can I help you?” I ask, trying to sound nonchalant and not incredibly guilty over imaginary things.

He’s standing on the front step in plain clothes, his hands at his sides, the small respectful distance of a man who does this for a living. Up close he’s older than I thought at the pub, late forties, solid build with that older man paunch. His eyes are grey-blue and they’re taking me in, all of me. I’m suddenly very aware of how disheveled I must look with my hair pulled back in a greasy, messy bun—I’m due to wash my hair—wearing a black hoodie, lime green silky harem pants I snagged on sale, and fuzzy slippers.

“I’m Inspector Sinclair. I saw you at the Torridon a few days back. I’d hoped to catch you then but you left before I’d had the chance.”

“Ah, yes, I think I remember seeing you there.” I give him a shaky smile, trying to play it cool.

“Aye.” He gives a small nod, as if that settles something. “Sergeant MacRae down at Lochcarron sent your report up to me. You called him awhile back about a man on your property?”

Oh. “I did…”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you can spare half an hour.”

“Sure.” I wait a beat, however, because the thought occurs to me: Could this be who Effie was talking about? Don’t let him in. Did she mean this cop? Did she means all cops in general? Did she mean any man?

But it feels like I’ll get in big trouble if I don’t oblige. “Come in, Inspector,” I say, stepping aside. At the very least I’ve always wanted to say a line like that, as if I’m acting in a British murder mystery show.

He gives me a faint smile and steps over the threshold.

I take him into the kitchen. I offer him tea and he accepts, and as the kettle boils, I make an effort to gather sugar and milk into little ramekins my aunt has stacked on the shelf so I don’t offend him with too little or too much of either.

He looks around the kitchen, noting the salt at the windows, but doesn’t comment.

“So, Miss Galloway…”

“Iris.”

“Iris. I’ll be straight with you. I’m working a series of incidents on this stretch of coast between Ullapool and Lochcarron and your name came across my desk. MacRae’s report mentioned a man on your property. A man you’d had at your door the previous evening. A man you said gave his name as Alasdair and said he was staying at the castle across the bay.”

“That’s right,” I say slowly.

“How many times have you seen him since?”

The question is so direct it almost takes me off-guard. Who is this man to know how many times I’ve seen him and if I’ve seen him at all?

“Once,” I lie through my teeth. “Maybe twice. At the start of all this. He came to the door; the time MacRae knows about. I saw him out walking around the bay once or twice after. We haven’t spoken in a while.”

It comes out smoothly, which surprises me. I’ve been a great many things in my life, but I’ve not, generally, been a person who lies cleanly to police officers. I always have a tell—and that’s to say too much—so I clamp my jaw together as a reminder not to go blabbering and ruin it all.

Sinclair’s face does not change.

“You haven’t spoken with him?”

“Not really.” His brow raises and my jaw becomes unclamped. “In passing. Hello. Good morning. You know, not what I’d call speaking, speaking. Just…noises coming out of my mouth, really.”

Oh god, Iris, shut up. So much for that.

“And he hasn’t been to the cottage since the night MacRae has on record?”

“No. He’s not been in here.”

It’s not a lie lie.

“Can you describe him for me?” he asks as he takes out a notepad.

I describe a man. I describe a man who is several inches shorter than Alasdair, with short brown hair instead of black, and with hazel eyes. The description I give would fit a hundred men on this coast.

The real question is, of course…just why the fuck am I lying for him, a supposed, possible serial killer?

Because you know, deep down, he’s not, I tell myself.

I’m choosing to believe that for now.

“Mm,” Sinclair rumbles.

He takes a long sip of his tea. His eyes go to the salt line at the back window again. They stay there for a beat, then they come back to me.

“Iris. There’s something you should know, and I don’t know that the people in these parts will ever come around to telling you.”

I set my mug down. Jesus. He has my full attention now.

“There have been four incidents this summer between Lochcarron and Ullapool. Women, on the shore, alone. I’m not going to give you details because the details won’t help you. What I will tell you is that the last witness we had described a man on the shore with the victim, and the description was specific enough to be useful, and the description matched what MacRae has on file about your visitor.”

He says it flatly, letting it sit in the air between us. Meaning, he knows the description I just gave him is a load of shit.

“I’m not here to tell you who that man is,” he adds. “I’m here to tell you that if he comes to your cottage again, or if you see him on your property, or if he speaks to you in passing, I would like to know about it. Here is my card.”

He slides it across the table. I don’t pick it up.

“You think he’s the one? This Alasdair?” I wonder.

“I think he is a man we’d like to talk to. I think you are a woman living alone in an area of the Highlands where four women have either been killed or gone missing this summer. I think your great-aunt kept her doors locked her whole life and the salt on her sills for a reason, and I think I wouldn’t be doing my job if I sat here and pretended I didn’t see that salt.”

“Did you know my aunt?”

“I knew of her.”

But there’s something else, I can tell it’s on the tip of his tongue. I do the thing where I wait, trying to be comfortable with the silence instead of yammering my way through it.

It’s hard but it works.

He clears his throat and slowly spins the teacup around. “There was a case in 1962. A young woman, Catriona Carmichael, went missing from this coast. Your great-aunt was the last person to see her alive. She was a person of interest. She was never charged, obviously. The case is still open. Inactive, but open.”

He’s watching me carefully, though I think he knows I have no idea what he’s talking about, nor how the hell my aunt got wrapped up in anything to do with a missing person.

“I’m telling you this because the cottage is yours now. And because, if anything turns up on this property, I’d want to know about it before I read it in a report.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It means call me first.”

Good lord, what is with these Highland men and their inability to speak plainly?

He stands up, the chair making a loud sound on the kitchen floor. He hasn’t touched his tea past the first sip.

“I’m sorry to bring this to your door, Iris. I’ll see myself out.”

He doesn’t wait for me to walk him. He goes back through the sitting room, into the front hall, and out the front door, then I hear the car start a moment later, and the wheels on the gravel, and the engine receding down the drive, and then nothing.

I get up and lock the door.

Then I go to the trunk.

I placed the trunk in the mudroom and, despite having told myself I need to go through all the letters and materials in the chest, I haven’t done so in a while. I guess there’s been a part of me that wants to remain in the dark.

But not anymore.

The latches are stiff as I work them open. The lid lifts with the soft dry creaking of old hinges, and the scents of camphor and lavender, and, beneath that, the smell of paper.

I take everything out and lay it on the floor around me.

The field sketches I have already looked at. The packets of pressed flowers, the tin of pen nibs, the notebooks I haven’t yet opened.

The horse on the cartridge paper, the one that looks exactly like the one I saw in the woods, came at low tide; did not invite.

The list of names, forty-seven of them.

At the bottom, against the cedar wood of the trunk’s base, are two things.

A bundle of letters tied with twine, the paper cream and slightly yellowed at the edges, and, beside the bundle, in the corner of the trunk like it was placed there with intention, a small wooden box.

It’s a bit larger than my palm. Dark wood, almost black, polished smooth. There’s no clasp on it, no hinge that I can see, only a thin seam around the middle that suggests it does come apart somewhere if I knew how. The wood has carvings on the lid I can’t quite read in the low light. Knotwork, maybe? Or letters that aren’t letters in any alphabet I know.

I pick it up.

It’s heavier than it looks.

I shake it gently. Something inside makes a dull, soft sound against the wood.

I sigh and flip it over again, unsure how to open it.

I set the box on the floor beside the bundle of letters and sit cross-legged on the cold floorboards with both of them in front of me, my hips screaming at the stretch, and look at them for a long time without touching either.

The bundle is the easier of the two.

I untie the twine and release the letters, maybe twenty in total. The top one is dated 3rd of March, 2024—a year before Effie’s death. The bottom one, when I work my way down, is dated 9th of November, 1949.

Seventy-five years.

I read the top one first.

It’s brief. The same handwriting on every letter, Effie’s hand, neat and slanting, the kind a person used to writing in field notebooks has after decades of doing it.

Eachann, it reads.

The bargain holds. I have not asked anything of you that you did not say you would give. I have kept what I said I would keep. I do not know if I am writing because I want you to know it, or because I want me to know it. Either way. The arrangement has been a kindness to both of us, though I would not have chosen the word at the time.

I will not send this. I never send them. But I write them. That is the part I cannot stop doing. Maybe in hopes that one day you’ll ask to see them.

—Eufemia

I sit back on my heels.

She didn’t send any of them? I suppose that’s why they’re all gathered here.

I read the next, dated 2014.

Eachann. I saw the woman from Inverness on the eastern shore this morning. I have not asked you and I will not ask you. I think that means something between us. I hope it does.

I read down.

The letters span the decades in the rhythm of a woman who knew a man for a long time and wrote to him often without ever sending them. References I can’t trace—the spring storm that took the boat, the woman who came with the dog, the cold winter when the loch froze the full way across—and references I can. Mainly names I recognize from the list of forty-seven. Bridget. Pavlina. Mary. Catriona. The names appear in Effie’s letters one by one across the decades, never in accusation, never in explanation. Just named, documented.

A letter dated 11th of August, 1962, is folded in three; the paper is creased deep with handling.

I open it carefully.

Eachann.

They came to my door today. I told them what I could and what I could not. I know what you did and don’t need to ask but they are hungrier than I am.

For what it is worth, I don’t regret the bargain. I don’t regret you, even on the days it feels like I do.

—E.

I read it again, slowly this time. The date…there’s something about the date.

Then I remember what Sinclair said. She wrote to him on the day they came about Catriona Carmichael. Whatever arrangement they had, she chose not to tell on him, for lack of a better word.

She loved him. All of these letters are nothing more than love letters she was too afraid to send to a man named Eachann. She refused to invite him in, for whatever reason, whether it was real or just superstition. She wrote to him for decades and never sent the letters, never let him in, never let her wishes be anything other than dreams.

That is a story. That is a love story I can hold, albeit a tragic one.

What I cannot hold is the man across the bay who told me, in a firelit room three days ago, that he knew her. Well enough.

But that was Alasdair. This Eachann is someone else, some other man. A predecessor. A man much older than the one in the castle now. Alasdair’s father, maybe? After all, Caisteal Eachainn was the name of his castle. Spelled differently, but too big of a coincidence to not matter.

What happened to Eachann? Was he still out there, killing and disappearing women? God, he would have to be Effie’s age, in his nineties I imagine, at least. Can ninety-year-olds do that? How old was the oldest serial killer?

I gather the letters back into their bundle. The twine is fraying in one place, so I tie it loosely and put it next to the mystery box. Blue light slants in through the mudroom window.

The afternoon has gone.

I’m about to stand up when I hear it.

Thud.

A single soft thud from above me.

Not loud. One muffled sound from the floor over my head, a sound like a book dropping.

My heart lurches. Every muscle in my body freezes, including my lungs.

No, not again, I think as I look at the ceiling. I can’t deal with finding more bones, not now.

But the cottage is silent around me. I only hear the faint drip from the kitchen tap. I strain my ears even harder but there’s nothing but a gull crying in the distance and the rustle of the wind outside.

I slowly get to my feet.

I know I closed that door, I know I did. I haven’t been up there since earlier.

House settling? It’s always a house settling, right? It was one thump, it’s possible.

As silently as I can, I creep to the bottom of the stairs and listen again.

Nothing.

I climb, the creak of the stairs giving me away to anyone who might be up there. My stomach churns, making me feel a little empty and sick with fear.

The hallway upstairs is the same as earlier. The door to the guest bedroom is still closed. I turn the knob, the sound loud and ominous, and push open the door.

The room is empty.

The single bed is against the far wall, the pale quilt smoothed flat. The jawbone is where it last was, which is kind of a relief in itself, and kind of not.

I stand in the doorway in the dimming light and make myself look at the room as carefully as I can, even though every new spot my eyes land on scares me. The rafters above me. The small window onto the bay. The wardrobe on the left wall, doors closed. The closet in the corner.

I look at the closet again, which remains locked and without a key after I tried to open it the first night.

The door is at the back of the room, set into the wall under the slope of the eaves, painted the same white as the wall with a small brass keyhole. The wood of the door looks older than the room somehow, and the handle is dark with use.

There are marks on the floorboards in front of it. I don’t remember seeing them before. It’s enough that I slowly cross the room toward it, the floorboards creaking noisily as I go. Which is another relief, because if someone really had been walking around up here, I would have heard it.

Up closer, I can see two small curved scuffs in the wood, the shape a door makes when it has been opened against floorboards more than once over the years. I carefully kneel and run my fingers along the scuffs. The arcs are recent enough that they have not gathered the same fine grey dust as the rest of the floorboards.

The closet has been opened. But when? Days ago? Weeks? Months? Years?

I’m about to get up when I noticed a gleam. I peer closer. There’s salt on the floor at the base of the door.

Just a few grains of coarse sea salt, the kind sprinkled all over the house. They sit just outside the closet’s threshold, on the floorboards, as if they spilled inside and have not been swept up.

I touch one. It dissolves slightly on the pad of my finger. I lick the next one to be sure.

Yup. Salt.

Someone has been pouring salt inside the closet, and, at some point, opened the door, making salt come out the opening.

And that someone was not me.

I sit back on my heels with my finger still pressed to the grain of salt and I look at the brass keyhole of the closet door. All this time I’ve been assuming it’s just a closet because that’s what the solicitor said—the spare bedroom upstairs has a large closet for storage—but now that I think about it, it takes up most of the room. A narrow A-frame like the rest, judging by the shape and length of the house, but there’s got to be at least four or five feet in there. It could be more of a small room than a closet.

I think about the wooden box downstairs.

I think about the carvings on its lid that look like letters from an alphabet I don’t know.

I think about Effie putting a key in a box and the box in the bottom of the trunk and the trunk under the stairs.

Did she leave me a map of some kind, like some sort of mystery to solve?

And if so, what’s the map for, and have I been reading it right?

The trunk was addressed to me, and her note was cryptic and disturbing as shit, but everything else in the trunk doesn’t seem to have much rhyme or reason other than she wanted me to discover them. She wanted me to learn something from them.

Only problem is, the more I discover, the more confused I get.

I think I have more questions for my new neighbor.

Chapter

Eleven

It’s been three days since I discovered the letters from Effie to Eachann, since I found salt at the closet door, since I realized that Effie has been trying to communicate something to me. I’m not going to jump to conclusions and say she’s doing so from beyond the grave because I’d rather not believe I inherited a haunted cottage, but she at least gave me some blueprints to survive this place before she died—it’s up to me to try and figure them out.

But as much as I love a puzzle, figuring it out hasn’t come easily to me. Mainly because the more I think about it, the foggier my brain fog gets, and the more I creep myself out.

So I keep busy, working in the studio and keeping my mind occupied, hoping my subconscious will do the heavy-lifting and come to an epiphany. I press the flowers. I draw and paint, trying to meet my deadline. I try not to look at the box I’ve placed on top of the chest in the corner of the sitting room, but every now and then I fail. I sit cross-legged with it in my lap, turn it in my hands. and try four ways till Sunday to find a latch, and the seam stays where it is, and nothing about the box opens.

It won’t give up its secrets, no matter how much I threaten it. I’m this close to smashing it open with a hammer, but something tells me that would bring me seventy million years of bad luck or something.

The next night I go down to the rocks at dusk. I sit on the flat black ones at the foot of my spit for an hour and a half and watch the water darken with the sky. Alasdair never comes up out of the water to meet me. I walk back to the cottage with my legs cold and my pride colder.

He said if you’re not there, I go home. I wasn’t there night after night, so…he went home.

And maybe he’d meant home for good.

Which could be for the best. I mean, there’s a—possibly senior citizen—serial killer on the loose, which my great-aunt may have been complicit in, plus talk of drowned wives and who fucking knows what else. I should be happy and relieved that my sexy, potentially murderous neighbor isn’t coming to visit me anymore.

But I’m not.

And then one morning, I wake up and I am just done.

I’m done with the box that won’t open. I’m done with the letters I’ve read four times. I’m done with sitting in a cottage waiting for a man who’s already told me he’s not going to come. I am, mostly, done with myself. Done with being in this cottage and letting things happen to me.

I need to make things happen for myself.

I’m going over to that motherfucking castle and knocking on his god damn door.

I’m aware this is a bad idea. I’m aware that the rational thing—the thing Maddie would say, the thing the woman I was a year ago would do—is to call Sinclair, hand him the letters, and let him do his job. I’m aware that I’m choosing a man over a detective, a stranger over a uniform, the version of this story with monsters in it, over the version that seems more straightforward.

I’m choosing it anyway. I don’t even need to talk myself into it. My brain, my soul, every witchy part of me that has been passed through the Galloway bloodline, wants to believe in creatures and ghosts and that something fantastical might be at play here. I have no fucking idea what that could be, and maybe in the end this really is a case of cold-blooded murder from a psychopath, but either way I’m going to figure this all out or die trying.

Okay. Hopefully not the “die trying” part.

I barely get a cup of coffee down before I’m on the move. I put on my wellies and the wax jacket. I put my hair up. I think about bringing the box and seeing if Alasdair can help me with it, but something tells me, very strongly, that the box should remain in the cottage and definitely out of his grasp.

The sky is growing lighter through the trees by the time I’m at the end of my driveway. By the time I’m on the main road, the wind has picked up. Halfway down his access road, the rain comes.

It comes down the way rain here does when it’s been making up its mind all morning—all at once and with relish—the kind of downpour that gets past the wax of any jacket in under a minute. I push my hood up and keep walking because there is no shelter between here and the castle and going back would be worse.

Though at the moment, I can’t imagine anything worse than this.

I’m soaked to the bone, and it is fucking miserable.

I keep slogging through, and a couple of soaked minutes later, I come to a sudden stop.

The white horse is in the same clearing as before.

He’s standing there calmly, his pewter mane gone dark and ropy with the wet, his eyes black and unblinking. I stop on the track and wipe away the rain from my eyes.

I should keep walking. I know I should keep walking. He bites. I know.

But I take a slow step toward him. Then another. He doesn’t move. He lets me come. I get within five feet, close enough to see the breath blooming at his nostrils, close enough to see the wet on his lashes, close enough that the part of me that read The Black Stallion is purring like a child who’s been told yes. Yes, I’m the special one, I’ll tame you.

I put my hand out.

My hand isn’t even fully extended before the horse’s head comes up sharply—not at me, not even toward me, just up, like he’s been spooked by something in the forest—and he’s gone, a clean, fast turn, and he’s thundering through the trees, the white of him visible for a beat between the trunks and then nothing. The clearing is empty. The rain falls into the space where he was.

I stand there with my hand still half-extended, feeling slighted and a little embarrassed. The part of me that thought he’d let me touch him was loud, but I have a feeling that horse spooking just saved me from a grave mistake.

I lower my hand, shove it in my damp pocket, and walk on.

The castle in the rain is a different castle. The downpour makes it streaked and shining, the stone gone dark, water sheeting from the broken parts of the parapet, running down the curtain wall in fast bright lines. It’s only now that I notice another building behind some brush and a rocky outcrop—maybe that’s the stable where he keeps the bay horse?—and a ruin of sorts with a car parked beside it.

So, he does have a car. It’s an old one, too; though I guess I expected that. A boxy khaki-green Land Rover from ‘70s it looks like. It seems to be in mint condition, but that could just be the rain covering up its flaws.

I stare at it for a moment, then turn my attention to the castle. I scramble down into the ditch and up the other side, gracelessly, slipping and sliding, through the gateway into the courtyard.

The foxgloves in the courtyard are bowed flat. The wild roses are dropping their last petals into puddles. I walk through with the rain in my face, and head straight to the door.

I knock.

The knock sounds faint, swallowed up by the rushing rain. I knock again, harder.

The door opens.

He stands in a dark blue sweater with the sleeves shoved to the elbows and an open book in his hand, his finger keeping the page, his hair a little disheveled like he’s been sitting in a chair reading for a long time. He sees me and his face does a thing I have not seen it do before.

It opens.

It’s the only word for it. The way his flawless, carefully-composed face seems to come apart at the seams, opening like the clouds do for the sun, uncovering a smile that is so full it almost has light in it. He looks at me, soaked to the bone with my hair plastered to my skull, and he smiles like he’d been given a gift he had long stopped expecting.

For a few seconds I forget how to breathe.

“Iris,” he whispers in awe.

“Can I come in?”

“Aye, you certainly can.”

He steps back from the doorway and I cross the threshold of the castle.

The hall is cool stone and warm light. The book in his hand goes onto a small table inside the door. He has not stopped smiling and it does silly things like let loose a swarm of butterflies in my chest.

“You’re soaked.”

“The rain started halfway down your road.”

“Here, take off your coat,” he insists, and I shuck it off, the water dripping all over his floor. He takes it in his hands and hangs it up for me.

“Come, I’ll start a fire,” he says.

He touches my shoulder lightly to guide me and brings me through into the room I saw from the courtyard window. The room is cold but it’s still warmer than outside, the numerous candles giving off heat of their own. The leather chair he was reading in is pulled close to the hearth, as is the small wood table beside it.

“Sit,” he commands, “by the hearth.”

“I’ll ruin your chair.”

“It’s survived worse.”

He goes to a heavy wooden chest at the side of the room and takes out a folded length of cloth and brings it back. I can’t tell if it’s a blanket or a piece of tapestry, all deep crimson velvet, worn to thinness in places, an embroidered crest at one corner, the gold thread of the crest tarnished almost to black. He drapes it over my shoulders and I immediately feel warmer.

I reluctantly sit down in the chair, my body immediately sinking into the soft leather, thanking me for getting off my feet. The walk down here has woken the fibro up the way the damp always does, the ache settling deep into my hips and the small joints of my hands, and I must give a certain look without meaning to—a wince perhaps, I can’t control my face—because he goes still, watching me, and his brow draws down.

“You’re in pain,” he notes, looking me over attentively.

“It’s nothing. An old friend.” I flex my fingers and they complain about it, loudly. “I have fibromyalgia. My body decided years ago it would hurt for no particular reason, and the cold and the wet make it worse, and I just walked here through both, so.” I shrug, the practiced shrug, the one that says please don’t make it a thing. “It’ll settle.”

I expect him to do what people do—the quick sympathetic noise, the changing of the subject, the faint discomfort of the healthy faced with a body that doesn’t work right. Instead he crouches by the hearth and builds the fire up higher, deliberately, until the heat of it reaches me where I sit, and then he takes the velvet from where it’s slipped off one shoulder and draws it back up, settling it over the worst of where I hurt without my having told him where that is.

“Then we’ll keep you warm,” he says simply. “And you’ll not move from that chair until you’re ready to. There’s no hurry in this house. There’s never been any hurry in this house.”

Something in my chest goes tight and hot, and it has nothing to do with the whisky. Because nobody does that. Nobody just…believes it, and adjusts, no questions asked, no making me prove it first.

“You didn’t ask if I was exaggerating,” I say, before I can stop myself.

He looks at me, faintly puzzled, like the thought hadn’t occurred. “Why would you exaggerate your own pain to me?”

And I don’t have an answer for that, because the honest one is because everyone makes you, and I’m not ready to say a true thing that large to a man I barely know.

He seems to read this on my face too because he says, “Whisky?”

“Yes, please,” I say, now grateful for the change of subject. All this attention, this beautiful, focused attention on my pain, is making my heart bloom.

He pours me a generous serving standing at his bar cart, and hands me the glass.

I drink. It burns, but it burns so good. I can tell the whisky is older than I am and probably expensive as hell.

He starts putting together a fire with logs from a brass bin and it lights quickly. In no time, I can feel the flames.

He drags another chair toward the fire and sits down across from me, looking at me through the firelight. The smile has gentled now, but has not gone. He still has that look of awe in his face—though I detect something else there; something I don’t want to read too much into.

I find my voice.

“I read the letters.”

His face falters slightly. “What letters?”

“Effie’s letters. They were in the trunk.”

A pause. He does not look away.

“I’m not exactly sure what letters you’re talking about.”

I might believe him.

“Seventy-five years of them. From 1949, to a year before she died. She never sent any of them.”

He looks down at the glass in his hand. “Well, that explains why I’d never heard of them, doesn’t it?”

Maybe.

“She wrote them to a man named Eachann but saved every one of them.”

He turns the glass once in his fingers, watching the amber catch the fire. His face has is impassive and impossible to read.

“Aye.”

“Who is Eachann? It’s in this castle’s name, isn’t it? The sign at the start of your driveway.”

“Yes. A name this castle has been called by, the man who lives here. The local term, going back a long time. Means chief. Leader.”

“So who was the man she wrote to?”

“Hard to say without seeing the letters.”

I have another sip of whisky. This time it goes down even smoother.

“There was a name in one of the letters,” I continue after a swallow. “Well, in a list. Catriona Carmichael. Inspector Sinclair came to the cottage and told me she went missing in 1962. Effie was the last person to see her alive.”

He looks up at me sharply. “Sinclair came to your cottage?”

“Yeah. A few days ago.”

He sets his glass down. His face has changed—not worried but definitely alert—his posture stiff, eyes more intense.

“What did he ask you?”

“About the man on my property I reported the other week. He wants me to call him the next time I see that man.”

“And will you call him?”

“No. I don’t know what man he’s talking about.”

I’m tempted to wink so he knows what I mean.

He looks at me for a long moment, the light from the fire dancing on his face hypnotically, his eyes seeming to spark with flames. Suddenly I’m out of breath again.

He picks the glass back up.

“Catriona Carmichael,” he says quietly. “The name sounds familiar. From the village, maybe, but very long ago. She had something to do with your aunt?”

“Seems so.”

“Hmmm.”

We lapse into silence, save for the crackling fire. The whisky is warm in my chest, and the blanket is heavy on my shoulders, and outside, the rain has slackened to a quieter rain, the kind that will fall steadily now for hours.

But I’m not done yet.

“The letters were with a list that had forty-seven names, including Carmichael’s.”

He waits, staring at me curiously.

“I think some of them are the drowned wives.” I go on, as silly as it sounds. “From the folk tales or legends. I think Effie was keeping count.”

“Aye.” He turns the glass in his hand. “She would have.”

“Did she know those women?”

“Hard to say, but that’s the sort of thing she would keep track of.” He peers at me. “The two of you are very much alike.”

Maybe too alike.

“Drowned by what? What drowned the wives?”

A small silence.

“There are stories,” he begins, adjusting himself in his seat. “There have always been stories, and the stories create new stories. This is the Highlands, Iris. Every loch in this country has at least one creature in it according to someone. The fishermen who used to work this coast lived their whole lives by them. Half the place’s names are bloody warnings.”

“Like the Loch Ness Monster?”

The smile comes back, smaller.

“Nessie’s a good soul. She doesn’t bother anyone.” A beat. “But these depths have other things in them, and you wouldn’t want to meet most of them on a bad evening.”

“And yet you just swim in the loch every chance you get.”

“I have nothing to fear.”

His face changes again, becomes softer somehow, and he sets the whisky down. He looks at the fire for a long second, and when he speaks, his voice has gone quieter.

“The women on your aunt’s list. If she meant the drowned wives, they were taken. Over a very long period of time.”

“By what?”

“By something in these parts.”

“Something…a person? An animal?”

He doesn’t answer, just raises a shoulder in a light shrug.

I let out a long, frustrated sigh. So helpful.

“The village has known about them and not spoken of them for as long as there have been villages on this coast,” he eventually says. “Your aunt was one of those who kept what she knew. She kept it well.”

“That literally doesn’t answer my question.”

“I suppose it doesn’t. I’m sorry I don’t have any answers to give you.”

I fight the urge to roll my eyes.

“Did you know any of them? The women on the list.”

A pause. The pause goes on a long time.

“I don’t know of this list without seeing it. But, aye, I knew of the drowned wives. I made a point of knowing of them. They were women on this coast. They didn’t deserve to die. They deserved to be known.”

He says it with a reverence I was not prepared for, like the way a priest says the names of the dead.

For all our talking, I feel like I’m at an impasse again, with even more questions than answers. I’m still wet yet warm at the same time, and the whisky is going to my head, and the man across the fire is talking about dead women like he cared for them, and nothing makes any sense at all.

I should be afraid. I have been afraid, off and on, for weeks.

Yet I’m not afraid now and I can’t explain it.

I take another sip of the whisky.

Hmmm. Maybe it’s the booze.

“You haven’t asked me why I came…” I trail off, running my fingers over the blanket’s faded embroidery.

“What does it matter? I’m just grateful that you did. I don’t want to interrogate the grace.”

“That’s a hell of a sentence,” I reply, biting back a smile.

“Aye.”

A log pops loudly on the fire, the sound filling the room. I’m starting to feel like time is standing still in this place, holding me in place by a current I have to fight against in order to keep talking.

“I came to ask you to be honest with me⁠—”

“—And I’ve been as honest as I can be tonight.”

“That’s not the same as actually being honest, though.”

“No. But it’s what I can give, foxglove.”

Despite myself, I can’t help but smile. “You know my name is Iris. Foxglove is just another flower.”

“You deserve to be named after all the flowers,” he insists in his rough brogue.

We stare at each other for a moment as I take in the beauty of his face, the slight cleft to his chin, the cut of his jaw, the mouth that’s both hard and soft at the same time, those eyes that pierce through the dimness with an intensity that rivals the fire.

Who are you? I think, as I have been asking myself this since the day I first saw him.

What are you?

“I should go,” I declare. “While I’m still capable of it.”

He doesn’t ask me to stay, which is kinda worse.

He stands when I stand. He carefully takes the velvet blanket from my shoulders, folds it once, and lays it over the back of his reading chair.

Then he walks me to the door.

In the hall, before the door, he stops.

He turns to me, and before I know what’s happening, his hand comes up. He cups my face with one hand—palm flat against my cheek, fingers light along my jaw—and he holds me there. He doesn’t pull me toward him. He doesn’t lean down, or try to kiss me. He just holds me and looks at me, like someone who is trying to memorize someone in case they don’t come back.

And his eyes…his eyes are wet.

I almost miss it. The firelight catches one of them; there is a brightness there that has nothing to do with the fire, and his throat moves once before he speaks

“I have waited a long time for a Galloway to knock on this door. If you come back,” he says thickly, “come back knowing what you are doing, and what you truly want with me. And I will tell you what I want with you.”

He lets my face go, my skin feeling impossibly cold without his touch while buzzing with electricity that seems to flood my whole body.

He opens the door.

I step over the threshold and the rain is still falling, the courtyard is silver in it. I walk back across the flagstones with the velvet of his hand still on my cheek, and my breath caught somewhere behind my collarbone, and I don’t look back until I am at the gateway.

When I do finally look back, he is standing in the doorway, watching me go.

He raises one hand.

I raise mine.

Then I’m on the road, and the rain is in my eyes again, and all I can feel is him.

That one touch wasn’t enough.

Chapter

Twelve

I’m shaving my legs.

This might not seem like much to some, but, to me, it’s the equivalent of putting banners and a wacky inflatable tube man outside of the cottage and announcing that my vagina is open for business.

I haven’t shaved my legs for a long time is what I’m getting at, and the only reason I’m doing so now isn’t because I’m planning on taking a dip in the loch and I want to look good for the drowned wives, but because I know I’m going back to the castle tomorrow.

Alasdair, in his ever-so cryptic ways, had told me that I would come back when I know what I’m doing, and what I truly want with him.

Well, unfortunately for him, for my mother, for my bank account, I’ll never truly know what I’m doing. I think that’s one of the great mysteries of my life that will keep on being a mystery, because at no point have I ever figured anything out, and I’m not sure if that’s going to change in the future. Being Iris Galloway means I’m one giant work-in-progress, a sketch that I keep erasing and redoing in the ongoing pursuit of completion. Of satisfaction. Of something close enough to be perfect so I can sit back and say, I did it! I know what I’m doing! Hang me up on the wall, I’m done!

But at least I know what I truly want from him…

His dick.

I want to climb that man like Tarzan and swing from all his branches.

I want to get fucking laid.

And that’s okay. I’ve accepted it, made peace with it, and decided that it’s okay. Because I deserve to have a little fun. I deserve it. And I know he’s just the man to give it to me.

Of course, the situation isn’t perfect.

He’s my neighbor, and there’s probably some proverb about not fucking your neighbor.

He also seems to be squatting at that castle—albeit in a really luxurious way since he seems to lay claim to it while everyone else says no one is supposed to live there.

He could be the serial killer that’s been murdering women in the area.

He seems to be on a first-name basis with the Loch Ness monster.

He’s really forward, and maybe more into this than I am, judging by his stalker-y behaviors—swimming back and forth to see me, standing outside my windows at night, appearing behind my laundry, and saying things like, “I have waited a long time for a Galloway to knock on this door”—whatever the fuck that means.

But I have seen that dick, and I know he has capable hands, so…

I’m shaving my legs. And everywhere else that counts.

The next morning, I have my coffee and sugary cereal with wee marshmallow hares and stare across the bay, wondering if I’ll see him appear. I know he said I would have to come to him, yet again, but still…if he could just swim over right now, that would save me a walk.

Alas, he doesn’t come. Which means I have the whole morning to chicken out. I attempt to sketch, then to read, but by noon I feel that pull—both from someplace deep inside, something destined if you want to be woo-woo about it—and from my nether regions. Because now that I’ve gotten the idea of sex in my head, I can’t get it out. Or should I say, my body can’t let the idea go, and I think I’ve become something of a heat-seeking missile.

Granted, I’m assuming that this is something he wants. He hasn’t actually told me what he wants from me; I’m supposed to tell him first. Like when you finally gather up enough courage in grade school to tell a boy you like him and only then will he say, “I like you too,” although that didn’t work out so well for me in the third grade when I told Nick Meffin I liked him, and he flung a booger at my face in way of response.

I’m not expecting anything like that from Alasdair, but I am being a tad presumptuous in assuming he’ll fuck me. The most he’s done so far is let his very intense gaze linger on parts of my body when he thinks I’m not looking (actually, he probably does know and quite obviously doesn’t care), and cup my face like a scene from a historical romance novel. When I thought he was going to kiss me yesterday, my knees were getting ready to buckle.

But he didn’t kiss me. I think he wanted to, but he refrained.

Oh, and I suppose there was the whole jerking off in front of me when he knew I was watching him.

Either way, I’m going to have to take my chances, because I can’t keep doing what I’m doing here at the cottage, pretending that the man across the bay hasn’t permeated every essence of my being. Maddie would kill me if she knew what I was thinking, but she was right in saying I had to at least get laid. Bad idea or not, whatever is brewing between Alasdair and I is…inevitable.

I get dressed for the cool, breezy weather which means thick wool socks, boots, and a cozy cardigan over a long-sleeved shirt. I also get dressed for the occasion, which means no tights or underwear under my skirt because the last thing I want is to deal with that in a hurry. Do I risk flashing someone if a gust does up my skirt? Yes. But I think the only person I’ll be flashing is him…and maybe a few sheep.

I lock the cottage, then double check it again before pocketing the key (if Alasdair isn’t a murderer, then I definitely still need to take precautions…of course I should take precautions if he is a murderer, too). Then I set out walking at a brisk pace, not wanting to dawdle. I take the lane to the main road and the main road to the turning, staying in the middle to avoid my legs being scratched up by brambles and bracken. I’m at the bottom of the access road in just under an hour, which is good time for an out-of-shape woman with fibromyalgia who is mostly thinking about an erection that isn’t yet on the table.

The access road is dry today. The trees have lost the rain-shine they had two days ago. The light is better now too, clean, early afternoon, going gold at the edges.

I am ten or fifteen steps down his road when I see Alasdair.

He is much further down. Two hundred yards, maybe more, where the road dips and the trees close in. He’s walking. Not toward me, but away from me, heading home, as if he had somehow been waiting for me for too long and gave up.

Something in my chest drops and lifts at the same time. I open my mouth. Alasdair, wait…I have the words half out of me, my hand already coming up when suddenly he stops.

He doesn’t turn at first. He just stops in the middle of the drive with his back to me, his hands at his sides, and he stands there for a long beat like he’s not quite sure what he heard and doesn’t dare hope.

Then he turns.

Slowly. There’s a deliberate way his shoulders come round before the rest of him, the way his face, when it catches the sun through the trees, does the thing it did at the doorway of the castle in the rain. That cold, careful arrangement of features coming apart, the smile that lights from within, the way his eyes find me as if he’s been waiting for me to be exactly where I am.

He starts walking toward me now.

I start walking toward him.

Neither of us runs, but the walk is not a walk. It’s the steady deliberate pace of two people who have decided that the meeting is happening, and the only question is how many seconds they have to wait for it. The distance closes, and I’m unable to look away from his face, unable to do anything but move toward him like I’m being tugged, an invisible rope around my chest and ankles.

He stops a few feet away, a careful distance.

I stop with him.

I’m breathing hard from the walk, but he’s not. In fact, as far as I can tell, he’s not breathing at all. He’s gone still as he often does, but this is not a calm, idle stillness. This is a man holding himself back; his hands at his sides, fists clenched. The clenching is the only thing about him that’s moving, the slow pulse of his knuckles whitening and easing, whitening and easing, like he’s timing something.

My heart does several summersaults as it waits.

“Iris Galloway,” he says in a low, rough rasp that makes the hair stand at the back of my neck.

“Hi,” I mumble dumbly, suddenly feeling very awkward and put on the spot.

“You came.”

“I did.”

He doesn’t say anything for a beat. He’s looking at me like he wants to be sure he has me right, like I’m actually here.

He clears his throat.

“I asked you something the last time you were here. Whether you’d come back knowing what you want with me.”

“I remember.”

“Do you know now?”

It’s the whole question. It’s what I’ve thought about for every step over the last four miles. And there is some part of me that knows the honest answer is I don’t really know, Alasdair, I’ve never known anything in my life, and the part of me that knows that should win.

Except the part of me that is here today is not the part of me that knows things. The part of me that is here today is dumb and reckless and impulsive, and wants what it wants, and is tired of trying to be perfect and do everything right and still failing at it anyway.

“I want you,” I declare. It comes out easily, my voice surprisingly steady.

And there it is. The truth, for better or for worse. And even though I feel incredibly vulnerable admitting this in front of him, I square my shoulders and stay firm.

He closes his eyes.

Only for a second. His head tips back slightly, his throat moves. When he opens his eyes again, the blue in them has gone so vivid that I find myself trying to figure out what color I would use to paint them. Forget-me-not blue. Manganese blue. The blue at the bottom of a flame.

Or maybe the color doesn’t even exist in this world.

Alasdair blue.

“Aye,” he replies, very quietly. “All right then.”

Then he steps forward and he kisses me.

The kiss is slow at first. One hand to my jaw, the other to my waist. He comes down to my mouth without rushing, as if he had promised himself to take it one second at a time. The press of his lips against mine is flush and full and soft, a gentleness that gradually changes, becoming something harder and hungrier, and by the time his tongue sweeps across mine, I’m making a pathetic whimper against his mouth, my knees officially growing weak.

He swallows the sound, and the kiss deepens.

His hand at my jaw slides into my hair. His hand at my waist slides around to the small of my back. He turns us as he kisses me, slow at first, and then faster, and the next thing I know, my back is against the pale white trunk of a birch on the side of the road, and his body is against mine, and his kiss has become an animal of its own.

“Christ,” he swears into my mouth. “Christ, Iris.”

“Don’t stop,” I plead, suddenly struck by some unreasonable fear that he might think this is a bad idea, because I suppose someone has to.

“I’m not going to stop.”

He kisses me harder as if to reassure me. His hand comes up to my throat, just a little pressure there, just a wee hand necklace right out of the gate. Then his thumb under is my jaw, and he’s tilting my face the way he wants it for the kiss, and I’m letting him.

I think I’ll let this man do absolutely anything to me.

His mouth leaves mine and goes to my throat.

“You wore a skirt.”

“I did.”

“Was that for me?”

“Yes.” I breathe hoarsely. “I thought you’d want me to.”

He laughs against my neck, the sound rough.

“Aye, lass. I want it.”

His hand has come down to my hip. He’s gathering the fabric of the skirt up slowly, an inch at a time, his palm hot through it, the friction warm even through the wool socks where his other hand has dropped to behind my knee. The bark of the birch is rough through my cardigan, but all I can really feel is his other hand at the back of my neck, his thumb at the soft place behind my ear, the slow steady pressure of his mouth working its way down to my collarbone.

I feel like I’m being devoured on the spot, every single nerve singing up and down my body.

The skirt is up over my hips now, and oh, god. Part of me thinks this is moving too fast, that I’m too revirginized, too sheltered overall, to let him dive right into it. But I want it fast. I want him diving in. I want it all, and I want it now.

He slides his hand up the bare inside of my thigh, knuckles brushing lightly against me where I’m very newly bare.

And sensitive, holy Jesus.

Alasdair pauses, his hand pressing against me. He goes very still; his mouth comes off my throat.

He knows.

He pulls back an inch and looks down at the gathered fabric of the skirt where his hand is exploring under, and then he looks at me.

“You’ve got nothing on under here,” he says gruffly.

He closes his eyes again, breathing out through his nose. His hand has not moved from the inside of my thigh.

“Do you know,” he whispers, “what you have done to me?”

“Show me then,” I say. I’m a huge proponent of show not tell.

And at that, a sound comes out of him from deep inside, something guttural, primal. He kisses me again, harder, nearly bruising, and his hand on my thigh moves up. His fingers find me, and I’m gasping.

“Christ, Iris. You’re so very wet.”

“I walked here thinking about this,” I manage to say through a gasp, the feeling of his cool fingers against my warm, bare flesh close to sending me over the edge already.

“Tell me what else you were thinking about,” he growls.

Of course I will play along. Not to think of Ryan at a time like this, but he was never one to be verbal during sex, and didn’t seem to appreciate it when I was.

“Your hands,” I tell him, the boldness coming through easily.

“Where?”

“Where they are now.”

“Where else?”

“Everywhere,” I breathe.

He groans and kisses me again, his mouth taking mine. His fingers start to explore me, slowly, carefully.

I can’t help the noises escaping me, they’re completely out of my control now.

“Quietly, lass,” he murmurs against the side of my mouth, his lips wet from mine.

“What?” I manage to ask.

“The woods are listening. I’ll undo you and you’ll come quietly, you understand?”

Not really, but I’ll honestly do whatever the hell he wants at this point. That need, that urge to come stems from some lizard-brained part of me, and right now it has total control.

He’s kissing me hard again, his tongue soft but violent—perhaps to devour me, perhaps to keep me quiet—and his hand is moving against me with a ruthless rhythm, dipping in and out of me slowly. The sound is lewd and surprisingly clear, which makes me want to yell at my vagina for being so loud when he specifically said not to be. The woods are listening, or something? Who cares!

He works me the way you do with something you know well, something you do all the time. Obviously, he hasn’t had me before, but now I know he’s had me before in his head a thousand times. The way his thumb knows where to be, and his fingers know how to angle, and the way he reads my breathing, and how his other hand touches my breast through the long-sleeved shirt, pushing under my bra cups, knowing exactly how I like my nipples to be pinched. I’m clutching at his sweater with both hands, and the bark of the birch is biting into my shoulder blades through the cardigan, but all I can really feel is his cool fingers on me everywhere.

“You’ll come for me, Iris,” he demands roughly.

“Yes,” I gasp. Almost there.

“You’ll come for me here, against this tree, before we go another step toward my house.”

I make another sound that sounds like a yes.

“And then you’ll walk the rest of the way with me with shaking knees, and you’ll step into my home, and you’ll tell me what else you want.”

God, yes.

“Yes.”

“Say my name.”

“Alasdair,” I moan.

“Aye. Christ, I could listen to you all day.”

And I could have him do this to me all day. All day, every day, forever.

I’m close. I’m closer than close. He’s been at it for what feels like a year but is probably two minutes, and I am moments from letting go entirely. He keeps his skilled hands moving, knowing exactly what they’re doing to me, and puts his forehead against mine, surprising me with the intimacy.

“Look at me when you come, Iris.”

I can’t find the words to refuse. I look at him.

His eyes are that Alasdair blue, swallowed up by the dark pools of his expanding pupils.

“Now.”

It moves through me like a tidal wave, slamming into every crevice and corner from head to toe, obliterating my thoughts. My hands are locked in the front of his sweater, and my hips are rocking against his hand, wanting more, more, more, even as I’m getting too much. The rough trunk of the birch is the only thing keeping me up, my eyes on his and his on mine. There is a moment where I see something in his face, this primal intensity of his eyes that verges on the surreal, the look of a creature being given a thing it has been promised. And then I close my eyes because I can’t look any longer. I’m suddenly afraid, so wonderfully, blissfully afraid.

His fingers slow, and he’s breathing hard for once. He kisses the corner of my mouth, and the side of my jaw, and my throat. He waits until I’m somewhat coherent again, my heart steady, and eases his hand out from under my skirt.

I watch him bring his fingers to his own mouth.

He closes his eyes briefly as he sucks on them, and when he reopens them, I’m beyond hypnotized at this point.

“Iris,” he says thickly.

“Uh huh.”

“You walked four miles to be undone by your neighbor. Tell me you will not be ashamed in the morning.”

“I won’t be ashamed,” I tell him.

“Tell me again.”

“I won’t,” I insist, even though the truth is I have no fucking idea what I will feel because part of me, most of me, can’t believe what the hell just happened.

“Aye, lass.”

He kisses me softly, with gratefulness and reverence.

Then he drops down and kneels on the mossy ground.

I can scarcely breathe with the sight of him at my feet like this.

He runs his palms up my thighs, strong fingertips digging into my flesh, and stares up at me through his dark lashes, his gaze electric.

“You are so very lovely, Iris. Worth waiting all this time for.”

I should probably press him on that, the whole waiting all this time for thing, because that’s not the first time he’s said something like that. But honestly, his fingers fucked the brain cells out of me and I have like, two left, and they aren’t doing much of anything but bumping into each other like a bunch of drunken buffoons.

He slowly brings his hand up higher, under the skirt, and I’m about to ask him to wait a moment so I can desensitize myself before he goes down on me, or whatever he has planned from that angle, when suddenly he goes still.

His head turns toward the driveway. He’s looking down it, toward the main road, the direction I came from. His mouth has gone into a flat line and from the tilt of his head, the way his eyes are scanning, I can tell he’s listening.

“Alasdair—”

“Hush, Iris.”

I hush.

I don’t hear anything for a second. Then I do. The sound of tires on gravel. The low growl of an engine taking the access road at a careful pace.

His hand is on my elbow before I have time to react. He pulls me, with speed that surprises me, around the trunk of the birch, into the deeper cover behind it. He has me against the back of the tree now, the side facing the woods, and his body is between me and the road. He puts one hand on the trunk beside my head and the other at my waist and he holds me there, still, his face above mine, his breathing controlled in a way it wasn’t a minute ago.

The engine gets closer.

It comes up the access road at maybe fifteen miles an hour. It rolls past us slowly, past the birch and wet bracken, and I can’t see it from where I’m pinned, but I can see Alasdair’s eyes following it. I see the second his eyes settle on whatever vehicle it is, because his face hardens, the look in his eyes becoming sinister.

It’s enough that I get a chill down my spine.

The car continues down the road toward the castle. The engine recedes. The sound of tires on gravel goes quieter, then faint, then is gone.

After a long beat, Alasdair steps back from the trunk. He looks at me. His face has smoothed out somewhat, but the concern is evident on his brow.

“Who was it?” I ask.

“Inspector Sinclair.”

The name lands sharply in my stomach.

“He’s going to the castle,” I say, feeling panicked. “To see you. Did he see us?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“He was watching the road. He didn’t look at the trees.”

I’m suddenly very cold, in the place between my shoulder blades that was warm against him a minute ago. The me that was proud of herself for getting fingered in the forest at long last is suddenly at odds with the part of me who just heard a police inspector’s car drive past her on its way to her lover’s house.

Lover.

The reality of what has just happened between us comes crashing down. I push it away, to deal with later tonight with a vat of wine.

“He’s probably come for you.”

“Aye, probably,” he agrees, running a hand through his thick hair.

“You can’t go, then.”

He gives me a sharp look. “I’m going, Iris. It’s my home.”

But is it, though?

“Alasdair…”

“He’s not coming to arrest me. If he were, he wouldn’t have come alone. He’s come to ask me things, to follow up on what he talked to you about. He’ll ask, and I’ll say what I say.”

“And what will you say?”

“What I have to.”

And what the fuck does that mean?

He searches my face, perhaps seeing the question there. “Go home, Iris.”

“Don’t tell me to⁠—”

“Please.”

The please is what does it. I have a feeling it’s a word he rarely dispenses.

“Go home,” he urges, gentler now as he takes my hand and gives it a squeeze that’s harder than it is comforting. “Walk a different way back to the road if you can. Stay off the access road. Stay out of his sight. He doesn’t know about you.”

“Of course he does. He just came to see me.”

“He knows you’re a woman in a cottage who lied to him about a man. He doesn’t know about us. Go.”

I want to protest again because I think he’s making a huge mistake, but he puts his hand to my face and cups my jaw the way he cupped my face at the door of the castle three days ago. He holds me there. His thumb moves once across my cheekbone.

“Iris.”

“Yes,” I whisper, feeling all gooey at his touch again.

“I’ll come and find you tonight. After he’s gone. Sunset. I won’t come into the cottage. I’ll be on the rocks. If you want to know what was said, you can come down.”

“Okay?”

“Go now.”

So I go.

I take a faint deer track through the woods that runs roughly parallel to the access road, the way he showed me with his eyes when he said go a different way. The track is rough and uneven and my hips will hate me tomorrow, maybe even tonight.

As for if I will hate myself, well, that remains to be seen. I don’t know whether I just made the best decision of my life, or set into motion a thing I won’t be able to take back.

Chapter

Thirteen

The first thing I do when I get home is pour myself a glass of wine, which I drink in the bathroom while I freshen up and do my business that needed doing.

Then I go upstairs, change into leggings and a sweatshirt because my body suddenly wants to be warm and hidden, come back down, refill the glass, and sit at the kitchen table. I make myself a bowl of soup and crackers which I barely eat, but I do drink the fuck out of that wine.

The bay is going gold outside the back window. The afternoon light has turned that low slanting Highland color that makes everything in this country look like a painting, especially as it lights the top of the castle. Surely, Alasdair and Sinclair have run into each other by now, but I don’t know whether Sinclair has cuffs out and a charge sheet open, or whether the two of them are sitting in those leather chairs in the firelit library with their whiskies, talking around the things they mean to talk about.

I don’t know anything, anymore, really. Today was proof of that.

I take another sip of the wine.

My phone is on the table. I pick it up. I open the message thread with Maddie.

She’d kill me. She’d kill me twice. Once for what I did against a tree on a road in the middle of the afternoon with the man she told me to stay away from—and who is probably the man my aunt told me to stay away from, too— and once more for what I’m planning to do about it. She’d probably try to convince me to talk to Sinclair again and tell him all that I know, which is that I know nothing. Worst case scenario she might even tell me to give up on the cottage and come back to Chicago.

But I can’t have that conversation. Not tonight. Not yet.

I put the phone face-down and push it away with my fingertips.

The trouble with Maddie being right is that, well…she’s right. Officially, as of today, I have gotten involved with a man a detective is investigating, whose attention I unwittingly called to the situation to begin with. I have lied for him by way of not informing on him, by way of sitting here and drinking wine and not saying a word. I’ve allowed my body to be put in a kind of debt I’m not, in my saner moments, capable of carrying.

A man who might be a killer. A man who, in some other reading of the evidence, is something even less likely than a killer, and yet somehow more dangerous. A man who no doubt is hiding things. A man who walked toward a police inspector without flinching while the taste of me was still in his mouth.

As of today, I’m involved with him in a way I wasn’t before. Yes, only his fingers have been inside of me, but it’s the beginning of the end anyway, the start of what I knew to be inevitable.

Because I want him inside me.

I want him inside me badly enough that the wanting is making it hard to sit still in this chair, even after I have come for him in the forest this afternoon. The wanting is its own thing now. It has its own gravity, its own direction. It is sitting in my chest like a small additional heart, beating just and only for that.

I keep waiting for the panic. I keep waiting for the part of me that should be sensibly losing her mind about all of this—the disappearances, the lies, Sinclair’s investigation, the names on the list, my dead great-aunt’s letter that says don’t let him in in a hand that has clearly seen things—to wake up and start kicking and screaming. But that part of me isn’t screaming. It’s sitting in the kitchen with me drinking the wine, watching the bay go gold.

It’s keeping me company.

And that is what’s scaring me. Not him.

Me.

I drink the rest of the glass.

I sit at the table for a long time until the gold darkens and the sun starts to go down, the kind of sunset where you think it’s going to be a good one judging by the high fluffy clouds in the sky, creating the perfect canvas to catch the colors.

Then sunset arrives in full and the sky goes from gold to bruised, that strange burgundy and orange, the kind of evening light that makes you want to break out the alizarin crimson and goldenrod and make a shoddy attempt of capturing it.

But there is no painting tonight.

I step outside to find the breeze enough to keep the midges at bay and strangely warm for this time of evening. I gaze at the surface of the loch, that metallic sheen rippling slightly in the wind, and then I see him.

He’s halfway across the bay, his head surfacing, dark and featureless and backlit enough that his black hair shines dark rose gold.

I’m down the slope and onto the rocks in less than a minute. He is closer than I thought, he has crossed most of the bay already, the white of his shoulders breaking the copper of the water with a slow easy stroke. Fuck, he’s fast.

He sees me come. He stops swimming for a second. and lifts his head out of the water. Even at this distance I can see the smile he gives.

He swims the rest of the way toward me with a slow easy stroke. He is maybe fifteen feet out from the rocks when his head comes up out of the water properly and he plants his feet on the bottom, the loch chest-deep on him, his hair slicked back, the wet of his face catching the gold-burgundy light. He starts wading in.

“Stay in the water,” I tell him. It comes out of my mouth before I have worked out what I’m going to say.

He stops and blinks once. “Pardon?”

“I’m coming in.”

His face contorts, and he looks both apprehensive and pleased. He doesn’t say yes, please, but he also doesn’t say no, don’t. He stands there with the water gleaming around his ribs, and watches me start to undress.

I’m quick about it. I’m quick about it because I know exactly what my body looks like in this light, and I know that quick is the most flattering. The last person I undressed in front of was Ryan, and I don’t have the body I had when I was first with him. I have softness in places I used to have firmness. I have the white lines on my hips from when I gained and lost weight in my twenties. I have the small belly that no amount of walking can lessen, but stress sure does know how to add to it. But the sundown is being kind to all of it, and if I am decisive, I can be in the water before he can find any of the parts of me I would rather he didn’t peer at too closely.

With my clothes off, I leave the pile on the flat rock and get straight into the water with laser focus. I try not to think about how dark it is, what could be in there—never mind Nessie; the last thing I want is to step on mussels or a salmon—or how deep it is. I just go, the water sloshing at my legs.

I shriek like a banshee.

No surprise—it is cold as fucking hell. It punches all the air out of me in one breath, the cold going up to my hips and then to my ribs and my breasts as I keep walking out. I hyperventilate slightly because my body is not under my command anymore. I just keep moving. If I stop, I’ll panic and flounder, and then I’ll be a naked embarrassment.

I get out to where he’s standing, chest-deep. He reaches for me before I quite reach for him.

I’m so cold that the warmth of his hands feels like fire. His arms come around me, one across my back and the other under my arms, and he pulls me close to him in the water, and the long press of his body against mine is—there is no other word for it—hot. He is so warm in the cold water that I cling to him without deciding to. Also, because he’s nice, and what was I saying earlier about climbing him like a tree?

“Christ, you’re freezing,” he says. His face is so close now I can’t look anywhere else. His hair is dark and slicked back, water beading along his lashes, the wet glinting at the line of his jaw and the small hollow at his throat. The sundown is doing ridiculous things to him—gold and burgundy in the wet of his skin, the high cut of his cheekbone catching the light, the cleft in his chin holding a small bright drop of water. He is impossibly beautiful like this and I feel dazed in response to it.

“It was warmer at the cottage,” I mumble, willing my teeth to stop chattering.

“First time in a Scottish loch?”

First time with a Scottish man too, I think.

“Aye,” I say with an exaggerated accent. “It’s fuckin’ freezin’.”

“You get used to it,” he says with a slight curve to his lips.

“You’re warm,” I point out.

“Aye, that I am.”

“But you’re like, really warm. How are you so warm?” Even still, I can practically feel the heat radiating off him. On land, he’s quite cool to touch, but underwater, he’s like a furnace.

“I don’t know,” he replies.

But I know he’s lying. It’s not even a good lie—I don’t know, about his own body, from a man who seems to know everything? I add it to the list, the one that’s getting long: the things this man won’t answer straight, the questions that hit him and slide off like rain off wax.

And then, the way it keeps happening whenever I’m near him, the wanting-to-know, the endless questions I have for him, my relentless curiosity just… loosens. Lets go of me. Like the warmth itself is talking me out of it, or his grip around me, or that dreamy look in his eyes. It’s not even that he looks dreamy, no his gaze is as intense as ever, but when I look into his eyes I get this sensation that I’m the one in a dream. And somewhere far off, the sensible version of me—the one safe on the shore, fully dressed, not wrapped around a beautiful stranger in a haunted bay—is pointing out that once again he evaded my question.

But I’m not on the shore. I’m out here, wrapped up naked in his arms, in a loch that should be killing me with cold and isn’t, and I let it go. And every time I let it go, is another moment when the truth slips right past me, and in its place lies something more dangerous than not.

He holds me against him in the water, his warmth going into me through every place we touch, and the cold of the loch continues to slowly losing its grip. My face is against his throat. I can smell him properly for the first time, his skin in front of me without fabric between us, the salt of the water on him, and something underneath the salt that is doing things to my brain.

He smells like cold water and warm smoke and something sweet underneath that, like wood that’s been burning a long time. I want to drown in it.

I press my mouth against the place where his throat meets his shoulder and breathe him in. He makes a small sound, his hand at my back tightening. His cock, this always-present behemoth, twitches, making itself officially known.

“There’s my foxglove,” he murmurs. “You have no idea how dangerous you can be. How badly I want things from you that I’m not allowed to have yet.”

I lift my head and look at him curiously. His face is close enough that the tips of our noses touch briefly. His eyes are doing the thing again, the vivid ice-blue almost gone, the dark center wide. He has me lifted slightly so the cold doesn’t get to my chest, and I can feel the long hard line of him against my hip under the water. In all the magic—and horniness—of the moment, I almost forget what transpired today. And though it will break the spell, I have to know.

“Tell me about Sinclair,” I demand, feeling like I had to fight through fog to ask the question.

He breathes out. He puts his forehead against mine, which makes my heart skip several beats, and then he starts.

“He sat in my front parlor, took my whisky, and made it clear he wasn’t there to charge me. Said he just had some questions. He asked me if I’d been on the road to Ullapool in the last two months, or to Applecross. I said I had not. I said he was welcome to check any CCTV of my car if he wanted. He asked me if I knew any of the missing women. I said I did not. He asked me where I was on the night the body washed up at Gairloch.”

“And?”

“And I said I was at the castle, alone, as I am most nights.”

“Can you prove it?”

“He didn’t ask me to.”

“Why do you think he came alone?”

“He’s careful, I take it. He wanted to look at me. He wanted to look at the castle. He wanted to take what he saw and put it next to what MacRae has on file. He’s building something.”

I swallow uneasily. “Building what?”

“A case, or the start of one. Or a conviction in his own head, which is often the same thing.”

No fucking thanks to me.

“Think he has it in for you?”

He lifts a shoulder in a shrug and I loop my hands around his neck. “Maybe. Maybe he just wants the truth. Can’t blame a man for that.”

And what is the truth?

The water laps at my shoulders. He shifts his weight, treading slightly for both of us as a small swell passes through, and his arm tightens around me. His eyes sweep the dark bay for things I can’t see.

“He asked me about you.” His voice is low, his gaze meeting mine again.

I knew he would. I still feel my stomach drop.

“And? What did you tell him?”

“That you and I are acquainted. That we have spoken on a few occasions. That you have never invited me into your cottage, and that I have never been there.”

“I suppose that’s true. You’ve never been inside…”

Don’t let him in, don’t let him in.

“Aye. And then he left when his whisky was done. He told me he might come back. He told me to call him if I thought of anything else.”

“Thought of anything else? He thinks you’re to help him with it otherwise?”

“I suppose it’s better than nothing.” He pauses, his gaze darkening slightly, or maybe it’s the fading light. “I told him one more thing, Iris.”

“What?”

“I told him I’d become acquainted with you, and that I respect you, and that I would not want my acquaintance to cost you peace of mind. That if he had questions about me, he could come to me with them, and leave you out of it.”

“Oh, no.” I shake my head. “Why did you tell him that?”

“He took it badly,” he says instead of answering. “Said I was not in a position to tell him whom he could interview. He said it more politely than that, but that was the gist. I expect he will come back to your cottage now. Sooner than he might have.”

“You drew his attention to us,” I hiss.

“I drew his attention to me.”

“That’s not the same. Now he knows we’re together.”

“He already figured that out; he’s not dumb, this one. He was going to come back to you anyway. Better to have the truth in the open.”

The truth…

The water is very cold again, and his body is very warm, and the bay is going darker around us, the bruised burgundy going to slate. His arm is hard as iron at my back, and his eyes are going past me to the dark again—as usual, I don’t know what to do with any of this.

But I know what my body wants to do with it, that much is clear.

I lift my mouth and kiss him.

The kiss is mine this time. I’m the one who reached for it. He goes still for half a second, surprised, or trying to remember whatever discipline he had a minute ago, and then his mouth opens against mine and he kisses me back, and the kiss is the kind that takes the rest of the cold out of me at once. He tastes of salt and whisky. My legs go around his hips. The hard line of him is against me again through the water. I roll my hips against his length, slow, and he makes the sound he made in the woods, a low guttural sound I feel in my frozen toes.

“Iris,” he rasps against my mouth.

I don’t answer, nor do I stop. I kiss the wet of his throat, then the line of his jaw. I get my hand between us under the water and find him, thick, hard and impossibly hot.

“Christ,” he swears, and I’m swearing too because my god, he’s a fucking big boy, I can hardly wrap my fist around it.

He lets me hold him for one long second. His forehead drops to my shoulder. He breathes against my collarbone. His hand at my back has gone stiff, fingers digging into my flesh. I run my hand along him under the water, slow, the way I have been thinking about doing for weeks, and the sound he makes is one that belongs to a barely leashed animal.

Then he catches my wrist.

He does it gently. He moves my hand off him, back up between us, and holds it against his chest, his fingers around my wrist, his thumb at the small pulse on the inside of it.

“No, lass.”

He says it the way you say no to a child reaching for a knife. Gentle and immediate.

It’s the kind of no that I don’t respond well to.

“Why not?” I grumble, trying not to whine.

“Not in this water, not in the cold, not where I cannot give you the attention you deserve. Not where…”

He trails off.

“Not where what?”

He doesn’t answer. His eyes are past me again, scanning the surface of the dark water. The arm across my back stiffens, and his other hand cups the back of my head, pressing my face against his throat, and I cannot see what he is seeing.

Tendrils of unease cascade down my spine.

“Alasdair?”

“Hush.”

“What is⁠—”

“Iris. Hush, please.”

I hush. His mouth is at my hair. I feel him breathing slowly, deliberately. The water around us has gone very still. Not even a ripple. There is no wind. There is no fish breaking the surface. There is nothing.

After what feels like a long time, his arm loosens. He pulls back enough to look at my face. His eyes are back on me, not past me. He smiles, and, though lovely, though ludicrously handsome, the smile is forced.

“I think I should get you out of the water.”

“What was that?”

“I think I should get you out of the water,” he repeats, voice firmer now, enough for the dread to take hold in my stomach.

He swims us toward the rocks, his arm across my chest, holding me up. The shallows come up under my feet and I find my footing on the mix of sand, pebbles and slippery seaweed. I walk up out of the loch alone, the cold air worse than the cold water, making me emit another banshee-like shriek, and I’m suddenly very aware of being naked on a stretch of rock with dusk coming down hard.

He doesn’t come up after me. He stays where he is, chest-deep, watching, as if I’m putting on a show. A really fucking awkward show called Iris Galloway Walks Away Naked!

I get to the flat rock, the pebbles ouchy on the bottoms of my feet, and put on my leggings and sweatshirt as quickly as I can, the fabric taking on some of the cold. Then I grab my boots and socks, not bothering to put them on—the chances of me falling over are high; I’m surprised I didn’t eat shit putting on my leggings. My hair is plastered to my neck and shoulders, and I’ll be cold the whole ouchy walk up to the cottage. I already know the bath is going to be the best bath of my life.

When I am dressed, I look back at him.

He has not moved. He is the same chest-deep silhouette in the water, his hair black against the slate of the loch, his eyes on me.

“Foxglove?”

“Yes?” Apparently that’s what I answer to now.

“Tomorrow, will you come to the castle? The afternoon is fine.”

My stomach swirls. “Sure.”

“I’ll be there. I’ll be waiting.”

Waiting for what? If he thinks I’m going all the way over there for nothing, he’s got another thing coming.

He looks at me one more time, nods, then turns and starts to swim away, gone within thirty seconds. Not just visually, but altogether, the way the rocks took him last time. One stroke and then nothing. No head breaking the surface. No long wake.

The bay is dark and empty.

I turn and climb the slope back to the cottage.

I let myself into the warmth, and lock the door. I peel off the damp clothes in the bathroom, wrapping my robe around me as I steal a glance at myself in the mirror. My reflection surprises me. My face is flushed like I’ve piled on copious amounts of blush, my lips wet and red, my eyes somehow darker, the whites whiter. I look healthy and fresh and younger, and though I know it’s probably because I just took a dip in a freezing loch, it might also be because being with Alasdair has made me feel incredibly alive. Yes, confused, afraid, worried, and horny, but all those things together really add to the “alive” experience.

When I’m done admiring myself, I turn on the bath, the pipes moaning loudly. Then, while it fills, I pour the last of the wine into the glass I left on the kitchen table earlier and bring it to the back window because I want to look at the bay one more time before I get in the tub.

That’s when I see her.

There’s a woman in the water.

She is maybe fifty meters out from my own rocks, in the deeper dark. Just her head and shoulders above the surface. Pale. Her hair is long, and grey, and wet against her face.

She’s looking directly at my cottage.

She is smiling.

I have a beat where I can’t make my body do anything at all, not even scream.

Then I blink and she is gone.

No splash. No ripple. The bay is the same flat dark it has been for the last twenty minutes.

There’s no one there.

There was never anyone there, I tell myself. It was something else. Your eyes are playing tricks on you at this hour.

In order to prove my point, I look around the bay and see a couple of gulls in the water closer to where the bay opens to the loch. Glancing at them quickly, I can see how, in this decaying light, one might think it’s someone’s head, the white of their chest being a face, the grey wings becoming someone’s hair.

It was a gull. That’s all it was.

I draw the curtain closed, blocking it all out.

But before I head to the bath, I pick up the jar from the shelf and refresh the salt at every window and door in the cottage. I do it carefully, the way Effie would have done it, and hope to god it holds.

Chapter

Fourteen

Iwake up better rested than I have any right to be.

The bath was hot, the wine finished, and I slept the kind of sleep you sleep when your body has been used hard until it totally gives up. My hair is still a bit damp on the pillow when I open my eyes. The sky outside the bedroom window is the soft pearl color above the velvet brown treeless mountains, the bay below it silver and smooth.

I stretch slowly, expecting the usual pains, but for whatever reason they’re operating at half capacity. Maybe there’s something about swimming in the loch, that cold bracing mineral water, that is good for the joints and muscles too. Like cold plunge therapy. Maybe that’s what makes Alasdair the way he is.

Alasdair. The memories of yesterday flood my mind and body over and over again, until I’m both reliving it and watching it like a voyeur might.

He told me to come in the afternoon.

That gives me a morning to figure out who I am between now and then.

I turn over in my bed, staring at the walls around me. The blank spaces where Effie had hung up art and took them down are just begging for something new to be put there, yet I can no longer be bothered. It’s funny how a week ago I was itching to make this cottage as mine as possible, and now, somehow, it already feels like it is mine, like we’ve kind of melded with each other, and we’re good the way we are. Still, if I saw a bric-a-brac shop in Torridon Village that looked like it could have some nice secondhand paintings, I could pick some up. Of course, I could paint my own, but I rarely hang my art. The one in the kitchen is already pushing it.

I wrap the robe around me, slip on my slippers, and put the kettle on. I make instant porridge because I don’t have the patience for the real kind today, and eat it standing at the kitchen window looking at the bay as I always do. Maybe one day, I’ll switch it up, stand at the front door, and stare at the gorse and heather and the thicket, and the tall, rounded peak of Beinn Damh as it looms over the cottage, but today is not that day.

I feel…fine. Good, even. Maybe great? If I want to be dramatic about it, I feel like I’d been lacking in several vital nutrients for years, and I finally got an IV infusion of them. And it wasn’t even his dick. Even his fucking fingers were enough to get the color back in my face, coupled with a bracing swim, of course.

I also feel, somewhere underneath the warmth, the small drop in my stomach that comes every time I think about how his eyes looked in the water, the feeling that we weren’t alone.

The bay this morning is empty. Bright, silver, ordinary. Nothing in it that I can see. That woman in the water last night was just a gull, I decided over and over again as I fell asleep last night. Nothing more.

Still, I think I’m learning not to trust the water.

I shouldn’t trust anyone.

Alasdair told me to come see him in the afternoon, which is good, because I have things I want to do first. I should be working—my deadline is coming up, and I’m so close to being done—but there’s pressure that comes with doing “official” work, and I just want a chance to get my bearings and work on something just for me. Better for practicing anyway.

After I have several more cups of coffee and get dressed, I head to the herb garden and breathe in deep, the bees buzzing in the late blooms of rosemary, the lavender already spent but still fragrant. I drag over a bucket to sit on and bring my sketchbook out to try and capture the sage.

It’s a tough herb to capture and my first drawing sucks. The leaves are not quite the right shape and the texture is off, the small downy hairs on the underside not catching the line the way they need to. It’s easy for the plant to look like it has Goofy and Pluto ears. So I do another sketch, which comes out better.

I sit on the overturned bucket in the even morning light and work for an hour and a half on the sage, getting two passable studies. The work does what I was hoping it would; taking me out of my body and mind, and putting me back into my hands. Hyperfocus takes over and whittles the rest of the world—the rest of my problems—away until there is only one thing: my pencil moving across the page, and the plant in front of me.

By the time I look up, the morning has stretched into a mild noon. The bay has gone from silver to the kind of grey-blue that has a bit of green in it. The light has softened and my back hurts, which means I have been hunched too long.

I stand up and groan, stretch a little, groan some more, then take the sketches inside. I look at the clock on the kitchen wall. It says quarter past one.

He told me to come in the afternoon.

Afternoon is now, I think.

I look down at my morning outfit—CU Boulder hoodie, grass-stained sweatpants—and decide to get changed.

Decisions, decisions.

It’s not like I have a lot of choices since all I have is what fit in my suitcase; the rest is still supposed to show up in a box one day. The skirt would work again, of course, but the chaffing from the walk wasn’t fun. I decide on those lime green harem pants—voted the ugliest pants in the world by most guys—but on top I wear a lace black bra, a thin-strapped black camisole, and a fuzzy black cardigan over that, so at least I have a little cleavage going on.

I mean, if I have any say in it, all these clothes will be coming off the moment I step foot in that castle.

I eschew my boots and the wellies because my back will kill me if I attempt another long walk in anything other than my sneakers, then I lock the cottage. I pocket the key and my phone, heading out to his access road for the third time in five days. The walk is shorter than it has ever been because my legs have learned this route now, and the bracken on the edges has started thinking of me as a regular.

I don’t see the white horse this time, and that is its a relief of its own.

I come down through the trees, through the gateway, and across the courtyard. The castle in daylight without rain looks less like a fairy tale and more like a real place, a home where someone lives, where logs need bringing in, where a man eats and reads and sleeps and does whatever the hell else he does.

I go to the door and knock.

He opens it before my knuckles have left the wood, and I’m suddenly face-to-face with him.

He’s been waiting, I can see that much. Though his expression as calm as always, there’s a gleam of impatience in his eyes, in the way his hand comes up to the doorframe like he is steadying himself before he steps back. He’s wearing an olive green dress shirt, dark pants, the collar of the shirt a little damp like he just washed his hair, and judging from the shine, I’d say he had. Or gone for a swim.

“Iris,” he says softly, and that low deep voice combined with my name makes my stomach flip a few times.

“Hey,” I respond, as if I’m all cool and casual.

“Come in.”

He steps aside, and I cross the threshold of the castle.

He closes the door behind me and the latch falls into place with a soft small sound. I am inside the warmth of the castle, the birdsong of the forest and the waves of the shore outside now muffled. In the background, I hear the fire crackle.

“You’re earlier than I thought you’d be.”

“I tried to wait but…” I shrug. “I’m not very good at that.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

He gently takes my cardigan from my shoulders and hangs it up on a brass hook by the door, the brush of his hands over my bare skin sending shivers up my spine. The heat of the fire is already reaching here, so the shiver is all him.

I turn to face him and he gives me the once over, a long quiet look that results in the faintest of smiles.

“Nice trousers,” he finally says.

I let out a small laugh. “Thanks. The diaper look is in, you see.”

“Aye. I see. Well, you make everything look lovely, though I think I prefer you in the kilt.”

“It was just a plaid skirt,” I tell him. “Or are all plaid skirts kilts?”

“Now you’re testing my fashion knowledge, of which I have none. Come.”

He takes my hand, his fingers closing around mine, a strong grip, his skin cool. He leads me through the front hall and into the room I sat in last time, the room with the leather chairs, the fire, and the books. The candles are lit on the long table, the candles down to perhaps half their height since the rainy afternoon, the wax pooled in the brass. The room is warm.

It feels like it’s been waiting.

The thought makes my stomach do another flip, though this time it’s tinged with apprehension. I might be nervous.

“Do you have a kilt?” I ask him.

His brows go up and he gives me an incredulous look. “Do I have a kilt?” His accent thickens as if to make a point and he gestures around him. “You’re asking if a man of the Highlands has a kilt?”

“I take it you do.”

“I have several.”

“Well, I have yet to see you wear them.”

“Aye. Well, perhaps you’ll see them one day.”

“So what clan are you?”

“Tea?” he offers, ignoring the question.

“No, thanks.”

“Whisky?”

“Not yet.”

He gives me a small smile and pulls a chair close to the fire—not the chair he reads in, a different one—and gestures to it. I sit. He goes to the wooden chest on the side of the room and brings out the velvet blanket again, the crimson with the gold-tarnished crest. He drapes it over my shoulders without asking. The weight settles on me, somehow calming. I feel like there’s something ceremonious about it all.

He sits across from me. He does not sit far; his knees almost at mine.

I run my fingers over the crest. “This crest. What clan does it belong to? Don’t make me google it.”

Those vivid pale eyes study me for a moment and then he nods. “Ah, yes. Google.”

“Yeah, google. When Sinclair came here, you must have given him a last name, one you haven’t given me. So, what’s your last name? What’s your clan?”

He continues to stare and then runs a finger over his chin, as if in thought. “MacCoinnich,” he finally says.

“MacCoinnich?” I repeat, the name pronounced Mac-KEN-ich. “Never heard of that last name before.”

“It’s old. Comes right from this area, from this coast.”

“And this crest?” I ask, looking down at the gold threads.

“It’s a bit worn, isn’t it? It’s supposed to be a mountain in flames. Same as our motto, Luceo non uro, which means I shine, not burn.”

“That’s beautiful,” I comment.

“Are you sure you don’t want something to drink?” he asks, clearing his throat.

“I’m fine, really,” I assure him.

“Then I would like to ask you,” he says, adjusting himself in his chair, “what you’d like to do.”

“What I’d like to do?”

“With the afternoon. With the evening. With the day, foxglove.”

“I don’t know.”

“Aye, you do.”

I look at him. He is watching me with the kind of patience he has been using on me for three weeks. He has no expectations; that much is clear. He’s offering me the day, and waiting for me to tell him what I want to do with it.

I want to get fucking railed, I think.

But instead, I say, “I want to know your house. This castle.”

He looks pleased with that, so I suppose I said the right thing.

“All right, then.”

“I want to see the library. I want to see the kitchen. I want to see wherever you spend your time.”

“It would be my pleasure.”

He stands, looming over me, and offers his hand. I take it. The blanket stays on my shoulders, like I’m a queen wearing a royal cape.

He shows me the library first, a long room behind the one we were in, two stories tall, the shelves going up past my head with a wooden ladder on a brass rail that rolls along the bottom shelves so a person can reach the upper rows.

How very Beauty and the fucking Beast.

The books are mostly old, like really old, but some are new. A clothbound Italo Calvino in English sits on a shelf next to a leather-bound something in Latin. There is a copy of a book about lichens of the British Isles that I actually have back at the cottage, having bought it right before I left the States.

“I have that one,” I say excitedly.

He watches me for a moment, that ghost of a smile cracking into something wider, into something like affection, and I realize he’s humoring me because only I would get excited that someone has the same book about lichens as me.

Calm down, you frigging nerd, I tell myself, but I know I’m hopeless.

Instead, I run my fingers along the spines of one shelf because I can’t help myself. The leather is so soft, thin and worn, and I bet the paper inside is the kind of paper that doesn’t exist anymore. I don’t dare pull a book out though, lest it crumble in my hands.

He shows me the kitchen next. It’s smaller and warmer than I expected, with a fire going too, banked low. There is a small brass kettle on the hearth, and a long wooden table scarred with decades of use. He opens a small side door that leads to a small kitchen garden full of bolted lettuce and a stand of leeks and herbs gone wild, rosemary like a small tree, lemon balm climbing toward the door.

“You grow herbs.”

“Some. Not as many as your garden.”

“You cook?”

“For myself. Aye.”

“Will you cook for me?”

He looks at me, brows raised. “If you’ll let me.”

“Oh, I’ll let you. I’m a terrible cook, and the only proper meals I’ve had are at the pub.”

He chuckles. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but somehow I’m not surprised.”

I punch him lightly on the shoulder. His muscle is rock hard and I try not to wince. “Show me what you’d cook.”

“For you? Now?”

“Yeah, why not? I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

I know I’m being a little pushy but I’m curious; anyway, he said the day was mine.

He thinks for a second, then goes to the door and looks out at his garden. He picks rosemary and lemon balm and brings them in and sets them on the wooden table. He goes to a stone larder room I had not seen and comes out with butter and a small piece of cheese wrapped in linen and a loaf of bread that he says he baked two days ago—he fucking bakes—setting all of it on the table and standing back as if to say, tada.

“Bread and cheese?” I ask, trying not to offend.

“Aye. With the herbs.”

It’s not exactly cooking.

“You know I can also make myself bread and cheese.”

“I’m sure you can. But I’m going to make you bread and cheese the way I would make myself bread and cheese. Sit.”

I sit on the bench at the wooden table and watch.

He toasts the bread over the fire on a long iron fork, browning each slice slow, then cuts the cheese into careful slices with a knife so old the handle is worn to fit his palm. He puts the lemon balm on the back of the hot bread and layers the cheese on top until it melts slightly, then adds sprigs of rosemary on top. He puts the small open sandwiches on a rustic glazed plate and sets it in front of me. Then he uncorks a small bottle of amber liquid and pours it into two tiny crystal glasses. Then he sits across from me on the bench and watches me eat.

The bread is incredible. So is the cheese, with a subtle smokiness. The rosemary is the right amount, and the lemon balm leaf he has tucked under one slice is the small bright note that makes the rest of it come together.

“Oh, hell, this is good,” I say, trying not to moan.

“It is.”

“No. This is literally the best bread and cheese I have ever had in my life.”

“Aye, foxglove. I know. Your face doesn’t hide much.”

True that. I eat the second piece slower because I want to savor it. He watches me eat and has a sip of his drink.

I do the same and I’m in for another surprise. The sweet tang of honey hits my lips, exploding on my tongue.

“Mead,” he explains, seeing my wide eyes. “Wine the way we do in the Highlands. Comes from heather honey. Very good. Might give you a headache if you’re not too careful though.”

It’s too late for that; I’ve already downed the heady liquor. He promptly refills the small glass.

“So, Iris. Tell me what you’ve been doing today.” He asks this like he’s genuinely curious, and is not just saying it to be polite and make conversation. By now I can tell he’s never one to talk for the hell of it.

“I drew sage,” I say before I take another bite of the bread. “Two studies. The first one was bad. The second one was less bad.”

“Will you show me, one day?”

“If you want. I mean, you’ve already seen my sketches on the kitchen table.”

“I meant, I want you to show me how you work. I want to see all of what you make, Iris.”

“Alright,” I agree shyly. “But I think we need to continue the tour.”

The afternoon goes along with certain ease. He shows me other rooms. A small chapel that has not been used as a chapel in a long time, the altar gone, but the cracked stained glass still in the windows, casting blue and red on the flagstone floor. A music room with an old piano, and a harp and bagpipes in the corner that he tells me he has not played in years—and I’m unsure if he meant the bagpipes or the harp. A small study with yet another fireplace and a polished desk stacked with books and papers, maybe the most chaotic part of the castle so far, and one room that seems recently used. I wonder what kind of work Alasdair does at the desk. I don’t see a computer in sight. Actually, I haven’t seen any technology at all.

By late afternoon, we are back in the main room with the tapestries and hearth. He pours me whisky now because the mead is finished, and we sit in the leather chairs across from each other as talk about this and that. Plants. The loch. The books he has read recently. Everything he says, every piece of information about himself he offers me, I take it like I’m starving, eating every piece of him up.

He tells me a story about a winter when there was so much snow he couldn’t leave the castle for days. He tells me about a fox that lives in the wall on the east side of the keep that I will probably see if I come often enough (though I really hope it’s not missing a jawbone). He tells me about the loch in October, when the light goes copper-bronze and the herons come down to fish before the season turns, and how he thinks it’s the most stunning time of year.

In exchange, I tell him about Colorado. I tell him about my mother and how she’s only texted me once since I got here. I tell him about my stepfather Frank and how much I dislike him. I tell him how much I miss my father. I tell him about Ryan, just enough that he knows I’m recently divorced. I tell him I miss having a dog—I had one with Ryan—Princess Buttercup—but she died a few years ago from kidney disease and I haven’t had the heart to adopt another since. I tell him I haven’t laughed properly in a year and I think I’m laughing again, here, today.

As we talk, the light goes amber, then bruised, then dim. The candles do more of the work. He gets up at some point and lights more of them around the room, moving from sconce to sconce with a long taper. The fire is built up. The room is warmer than my cottage has ever been.

I look around, trying to see if there are any actual lights. There is electricity in this place, isn’t there?

He comes back but he doesn’t sit down, just stares at me for a long second until I squirm a little in my seat.

“Iris,” he announces, as if he’s about to announce something serious. “I would like to take you upstairs.”

I don’t pretend not to know what he means.

“All right,” I say in a small voice, that apprehension coming back.

He leads me out of the room, across the front hall, and up a stone spiral staircase I’ve not been on before, the steps worn in the middle from centuries of feet. At the top of the stairs is a long corridor with doors on either side. He leads me to the one at the very end and opens it.

It reveals a massive bedroom with a very high ceiling. The bed is a four-poster of dark wood, hung with heavy curtains in the same deep red as the velvet blanket downstairs. There is a fire in the small fireplace, already going. There are candles lit, as if they were waiting for us, and a long window with the bay outside it, the late dusk just visible through the leaded glass.

He closes the door behind us then turns me toward him. He cups my face in both hands and I’ve never felt so dainty and small.

“Foxglove?”

I swallow hard. “Uh huh,” I squeak.

“Tell me what you want.”

He’s going to make me spell it out? “I told you yesterday,” I say.

“Tell me again.”

So he is going to make me spell it out.

I take in a deep breath. “I want you.”

“Aye.”

“All of you,” I add.

More than just getting finger-banged in a forest.

He tilts his head, as if thinking something through.

“You’ll have what I can give you tonight.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I will have my hands on you and my mouth on you in a bed for the first time, foxglove. It means I will make you come for me until you can’t anymore. It means I will not yet take all of you, because I am keeping that for a day that hasn’t come yet.”

My brows go up. “Why not?”

“Because there are still things you don’t know about me.”

Things? Oh, just things? How about mostly everything?

“Okay, so tell me them now.”

“No,” he responds, somewhat firmly. “Not now. Tonight you are mine in the ways I can have you. The rest is for tomorrow.”

I should push him and make him tell me. I shouldn’t let him put my body in his bed without telling me what he’s been waiting to tell me.

But I don’t push him, because I am a horny fool, and because the idea of his hands and mouth all over me reduces me to those two bumbling brain cells again.

I let him kiss me instead.

The kiss is long and slow and undoing. He has me in his bedroom, with the bed behind me, and he’s going to take his time. He undresses me piece by piece—the camisole, my bra, the pants, my underwear. He kisses along my skin where it becomes bare, then folds each thing as he takes it off me, setting them down on a side table. Eventually, I’m totally buck naked and he’s still fully dressed. Just like last night, before I got in the water. But unlike last night, while I do feel on the spot, I don’t mind him looking so much.

And he looks. He takes his time and my skin erupts in gooseflesh where his heated gaze has been.

“You are unfairly lovely,” he murmurs, his eyes flicking over me.

I make a whimpering noise, my cheeks and chest flushing.

“You need to take your clothes off,” I manage to say.

“In a minute.”

“Now. You’ve seen me naked like this twice now and I’ve not seen you.”

“Oh, but you have seen me naked,” he jokes with a small curve to his lips. “With binoculars of all things.”

“How did you…” I begin, but he walks me back to the bed. He lays me down on it slowly, his hand at the small of my back, easing me onto the heavy quilt. The bed is soft and old and the smell of it is woodsmoke and clean linen and him, more him than any room I have been in.

He stands at the foot of the bed and stares at me.

“Open your legs for me, foxglove.”

I make that whimpering sound again.

I open my legs for him.

He kneels at the foot of the bed.

“Christ, Iris. Look at you.”

But I can’t look at him. I look at the canopy of the four-poster above me. The wood is carved in places, the shapes are flowers, or knotwork, or…

Fuck it, I can’t focus on them anymore, because he’s sliding his hands up the insides of my thighs and pushing them wider, wider. And his mouth has come down to me; the first long, flat stroke of his tongue against me is the kind of thing that takes the air out of my lungs.

“Fuck.”

He laughs against me. Low. Pleased.

“Aye. Quiet, foxglove. The whole castle will hear you if you start now.”

The whole castle? Who else is here? I raise my head to meet his eye, but his attention is elsewhere. And then my attention is elsewhere.

He goes slow at first and licks me like he’s been wanting a taste for a long time and has decided he’s going to finally enjoy it. The flat of his tongue, then the point of it. The slow drag from where I am wet to the place where I need him most. He works me there with the tip of his tongue, small steady circles, while his hands hold my thighs open, and his thumbs press into the soft skin of my inner thighs hard enough to bruise.

I have never been done like this. Ryan only did this once and said he didn’t like the taste. But Alasdair is making sounds against me that suggest the opposite, small low groans that vibrate through me, like he’s the one being pleasured.

He shifts. He flattens his tongue and licks me long and slow from the bottom up, and at the top of the stroke he closes his lips around my clit and sucks, gently, and I make a noise that’s borderline embarrassing.

“That’s it,” he speaks against me. “That’s it, foxglove. Let me hear you.”

“I thought you said…”

“I said quiet. Not silent. Let me hear you.”

He puts his tongue back on me. He puts a finger inside me, then two, and the curl of his fingers finds the place inside me I’ve read about and never properly found in myself, the combination of his mouth and his fingers and the low steady pressure he is keeping has me undone in less than a minute.

I come on his mouth; a loud gasp turned into a breathless moan that fills the room. He keeps his tongue moving on me through it all, slow, easing me down, and his fingers stay inside me, the steady pressure of them the only thing keeping my hips from bucking off the bed.

When I am breathing again, he kisses the inside of my thigh.

He makes his way up.

He kisses my hip. My stomach. The space between my breasts. He kisses my throat, and my jaw, and my mouth—his mouth on mine tastes of me—and the way he kisses me with my own taste in his mouth is something I’ll dream about for a long time.

He pulls back and looks at me, just the faintest touch of red on his cheekbones, the gloss of me on his full lips.

“Turn over, foxglove.”

“What?” I eke out.

“Turn over for me. On your stomach.”

I do as he asks, with his help, his large hands around my waist. The quilt is cool against my front; my face half-turned into the pillow. I can hear him moving behind me, can feel the shift of his weight. The sound and feel of his hand sliding up the back of my thigh.

“Spread your knees.”

I spread my knees.

“Wider, foxglove.”

Oh, lord.

I move them wider. I am embarrassed and turned on at the same time, and the balance is shifting fast toward the second one.

“Christ.” His voice has gone lower. “Look at you. Look how wet you are.”

His hands grip my hips. He lifts them slightly, so I am on my knees and my chest is still against the bed, and the angle puts me on display for him in a way I have never been on display for anyone.

Oh my god.

“Alasdair…” My voice is muffled against the pillow.

“Hush.”

His mouth comes back to me.

From behind.

I cry out harshly in surprise, and his tongue is on me again, but from a different, better angle. He administers the same long, flat strokes from before, but now also on places I had no intentions of ever letting anyone near.

He puts his mouth everywhere.

He licks me where no one has put their mouth on me—or anything—in my whole life. He does it without ceremony, without asking, like the whole of me is his to taste, and there is no part of me that is exempt.

I make another noise that is muffled by the pillow because I have buried my face in it.

“Don’t hide from me,” he chides me but I keep my face where it is, practically suffocating.

He licks me again. Long. Slow. The flat of his tongue moves up and across me, ending with the point of it where I am wet and aching. He stays there, working me with his tongue, grinding in and further in yet, while his hands hold my hips off the bed, one of his thumbs is doing something to me that I’m going to think about every time I see his hands for the rest of my life.

I come for him a second time, only this time it catches me off-guard. It comes up from somewhere I didn’t know was in me, urgent and violent. I cry into the pillow and my legs shake, and he holds my hips up because they cannot hold themselves up, his mouth on me through every shudder. He does not stop until I am limp against the quilt and breathing in ragged gasps, and saying his name into the pillow in a voice I don’t recognize as my own.

He brings me down, soft and reverent.

He kisses the small of my back. He kisses each of the small dimples above the curve of my ass. He kisses up my spine, one vertebra at a time. He kisses my shoulder blade, the side of my neck where my hair is stuck to my sweat-damp skin. He rolls me carefully onto my side and gathers me against his front, fully dressed against my bare skin, and he holds me there while I shake.

“There you are,” he says softly.

I can’t speak for a minute. If I tried, it would all be gobbledygook.

He waits, his hand stroking my hair, which in itself undoes me further.

When I can speak, my voice is wrecked.

“Let me touch you,” I croak.

“Foxglove…”

“Please.”

“Iris.”

“Still please. Just…let me. I don’t care if it’s only my hand. I want to. I need to touch you.”

A long beat.

“All right.”

He shifts. He’s still dressed, the shirt unbuttoned at the throat, the sleeves rolled, and his trousers are still on him. I reach for the front of his fly and my hand is shaking. He helps me. He undoes the button, and guides my hand inside the fabric, and I discover he’s going commando.

I gasp when my palm meets his cock. He’s hard, so much so that it must be painful, the skin velvet soft and hot to touch. I give it a tight, eager squeeze and a sound falls from his mouth, more animal than man.

I stroke him once. Slow, the way he has been showing me he likes things slow.

He shudders, his breath a gasp.

My lord, he is even more beautiful like this. How badly I want to fucking undo him until he’s completely unraveled. Just to see what that’s like.

I stroke him again, slower, and his forehead drops against my shoulder. His hand goes to my hip and grips hard, and I am starting a third stroke when he makes the sound again and his hips jerk against my hand and he is coming, hot and quick and wet against my palm, wrist, and the blanket underneath.

He breathes against my throat for a long beat.

“Christ, Iris.”

I am too pleased with myself to speak, even if my hand is a little sticky now with his cum.

“I’m sorry,” he goes on, breath ragged. “I…fuck.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I tell him, grinning. I can’t help myself.

“I wanted to last longer than that for you.”

“I have just been done twice in twenty minutes. Do you think I care?”

He laughs. The laugh is low and rough and a little embarrassed and it makes me smile even more.

Eventually, he gets up on slightly unsteady feet and goes to a small basin on the dresser and he wets a cloth. He comes back. He cleans me, then himself, then the bed, taking his time. I watch him as he does this, the way he kind of can’t believe what had just happened.

Then he undresses, removing his shirt, pulling down the rest of his trousers. His dick hangs heavy and wet between his legs, though it twitches slightly under my gawking.

“You could have gotten undressed earlier, you know.” I say, tearing my eyes away, as if I didn’t just give him a hand job.

He just gets into the bed beside me before I can stare any further. He pulls the heavy quilt up over both of us and tucks me against his side with my head on his chest and his arm under my shoulders, and I am warm and wrung out and safe. Or, at least, the safest I’ve felt in a long time, which is all sorts of ironic that I don’t want to unpack right now.

“Alasdair?” I ask. I shouldn’t, but I do.

“Aye.”

“Did you mean it? About the things I don’t know about you.”

“I meant it.”

I swallow hard. “Are they bad things?”

A long beat.

“They are what they are, foxglove. I would rather you sleep, tonight, and ask me tomorrow.”

I should sit up. I should ask him now and threaten to leave if he doesn’t. The part of me that is sensible should win, but that part hasn’t won in a long-ass time. And like every time before when I feel the questions rising, a fog seems to sweep in over my brain, clouding it into a haze, though I suppose that could also be the aftermath of the orgasms.

I close my eyes against his chest. The fire is low and orange, the candles are burning down. The castle is quiet around us.

You could be sleeping with a murderer, I think to myself. Stay vigilant.

But I drift off to sleep instead, and just hope I’ll be alive in the morning.

Chapter

Fifteen

It takes me a beat to place myself. The pillow beneath my head is thin but heavy, the linen smoother than anything I own. The light coming through the leaded glass is soft and grey. The bed under me is a four-poster with heavy red curtains gathered back at the corners, and the room is warmer than usual.

Because I’m not in my bedroom.

I’m at the castle.

In his bed.

I turn my head on the pillow to look at him.

There is only empty space.

The quilt is folded back carefully and there is the small dent of his head on the pillow next to mine, but that’s the only sign he was there.

I sit up slowly, my body protesting, and look down at myself, puzzled.

I’m wearing his shirt. I don’t remember putting it on. I remember him pulling the heavy quilt up over both of us, I remember the smell of him, and I remember falling asleep against his chest, but I don’t remember anything after that.

Oh, well, I do remember telling myself I might be sleeping with a murderer and I’d be lucky to be alive this morning. Anyway, I’m alive!

I do a light stretch as I look around the room, my muscles slow to wake and little testy. The fire in the small fireplace has burned to embers. The candles on the mantel are gone, the wax pooled at the base. The room smells like beeswax and woodsmoke and him.

I get up, slowly easing myself out of the high bed. The floor is cold under my feet, making my soles scrunch. There are slippers, old, soft, woman’s slippers, set neatly at the side of the bed as if put there for me. I have no idea whose slippers these were and I don’t want to know and I definitely don’t want to put my bare feet in them. I find my socks scattered about and put them on, then put on the slippers.

I also find a robe over the back of a chair. It is heavy wool, the dark blue of the deep loch, and the hem trails on the floor when I put it on. I belt it tightly and head off to find him.

The castle in the morning is a different place than the castle by firelight.

The corridors are longer. The stone is colder. The light through the slit windows lays in pale bars across the flagstones. The tapestries on the walls are duller than they were last night and the candles in the sconces have not been lit.

I don’t know where I’m going but I walk anyway. The castle is large and quiet and somewhere in it he is awake.

I try every door on this upper corridor but all are locked, so I head down the narrow stone staircase to the lower level. I find him right away.

He’s in the study he showed me yesterday, at the desk stacked with books and has a fountain pen in his hand and a thick, textured piece of paper. He is writing something, his penmanship small and careful.

He looks up when I come in and while he doesn’t outwardly smile this time, his eyes do. “Foxglove.”

“Good morning,” I say through a yawn.

“You’re awake.”

“No, not until I’ve had coffee.”

He sets the pen down and folds the paper, sliding it into the desk drawer as he stands.

He crosses to me. He puts his hands at my hips through the wool of the robe and he kisses me on the forehead. It’s so sweet I feel my toes curl.

“Sleep well?” he murmurs against my skin.

“I think I’m still asleep.”

“Come, I’ll feed you.”

I laugh and he takes my hand and leads me to the kitchen, which is now warmer than it was last night. The fire in the long hearth is up. There’s fresh bread on the wooden table, the smell of it the first thing I take in. There’s butter in a small dish and a tea pot under a cloth.

There is also a small white dish with three kippers laid neatly in it, glossy in the morning light, skin still on.

He’s been awake long enough to bake. My nose wrinkles. And sort out some fish for breakfast?

He pulls out the bench for me. I sit and he pours my tea. “I’m sorry I don’t have any coffee in the house at the moment, but I’ll make sure to remedy that.”

“It will do,” I reply, even though it most definitely will not do. Tea is my après-coffee caffeinated drink; the bridge between coffee and wine. I won’t function without it, and my ADHD will run amok.

“So you aren’t a coffee drinker?” I wonder, reaching for the sugar jar and pouring an obscene amount in my teacup, because I need something.

“Is that a dealbreaker?” he inquires wryly, watching the sugar keep coming.

“Could be,” I quip, though I give him a small smile that says I’m only kinda kidding. Serial killers I can work with, but someone who doesn’t drink coffee? Yeesh.

He pours the tea and watches me take my first sip, then cuts me a slice of the bread and butters it slowly, the knife flat across the warm crust, and slides the plate in front of me. Then he sits across from me on the bench with two kippers on his own plate and eats the fish the way he does everything, slowly and with all the patience in the world. Then again, I wouldn’t be in a rush to eat that dried fish either. There are too many Scottish specialties I have yet to take a liking to.

But at least he bakes a damn good bread.

He clears his throat when he’s done and his plate is pushed away.

“I would keep you here today,” he begins quietly.

“Oh?” I finish the rest of my tea and the thick dregs of sugar at the bottom. I can’t help but feel disappointed because it sounds like he’s asking me to leave. “Why don’t you? I have no plans.”

“Because if I keep you today, perhaps you won’t come back tomorrow.”

I frown, not sure what he means by that. Then again, what else is new with Mr. Cryptic?

He takes my hand across the table, he turns it palm up in his, and kisses the inside of my wrist.

“Foxglove?”

“Yes.”

“Walk down to the gateway with me.”

And I guess that’s my cue that I need to get going.

I head back upstairs and get dressed while he does the dishes. I get changed into the outfit I wore yesterday, then run my fingers through my hair in the small mirror in the ornate stone bathroom—complete with normal plumbing, thank god. I look older somehow, still as fresh and alive as the other day, but there’s something about my reflection that reflects a maturity I don’t think I’ll ever feel.

When I’m done, he’s waiting at the bottom of the narrow staircase and offers me his arm in the old-fashioned way and I take it, pretending for a moment that I’m in an episode of Bridgerton. In this place, with this distinguished, old-fashioned man holding on to me, it’s not hard at all.

He walks me through the front hall, then across the courtyard. The foxgloves are still standing in the joints of the stones. The wild roses have gone over, the petals dropping in the gravel. The hawthorn in the window arch is heavy with red berries now, hard and dark.

We come through the gateway and he stops. He turns me to him and holds both my hands in his, strong-fingered and cool.

“I want you to know something before we go any further,” he says, choosing his words carefully. “It’s very, very important.”

I wait.

“When this happens between us—when you let me have all of you—things will change.”

“What do you mean? What this? What change?”

“This. When you let me have all of you, the version of me you fall asleep next to won’t be the version you wake up to. Do you understand?”

I look at him and do my best not to smile. He’s always been a very serious man but now he looks positively grave.

“Alasdair…” I begin. “Most women have heard this before, in less interesting accents. I’m not naive, I know what this is. It’s just sex. I’m not asking you to be soft for me forever. You can be…whoever you want to be. Whoever you are.”

He looks at me for a long second.

I go on. “And I’m not going to freak out on you after. We can just keep this as it is. I promise I won’t turn into a stage five clinger.”

His brows knit together. “A stage five clinger?”

“You’ve never seen Wedding Crashers?”

From the continued puzzlement on his face, I’m gonna say no.

“What I’m saying,” I continue, trying not to laugh, “is I don’t need the warning. I appreciate it; that’s more than most people get. But I know what I’m getting into.”

A strange look passes over his face for a moment, almost like…grief.

Then he nods.

“Aye, my foxglove. All right.”

“That’s it? You’re not going to try to convince me to take it more seriously?”

“No, Iris. I think you’ve heard me as plainly as I can say it. I won’t say it again.”

“Okay, but now you sound a little sad.”

“Aye. That happens.”

He kisses my forehead one more time and holds me against him for a beat. His arms are warm through the wool of his sweater and he continues to smell divine.

He pulls back and holds me by my shoulders, peering at me. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Oh, will you, now?” I muse.

“I will. You’ll come here for dinner.”

I raise a brow at his bossiness. “Well, luckily for you, I would love to.”

“Might be best that you drive here, supposed to storm tomorrow and the next few days, aye?”

“Aye, aye captain,” I joke, but he does not get the idiom.

So, I awkwardly turn around and head down his drive. I look back twice. Both times he is standing in the gateway, hands in his pockets, watching me go.

The third time I look back, however, he’s gone.

I walk home with the morning breeze on my face.

The road is long, but my legs have become used to this route now, and the air is doing me good. By the time the cottage comes into view, I’m spent in the best way my body can let me be spent. I am, for a stretch of single-track road in the Highlands of Scotland, the happiest woman alive.

I am also, somewhere under the glow, sitting with what he said before we parted.

The version of me you fall asleep next to won’t be the version you wake up to.

The category I put it in at the time was the I’m not the relationship type category. The I’m going to disappoint you category. The I’m going to be distant category. He was warning me he’d pull back, the way some men do, and I suppose it was kind of him to give me a warning. That shows a bit of self-awareness, doesn’t it?

I get to the cottage and step inside. It smells stale and familiar and like nothing has happened in it for twelve hours, which is true. It’s the first time I’ve been gone for more than half a day.

I make coffee, because finally, coffee. I drink the first cup standing at the kitchen window, watching the bay and the clouds coming up over the mountains. Then I refill the cup and sit at the table.

I take out my phone for the first time since I left this place. I had it with me at the castle in case there was an emergency, but I didn’t feel the pull to look at it even once.

Now I can see there is one text from Maddie, sent late last night her time.

Hey love. Checking in. Tell me you’re alive in the morning.

I look at it for a long time.

I should call her. I promised her I would. I should pick up the phone right now and dial her, regardless of the hour, to tell her about last night, where I just had breakfast, and tell her about the man who said things will change, and that there are such things as fuckboys who live in castles.

But, of course, I can’t.

I can’t give her any of it because if I give her any of it, I have to give her all of it, and the all of it is a story she can’t hear without me getting an earful. I promised her I wouldn’t have sex with my neighbor, and while I guess that’s kind of true if you want to be really, really technical about it, she’ll be mad. Even though she also said she knew I’d do it anyway, she’ll be mad.

I type back: I’m alive. Glowing, actually. Tell you more soon. Love you.

I set the phone down.

I have just lied to my best friend by omission, which I hate. Ryan did the same to me, and look how that turned out.

But while I can’t tell Maddie what’s happening without her freaking out or me getting a (probably well-deserved) lecture, I want to tell someone.

I want to tell someone what I did last night, what I have planned for tomorrow, and I want to be heard by a person who won’t pick up a phone and call the police or worry about me.

There is only one person who fits that description.

And she’s been dead for quite a bit.

I get up. I put on my boots and her wax jacket and I get in the car.

The graveyard—or kirkyard, as it’s called here—is in the village, behind the small, white-painted church I’ve driven past a few times now. The gate is iron, low, the kind a person leaves unlatched. I push it open. It doesn’t creak. It has been kept oiled, I think, by Mhairi or someone like her who takes care of such village things, I don’t know.

The stones are mostly old, some going back to the 1700s, the lettering on them worn down to ghosts. The newer ones are at the back, near the wall. I walk through them slowly, looking at the names. There are Mackenzies and MaCraes and MacLeods and Rosses, the same surnames recurring for two hundred years, families staying in the same place.

No MacCoinnich, though. Not on any of the new stones, not on any of the old ones.

I find that interesting. Could he have lied about his name? Why? I try to make a mental note to google it later.

Eventually I find Effie.

Her stone is grey and plain. Eufemia Galloway. 1927–2025. No epitaph. No flowers, at least none that have been brought here recently, which I register with a pang of guilt because I should have been by here sooner. I suppose since I’ve been living in her cottage, sleeping in her bed, wearing her clothes, reading her letters, and befriending her neighbor, I haven’t felt much of a separation from her.

But though there are no bought flowers, something is growing at the base of the stone.

A foxglove.

A single foxglove. Tall, in full bloom, the deep pink with the dark spots inside the throats of the bells. It is rooted at the foot of the stone as if it has been there for years.

Effie’s grave grew its own flower. A deadly flower, but a flower nonetheless.

I kneel.

I’m not the praying kind. My family didn’t go to church much outside of Christmas. I just sit cross-legged on the grass with my hand flat on the cold top of the stone, and I talk to her.

“Hi, Effie.”

The wind moves through the grass.

“I’m sorry I haven’t come.”

The foxglove at the base of the stone tilts slightly in the same wind, as if listening.

“I’ve been a little busy, as it turns out. I’m sure you know.”

I look at the stone for a long moment. I look at the carved letters. I look at the dash between the two dates.

The dash that is a person’s whole life.

Tears immediately prickle behind my eyes, and I take a breath.

“I slept with him last night, Effie. The man at the castle. Alasdair. The man…I think you knew him. I think he is some…I don’t know…younger version of the Eachann you wrote to. I can’t quite tell. He’s being careful with me about his own history, which is annoying as hell. But I slept with him. Last night. In his bed, in the castle. Okay, maybe we didn’t go all the way, but you know…times were had.”

The wind dies down as if it also doesn’t want to hear this TMI.

“He was… so careful with me. He’s been careful with me from the start. He warned me. He warned me this morning. He told me that when we go further than we’ve gone, when I let him have all of me, that things will change. That he won’t be the version of him I’ve been falling asleep next to. Not that I’ve done that often. It was only last night, I promise.”

I press my hand flatter to the stone. The stone is cold under my palm.

I look at the foxglove, as if daring it to bow its head.

“I’m going back to him, though.”

The foxglove doesn’t move.

“I’m going to give him what he’s asking for, and I don’t care if he breaks my heart. I’m going to do the thing you spent your whole life not doing. I’m going to open the door you kept closed with Eachann.”

I sit with that for a beat.

“And I came here because I’m scared, Effie. But not the way you would think, not in the way I should be, because he’s a person of interest when it comes to the missing women and the last thing I should be doing is engaging with him, let alone sleeping with him. It’s funny because I’m not scared of him. I am scared of not having him.”

I sigh and feel a tear tickle my face. I wipe it away with the heel of my palm.

“I don’t want to be you, Effie. I’m sorry. I know that sounds bad to someone who’s dead and can’t answer, although maybe you can answer and have been trying to. Anyway, I mean it the way a woman means it when she is looking at her own future in another woman’s gravestone. You lived alone here for sixty odd years. You wrote him letters you didn’t send. You kept your wards. You died in that cottage and there is one foxglove on your grave and no one has brought you any flowers.”

The wind picks up again, bringing a chill off the bay and smelling of rain. I sniffle.

“I don’t want that for myself. I’ve lived my life trying to do the right thing, trying to be normal and responsible, and, I don’t know, behave, and it never felt right, never felt like I was living for myself. I mean, I was already married and I lost that fairy tale. Now you, this land, it’s presented me with a new one. With Alasdair. I want him. I want that chance to start over. And yeah, maybe this is exactly what he was warning me about, maybe he knew I’d start to get in my feelings, maybe I’d think of him as more than a rebound. Maybe any guy in his right mind would worry that I would do something like sit here and tell you that the two of us are a fairy tale. But at the same time, I have to risk it.”

I sit up. I take my hand off the stone.

“Tell me how to do it differently, Effie. Tell me how to want him and not end up…here.”

The foxglove at the base of the stone moves once in the wind.

She doesn’t answer me. She can’t.

I sit at the grave for a long time. The afternoon goes amber, then grey with the coming clouds. The birds in the field beyond the wall call to each other. The shadow of the church creeps across the stones, reaches Effie’s grave, and passes over us.

I don’t get an answer.

But I get the thing I came here for—which is the thing I have known the whole time—that I’m going back to him tomorrow.

Not in spite of the warning.

Because of it.

Because the version of me that walks away from him tonight is the version of me that ends up in a stone like this one—beloved by no one enough to bring her flowers.

I stand up.

I put my palm on the top of the stone one more time.

“Thank you, Effie.”

I walk back through the kirkyard, unlatch the gate, close it carefully behind me, and get into the car.

I sit in the car for a long moment before I turn the key.

I cry all the way home.

Chapter

Sixteen

The wind picks up just before sundown.

I’m at the kitchen table, with the kettle going and the feeling of the kirkyard still on me, when I hear it: the soft repetitive bang of wood on wood from somewhere outside. The boat shed door. I left it closed when I worked in there last, but I had also oiled the fuck out of those hinges as per Alasdair’s suggestion, and now I think it’s working against me.

I sigh. I really don’t want to go outside. I want to be inside this cottage with the kettle and the lamp and the hot orange glow of the wood stove.

But the shed door will batter itself to splinters by morning if I don’t close it, and I don’t think I’ll sleep a wink with that racket.

I pull on the wax jacket and my boots and let myself out.

The water in the bay has gone a gunmetal that reflects the cloudy sky, the sunset nowhere to be found. The wind is up, gulls wheeling in the sky just before they turn in for the night, and the bracken is shaking, the fronds creating a rattling sound I find pleasing.

I cross to the shed, the breeze tousling my hair not as cold as I thought it would be; more electric than anything.

The latch has lifted itself, the door is swinging on its hinges, banging soft against the frame in the small gusts that come up off the loch, the same gusts that create waves and the occasional white cap. I push it closed and slide the latch back into the hasp. I jiggle it. It holds.

I look out to the loch, the widest deepest part, taking in the wind and the weather and that’s when I see something.

A woman in the water.

She is well out into the loch, past the mussel beds and where the bay opens up into the main run of the water, and she is swimming. The kind of unhurried steady breaststroke a person does when they have been in cold water a long time and are not in any hurry to get out of it because their body has gone completely numb.

I freeze where I am.

She’s not the same woman I saw in the bay a few nights ago, so there’s that. I told myself she was a gull. I told myself I had been drunk. I told myself a lot of things.

But this is not a trick of the eye, even with the light going down. This is an actual woman in the water.

But what kind of woman would go swimming at dusk in a coming storm?

I don’t know; sounds like something you might do, I say to myself.

I lift my hand, instinctively.

“Hello!”

My voice carries small across the water.

She lifts her hand back.

For half a beat I think she is waving and I am ready to feel ridiculous about thinking any dark and spooky thoughts. She’s clearly a swimmer. Just a swimmer. Highland people are a hardy lot. Some of them do this for sport, the way people in Colorado do polar plunges in the lakes in January.

Then I see what her hand is doing.

She’s not waving.

She’s beckoning.

Her hand is curled toward herself, the way you call a child closer. Slow. Deliberate. Once, twice, a third time.

Come here, she seems to say.

Come into the water.

The breath leaves me.

She has stopped swimming. She’s treading now. She’s far enough out that I can’t see her face clearly because the twilight is blurring it and her hair is dark and wet and clinging to her cheeks.

But I can see her arm and her hand and the deliberate slow motion of the gesture.

Come here.

Then she starts swimming again.

Toward me.

The same unhurried, steady stroke. She’s not in a panic, she’s not in a hurry, but she is closing the distance, and she’s not closing it the way a friendly swimmer angles toward shore to wave hello.

She is coming straight at me. Across the open water. From a long way out.

As if to get on shore and tell me something important.

As if to wrap her hands around my ankles and drag me under.

Oh hell no.

I don’t move; I can’t move. I can only stare.

She’s fifty meters out now. Maybe less. The dusk is thickening, but I can see her better. Her shoulders are bare; her hair plastered to the sides of her face. I still can’t quite see her features and nor do I want to at this point.

The oar.

There’s an oar leaning against the side of the shed. It belongs to the small boat below that’s half on the rocks, half in the grass.

I take three steps backward toward the shed. My hand finds the oar without me having to look for it. I lift it—it’s heavy—holding it across my body the way I have seen women in films hold improvised weapons, which is not a way I have ever held anything in my life except when I went to Disneyland and picked up a life-sized version of Thor’s hammer.

I don’t know what the hell is going to happen, but if she comes out of the water, if she walks up the rocks of my spit, I’m going to swing this fucking oar at her. I’m ready. Somehow, I’m prepared. I’m standing at the edge of a Highland Bay with an oar in my hands, ready to hit a woman with it, and the decision feels oddly rational instead of violent, which should worry me.

But right now, I’m only worried about her.

She’s forty meters out.

Thirty.

Still swimming, still coming, and ugh her face—I don’t want to see her face. Does she even have a face? Are her features just a blur?

I plant my feet on the rocks. I lift the oar a little higher.

And then…

She turns.

She turns in the water, smooth, without breaking her stroke, and no longer swimming toward me. She is swimming along the shore. Parallel to it. Headed southeast. Toward the bend of the loch where the coast curves around toward Torridon Village. The same unhurried steady stroke, only now her body is laid out long and pale along the surface of the loch, and her dark hair is fanning out behind her in the dimming light. She moves along my shoreline the way a person moves along a hallway, looking for a specific door.

I watch her.

I do not put the oar down.

She swims for what feels like a long time. The dusk is going dark now, the loch is going darker with it. She is a pale shape moving along the water, getting smaller, until she rounds the bend toward the village and is gone behind the curve of the coast.

The loch is empty.

I stand on the rocks with the oar across my body, and the wind in my hair, and the cold reaching my boots, and I don’t move for a while.

A swimmer.

It was just a fucking swimmer.

I say it out loud to myself, into the wind that takes the words off the rocks and away. “It was a swimmer. A weirdo, but a swimmer. People swim. People swim in cold water. People are weird. She wanted me to come in the water and join in her weirdness.”

The wind agrees with none of this.

But I’m going to choose the version of this that lets me go back inside with peace of mind.

I lower the oar. I lean it back against the shed. I check the latch on the shed door one more time, then I cross the patch of grass and let myself in through the back door. I immediately lock the door behind me, and stand in the kitchen with my back against the door, breathing for a moment.

The cottage is warm. The kettle is whistling merrily. I have only been gone five minutes.

It felt like an hour.

I turn the kettle off, then refresh all the salt lines around the cottage.

I am going to dream about drowning tonight. I already know.

I do dream about drowning.

I dream a woman holds my ankles under the water, not letting go. I try to surface, but the surface is silver above me, and I cannot reach it. The woman’s grip is the grip of a person who has been waiting a long time to hold someone down, and the cold is the kind of cold that sinks into the bones. I wake with my heart hammering against the inside of my chest, the duvet kicked off, and the sheet damp under my back.

It is dawn, thank fuck. The light is grey and clean and I survived the night. The wind has died. The rain has not started yet, but the clouds have the heavy darkness of a downpour coming. I lie in bed for a long moment with my hand on my chest, remembering the dream wasn’t real, remembering to breathe.

Eventually I get up and get on with my day, though the only thing on my mind—other than the swimmer—is the fact that I’m driving over to the castle tonight. And that alone means I have to prepare for what’s to come. A few days ago, I might have alluded to such an event as the, “Iris and Alasdair Fuck Fest,” but now I feel it’s just too silly and crude. After Alasdair’s warning, and the look on his face, this has all taken on a much more serious tone. I guess there’s no point in pretending that it’s going to be just sex and nothing else, no matter what he says.

Still, I run a bath to make myself as fuckable as possible. I add the thyme salt to the bath and get in, using the same salt to exfoliate before I shave my legs and everywhere else. I stay in the water until my fingers wrinkle and the heat has gone into all the places that have been cold since I stood on the rocks last night, scaring myself silly.

I towel off. I rub the fancy Dipytique lotion Maddie gave me for Christmas into every part of my skin. The lotion smells like expensive roses and I imagine Alasdair running his nose along me, breathing me in.

I do my hair a little fancier than usual, styled straight with Effie’s loud but effective blow-dryer, then just a little bit of eye makeup and copious amounts of deodorant.

I look like a woman who has decided exactly what she wants.

I get dressed in skirt again since he seemed to like it so much, plus a cream waffle-knit with a soft scoop neck. A wool cardigan. And underneath it all…nothing. No bra, no underwear. The scoop neck is fitted enough to hold me up, and what’s the point in panties if they’re just going to come off?

Then I put on my combat boots.

I look at myself one more time.

The woman in the mirror is the woman I’m going to be tonight: a woman who will roll with the punches and make Alasdair see stars. The woman in the mirror is calm. The woman in the mirror does not have an oar in her hands ready to bludgeon a stranger to death.

I throw on a raincoat since the rain has already started, coming down light for now but will surely be heavy later as the wind picks up. Even though the walk to my car and back is short, I’d rather not be wet.

I drive his road for the first time as a driver and not a walker.

The trip is so much shorter. The trees close in over the road. The wipers work in a steady rhythm. By the time I am at the gateway, the rain has thickened, the courtyard is wet and silver, and there is a small lantern lit on a stone beside the place where I should park, as if he has set it out so I will not stumble in the dusk.

He’s at the door before I am out of the car, standing in the doorway. The light from the hall behind him shrouds him in silhouette. He has on a dark green wool sweater with a light plaid detailing at the shoulders, and dark trousers. No kilt, which is mildly disappointing.

“Good evening, Iris,” he says in that low, rich voice of his, sounding so formal.

“Good evening,” I say, matching his tone.

“Hurry in before you get wet.”

The drops of rain are fat as they bounce off my coat and I quickly step over the threshold. He closes the door behind me. The castle is warm. The fire in the front room is going; I can see the orange of it down the hall. He takes my jacket off my shoulders and hangs it on the brass hook where it drips.

He then turns me to him and gives me the smallest smile, eyes blazing with heat.

“Look at you,” he purrs.

“It’s just a skirt,” I say with a shrug, though I’m delighted with his response so far.

“It’s not just a skirt, Iris.”

He kisses me on the forehead. The kiss is brief and warm and utterly disarming.

“Come. I’ve put us in the dining hall tonight.”

“The dining hall? Ooh, fancy.”

“Aye. I never have an excuse to use it, so I’m using it tonight.”

He takes my hand, giving it a firm squeeze, then leads me down the front hall, past the room with the leather chairs and the fire, down the corridor, and through a heavy oak door at the back.

The dining hall is long, and the ceiling is high and beamed. There are tapestries on the walls—proper tapestries—the kind I have seen in museums and art history books, full of hunting scenes and mountain scenes with stags and women in long blue dresses and men with hounds. The walls between the tapestries are hung with paintings; more landscapes, the bay, the loch, the mountains in different seasons. There is no overhead light, and the room is only lit by a long iron candelabra running down the center of a long oak table, by sconces on the walls with candles burning in them, and by a fire in a stone hearth at the far end of the room.

The table could seat twenty. He has set two places at one end, close together, with a small linen runner between them and proper cutlery and crystal glasses and a bottle of red wine open and breathing in a decanter.

“Holy shit.” I breathe.

“Too much?”

“It looks like Medieval Times up in here.”

He laughs, low and pleased.

“Aye. The castle has a sense of itself, doesn’t it?”

He pulls out a chair for me and I sit, and he sits across from me, not at the head.

The dinner, I discover, is fish. A whole salmon from the loch, baked with butter and lemon and herbs from the garden, the skin crisped over the flesh. There is bread, his bread, and a small dish of greens from the garden dressed in oil, and the wine. It’s a simple meal that somehow suits the grandness of the room, like I can imagine his ancestors eating this same meal centuries ago.

He serves me first. He fillets the fish on my plate with the same careful, old-fashioned competence he does everything, the bones lifted out clean in one motion. He cuts me a slice of bread and pours my wine.

Then he does the same for himself but he doesn’t dig in right away. Instead, he sits, waits, and watches me.

Despite his rapt attention and the fact that I know I don’t look great shoving food in my mouth, I eat, hungrier than I thought I was. The fish is delicate and clean and tastes of the loch I suppose, of the cold water that brought it up and the herbs from the garden and the slow careful preparation. The bread is the bread of yesterday while the wine is red from Spain.

He eats too, albeit slowly. The small careful bites of a man who isn’t as interested in the food as he is interested in the woman eating the food.

Either way, he’s still a damn good cook.

We do not say much as we eat and that’s for the best, since I don’t want fish flaking out of my mouth. Anyway, the silence isn’t awkward. It’s become a comfortable thing between us, even though I know we both have a lot on our mind, at least with regards to tonight.

I finish my fish. I finish my wine. He refills my glass and it’s not long before I finish that too. My head goes warm from the rioja. The candles and fire add to the heat, to the haze of the evening. The tapestries are watching us in the candlelight, the women in their long blue dresses eyeing me with disinterest.

He sets his cutlery down.

“Have you had enough?” he asks.

“Of the dinner?”

He nods.

“Yes. Thank you. That was amazing, but I’m quite full.”

A long beat. He turns the stem of his wine glass between his fingers.

“Iris.”

“Yeah?”

“Will you come upstairs with me?”

I stare at him, swallowing hard.

His face is very still, waiting patiently for my answer.

There was always only one answer.

“Yes.”

Chapter

Seventeen

Alasdair looks at me for a long moment, the candlelight flickering on the sculpted planes of his face, before he stands and offers his hand.

I stare at his palm for a moment, wondering what will change forever if I take it. Because if I take it, there is no going back. I am going upstairs to be ruined by this man.

And I’ve never wanted to be ruined like this before.

I put my hand in his and it suddenly feels like I’m entering into something I’ll never properly come out of, like a physical but still binding contract.

He brings me up out of the chair, being extra careful with me, and does not let go of my hand. He leads me out of the dining hall and up the stone spiral staircase. With the stone walls circling us, I have a strange sense of being back in time. It’s not hard to imagine what it was like back then, not in this place.

The corridor at the top level is dim. The candles in the sconces are lit, every single one of them, the flames small and steady. The light moves on the stone as we pass, making shadows dance.

We enter the bedroom and it somehow looks different than yesterday. The fire is built higher. The candles on the mantel are full and lit. The four-poster has been turned down, the heavy quilt folded back, the linen sheet beneath it crisp and white. The heavy red curtains at the corners of the bed are pulled back and tied with gilded rope. The leaded glass of the long window is fogged at the edges with the heat of the room and the cool of the rain outside, and the rain has settled in now, hammering steady on the glass.

If I wasn’t so nervous about what’s about to happen, I’d think it was epically cozy and comforting.

He closes the door behind us, and the sound echoes across the walls. It feels final, like we’re locked inside, like there’s no turning back, and I have to fight the urge to panic.

He turns me to him and gently cups my face in both hands.

“Iris. There’s something I want to ask you.”

“Okay.”

“You have been with…how many?”

I blink. I hadn’t expected the question. I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t that.

“One,” I admit. “Just Ryan.”

“Your husband.”

“Ex-husband,” I correct. “But yes. Just him.”

It was one of the things I’ve been annoyed about since the divorce, actually. All throughout my teens and twenties I could have been sewing my wild oats, but instead I settled with him and there were barely any oats sewn at all. Sure, there had been a high school boyfriend I fooled around with before Ryan, but Ryan is the one I officially lost my virginity to. Feels like I wasted so many of the “good years” of my life, even though I know that’s nonsense.

“Aye,” Alasdair says. The expression on his face gives me nothing.

“I have an IUD,” I add, because the question has put me in the headspace where I am telling him things he might want to know. “I’m not going to get pregnant. I have no interest in getting pregnant, believe me. That isn’t a thing you need to worry about.”

His expression softens for a moment.

“Aye, foxglove. Thank you for telling me.”

“And…” I clear my throat. “I’m clean. Sorry, that’s a terribly outdated thing to say. I mean, I don’t have any STIs. Only been with the one person and it’s been over a year and I hadn’t been with anyone else. I mean he was with someone else, that rat bastard was cheating on me, but when I found that I got tested and…”

“I understand,” he says, giving me a placating smile that says I don’t need to keep on blabbering.

“And you?”

He looks at me like I’ve humored him.

“It has been a very long time,” he eventually says.

“How long?” I ask, because I’m nosy.

“Long enough that you don’t need to worry about anything I might give you. Long enough that the asking embarrasses me, foxglove.”

That was not the answer I expected, and yet it’s the answer I should have expected. He’s a man who lives alone in a castle on a tidal loch in a part of the Scottish Highlands that does not have a town for fifteen miles or a city for hours, a man that doesn’t seem to interact with anyone but me. Of course it’s been a long time. Then again, small towns can surprise you.

“Okay.” I surrender.

“Okay.”

“Are we…good?”

“Aye, foxglove.”

He kisses me.

The kiss is different from the kisses he has given me before. It is the kiss of a man who has stopped negotiating with himself; who no longer wishes to be held back. His mouth opens against mine and his tongue is in my mouth, full and wet and wanting, and his hands are on my face and then on my throat and then at my shoulders, and I’m being pushed gently back toward the bed without my feet quite finding the floor between his steps.

The backs of my knees hit the edge of the mattress.

He pulls back.

He looks at me for a beat, as if to read my reaction.

Then he undresses me.

He does this slowly, even slower than he did yesterday. He undresses me like he’s unwrapping a present he’s been waiting all year for. The cardigan first, slid off my shoulders and laid across the chair beside us. Then his fingers at the hem of the cream waffle-knit, lifting it, pulling it up and over my head, the cotton catching briefly on the half-up of my hair before he frees it. My hair falls back around my shoulders.

He looks down.

I am bare from the waist up, my boobs free.

The realization that I didn’t wear a bra moves across his face the way a slow tide moves across a flat beach.

“Christ, Iris,” he says, inhaling sharply.

His hands come up. He cups my breasts in both hands, slow, like he’s weighing them. His thumbs find my nipples already hard from the air of the room and from him. He drags the pad of each thumb across them and I make an involuntary sound.

He bends and puts his mouth on my left breast.

His mouth is hot as he takes my nipple between his lips and sucks once, gently, then with more pressure, then he uses his tongue and his teeth in a small careful combination that goes through me like a wire pulled tight.

Holy fuck.

I clutch his hair.

He moves to the other breast and does the same. Even slower now, spending a long time. By the time he straightens, his mouth is slightly red, my breasts are wet from his mouth and aching, my nipples are hard as pebbles, and I’m barely standing.

He unzips the skirt at my hip.

It falls.

He looks down.

Nothing under it either.

He goes very still and lets out a slow, rough exhale.

“Did you walk into my house wearing nothing under this skirt?”

I bite back a grin. “Sure did.”

“All through the dinner.”

“Yup.”

A long beat.

“Iris.” He meets my gaze. “You’re going to ruin me.”

“That’s the idea.”

He laughs, a short, rough sound and tugs the skirt down the rest of my legs, then helps me step out of it. He gazes at me with the firelight on the side of his face and his mouth slightly parted, and the look on his face is the look of pure carnal desire, barely leashed.

Then he undresses himself.

He pulls the sweater and shirt off over his head in one motion. Of course, I’ve seen him shirtless before, felt him shirtless before—last night, the swims in the bay—but right now he looks different. He’s allowing me to look, wanting me to take him all in.

So I do.

He has the build of a man who has come from hardy stock, lean, hard, the muscles long, the skin pale, with a faint dusting of chest hair. There are small scars I had not seen before, faint, white, scattered across his shoulders and ribs the way a body collects scars across decades. I wonder where they’re from, wondering if he’ll ever tell me or if he’ll evade like he often does.

He unbuckles his belt, then unbuttons his trousers. He pushes them down and steps out of them.

He is fully bare.

I have seen him through binoculars, and I have had my hand on him in the loch and for three strokes in the dark, and I saw him last night after he came. I have not seen him like this, within touching distance, in firelight, fully and openly hard for me, his cock long and thick and standing flat against his stomach.

I forget to breathe.

He is terribly beautiful. He is terribly beautiful in a way that should not be possible for an actual man standing in an actual room, and the part of my brain that keeps trying to put rational frames around him is having a hard time tonight.

Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? There’s a terror built into him. His beauty is something sublime, but not that of a god, least not a benevolent one. He reminds of that statue of Lucifer, Le Genie du Mal, that sculptor Jozef Geefs made in 1842 that the church deemed too sexy for Satan, so they hired Jozef’s brother Guillaume to remake the statue, only his version was even hotter.

Yeah, that even hotter second statue of Lucifer is on par with what I’m staring at right now.

And I’m this close to telling Alasdair that, but he wisely closes the distance between us and pulls me to him. He kisses me deeply as he lays me down on the bed slowly, the linen cool against my back. The room smells of beeswax and woodsmoke and him. He stands at the foot of the bed for one more second and looks at me bare and waiting on his sheets.

Then he’s on me.

He kisses me hard, far harder than before, deep and with punishing strokes of his tongue. He kisses my throat. He kisses my breasts again, longer this time, until I am whimpering. He works his way down my body. He runs his tongue over my stomach and my hips and the soft skin at the inside of my thighs, and his hands are everywhere, sliding under me, lifting me to him, holding me open.

I expect his mouth again, there, but I don’t get it.

Instead, he kisses the inside of my thigh, and then he comes back up. He settles his body over mine. He braces himself on one forearm above me and uses the other hand between us. Two of his fingers find me wet and ready. He slides them in.

“Christ, foxglove. You are soaking.”

“I have been since you opened your door.”

“Have you now?”

“I’ve been soaking since I got in the car,” I add.

“Aye, you’re killing me.” He groans.

He works me with his fingers, slow, the curl of them finding the place inside me he found yesterday. I am already close. I am already so close it’s embarrassing. He has barely touched me and I am already shaking.

And just like that, I come.

I come on his hand, making a small high sound that’s half a cry and half a gasp and my hips lift off the bed and his fingers do not stop, and I am riding out the orgasm with my hand on the back of his neck and my forehead against his shoulder, holding on for dear life.

He works me through it until the waves subside, then he brings me down.

Then he’s between my legs again.

This time I feel him.

The blunt hot head of him at my entrance.

He does not enter me immediately. He drags himself through my wetness, slowly, the head of him moving along my folds, against my clit, back down, the slow steady tease of a man who is going to enter me when he is good and ready and not a second sooner. The sound is so loudly wet it borders on pornographic.

“Alasdair,” I moan, greedy and impatient.

“Patience, foxglove.”

“I want…” I breathe.

“I know what you want.”

“Now, please,” I beg, because damn it, I am begging. “I want you inside me now.”

He laughs against my throat, a rich low, almost menacing chuckle.

He lines himself up.

He enters me slowly.

Inch by inch. The kind of entry where I feel every single part of him going in. He is so big and I am so wet and we still have to take it slow because my body has not been opened to a man in a long time and certainly not to this much of one. He stops halfway. He lets me adjust, lets me find my breath. He kisses my mouth and goes a little deeper.

He stops again, fully seated, to the hilt.

He is so deep in me I can’t breathe.

He holds himself there. He puts his forehead against mine. His breathing has gone uneven for the first time.

“Iris?”

I make a whimpering sound.

“I’m not going to be careful with you much longer.”

“Good.”

“Foxglove,” he warns.

“I mean it. I’m not going to break.”

He kisses me again and starts to move.

The first stroke in and out is slow. The second is slower. The third is the same. He’s keeping the discipline, even with all of him inside me, even with his control as thin as it’s ever been before. He’s working me up to him. He’s letting me feel every withdrawal and every return, and the rhythm is the rhythm of a man who’s decided to ruin me in stages.

This is just the first stage.

And I come again.

I didn’t even know I was that close, the orgasm slamming into me from nowhere. My hips are lifted slightly, and he’s hitting something inside me at this angle, and the slow, steady pressure of it builds and builds and breaks in a wave that has me digging my nails into his back, making sounds against his throat that I have zero control over.

He fucks me slow through the whole of it, and when I am limp and breathless and crying a little, he kisses my temple and pulls out.

“Turn over, foxglove.”

I turn.

I’m on my hands and knees on his bed just like last night. The cool of the linen is against my breasts and my forearms. My ass is in the air. I am offering myself to him again like this, only I know this time will be different.

His hand lands flat on the small of my back.

“Christ. Look at you.”

“Look at me what?” I prod, wanting to hear it.

“Look at you on your knees on my bed waiting for me to fuck you, foxglove. I’ve wanted this since the day I first saw you through the window.”

He enters me again.

From this angle he is deeper. I make an inhuman sound as he drags himself out slow, then pushes back in. He sets a rhythm that is harder than the first one, the slap of his hips against my ass quiet in the room but real, his hands at my waist holding me steady, his cock moving in me at a depth I didn’t realize it could go.

“That’s it. That’s it, lass.”

“Alasdair.”

“Take it. Take it for me. There you go.”

I take it.

His pace builds. He is using my hips for leverage now. He’s no longer being careful with me. The discipline has stopped being the discipline of a man holding back; it has become the discipline of a man taking what he has been allowed to take, and the difference is in his rough hands and his raspy voice and the angle of his pelvis against me.

He fucks me harder.

He fucks me like a man who has been promised this for a long time.

He fucks me until I’m crying into the bedspread and my arms have given out and I am face-down with my ass in the air and his hands at my waist and his cock moving in me in long deep strokes, and the guttural, primal sounds I’m making echo around the room.

He pulls out.

“No, please don’t,” I cry out, suddenly bereft and desperate for him.

“Up, foxglove.”

“What?”

“On your knees. Properly.”

He pulls me up by the waist, off my elbows, onto my knees on the bed facing the headboard. He puts my hands on the carved wooden post of the four-poster at the corner of the bed. He wraps my fingers around it.

“Hold.”

“Alasdair…” I breathe.

“Hold on, foxglove. I’m not done with you. I never want to be done with you.”

He’s behind me again. The four-poster’s post is in front of me, dark wood smooth from a hundred years of polish, and I am on my knees on the bed with my hands wrapped around it and my forehead pressed against my own knuckles, and his hands are at my hips, and he is sliding back into me.

The angle from here is different. It is deeper still. He drags himself out slow and pushes back in and I make a noise that is closer to a sob than a moan, and the wooden post under my forehead is the only thing keeping me upright.

He goes harder. So much harder, my lungs cease to breathe.

He grips the post above my hands with one of his own and uses it for leverage, his fingers above mine. His other hand is at my hip, holding me back against him. He is pulling me onto him with each stroke, using my body in a way I have not been used in my life, and I don’t want him to stop. I want him to do this until I can’t stand. I want him to leave me wrecked on his bed for the rest of the night and into the morning.

“Foxglove. Look at you. Holding on. Fucking hold on.”

I hold on as much as I can.

“That’s my girl,” he says, and I can’t help but beam.

“Alasdair…”

“You feel that?” he rasps.

“Yes.”

“You feel me, lass? You feel how deep I am?”

“Yes. You’re all I feel.”

“Tell me whose this is. Tell me whose cunt this is.”

I can’t speak for a beat, his language throwing me for a loop, creating a deep flush up and down my body.

He pulls almost all the way out, then stops. He holds himself there at the very edge of me.

“Tell me, Iris,” he growls into my ear.

“Yours.”

“Aye. That’s right.”

“Yours, Alasdair.”

“Mine.”

He pushes back in. Hard. The wooden post creaks faintly under my hands. He sets a pace that is not gentle and not slow and not anything I have known, and he is on me and in me and the sound of his hips on my ass is a steady wet slap in the candlelit room. His voice in my ear has gone lower than I have heard it.

“That’s right, foxglove. You take it. You take it because you came for it. You walked into my house wearing nothing under your skirt and you sat at my table and you ate my food and you let me bring you up here and now you are going to take what you came for, all of it. Every inch of me. Every fucking inch, foxglove. Take it.”

Fucking hell. A strangled noise comes out of me.

“Christ, you are tight,” he groans.

“Oh god.”

Oh god, oh god, oh god.

“You’re wet for me. You are dripping for me. Look at you.”

“I can’t, I⁠—”

“You are going to come for me again before I come in you. Do you understand that?”

I make a feeble noise.

“Do you understand, Iris?”

“Yes. I understand,” I manage to say, breathless, heart hammering each word.

“Aye. That’s right.”

His hand leaves the post above mine. It comes down between my legs. His fingers find me where I am already swollen and wet and he works me with them while he fucks me, hard, the combination of his cock and his fingers and his voice in my ear undoing me in a way I didn’t think possible.

I come hard again. I come crying out against the post with my hands gripping the wood so hard my knuckles go white, and he fucks me through it. His voice in my ear has gone hoarse, and I’m afraid we might break the fucking bed.

“That’s it, foxglove. That’s it. Christ. You are mine.”

He’s close now. I can feel him close. His pace stutters. His hand at my hip tightens.

He pulls almost out again. He holds.

“Tell me where you want me.”

“Where you are right now,” I manage to say.

“Tell me where you want me to come.”

“Inside me.”

“Iris.”

“Inside me, Alasdair. I want you inside me. Come inside, come inside. Come inside me, please.”

I can’t see his face, my forehead is still pressed to my knuckles, but I can feel him looking at me for a moment that stretches on forever.

“That’s all I needed,” he says.

And with a loud, shaking groan, he pushes back in to the hilt and he stays.

Then…he comes.

He comes inside me with a sound that is more animal than man, low and broken and almost a growl, and I feel him in me, the hot pulse of him deeper than anything has been in me in my life, his hand fisted in the bedpost above mine and his other hand at my hip hard enough to bruise.

He stays, riding it out, his pumps short and dragged out, his breath ragged, until he stops entirely.

He stays inside me for a long beat after.

His forehead drops against the back of my neck. He is breathing in a way I’d never heard from him before, hard, winded, undone.

The room is very quiet.

The rain is still pattering on the window, a little louder now.

He kisses the back of my neck. Once. Soft.

“Foxglove.”

“Yes.”

“I have you now.”

“You have me,” I say dreamily.

He withdraws from me slowly. He helps me unwrap my fingers from the post. They are stiff and hurt but who cares about pain right now when I have been so thoroughly ravaged. He turns me carefully and lays me down on the bed and the sheet is cool against my back while the rest of my skin is sweaty hot.

He goes to the basin and wets the cloth.

He comes back.

He cleans me with the same care he showed yesterday, slower this time, more reverent, sliding the warm wet cloth between my legs and over my hips and down the insides of my thighs. He cleans himself too, then sets the cloth aside.

He gets back into the bed beside me, and pulls the heavy quilt up over both of us.

He tucks me against his chest.

“Iris?” he whispers.

“Mmm?”

“Sleep.”

“Mm.”

He kisses my forehead.

I fall asleep against him.

I wake in the dark with the urge to pee.

The fire has gone down to embers. The candles on the mantel have burned out. The rain is hammering against the leaded glass, the sound of it filling the room in uneven lashings thanks to the wind. I have no idea what time it is. Somewhere in the small hours, probably, the deep middle of the night when the body knows the dawn is still a long way off.

The creepy hour, I sometimes think.

I turn my head on the pillow to look at Alasdair.

He is not asleep.

He’s sitting up against the headboard; his back against the dark wood. The quilt is pooled at his waist, his chest bare.

He’s watching me.

I blink.

His eyes…

For a beat, in the low light from the dying fire, his eyes are wrong.

They’re so terribly wrong.

They’re all black. No blue, no iris. Just black and it fills the whole of his eye, edge to edge, like a void.

I make a small sound. Not even a word.

He blinks.

His eyes are his eyes again.

The blue is rimmed with dark; the pupil is where the pupil should be, the whites are white.

He’s the man I fell asleep against hours ago.

He smiles. A small, careful smile.

“Hush, foxglove. Sleep. I’ll be here.”

I automatically close my eyes.

I tell myself I imagined it. I tell myself it was the dying fire on his face and my eyes still adjusting from the dark and the wine still in me from dinner. I tell myself a lot of things these days.

And I’m too tired to think about it.

I fall back asleep with the rain on the window, and the last thing I’m aware of is that he is mine now, and I am his, too.

I don’t know yet what that’s going to cost me.

Chapter

Eighteen

Iwake to grey light and a familiar ceiling.

Except…it’s the wrong kind of familiar. I’m staring at the low, whitewashed plaster of my own bedroom, the slope of the wall where Effie’s wardrobe stands shadowed in the corner, the gauzy curtains pulled across the window facing the bay. It’s the ceiling I’ve been waking up to for almost a month, and this morning it’s all sorts of backwards because…

Didn’t I fall asleep at Alasdair’s castle last night?

I lie still under the quilt and try to put last night back together. I remember the roaring fire, the Spanish wine. The dining hall, and the tapestries with their blue-dressed women watching me eat his fish. His mouth at my throat. The four-poster bed. The post under my forehead. I have you now. I remember falling asleep against him. I remember the rain hammering the windows.

I remember the flash of his eyes in the middle of the night.

But I don’t remember leaving.

The pillow under my cheek smells like the lavender sachet I tucked into the linen drawer last week. The quilt is Effie’s. But I think I’m wearing one of Alasdair’s shirts? It’s a man’s shirt, far too big, soft old cotton, the cuffs frayed…

And I’m wearing nothing else. My hair’s dried in damp tangles. From the rain, maybe? From whatever the fuck happened between the bed I fell asleep in, and the bed I woke up in? There’s a low ache between my legs from him, but at least I do remember how I got that.

I just don’t remember being moved.

I sit up, my body aching. The wood stove’s been tended to, the warmth of it flowing softly underneath the bedroom door. I eye the window and the salt that is still there, undisturbed, in a thick line. Which, of course, means nothing. Those are Effie’s superstitious habits, not literal protections. A line of salt isn’t going to stop a grown man from walking through a door.

Because he did walk through the door. He’s here. Alasdair is inside the cottage, I can tell. The air has weight to it now. The wood stove smells the same, the radiator ticks the same, and the fridge hums the same, yet the whole house has tilted a degree on some axis I can feel under my skin. The walls and the floorboards all seem to scream, he’s here.

I get out of bed, and cautiously pad to the bedroom door in his shirt and bare feet. I push it open and look down the hall.

He’s in the kitchen.

He’s standing at the window with his hands curled around a steaming mug, his gaze on the bay. The early light coming through the glass showcases his profile—the way his dark wet hair shapes his jaw, the glint of blue in his eyes, the firm, sculpted planes of his bare back, shoulders, arms—because of course he’s only wearing pants.

He’s heard me; he knows I’m there from the way he’s gone still, like a predator does when it thinks it’s been spotted. But he doesn’t turn to face me. He keeps his focus on the water, as if he’s looking for something.

“Uh, hi?” I say, throwing an arm out to get his attention.

“Good morning,” he replies. Gradually, he turns his head and looks me over and something like a smile ticks at the corner of his mouth. “My shirt looks good on you.”

I just stare at him. “That’s all you’ve got to say? Your shirt looks good on me? Your shirt that I don’t fucking remember putting on?”

Now he’s fully facing me, leaning against the wall beside the window, one ankle crossed over the other, looking utterly at ease and at home in a way that shouldn’t infuriate me but does. “You didn’t put it on. I did. The clothes you wore to my place seemed too uncomfortable to be dressed in again.”

I shake my head, and when no sense appears, I press my fingers into my temples as if that might make everything come together. It doesn’t. “How did I even get here?”

“I drove you home.”

I blink rapidly. “In my car?”

“Aye,” he confirms with a nod before having another sip of his drink. He’s drinking out of my second favorite mug too, the one with the sailboats painted on the side.

“You drove my car,” I repeat, my voice rising.

“You were dead on your feet, foxglove. I would have taken my own car, but I knew you’d want yours anyway.”

“And if you got into an accident, the car rental insurance wouldn’t count. I’m the only approved driver!”

He frowns at me like he has no idea what I’m talking about, and I realize that car insurance formalities are the least of my worries right now.

I continue, getting back on track with my million questions. “Why did you bring me back here? Why not let me, you know, stay in bed and wake up in the castle like I did the other day?”

Another twitch of his lips. “I didn’t have coffee.”

My brows raise. “Pardon?”

“You wanted coffee the other morning.”

I cross my arms over the borrowed shirt. The cotton smells like him, and I hate that I’m breathing it in and noticing it despite everything.

“Yeah, and?”

“Well, I noticed,” he murmurs, clearing his throat. “You came down for breakfast and I’d put out tea and the food and you ate and drank. And you smiled and said thank you but…you’d wanted coffee. I could see it on your face. You were disappointed and, well, I suppose I didn’t want to disappoint you again.”

I open my mouth. Nothing comes out of it.

“I don’t usually drink it,” he goes on. “So, there’s none in the castle, and I’ve not had a chance to go into town for any. And I knew you’d want it.” He eyes the wood stove, where the kettle’s quietly going, then the counter behind him where I notice my French press and the bag of coffee I bought in Fort Williams open beside it and the mug I drink out of every morning—chipped and overlaid with thistles—is set out with a spoon laid across the rim. “And, well, you have it here.”

I stare at him for a moment, having a hard time comprehending it.

“You brought me home because of coffee?”

“You looked so disappointed when you drank the tea, foxglove. You were polite about it. It bothered me that I haven’t had the time to get you some, so I thought this was a simpler solution—albeit an intrusive one. Sorry if you had a fright this morning.”

I don’t know what to do. I want to laugh. I want to cry. I want to push him out the door and lock it and salt the threshold and have a quiet sit-down with myself about what kind of woman I’ve become in three weeks at this cottage, that the answer I noticed you wanted coffee strikes me as both the most romantic thing a man has ever said to me and something that has the hair up on the back of my neck.

I’m quite disturbed by his actions, yet fucking swooning at his attentiveness. Is the bar in hell?

He’s watching me work through it.

“Iris, I…”

“Give me a second.”

“Aye.”

“You woke up in the night and decided for us to move and you…dressed me in your shirt? While I was asleep, somehow without waking me? Then carried me downstairs and outside then drove my car in the dark in the rain…and let yourself into my house. How? It was locked.”

I locked it to stop people like you.

“The keys were in your pocket,” he explains. “The car key and house key. I let us in.”

Don’t let him in.

I push that voice out of my head, because I don’t want to think about that right now. “And put me in bed,” I continue. “And started the fire. Because I drank tea yesterday morning, and you could tell I wanted coffee.”

“Aye.”

“That isn’t…Alasdair. That isn’t normal.”

“No,” he agrees, “I suppose it’s not.”

“You should’ve woken me up, at the very least.”

“I tried, lass. I asked if you were all right, and you said ‘mm’ and put your face against my neck. I made the call.”

“What if I’d woken up and panicked? What if I’d called the police?”

He looks at me a long moment.

“Then I’d have stood at the window and waited for them.”

I exhale shakily.

“That isn’t comforting.”

“I’m not going to tell you a thing is something when it’s not.”

His voice is low and careful and doesn’t bend even when bending would be the more normal thing. He just hands me the truth and doesn’t care what I do with it.

He takes one step toward me and stops, a strange look coming over his eyes.

“I’m not going to manage staying away now, Iris. Not after last night. You should know that going in. I tried it for weeks across the bay, and I won’t manage it any longer. I’m telling you what I’m like so you can decide what you’re going to do about it.”

Once again, I can’t seem to find the words. I can’t even find the thoughts. The way he’s so easy and accepting of his many red flags—the fact that he dressed me and drove me home while I was sleeping, the fact that he’s saying he can’t stay away from me. And, of course, the numerous other red flags that have popped up since the first day I saw him. That damn dick of his waving around from across the bay should have been a red flag in itself.

And yet…

I like that he’s a walking red flag. You’d think after Ryan I would want someone safe; someone who didn’t carry any toxic traits. But the difference is, Ryan painted all his red flags green. He kept them hidden, making everyone believe he was this perfect husband, when, in reality, he was an asshole.

Alasdair lies to me too—I’m not stupid, I know he does. He’s evasive about half of everything, he won’t give me a straight answer about what he is, and I barely know the man. But there’s a difference, and it took me until now to put my finger on it. Ryan lied about who he was. Alasdair only lies about the facts. He’s never once pretended to be gentle when he wasn’t, never faked being safe, never dressed himself up as a good man—if anything he keeps warning me he’s the opposite. He hides what he is. He’s never hidden how he feels about me.

And god help me, after Ryan, that’s the part that counts. It probably shouldn’t, I mean, I know how reckless and dumb I’ve been and will continue to be (at least I’m self-aware about that) but, it’s true.

Besides, the man knew I loved coffee so much that he took me in the night and brought me here so I could have some when I woke up.

My god, he’s going to be the death of me, isn’t he?

I push off the doorframe.

I cross the kitchen, the bare floor cold under my feet, put my hand flat on his chest, and push him back against the wall by the window, my body suddenly seizing control from my mind and burying what few objections I had to this whole scenario.

His hand catches the small of my back through the shirt, his other hand sets the mug on the sill without looking, and his eyes are that vivid glacial blue, Alasdair blue, and he’s looking at me as if I’ve just done something he’s been holding his breath for.

“Foxglove.”

“Don’t be gentle,” I tell him.

“Aye,” he murmurs, the tip of his nose brushing against mine.

“Be the thing you are when you’re not being careful with me. Be whatever it is that you hold back. I know you hold back.”

He breathes in slowly, his chest moving under my palm. I feel the pause in him—the discipline he’s choosing. But I don’t want him to be disciplined, and I don’t want his patience right now.

I want the part of him that’s been waiting.

“Alasdair. Please.”

His hand comes up and he fists it in my hair at the back of my skull. He doesn’t pull. He just gathers it, the damp weight of it, and tightens, waiting to see if I’ll tell him to stop.

I don’t tell him to stop.

I want him to hold me harder.

“You ask for that again,” he warns, eyes flashing, “and you’ll have it.”

“I’m asking.”

“Christ.” He exhales roughly.

Then his mouth is on mine, and he kisses me hard, like he’s been waiting downstream for this moment and the dam has broken, and the kiss is rougher than any kiss he’s given me yet, his teeth at my lower lip, his tongue in my mouth, his hand in my hair still gathered tight at the nape of my neck. The other hand is at my hip, then under the shirt, on the bare skin of my waist, and he’s pushing off the wall and walking me backward through the room. I pull his pants because I need them off, I need him bare, I need him here, in my kitchen, because I don’t think I’ll even make it to the bedroom.

He manages to shuffle out of his pants until he’s completely naked. I barely have enough time to ogle him before he’s picking me up.

He picks me up like I weigh nothing and sets me on the kitchen table where I eat my fucking toast in the morning. The crocheted runner slides under me, and his hands are on the hem of the shirt—his shirt—and he’s dragging it up over my head in one motion.

I’m naked on my own kitchen table.

He pauses and looks at me, eyes flicking over my skin. He stares at me in that way of his that’s made me feel both seen and slightly afraid of being seen—except his gaze is stronger, deeper. It seems to burn from within.

“God help me, foxglove.”

“Don’t talk,” I tell him.

“I’ll talk, love,” he says gruffly. “I just won’t use any words.”

He pulls me forward by the hips so my ass is at the edge of the table. Then he drops to one knee and places my legs over his shoulders. He puts his mouth on me like a man having a meal he’s been thinking about for too long; the groan that comes out of me reverberates—no rain this morning to cover it—no fire roaring, no four-poster bed soaking up sounds. There’s only the quiet of my own kitchen, the cry of the gulls in the bay, and him.

He works me with his mouth like he’s in no hurry, until I’m leaking onto his chin, my heels pressed into his back. When I’m close—so fucking close—he rests his forehead against my thigh like he has to take a moment.

“On the floor,” he rasps against my skin. “I want you on the floor.”

I attempt to say, okay, but it comes out as a garbled noise. I’m so damn greedy I don’t want him to stop, not even to change positions.

Smoothly, he lifts me off the table and sets me down on the rug in front of the wood stove. The rug is rough but warm, and he’s on me, hard and ready, his hand between my legs guiding himself. I’m opening for him with the easy slick of a woman who’s been undone by his mouth, and the dragging of him in is the slow stretching thing it was last night, yet it’s also new—because this is my floor, my home, the house that maybe he wasn’t supposed to be inside of.

Don’t let him in.

Too late for that.

“Iris.” He breathes. “Iris.”

“Don’t go slow.”

“You’re sore from last night.”

“I don’t care,” I say through a breathy moan.

“I care. I could hurt you, I⁠—”

“Alasdair.”

He looks at me with his forehead against mine, his weight on his elbows and his hips held at the edge of me. He frowns and then nods, seeing the wanting, the crazed desperation that must be written all over my face.

He pushes in to the hilt in one punishing stroke.

The sound I make isn’t pretty.

“That what you want, foxglove?”

“Yes.”

“You want it like that?”

“Yes. Yes.”

He fucks me on the floor like he’s been let off a leash he didn’t tell me he was wearing. There’s none of the slow careful unwrapping of last night. None of the soft take it for me, lass. This is the version of him I asked for. His hands in my hair, tight against the rug, his hips moving in a hard steady drag that’s going to leave me with bruises on my tailbone and the inside of my thighs. His mouth is at my throat where the pulse runs and he’s biting, just shy of breaking the skin, and the noise he’s making in his chest isn’t quite a human noise. It seems to come from some guttural, primal part of him and I want it to go on forever.

“You’ll think on this,” he growls against my throat. Low and ragged. “Every time you stand at that stove. Every time you put your kettle on. You’ll see me on this floor for the rest of your life, foxglove.”

I let out a cry, my eyes pinched shut.

“Look at me,” he commands.

I look. His eyes are dark, pupils wide, his gaze fiery and intense, the kind I feel deep in my soul.

“That’s it. There you are.”

His hand has gone from my hair to my throat, his palm flat under my jaw, his thumb at the angle of it, not pressing, not threatening, just holding me there like he’s claiming me, keeping me as his. His other hand is between my legs working my clit while his cock pumps into me, deep and slow. The combination’s going to undo me in about thirty seconds and we both know it.

“Look at the state of you,” he rasps. “On the floor of your own kitchen with your hair spilled on the rug and my hand at your throat. You came over the bay to me last night and now I’ve come back over to you. You’ll not be rid of me, foxglove. You’ll not be rid of me even when you want to be.”

“I don’t want to be rid of you.”

“Aye. You will…”

The words drop into me like cold water, even as his hips don’t break their rhythm. I’m not about to ask what that meant, not when I can feel myself climbing. The world’s narrowing to bits and pieces—his cock deep inside where I’m pleasantly sore, his hand at my throat, and the slow drag of his fingers where I’m wet and swollen.

And the deep, dark certainty in his voice that he’s right.

“There you are,” he murmurs, and I realize I can’t keep anything off my face. I’m there for him to read—and fuck—like an open book. “There’s the lass who sat at my table last night, at my dinner, drank my wine like a queen, then let me take her upstairs to defile her. Look at you now, here beneath me in this home, in your home, defiled even further. Look at what I have between my hands.”

His pace stutters, like he’s lost a thread of himself. The man who sat across from me at the dining hall has been replaced by the man who was on the other side of the bay for weeks, watching and waiting and yearning for me, and I don’t know which one is the real him. I don’t want to know right now, because the one on top of me is moving in me at exactly the angle I need, and the orgasm comes up through me like a rogue wave from the depths.

I come. I come on his fingers and around him, with my hand fisted in the rug, and his palm at my throat, and he fucks me through it, and past it, and into the shock of a second, then he comes with me, his face buried in the curve of my shoulder, the sound he makes against my skin lower and longer than any sound he’s made yet. Purely animal.

“There you are,” he whispers. “There you are, my love.”

He stays inside me a long beat after that.

Then his hand lifts off my throat, goes to the side of my face, his thumb at my temple. He’s shaking almost unnoticeably; a tremor in the arm braced over my head, in the firm, hard chest pressed against me.

I place my hand on the back of his neck and hold him there. He doesn’t seem like someone who can be comforted by anyone who needs comforting to begin with, yet I can’t help myself.

“Iris,” he says hoarsely.

“Mm?”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

He doesn’t answer right away.

When he speaks, it’s quiet against my collarbone.

“For coming in.”

We end up in bed afterward. He carries me to the bedroom and sets me down on the quilt like I’m made of glass. He goes to the kitchen and comes back with a cup of water then sits on the edge of the bed and holds the cup to my mouth until I’ve drunk what he wants me to drink.

I let him, because he just fucked the life out of me so much that I can barely walk, and I woke up in the wrong bed this morning, and because, well, honestly, it feels nice to be doted on.

Even though in the back of my mind, I keep hearing the starkness of what he said earlier: I’m not going to manage staying away now. I’m telling you what I’m like so you can decide what you’re going to do about it.

And I don’t know what I’m going to do about it, other than let him keep screwing the hell out of me.

Sound like a plan?

He walks out of the bedroom and I can’t help but stare at his firm, high ass—swimming does this man’s body a lot of good—then I hear him turn on the kettle. I hear the wood stove door creak open and a log go in, then water running, and the small clatter of the French press, and then the smell, the rich dark smell that’s been absent all morning, comes drifting through the bedroom door, and I close my eyes.

He’s making me coffee.

He fucked my brains out, and now he’s making me coffee.

I close my eyes and drift away with a delirious smile on my face.

Chapter

Nineteen

When I open my eyes again, Alasdair is in my bedroom doorway, and I realize it wasn’t all some crazy dream. I really did wake up here this morning because he took me in the middle of the night because he thought I would want coffee when I woke up.

And now he’s got his pants back on, with a mug in one hand—I can smell the coffee from here, and it’s like I’m instantly awake—and a plate in the other. The plate’s got bread on it with the soft sheep’s cheese from the village and a slice of the apple I bought a few days ago. He sets the plate on the nightstand and sets the chipped thistle mug beside it.

The coffee’s perfect. Just a bit of oat milk and sugar. Not enough to bury the flavor of the roast. I try and think when he’s seen me drink coffee, how he could know how to make it exactly the way I like it, but I’m drawing a blank.

“Eat, foxglove.”

“I will.”

“You’ll eat now.”

I raise a brow. “Jeez, you’re bossy.”

“Aye. And I’m just getting started,” he says in his brogue.

I eat. The bread’s gone slightly stale, but the cheese is good and the apple’s cold and tart and I’m hungrier than I thought. He watches me eat with the same rapt attention he had at the dining hall last night, and I’m no longer self-conscious about it. I suppose it’s hard to be self-conscious around someone when you’re continuously having their cock inside you.

When I’m done, he takes the plate away, and I hear him doing the dishes in the kitchen.

I glance at the line of salt around the window and wonder what Effie had been so worried about. I know now that she wasn’t keeping out Alasdair, wasn’t keeping out a man who fucks you hard, makes you coffee, and brings you food in bed. She wasn’t keeping out him, so…who was she keeping out?

And do I still have to be worried about them?

I want to ask Alasdair about it, but decide not to. He doesn’t seem to be annoyed in the slightest at my constant questions, but I also know they tend to not get me anywhere. Anyway, I’m too blissed out to rock the boat at this exact second.

After a while, I get out of bed again and dressed in my own clothes, walking into a sparkling clean kitchen where I find him milling around in his own world. He moves about the cottage with a cup of tea in hand, looking around as if he’s never been inside a building before. There’s a sense of awe on his features.

He appears to go from room to room with no agenda except to look. The sitting room first. He stops at the mantle and observes the things placed there; a candle, a ceramic dish filled with sea glass I collected from the beach, the framed pressed foxglove I made that has a touch of black at the edges where mold had gotten to it (foxgloves are a bitch to press). He picks up the frame and looks at it for a long beat then sets it down. He absently runs his fingertips along the back of the armchair before he moves on to the books on the shelf. He doesn’t pull any of them down. He just runs his eyes over the spines, slowly, taking in the reading material. He finally points to the book about lichen that he has at the castle and gives me an appreciative nod. Fucking nerds.

After that, he goes back to the kitchen and I trail behind him like a curious puppy. He opens the cupboard where Effie kept the herbs. He looks at the labeled jars of mugwort, yarrow, vervain—the things I haven’t dared throw out because I don’t know which of them is for cooking and which of them is for keeping me alive in some way I’d rather not ponder. He closes the cupboard.

He goes to the back door. He runs his palm flat down the wood of the frame.

Then he turns and looks at me with an inquisitive expression.

“What?” I ask, having parked myself at the table after getting myself another cup of coffee. I’m pretending I didn’t just have my ass cheeks pressed on this runner earlier.

“I’ve never been in here,” he comments.

“I know.”

“It’s strange, it’s somehow bigger that it seems from the outside. You know, once you’re inside.” He smiles a little. “It suits her.”

“Effie?”

“Aye. Suits you, too. Like you were made for this place.”

He says it casually, and yet I take it with some weight because I’ve never felt like I was made for any place. So the fact that he’s saying this now has my chest feeling tight with too many feels that have come out of the cottage’s very old woodwork.

He sits across from me at the table and his eyes go past me to the windowsill, where Effie’s wooden box has been sitting beside the salt jar for three days.

“And that?” he wonders with a nod.

“That’s Effie’s box. No idea what’s in it. I can’t figure out how to open it.”

“May I?” he asks, politely placing an open palm across the table.

“You’ve made yourself at home,” I say wryly as I get up and place the box on the table. “Please, have at it.”

The box sits between us now and he doesn’t touch it, not right away. Instead, he looks at it for a long beat. Then he reaches for it, delicately, and his long fingers find the carvings on the lid, those letters in the alphabet I don’t know, the ones I’ve been running my thumbs over for ages now without finding a single seam. Watching him is like watching someone read Braille—he only stares at the carvings for a moment before his gaze goes off to the window. With an absent look on his face, he continues to run his fingertips over them.

He carefully turns the box in his hands, slow, two revolutions. Then he nods, as if deciding something for himself, and presses two of the carvings at the same time, his thumb on one and his middle finger on the other, and then with his other hand he slides the lid sideways instead of lifting it, and the lid comes off in a way I haven’t even thought to try, because boxes don’t usually open sideways.

But this one did.

And he did it.

The box is open.

Ta-da.

He gently sets the lid down beside it on the table and peers into it as I do.

Inside, is a thick pouch of oiled wool the color of old butter.

He reaches in and opens the pouch, pulling out a Gothic skeleton key and laying it on top of the wool.

It’s fairly large. Maybe gold, maybe some tarnished metal. Very old, long shaft, a single bit at the end, the head a worn quatrefoil that’s gone soft at the edges from age.

Both of us stare at the key in the box for a moment, and then he glances up at me.

“Iris?”

“Yeah?” I breathe.

He lifts the key out of the wool. He holds it across the table to me on the flat of his palm.

“This is for you.”

I take it.

It’s heavier than it looks. The metal’s cold and the bit at the end’s worn unevenly on one side from use. I close my hand around it and the shape of it presses into my palm. It feels…good.

And I know exactly where this key leads.

I’ve known since the night I found salt at the base of the closet door.

Alasdair is watching me hold it. The face is the carefully-chosen stillness I’ve seen on him before, but I can see now that the stillness is for me, not for him. He’s letting me have this moment without putting anything of himself into it. He’s letting me find what I need to find.

“How did you know how to open it?” I inquire quietly, feeling like the air we’re breathing from that long-closed box is sacred, or something.

He swallows audibly. “I’ve seen a box like it before, lass.”

“Where?”

“A long time ago.”

Of course.

“Have you seen the key before?”

His eyes lock with mine for a moment and I can see something dark pass over them. “Aye. On your aunt’s neck, from time to time. No, I never asked about it. I don’t know where it leads. That’s all yours to find out. Not mine.”

He stands up from the table.

The standing has a finality to it I don’t like. He moves around the table and stops behind my chair, and he leans down and puts his mouth against my temple and breathes in once, deeply. He kisses me there and then he straightens.

“Where are you going?” I ask

“Home. I’ll come back tonight, if you’ll have me. If you don’t want me, leave the salt at the back step and I’ll know to keep going.”

I stare at him for a moment. “That salt doesn’t really keep you out, does it?”

A ghost of a smile flits across his lips. “It’s only salt. But it’s a signal.”

“And if I want you here?” I ask.

His face changes at that. His smile doesn’t quite fade; it just becomes a touch wicked. “Then ask me, foxglove. In the daylight. With your eyes open.”

What the fuck does that mean?

But he’s already opening the door. The cold off the bay comes in over the threshold, he goes through it, and pulls it closed behind him.

I sit at the table for a long time.

The key’s still in my hand. Heavy and cold, despite being in my palm, but seeming to throb with some energy I’m probably just imagining. The empty box is open in front of me.

I open my hand and I look at the key.

It’s just a key.

And yet I know it will open to something that will finally give me the answers I need.

The only problem is, I don’t know if they’re the answers I want.

The cottage settles around me, feeling quieter than ever with Alasdair gone.

I stand up, walk to the bottom of the stairs, and stand there with my hand on the banister and the key in my palm.

I look up into the dim of the upstairs corridor.

Chapter

Twenty

The closet is not a closet.

Surprise, surprise, something I thought was something in this damn house is not the thing I thought it was.

I stand in the guest bedroom with the Gothic key in my palm, the door to the closet-not-closet open in front of me. As the cold of an unused space comes across my face, it takes me a beat to understand what I’m looking at, the area dimly lit only from the light of the bedroom.

It’s a small room, maybe five feet deep, the same width as the bedroom, but a room nonetheless, tucked behind the wall where I had assumed there was nothing but eaves and pipework. The ceiling is low because it’s under the slope of the roof, and the air inside is colder than the bedroom by a few degrees. There’s a smell coming out of it. Beeswax, old paper. Something underneath that’s sharper. Pigment or linseed oil, maybe?

I duck and step in, but I don’t get very far. It’s enough that I pull on the cord hanging from the bulb and the light comes on, illuminating everything in a stark wavering light as the blub swings above me.

There are paintings upon paintings stacked against the walls, some hung, some leaned, some racked in narrow wooden racks. Canvases of many sizes, though none larger than two feet across. A small worktable along the far wall with brushes in jars and clay pots of dried pigment and a glass cup of old turpentine that has gone the color of weak whisky. A paint-stained smock on a peg. A small kerosene lamp on the table, with a box of kitchen matches beside it. A bundle of rowan twigs tied with red thread. A small dish of grey hair—I’m sorry Effie, but I can’t help but shudder at that one. Hair that’s not on a head is an ick of mine.

I take another step, and my feet crunch on something.

I look down and cringe, fearing the worst, like I just stepped on a bunch of dried out spiders.

There is salt on the floor.

On the floorboards in patterns. Circles. Several of them, drawn in coarse sea salt, some disturbed and redrawn, the older lines visible underneath the newer ones, the way a pentimento shows under a painting that has been reworked. Jars of more salt on a shelf above the worktable. A small leather-bound notebook on the table beside the lamp.

It’s all so witchy as fuck but I still don’t understand any of it.

I turn to the nearest painting to look at it closer and then…

Then I understand all of it at once.

It’s Alasdair.

A small oil portrait in a plain dark wood frame, his face in three-quarter profile. The angle of his jaw, the cleft in his chin, the Alasdair blue of his eyes.

The signature in the bottom right corner reads, E. Galloway. 1989.

I blink at it, my brain short-circuiting, then turn to the next.

It’s Alasdair again. Different painting. Smaller. His face turned to the viewer this time, his eyes finding mine in dots of vibrant cornflower. E. Galloway. 1972.

The next. Alasdair on the rocks of his spit, in dark clothes, looking across the bay. E. Galloway. 1994.

The next. Alasdair at a kitchen table I do not recognize, a candle in front of him, his hand on a book. E. Galloway. 2003.

The next. The white horse standing in bracken, mane long, eyes black. E. Galloway. 1981.

The next. A close-up of Alasdair’s hands. E. Galloway. 2017.

I keep looking at the paintings. There are dozens. Some half-finished. Some signed and dated and finished. The earliest one I find on the wall is dated 1962. The latest is dated 2023.

He is the same in every fucking one.

Thirty years apart, fifty years apart—it doesn’t matter. The same face. The same eyes. The same line of his jaw.

I sit down on the floor, my back against Effie’s worktable. There isn’t much room to sit but I sit anyway, because my legs have stopped wanting to hold me up.

The math is absolutely not mathing.

There is no version of it that does, even though I try every logical angle. Alasdair has a father who looks exactly like him. And a grandfather who looks like him. That could happen, couldn’t it?

I reach around and pick up the leather-bound notebook on the worktable. I flip it open to see her handwriting, see the first date in 1962.

I tried the salt circle with the rowan again. He came to the gate. He did not cross. I do not know why the wood does not work alone. I also don’t know why he keeps coming back.

—E.

I flip forward a few pages.

Catriona is missing. They came to my door. I told them what I could, and what I could not. I sat with my tea afterwards, watched the bay from the kitchen window, and waited for him to come to the rocks. But he didn’t. He hasn’t come for three nights. He knows I know it was him.

I flip forward. 1981. The year of the white horse painting.

I have tried the binding seventeen times. The thing my grandmother told my mother about, the piece of the horse hide. I cannot do it alone. He will not give it to me. The bargain only takes the form he can keep.

I flip to the last entries.

I am eighty-three, and he looks the same as he did when I was twenty-two. When I die, the bargain breaks. The next Galloway will have to do what I could not, or refuse him entirely. I will be the one who left her this. I will have to die with that.

The last entry is undated.

Iris will have to do what I could not. I am sorry to leave her this. I see no other way.

I close the notebook and stare numbly at the paintings.

Effie tried for sixty years to do something, some binding, and she failed at it.

Effie created a bargain with Alasdair.

Effie left me the cottage knowing all of this. She was unable to tell me outright—perhaps because I wouldn’t believe it until I lived here long enough—until I eventually came to know Alasdair.

I sit there for a long time.

When I get up, I am decidedly undecided. I know only there is one more person I have to talk to before the day is done; before my brain absolutely melts into goo.

I duck back through the doorway. I lock the secret room behind me, refuse to look at the jawbone that I know is still on the bed, then go downstairs. I get my keys from the kitchen counter where Alasdair left them.

I drive to the village.

Mhairi is at the till when I step inside her shop, the air inside warm and a little stale, smelling of tea, and butter, and lavender. It all seems so quaint, so normal and ordinary, and, for a moment, I think I’m being silly by coming here. That there’s no way I’m about to tell this shopkeeper I barely know that my neighbor seems to be immortal.

Even Mhairi seems so unassuming, keeping busy by sorting a stack of envelopes. She pauses her shuffling and looks up at me when I walk in.

She stares a beat longer than she needs to and squints, raising her chin. She doesn’t say anything, but I think, somehow, she already knows. She sets the envelopes down, then turns and puts the kettle on.

“Mhairi?” My voice is clear as I approach.

“Aye, hen. Cup of tea?”

“I’m good,” I tell her, raising my palm.

“You’ll be even better when you have tea. Sit down.”

There’s a single wooden chair by the cold radiator at the back of the shop, beside the rack of postcards the odd tourist or hill-walker buys—who apparently don’t care that they’re all yellowing at the edges. I sit down while Mhairi makes the tea. I know the stores back at home—least not the places I’ve lived in—would never offer tea to their customers as if they were old friends, but here it feels like a custom; part of the landscape. Besides, even though I really should just get some bread and a few things, I do have a fuckton of questions for her, and she’s more likely to answer them if I just do as she says and have tea.

She brings me a mug and a plate with a tablet of shortbread on it then pulls a stool over from behind the counter and sits across from me. She looks at me with her clear, hazel eyes for a long second before she speaks.

“Let’s cut the idle chitchat, shall we?”

I nearly choke on my biscuit. Straight to the point, this one. I hope that comes in abundance today.

“You’ve been over there,” she states.

I don’t have to ask her to clarify where “there” is.

“You’ve gotten to…know him,” she adds with a glint in her eye. I don’t want her to clarify what that means either.

“I have,” I say slowly. “Fairly well.”

“And now you’re wondering who exactly you’re dealing with” She grimaces. “Or what.”

I stare at her, because we’re about to embark on a conversation I never thought I would have with anyone. A conversation about the fucking impossible. The supernatural. And Mhairi here is acting like this is just a regular workday for her.

“What do you know?” she asks between a sip of her tea.

“I don’t fucking know what I know,” I blurt, then I cover my mouth with my hand, eyes wide. “Sorry, didn’t mean to swear.”

“Aye, hen, you swear as much as you need to.”

I sigh and run my hand over my face, shaking my head. “This is going to sound crazy but…I discovered a box, and inside the box was a key, and the key opened a room upstairs, and in that room…”

“The paintings,” she states simply.

I blink at her in surprise. “You know about the paintings?”

“Your Effie was a great artist. She took great pride in her art, even those paintings she made of her neighbor. When I’d come to Tigh-na-Mara over the years, she would have them all over her walls. She didn’t let many people in, mind you, but she did me from time to time. I knew of her fascination with him. Couldn’t blame her, really.” She takes another sip of her tea and lets out a long sigh. “Then, the last time I came over, when she was doing poorly health-wise and we knew she’d have to get proper care soon, I noticed the paintings were no longer on the walls.”

Suddenly I’m picturing the walls around my bed clearly. The paintings that were gone, the blank spaces left behind. Those paintings had been there. She had Alasdair watching her as she slept.

“I just figured that those paintings had to go somewhere.”

“But…the paintings are all of him.”

“Aye.”

“They’re dated,” I say, hoping she’s picking up what I’m putting down.

“They are,” she confirms. She has that same way of direct answering that Alasdair does.

“He’s the same in every one. Every single one. From the sixties onward. He looks the same. You understand that’s crazy, right? He looks the fucking same.”

A long beat. She takes a nibble of her shortbread and gently wipes the crumbs from her lips.

“Aye, hen. He is the same.”

I take a breath.

“It’s not possible.”

“Many things aren’t until they are.”

Helpful.

“I want to know who he really is, what he really is,” I tell her.

She nods slowly.

“All right, hen. Ask away and I’ll tell ya. It’s better this way.”

Here I go. “He’s a vampire, isn’t he?”

She chuckles, which is a bit of a relief. “Good heavens. No. No vampire. Not sure they exist really, and if they do, I’ve never come across one.”

I never really thought Alasdair was a vampire. To be honest, I never really thought he was anything other than possibly an eccentric at best, and a serial killer at worst. I mean, he doesn’t have fangs, he walks about in broad daylight—as broad as it gets here—I’ve seen him eat garlic, and I’ve felt his heart beat. He’s not undead.

“Is he a…merman?” I ask next, because that’s also been nagging at me, the fact that he’s always swimming, even though I’m almost smiling as I say it because it sounds so ridiculous.

She shakes her head. “No, hen. There are no such thing as mermen. Mermaids, sure, though I’ve never seen ‘em. Rumor has it they died out a long time ago, or migrated to other parts of the world.”

“Uh. Okay. Selkie?” I mentally rummage through every mythological or supernatural creature.

“Selkies are real,” she confirms, “but he isn’t one. Selkies come up out of the sea, shed their skin, and walk about as men and women. They are beautiful and they are not safe, but they don’t drown women. They integrate, and marry, and break the hearts of the people they leave behind.”

I throw a hand up. “Okay, so what the hell is he then? Just…an immortal? Someone who sold his soul to the devil?” I pause. “Oh, I know! He’s Dorian Grey!”

She looks at me for a long beat.

“You really want to know?”

“I want to know. I need to know.”

I need to know what the fuck I’m sleeping with.

“All right. Here, in these parts, we have the each-uisge.”

She says it easily. Ech-OOSH-keh. The ch in the back of the throat.

“Each-uisge?”

“Ech-oosh-keh. Like a loch.”

“Each-uisge?” I repeat, trying to really lay on the Scot’s brogue.

“Aye. Closer. Water-horse. The old word.”

“Horse!”

“Aye. Surely you would have seen that connection by now.”

“He’s a fucking horse!?” I exclaim, then quickly look around the shop to see if anyone came in without me noticing. It’s still empty.

“A horse that lives in the water,” she explains, her tone so matter-of-fact it’s almost comical. “They come up out of the lochs at certain times of the year, and they will let you ride them, but if you put your hand on them your hand will not come off. The horse will go back into the loch and you will go with it, and that is the last anyone will see of you. Your liver will wash up later, sometimes. That’s how they’re known.”

The liver. That’s what the locals at the pub had said, about the woman in Applecross, how only a liver remained.

“The white horse in his woods…” I say slowly, remembering how it watched me near the castle, how he warned me not to touch it.

“Aye.”

“The white horse is…Alasdair?”

She takes a sip of her tea.

“That is what it is.”

“He is the horse,” I repeat.

“He is.”

“And the man.”

“He is both. A shapeshifter. He has been one for a very long time.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know exactly. He was on this coast when my grandmother was young. He was on this coast when her grandmother was young, by what she told me. The records of this village do not go back as far as he does, you see.”

I try to let that fact sink in, but it’s hard. Every part of my brain wants to fight against what I’ve been told, even when I’ve seen some evidence of it. At the very least, I know that he’s been alive and hasn’t aged for a very long time, the paintings are evidence of that, and yet I still can’t seem to wrap my head around the rest of it.

“But I saw him riding a horse…”

“He rides them, aye. There are wild horses here that belong to him, running loose on the hills and the moors. They are kin, in a way.”

“He told me his last name…” I offer, feeling like I finally have some information she may not.

“What did he tell you?”

“MacCoinnich.”

She nods. “Aye, it is. Or it was. That was the spelling before they anglicized it. It’s Mackenzie now.”

“Mackenzie!” I exclaim.

“Aye. The clan is everywhere on this coast. He’s from before the change in spelling. He’s never updated. Why should he? He doesn’t really exist.”

I close my eyes and give my head a shake. Too much. It’s too fucking much. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

I open them. Mhairi is watching me closely.

“The names,” I say, my voice coming out flat now. “I found a list in Effie’s trunk, of names of women throughout the years, including Catriona Carmichael…”

“Aye.”

“He killed them.”

“He did, hen.”

I knew it and yet refused to know it at the same time. The truth lodges in my chest like shrapnel from an explosion I’d been expecting.

“He killed all of them.”

“All of them,” she repeats with a grim nod.

The drowned wives. He was the one that drowned them. He is the one that created them. No wonder he talked about them with reverence. It was because he was fucking guilty.

“He killed Catriona Carmichael.”

“Aye.”

“The four this summer.”

She pauses and then nods. “Aye.”

The four this summer. It seemed like a lot at once considering how spread out it had been during the decades before.

“Why this summer?” I ask. “Why more?”

She sets her tea down. “Because Effie died, hen. She kept him bound, in a way. The one your bloodline has kept on him since the first Galloway came to that cottage, and whatever dwelling may have stood there before. As long as the Galloway woman of the line kept her threshold closed to him, he held to a pace. He took rarely. He held himself to the loch. It was a bargain between them.”

“What did he get out of it?” I ask. Because I have to ask. Because the only kind of arrangement I understand is the kind both sides want.

Mhairi looks at me for a long beat over her tea.

“An anchor, hen. They need one. A woman by the water who knows them by name while also refusing them. Without that, they forget what shape they are. They go back to the water and they don’t come back as anything you’d want to meet. The keeper kept him a man as much as she kept him to the loch. He needed her for that. He needs you for that, hen. And he’s losing it now.”

“How is he losing it?” I ask.

Mhairi takes a slow sip of her tea. Her eyes don’t leave mine over the rim of the cup.

“You’ve been there long enough to start seeing it, hen. The four this summer. He’ll be holding to a pace he set centuries ago, and that pace is breaking. He’ll be eating more, and what he eats is going to start looking less like the careful choices of a careful creature. The form will slip on him when it didn’t used to. Some night the man will sit at your table, and you’ll look up and not be sure for a second whether it’s even a man anymore. He’ll know it’s happening. He won’t be able to stop it. The longer he goes without a keeper, the less of him there is to come back to her when he comes up out of the water.”

She sets the cup down.

“I’d give him a year, hen. Maybe two. Before there’s nothing left across the bay but the horse. And it will be as if the man never existed.”

I can’t even think about it.

“And so when Effie died…”

“The line went dormant. He has been losing the bargain in stages since the spring. The four this summer are what happens when there is no anchor.”

“Eighty years…” I can barely breathe.

“Effie was the longest keeper of the line. She refused him at the threshold when she was twenty-two, and she refused him every year of her life after that; the refusing held the bargain longer than it had ever been held.”

“And now I’m here.”

“Aye. That you are.”

“And I…have not refused him.”

She does not answer. She does not need to.

“I tried though,” I plead. “I didn’t know what Effie meant by keeping everything salted, but I did it anyway. I didn’t know she meant Alasdair—I feared she meant Alasdair—but…I didn’t invite him in. Yet…”

“Yes?”

“This morning, I woke up in my bed and he was there. He brought me there overnight from the castle. He came in through the front door. The wards did not hold. Shouldn’t they have held?”

“Hen,” she murmurs gently, placing a cool hand on top of mine. “You did let him in.”

“I didn’t. The door was locked. He unlocked it with the key but I know I didn’t…I was asleep but I know I wouldn’t have…”

“I do not mean the door, Iris,” she snaps sharply.

I frown. “Then what are you talking about?”

She gives me a pointed look.

“Your body, my dear.”

The shop tilts, and I suck in my breath to keep from going with it.

Don’t let him in.

“The bargain has not been about doors, at least not all of it,” she explains. “The salt at the windows and the rowan at the step have been the small theatre of a much older rule, and the older rule is that the Galloway women keep their thresholds closed.”

But if the threshold is also her body?

Effie kept hers closed for sixty years.

And I have decidedly not.

“Oh. Oh fuck.” I gasp.

“Aye, hen.”

“Oh my god.”

“Aye.”

“Mhairi—”

“I know.”

“But I didn’t know. Effie’s letter said⁠—”

“I don’t know what Effie’s letter said, but I know she couldn’t have written it plainly. There are things one does not put on paper in this country, even now. She wrote what she could. She trusted you would understand the rest.”

“I didn’t though!” I cry out softly, feeling so utterly dense. “It’s taken weeks to figure it out.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have figured it out right away. You’re not from here. You didn’t grow up with this folklore, with these tales.”

I need a drink. I look around the shop and spy the local whiskies at the till. I need to drink like a million of those.

Mhairi sighs. “I suppose it’s not so early anymore.” Then she gets up, goes behind the counter, and brings out a half-drunk bottle of Scotch. The cork comes out with a loud pop. She comes back over, picks up my teacup, drinks it back even though I’m pretty sure it’s still hot, then pours the whisky in the empty cup. “There. This is a greater medicine than tea. You’re having a shock. This’ll set you right.”

I nod and shoot back the whisky. It burns going down, but it’s not enough to smack some sense into me, not enough to make any of this make sense. I gesture with my chin and she pours another. I shoot that back too and I feel just a little better.

I sink back in my chair and watch as she takes a swig herself from the bottle then slams the cork back in with the heel of her palm.

“I have known about him since I was eight years old.” She sighs, sitting back down. “My mother sat me down at the kitchen table and told me what lived across the bay from the Galloway cottage, the same way her mother had told her. The village has been keeping his secret for longer than any of us have been alive.”

“And the police?” I ask, thinking of MacRae and Sinclair. “What do they know? Do they know?”

“The police are not from here either. They know what people say, but they look down on us coastal folk, say it’s all tall tales. Because they don’t believe—or don’t want to believe, as is the case with Constable MacRae—they rule it out. But it doesn’t matter anyway. He cannot be stopped by the people of this village. He can’t be stopped by the police. He can’t be stopped by men with guns. He can only be stopped by the line. He can only be stopped by a Galloway woman willing to do what Effie tried for sixty years to do.”

“And…what is that? How do I stop him?”

“That’s for another conversation. Come back when you’re ready to ask it. You’ll need to get used to the truth first.”

I stare at her. She is exactly the same woman I’ve been buying bread from for weeks now. She has been holding this knowledge for me since she was first evasive about who lived in the castle.

“So, what do I do now? Now that I know what he is.”

Now that I know he’s a killer. That he killed forty-seven women in the decades before, plus four women this year, plus who knows who else.

Not to mention being immortal.

And also…the horse thing.

“That is up to you,” she says.

“Aren’t I in any danger?” I ask.

She rubs her lips together, weighing it. “To be truthful with you, I don’t know. He’s never hurt a Galloway. He’s always needed them. He needs you in many ways and he’s used you in many ways. But no Galloway has ever let him in like you have and I don’t know what that means for him…or for you. If the bargain is broken and the threshold is gone, what is left to tie him to his humanity?”

I think about what Alasdair had warned me about. When this happens between us—when you let me have all of you—things will change. When you let me have all of you, the version of me you fall asleep next to won’t be the version you wake up to. Do you understand?

I didn’t understand. I really didn’t understand.

“He was controllable before,” she continues, her eyes taking on a hard gleam. “Then Effie died, and he started ratcheting up, still bound, but freed slightly by her death. Now the bargain is gone completely, and there’s no telling what he will do. So, no, I can’t tell you if you’re in any danger, but I think you should start acting like you are.” She pauses. “I can tell you have some hard decisions to make.”

That’s an understatement if I’ve ever heard one.

I get up, my legs a little shaky from the conversation or maybe the whisky, and give the sincerest smile I can muster.

“Thank you.”

“Aye.”

“I’ll come back when I’ve figured out what to do.”

“I know you will. You stay safe now, alright? Best to keep salting those doors and windows and keep them locked. You let him inside once—you don’t have to do it again, you hear?”

I hear. I don’t bother telling her I’ve let him in more than once, including that very morning on the rug in front of the woodstove.

I head out of the shop and into the empty street. The afternoon has rolled on; the gulls wheel and cry overhead.

I get into the car. I sit in it for a long moment before I turn the key.

Then I drive home with my hands white-knuckled on the wheel, a man named Eachann Alasdair MacCoinnich—Mackenzie—each-uisge, the white horse, the man across the bay, the man I let into my body, sitting in the passenger seat of my head, looking at me, waiting to see what I will do.

Chapter

Twenty-One

Isit at the kitchen table all afternoon, and the day moves past me in shows of light across the loch, changing from silver, to pewter, to bronze.

The tea has gone cold three times. The kettle’s been refilled twice. I’ve tucked into a bottle of Speyside whisky I bought when I first got here, and even though it’s tempting to keep going and down the whole thing, I know I need to stay sharp. I know I need that more than ever if I plan on figuring out what to do.

I glance at the salt jar on the counter. I think about the back step. I think about Alasdair telling me, leave the salt at the back step and I’ll know to keep going. I think about him saying it just this very morning, when I still thought he was a man humoring my aunt’s habits. I think about how his face looked when he said it, that he didn’t look like he was humoring anything, that he looked absolutely grave.

He’s been waiting for me to know the truth; to find it out on my own. He’s been waiting for me to know for weeks. Maybe months. Maybe years. He knew there would be another Galloway, just like my great-aunt, and that I could be the one that would finally give him what he wants.

And I did just that.

I gave him what he wanted.

That thought sits in my chest like a stone.

The betrayal is real. It doesn’t feel like it did with Ryan, but it’s still there, still this acidic thing that’s eating away at my ribs, trying to get at my heart.

Mhairi was right—he used me. None of what he said was real, he was just trying to get into my pants, just trying to break this age-old bargain so that he could be free to…what? Continue his murder spree?

And what did he do with the victims anyway? Why were they only females? Why was the liver left behind? Did he just kill them or did he…

I push back from the table, refusing to think about that. Of everything I just heard at the shop, we didn’t discuss how he killed or why, and I don’t want to know what he did with the bodies. All I know is whoever they were, they became the drowned women of this loch. The drowned women were real, which meant that gull I saw in the water the other day might have been one of them. That woman swimming, beckoning me in? That might have been one of them, too.

I pick up the salt jar and walk to the back door, standing there with my hand on the latch, staring through the window at the ever-changing water.

I open the door an inch. The cold off the bay comes in, smelling of brine and fresh air and the faint smell of a campfire. I glance up at the castle and see the smoke rising from one of his many fireplaces. He’s there. He’s home.

But he’s sure as fuck not coming here.

I pour the thickest line of salt at the back step, as wide as my finger.

Then I lock every fucking door and window in this cottage and resalt everything, moving through the rooms with a manic energy in my chest.

After, I take a long bath, too hot, doused with copious amounts of salt for my screaming muscles that are angry at me for running around like a loon, and I get out after ten minutes because I can’t lie there with my eyes closed feeling so vulnerable.

I put on my flannel pajamas and make toast because I realize I haven’t eaten much of anything today. The toaster is terribly loud, the pop when it’s done making me jump, my heart racing. I butter the slice with a trembling hand and sit at the kitchen table with lavender tea; the sound of my chewing fills the cottage and my head.

Until…there’s something else…

Some other sound.

I stop chewing. I sit with the toast in my hand I listen.

A footstep on the gravel in the driveway.

Then another.

I don’t breathe.

The kitchen lights are on overhead and the windows are black against the night. I can see myself in the glass—my face, my wet hair, my pajama collar—reflected back at me in the dark.

I look at my reflection.

My reflection looks back.

I tell myself it is the wind at the eaves, that the gravel settles, that it is just an animal outside, a fox. I sit totally still and I keep my eyes on the woman in the window.

Her face moves.

Just half an inch, to the left. The shift of a face that has been still and turns slightly…

But I haven’t moved at all.

I’m frozen at this table with a toast in my mouth, and my reflection is doing what reflections never do— moving without me.

For one beat I see it. The second face fitting into mine in the glass.

The blue eyes filling in my brown ones.

Then it’s just me again.

My hair. My collar. My eyes wide.

I should get up and close the curtain, but I can’t make myself walk to that window. Instead, I manage to get to my feet and reach for the light switch on the wall. I flick it off without turning my head, and the kitchen goes dark, the reflection going with it.

There are no more footsteps.

There is only the wind.

Time for fucking bed.

I check the bedroom window, the salt at the sill. The horseshoe points up above the doorway, and I lock that door too for good measure. I flick on the lamp and read three pages of one of Effie’s notebooks, trying to figure out what kind of trouble I’m in—what the hell I’m supposed to do now—before the words start swimming, and my eyes go heavy with the kind of fatigue that’s been sitting on me for two days, the fibro coming up under the dread like a hand under a sheet, reaching for me and pulling me under.

I want to stay awake.

But I close my eyes and immediately fall asleep.

The first thing I do when I wake up is grab my robe and slippers and head straight out to the kitchen, peering through the window of the backdoor and onto the step.

The thick pale ridge of salt is exactly where I laid it last night. The line has not been broken. Nothing has crossed it. The bay beyond is silver-grey in the early light, and, beyond it, the castle.

Was it Alasdair last night walking around my cottage? Was that his face at the window? Had he come by earlier and seen the salt, then came back in the darkness to see if I had changed my mind? Or was that all in my imagination, rapidly running wild in order to catch up with the reality that Mhairi bestowed upon me?

I stand against it for a beat with my hand flat on the wood and do the calm assessment my therapist back home got me to do: Where are you? What did you do? What is the situation?

I’m in my great-aunt’s cottage. I salted the step against a monster, and the monster did not come in.

The monster did not come in.

I let out a breath I’ve apparently been holding since last night and press my forehead to the cool door.

I should not be relieved. I should be more worried. The salt holding means the salt has been holding for over sixty years against the same thing, which means everything I’ve been doing in this cottage to make myself feel better about Effie’s habits has been keeping a literal monster off the back step—a sentence so insane I can’t let it sit in my mind for more than a second.

But the salt held.

I let him inside my body, and yet the salt held.

I put the kettle on and notice my hands are not entirely steady, but I go through the motions of a normal morning anyway, because what else am I supposed to fucking do?

I drink my coffee and stare out at the bay, at the drowned wives hidden beneath the water, at the looming castle where the monster resides, but the feeling of normalness, that falseness, doesn’t hold for long. It’s not like the salt; it holds nothing back. I have to do something, and I have to do something today, because if I sit at this table any longer I’m going to lose what’s left of my mind.

I finish my coffee and get my neglected phone. There are two texts from Maddie. The first from yesterday morning: checking in love, you’ve gone weirdly quiet. The second from late last night, when Maddie’s evening would have been my middle of the night: Iris if I don’t hear from you by tomorrow, I’m calling.

I look at the texts.

I think about all the shit I could text back—the way she’d laugh at the truth, then realize that I’ve gone crazy and need psychiatric help. Then she’d get on the next plane, Andrew in tow, and come get me to bring me back to the States.

Was that really such a bad idea?

Isn’t leaving this place exactly what I should do?

But it’s not what Mhairi suggested, and it’s not what Effie wanted for me. She wouldn’t have left me the cottage otherwise. She chose me for reasons I don’t fully understand, but I think at least one of those reasons is really important. Is it an Iris Galloway Saves the World kind of responsibility? God, I hope not. But I do think things would be worse for the people around town if I wasn’t here.

I type back to Maddie: Hey, sorry, day got away from me. All okay. Call you later. Promise.

Now, what the fuck am I going to do about this situation?

To be fair, last night I had gone looking for something to read about the each-uisge so I dug my Kindle out from my backpack—turns out I had never taken it out of my bag since I got here. But it had given me a small spinning circle, then a black screen, and then a tiny battery icon flashing for thirty seconds before it died entirely. I had plugged it into the charger and gone to bed.

I head to the bedroom and pick up the Kindle, thinking it should be fully charged by now. I tap the screen and it does the spinning circle of death and the black screen again and then it dies. Again.

The Kindle has chosen the worst possible day to lie down and give up.

I look at it for a long beat, cursing the machine and myself for not updating it for the last ten years, then I go back to my phone. I’ll just read the ebooks from the mobile app. But when I start looking for the right books online, all I find are anthologies of Celtic Tales and children’s books. The few I really want aren’t available for a US-based account.

Fine, then.

Seems the universe wants to do this old-fashioned way.

I’m going to the library.

I get dressed, grab my shit, and open the front door.

I pause on the doorstep and look at the salt line before stepping over it.

I can only hope it holds while I’m gone. Last thing I want is to come home and find a fucking horse in my kitchen.

The nearest library is in Lochcarron, forty-five minutes south, and the drive is the kind that should do me good, all pastoral and scenic, the road following the loch, the morning sun catching on the heather, the long curves through bracken. But instead, the drive is the kind of drive where I keep checking the rearview, and the verges, and the gaps in the trees, because every white shape between trunks could be a horse.

(It’s always a sheep.)

By the time I get to Lochcarron, my shoulders have been at my ears for forty-five minutes, and my hands have created grooves in the wheel.

The library is in a converted village hall, small, low, with two big windows and a sign that says it’s closed. I’m about to despair, when I then see a small handwritten note that says I’m at the post office I’ll be five minutes.

I wait on the doorstep with my hands in the pockets of Effie’s wax jacket, the wind off the loch in my hair. After about three minutes, a small woman of approximately seventy in a navy quilted coat walks briskly down the road. She gives me a friendly nod, unlocks the library, and tells me she’s Anna welcoming me in out of the cold.

I almost say if it’s this cold at the end of August, what’s it going to be like in the fall? I refrain because I’m no longer sure I’ll be here then. I’m not sure of anything anymore; let alone how the known universe works.

The library smells of old books and damp coats and the kerosene heater that she has just turned on. There are books on shelves around three sides of the room, and a long wooden table with reading lamps in the middle.

Then I notice the small section at the back labeled LOCAL INTEREST with a hand-printed card, complete with a thistle and smiley face.

I head right on over and scan the spines.

Highland Folklore and Tradition, by someone called Briggs, 1976. The Water-Beings of Scotland, by McKay, 1992. Songs and Tales of the West Coast, by Mary MacLeod, 1958. A thicker hardback called The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, the spine cracked, the cover faded.

I take all four to the table.

Anna watches me carry them over with a small, interested look on her face, but she doesn’t say anything. She’s probably the kind of village woman who has seen a lot of foreigners come in for a lot of reasons over a lot of years, and has long since stopped asking.

I sit down and open Highland Folklore and Tradition. I go to the index and get somewhat excited to see that each-uisge is there. Pages 47-52 and again at 184-186.

I flip to 47.

The book is matter-of-fact about it in a way that is somehow worse than if it had been melodramatic, addressing the folklore as if it’s reality. Here, the each-uisge is a category. They are distinct from kelpie—though similar in many ways, kelpies are tameable river creatures and the each-uisge are sea-loch creatures, larger and deadlier. They come up out of the water in the form of a fine horse, often white or grey, with a wet shine to the coat. They might seem friendly. They will let you approach. They will let you mount. But the moment you touch them, your hand fuses to the hide. You’re basically glued. Then they carry you into the deep water. They drown you. They consume the body. The liver is sometimes returned to shore as a sign and the only part they will not eat. They are particularly fond, the book notes, of beautiful young women.

I loathe myself for taking that line like it’s flattery.

The book also says they can take human form. Often a tall, handsome man. Often dark-haired. Often with something wet about him that he cannot fully shed—the hair, the cuffs of the sleeves, the smell of the loch. He will be charming. He will be a good lover. He will seek out women near his loch, and he will court them in human form before he takes them, and the women who go to him willingly are the ones he keeps the longest.

The women who are eaten quickly are usually the strangers and the hill-walkers, the ones with no connection to the land.

The women who are eaten quickly, the line repeats in my head, bouncing around like a ping pong ball.

The women who are eaten quickly.

He eats the women.

Not in the way he’s been eating me, either, he…

I blink that fact away and continue to read.

Of particular note, the book says, is the each-uisge’s apparent need for an ongoing bargain with a local woman or line of women. The creature seems to require an anchor of sorts, a household, a hearth, which it cannot fully cross until permitted. The traditional ward against an each-uisge is salt at every threshold, iron over the lintel, and rowan at the door. These are not symbolic; the creatures are reported to be physically unable to cross a properly maintained ward without invitation. There is a body of folklore around the keepers of these wards, women who maintained vigil over an each-uisge for the protection of their village, sometimes for decades or generations. The keepers were respected and lonely women.

I read the paragraph again.

Particularly that last damn line.

Then I read about the binding. The book is less specific here. The binding requires a piece of the hide: taken from the creature in horse form, willingly given, kept hidden by the keeper for as long as the binding must hold. The book doesn’t say what willingly given means. The book doesn’t say what hidden means either. The book also doesn’t say what happens if the hide is found, or how you even get the hide. The whole idea makes me sick to even think about it.

I read and read and after some time Anna brings me a cup of weak instant coffee unprompted. I thank her and slam it back, cringing all the way.

When I leave, I check out two of the books, Highland Folklore and Tradition and The Water-Beings of Scotland. The librarian looks at the titles as she’s stamping them, but doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to. The look she gives me is exactly the look Mhairi gave me yesterday, that knowing-too-much look, and I realize, standing at her little desk in her tiny library, that the women in this part of Scotland have a network I have only barely begun to see the edges of.

“You take care now,” she says, handing the books back.

“Thank you.”

“Drive safe on the road home.”

“I will.”

“Mind the road. The verges are deep this time of year.”

But I know she’s not talking about the verges.

I’m not too far from the turn-off to the cottage when Maddie calls, her name coming up on the display screen. I stare at it for two rings before I answer, because two rings are what I need to brace for impact.

“Hey, Maddie,” I say, trying to sound bright and cheery even though I know she’ll call my bluff.

“Iris.”

The single word has a whole speech in it.

“I’m sorry.” I immediately apologize.

“You went radio silent.”

“I know, I know. I’ve been a bad friend. Bad sister. I’m sorry. I’m okay though. Really. I was going to call you today.”

“You were going to call me today?” she repeats flatly.

“Well, I said I was going to in my text, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, but you didn’t call me. This is me calling you.”

“I got…distracted.”

“Hmmm, well I almost booked a flight.”

“Please don’t book a flight. I’m fine. Truly, I am.”

I am lying through my fucking teeth and she knows it, but I have to do what I can to make her think otherwise.

There’s a long pause on the line before I hear her exhale. I can picture her with her hand over her face the way she does and I know she’s mad at me. But she’s also worried, so the proportions are about even.

“Iris…”

“Yeah.”

“Are you actually okay though?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not just saying it?”

I have to get some form of the truth out. “I’m sleeping with someone,” I blurt.

She inhales sharply.

“Girl…”

“I know.”

“You said you wouldn’t.”

“I said I wouldn’t sleep with the neighbor. I slept with someone else.”

Liar, liar, liar.

“Mmm. Right. Who?”

“Just…some guy.”

“Does some guy have a name?”

“Yeah.”

“And what is his name?”

Horsey McHorseCock.

“Eachann MacCoinnich,” I say somewhat triumphantly. Not a lie!

“Is he the castle guy?”

I swerve around a rabbit that attempted to cross the road and nearly go into the verges myself. “Sorry, I almost hit a rabbit.”

“It’s the castle guy,” she says definitively, my lies collapsing.

I sigh in defeat. “It’s complicated.”

“What does complicated mean?”

I take a breath.

“It means I’m in over my head, and I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.”

“Iris, that’s the kind of sentence that gets a friend on a plane.”

“Please don’t get on a plane,” I beg, “I forbid it.”

“Then talk to me.”

I am rounding the bend where the single-track curves around the headland and the bay opens up, the long silver throat of it stretching toward the open sea, and I think for a beat about telling her. About telling her the whole thing. The whole fucking crazy-ass truth.

Maddie, the man across the bay is not a man, he’s a creature out of folklore, Horsey McHorseCock, because yes he shapeshifts into a horse and his cock is equally as large, and yes I’m sleeping with him, and last night I salted my back step against him and the salt held, and today I drove forty-five minutes to a village library to read about him in a book, and I don’t know what I’m going to do because one part of me wants to keep sleeping with him because he’s immortal and a monster and therefore infinitely more fascinating than anyone on earth, and the other part of me thinks I need to run far, far away and I don’t know which part of me is going to win.

I think about her face hearing that overwrought sentence.

I think about her reaching for her laptop and pulling up flights.

So I don’t say it.

Instead, I say, “He’s older than me. Like…significantly older.”

“How significantly?”

“Significantly,” I reply firmly. “He’s also…he’s—he’s not normal, Maddie. He’s strange. He’s strange in ways I can’t explain.”

“Strange how?” Her voice has gone quiet, rife with suspicion.

“Strange like…he watches me too much but not so much in the stalkerish way, more in the he’s fascinated by me way. He also says things that don’t quite make sense, and treats me like I’m made of gold, and I don’t know whether he’s the best man I’ve ever been with, or the most dangerous one.”

“That’s it, I’m getting on a plane.”

“You can’t!” I interject. “You can’t, it’s expensive, and you have your daughter, and Andrew, well, he can’t take care of her, Andrew has that thing.”

“What thing?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure he has a thing, he always has a thing.”

She goes silent for a beat and I can almost hear her pulling up the calendar in her brain. “You’re right, he has that conference in Delaware.”

“Yes!” I exclaim. “Delaware!”

“If you’re seriously in trouble though…”

“But I’m not seriously in trouble.”

Shit, the lies are coming easier now, almost as if I believe them.

“You just listed a bunch of red flags.”

“I know, Maddie.”

“Get out. If not out of the situationship, then out of that cottage. It’s doing you no good.”

“I can’t.” I sigh heavily.

“What do you mean you can’t? You’re in your car. Drive to Inverness. Get on a flight. Come home.”

“I can’t, Maddie.”

“Why not?”

“Because I…”

I don’t have an answer she would accept.

Because the creature is bound to this loch, and I am bound to him by something he made when I let him into my body. Because there is a binding that needs to happen, and I’m the only Galloway left to do it. Because Effie left me this, and I’m not going to be the one who refuses it.

Because I’ve spent my whole life believing there was something out there for me, some purpose, something that made me special, and this might just be it?

“Because it’s not that simple.”

“Babe. It is exactly that simple. You accepted this whole fucking harebrained inheritance plot to begin with. You accepted it so fast, with so much ease, you tricked everyone into thinking it was a good idea to just randomly up and move to Scotland because you made it seem oh so simple.”

“Maddie, please. I’m asking you to trust me for a few weeks.”

“A few weeks?” she cries out.

“I have to figure something out and I have to figure it out here. I’m asking you to trust me to do it. Please.”

The line goes quiet for a long beat.

“Are you safe? Like, are you actually safe right now? This is the man you think is a serial killer, is it not?”

I think about the salt holding. I think about him not coming last night. I think about the wards I have been keeping by accident and the wards I am keeping on purpose now.

“I’m safe today,” I say, which is the truest sentence I have managed in twenty-four hours.

“Today…”

“Yes.”

“Iris, that is not good enough.”

“It will have to be! I love you. I’ll call you tomorrow,” I tell her, getting ready to hang up before things get more disastrous.

“No, you won’t,” she complains with a dry laugh as I round the last bend and turn onto my drive.

The white horse is in the road.

I brake, hard.

“Holy fuck!” I shout.

“Iris? What’s happening?”

The car stops about thirty feet from it and the tires squeak slightly on the gravel.

The horse doesn’t move.

It’s in the middle of the road where my drive turns down toward the cottage. Its broadside to the car, the long white flank of it across the path, the head turned toward the driver’s side, the eye on me. It’s bigger than it was somehow, and I don’t know if it’s my imagination, my fear, or my position in the wee car. The mane is long and pale and wet, and the wet has run down the side of the neck along the shoulder, the coat a white that is almost grey, dark with the damp.

The eye is dark—too dark—the color of the loch at midnight. Its focus is on me, and even though this one belongs to a horse, even though it’s black, not blue, it’s the same knowing eye that has been on me for weeks at a distance, on the slope, by the rocks, through the back window.

In my kitchen.

“Iris!” Maddie shrieks through the car speakers. It’s enough to knock some sense into me.

“Sorry, I almost hit a horse but I’m okay. I better concentrate on driving before I get in an accident, talk to you tomorrow.”

I quickly end the call and sit in the car with my hands on my lap, wondering what to do, my thoughts running wild.

I told him no last night. I told him no with the salt. He honored the salt. He went home. And he’s here now in this form because he wants me to see him, because he wants me to know the thing I refused.

He has come in horse form to be looked at.

At least, I hope that’s all he’s come here for.

We hold like this for what feels like a long time, though it could just be a few seconds, the engine still running, my foot still jammed against the brake.

The horse takes a single step toward me. The weight of it shifting onto the foreleg, the body coming a foot closer, the head still turned to the driver’s side. I can see its breath now in the air, as if the temperature outside suddenly dropped.

I put my hands on the wheel, my grip tightening.

The horse takes another step.

Its gaze has not left my face.

I don’t know what I am supposed to do, if I am supposed to get out and talk to him. I mean, what does he want with me in this form? Should I drive around the horse? Reverse? None of the books explained this particular situation.

All I know is there’s no way in hell I’m laying a hand on that thing.

I put my hand on the gear shift, thinking, trying not to panic.

Then, I put my hand on the window button and roll it down.

Stick my head out.

“You honored the salt,” I say to the horse.

The horse’s ear flicks, the movement so natural that for a moment I wonder if I’ve seriously lost it and this horse really is just a motherfucking equine, and I’m talking to it like it’s my boyfriend.

But despite that fear that I should be committed, I continue. “I asked you not to come. And you didn’t come. I heard you outside, I know it was you, Alasdair, but you didn’t come inside.”

The horse takes another step. My pulse quickens.

“I appreciated that, I really did, and I’m totally grateful you kept your word and would appreciate it if you did it again. So, I’m just going to, you know, scooch on past you now. I’m going home where I’m going to lock the door and I’m going to put more salt down. You can stand here all day if you want, do whatever horsey stuff you do, eat some grass, canter through a meadow, I don’t know, but I’m going home.”

The horse looks at me.

I put up the window and ease my foot off the brake.

I don’t dare look at the horse as I edge the car forward. I look at the road instead, as a good, non-distracted driver should. I move at a walking pace. The horse does not move out of the road, so I have to go on the verge around it. I drive past its head with maybe four feet between the side mirror and its nose, the wet flank of it slides past the passenger window and the smell of it comes in through the vent—cold water, deep loch, an animal smell underneath, something faintly sweet and rotten that I don’t let myself think about—and the eye in the side of its head tracks me as I pass.

I don’t dare to look at the eye. Instead, I drive down my lane, slowly but surely.

I park at the cottage in my usual spot, and refrain from looking in the rearview mirrors. I get out as quickly and calmly as I can and lock the car, thinking this horse might behave like the bears do in Colorado, and I’ll find it in the backseat eating garbage if I don’t.

I move swiftly over to the door, my stride quickening as I approach, relieved to see the salt is still intact where I left it. I unlock the door with shaking hands and step over the salt line into the house, closing the door behind me and locking it.

I lean against it, heart racing against my ribs.

My phone is still in my hand. To Maddie’s credit, she hasn’t called me back. She doesn’t want to interfere with my driving.

That’s when I realize that while I have my phone, I didn’t bring in the fucking books.

I go to the window by the front door to see if the coast is clear.

It’s not.

The horse is still there, far away at the start of the drive.

Then it turns, ever so slowly. It walks off the road, into the bracken, and the bracken closes behind it. The last thing I see is the wet, pale flank moving through the gorse, heading up the slope toward the woods behind the cottage, heading toward the castle.

And then it’s totally gone.

I realize I’m holding my breath and let it all out, bracing myself. I make a mad dash back out to the car, fumbling like a lunatic as I go, dropping the books a bunch of times as I bring them out of the car and to the cottage, locking everything all over again.

Once I’m certain everything is secure once more, I unload the library books onto the kitchen table before making myself a fresh pot of coffee. Then I sit down with the books open in front of me and start reading again.

I have a long day to get through and I’m going to need to read every single page before I can figure out what the fuck I’m going to do.

I can only hope I’ll find the answers.

Chapter

Twenty-Two

The clock on the bedside table reads 3:17 in red.

The creepy hour, I think distantly, my head full of slow sand, the kind of waking that comes up out of deep sleep in stages, eyes open on their own, brain trailing a few heartbeats behind.

The cottage is cold. That’s the first thing I catch up to. The wood stove I banked before bed shouldn’t be dead yet; the radiator by the wall is on low, and the room isn’t freezing per se, but there’s a current moving through it, the moving kind of cold, the kind with a source.

The second thing is the smell. The bedroom smells of the bay.

I don’t move. I keep my eyes on the ceiling and my breathing level while I work out that the cold is coming in from over to my right, the wall with the wardrobe and the window.

I turn my head slowly toward the corner.

The wardrobe’s there. Ornately-carved, dark, vaguely person-shaped in the dim, the thing my eye has snagged on all these nights and corrected before I freaked myself out. Just the wardrobe, my brain offers, trying to be helpful though it’s tired. Not a person. It’s never a person.

Then my eye keeps going, to the window.

It’s open. Open wide, actually, the curtain pulled inward on the cold, breathing in the darkness outside.

I never opened it.

I closed it before bed, I know I closed it because it was cold out and also I salted the sill heavy hours ago with my own hands.

But now…that salt is broken.

The clean white line I laid is scattered back across the sill in a smear, like a hand went through it. The cold’s coming straight off the loch, through my open window, and I’m working out how the fuck and what the fuck, when the shadow of the wardrobe shifts out of the corner of my eye.

It fucking moves.

Just slightly.

But the wardrobe can’t shift.

The wardrobe’s stood in that corner, not moving for decades, I’m sure. It isn’t the wardrobe that moved, but the dark beside it, the dark in front of it, the vaguely person-shaped dark I’ve dismissed as just a wardrobe…except tonight, when I stare at the shape, it doesn’t resolve into carved oak.

It resolves the other way.

Into my worst fears.

Into a man.

Internally, it’s like all systems stop—my lungs catch, my muscles freeze—while externally I also go still, the stillness that lives below thought, a rabbit hiding in the grass, prey operating on instinct only. I can only lie in my own bed and look at the corner of my own bedroom where a fucking man is standing in shadow.

The intruder doesn’t move for a bit either.

He’s letting me see him.

Then his face shifts, and his eyes catch the very dim light that comes through the curtains, from the outside security light that’s posted by the front door.

For one beat his eyes are black. Not shadowed, but black. Wet, and depthless, and lightless, the way the loch goes at midnight where the bottom’s never been mapped, two points of nothing at the height a man’s eyes would be, fixed on me.

Then gone. Back to faint hint of glacial blue.

I don’t make a sound. I would if I could, but my throat’s shut in terror.

Then he takes a step toward me, and I gasp, and the floorboard under his foot doesn’t creak the way it should. I’m starting to wonder if he’s really here at all.

He answers me with another silent step, and the shape resolves into Alasdair fully as he comes out of the shadow.

But now I know he’s also the…thing I just saw in the corner.

He takes another step, stopping at the foot of the bed, wet and naked.

I haven’t moved. Haven’t told him to leave, haven’t sat up, haven’t reached for the lamp. I’ve lain here with the quilt to my chin and watched him cross the room toward me and done nothing to stop him. Has this been some kind of test, one that I’m about to spectacularly fail?

He lays his hand on the footboard. No weight on the mattress yet, just his fingers around the wood, and he looks at me down the length of the bed.

He doesn’t speak. He just waits.

The waiting is the worst of it, because the waiting is where I could still send him away. He’s approached me slowly, like the way a cat comes after a mouse, but also giving me enough time to do the things I need to do. In the last minute, I could’ve screamed or sat up or said no, but I didn’t, and this last stillness is him showing me he knows I won’t say or do any of that.

He knows me well, and I hate it.

And in this moment, for not stopping him, I hate myself.

He puts a knee on the mattress and the bed dips, and at last I make a sound, not a word, just a small involuntary noise from the back of my throat, because now I know this is real.

He puts the other knee down and moves over me on his hands and knees, slow, so slow, prowling. His face comes out of the dark above mine, eyes very close and blue and looking at me like he’s about to take something from me, rather than give.

He stops with his hands either side of my head, his weight not yet on me, his face six inches from mine, and he draws the quilt down. Slowly, his hand at the hem, the heavy weight of it coming off my chin and my collarbone, down past my chest, past my hips, to my knees, where he folds it back and leaves it, because he isn’t uncovering all of me yet.

His palm comes to the side of my throat. He doesn’t squeeze, doesn’t hold, just lays his hand where the pulse runs, the way he has before, except now his hand is cold.

I exhale, the noise shockingly loud in the room.

He makes a noise back, a small intake of breath, the smallest acknowledgment, like he needed to know I was fully here and present. Then his mouth is at my throat where his hand was. Not biting, just his open mouth against my pulse, breathing me in, taking the scent of me into him slow, his nose at the side of my neck and his lips under my jaw, his breath warm. He stays there a long time, just…smelling me.

I don’t move.

When he speaks at last it’s so quiet I almost miss it. “Foxglove.”

I make a sound. Then find my voice. “The salt.”

I salted the window; you shouldn’t have been able to get through.

“I know,” he says against my throat. “I know what you did, foxglove. The salt would not have stopped me. You knew that when you laid it.” A pause, his mouth moving on my skin. “You laid it for yourself.”

His hand has moved down between my breasts, the backs of his fingers grazing me through the cotton of my shirt, down the center of me to my stomach, where his palm goes flat. I feel the cold of him through the fabric.

“Lift,” he murmurs.

I don’t ask what he means. My body has its own agenda. My arms come up on their own accord, and he takes the hem in both hands, drawing the shirt up my body, the cotton dragging over my hips and breasts and collarbone. Once it’s over my head, he lets it drop off the side of the bed.

I’m naked under him, the cold blowing over me, making my skin tight and goosefleshed.

He looks at me. It’s too dark to read his face well, but I can read the rest, the way he goes still over me, the way his weight settles, the way his breath catches.

“You’re mine now,” he rasps. “You always have been.”

I don’t speak; I can’t.

He puts his mouth on me, starting at my collarbone and working down my breast, my ribs, my stomach, the inside of my hip, then the soft place between my hipbones, an open kiss there, long, his tongue in it, and I can’t help but groan. His hands push my thighs apart, slow, unhurried, and then he goes down on me like he has all the time in the world, like he’s made time stand still for as long as he’s in this room. Who knows, maybe he has? At this point I’ll believe anything.

The first stroke of his tongue is flat and slow and I moan loudly in response. As his mouth works, he places a hand under me to lift my hips, his other arm hooked around my thigh to hold me open. The cold of him shocks my skin, and somehow it isn’t unwelcome, somehow it’s exactly the temperature I want him, because I’m rising fast and hot—faster than I should—all the waiting and all the dread coming out of me at once.

Then my breathe catches.

I can feel his teeth.

They’re at my inner thigh, and they’re not the teeth he had before, not the teeth any man has—longer at the canines, narrower—and when he closes them on the soft skin there, they catch.

He doesn’t quite break the skin though, he stops just before, holds his teeth there, lets me feel it.

I feel it. Oh, I fucking feel it.

And I’ve never been so turned on and terrified in all my life.

He lifts his mouth and looks up the length of me, his mouth wet, his face shadowed so I can’t see his teeth now, can’t tell if they’ve changed. He says nothing, just stares with an intensity that makes the back of my neck prickle, that makes my clit throb, my fight-or-flight fully activated, except it’s more like fuck-or-flight.

He puts his mouth back on me, his teeth are blunt again. Or I imagine they are. Or I’m past the point of telling what I imagine and what’s real.

I come with one hand fisted in his thick, damp hair and the other at my own mouth, biting my knuckle against the sound trying to get out of me, because everything feels too quiet, like the sound might wake me up from this beautiful nightmare. My orgasm crashes through me long and hard, leaving me wrecked under him.

He moves up my body the way he came down it—hipbone, stomach, ribs, breast, collarbone—and kisses my mouth. His tongue tastes of me and something with the faintest metal in it, like water that’s sat too long in old pipes. I don’t pull back. He kisses me long, and open, and wet, with his hand between my legs again—two fingers in me now—working me slowly where I’m nearly too sensitive.

He pulls back to look at me.

His eyes are fully black again.

The iris gone, swallowed, no center to them anymore, just the wet, lightless black of deep water with no sun to give it a color, and he doesn’t blink it away this time.

I look at him. He looks back.

It’s like staring into a cosmic abyss, into an eldritch void, and the vertigo is real. I feel like at any moment I’ll tip over and fall into them forever and ever.

“There’s my girl,” he murmurs softly, that low voice that sinks somewhere deep in my chest. The voice pulls me back, gives me my balance even as I lie here on this bed.

Then he pushes into me. Slow, slower than he ever has, one long inevitable slide that doesn’t stop until he’s to the hilt, and the angle’s different, deeper, like he’s reached a place in me that’s been waiting for him, and the cold of him is inside my body now making a home.

He doesn’t move. He stays in me with his forehead to mine, and his hand at the side of my face, and his black eyes on me, breathing against my mouth, not moving for a long, long moment.

Then he fucks me. With deliberation and control. Like he’s decided to be inside me for the next hour, the rhythm steady and deep, the angle finding the place that undoes the rest of me that I thought just came undone, his thumb at my temple and a reverence on his face I haven’t seen him give me before, like a man on his knees at an altar.

He doesn’t say mine again. He doesn’t say yours. He says foxglove, love, Iris, low and dragged, again, and again, as if reciting a prayer he’s kept to himself for centuries.

His hand moves from my face to my shoulder and grips hard, and at the join of my shoulder and my neck I feel a point that isn’t the pad of a thumb.

It’s his nail.

But it’s longer than a nail.

And sharper.

I gasp.

He doesn’t ask if I’m all right, doesn’t pull back to check, doesn’t soften his grip. He keeps fucking me and his thumb bears down until the point breaks my skin, the small pain bright in the dark, and I feel the wet of my own blood under his thumb where he’s opened me.

But the sound that comes out of me isn’t protest. In the dark, with his voided eyes on me and his cock in me and his sharp thumb at my throat, the sound that comes out of me is the sound the old version of Iris would be ashamed of.

It’s more.

I want more.

He hears it. The reverent expression leaves his face and something older…ancient…comes up underneath.

He fucks me harder. The slow goes fast, the reverence goes hungry, his other hand down at my hip now with sharp points at every fingertip, and I feel them drag up my side as his hand moves, thin, shallow lines of skin opening under fingernails that aren’t fingernails anymore.

He bites my shoulder, the sharp teeth returning and the pain is blooming hot, and I make a sound that’s half cry, half moan, but he doesn’t stop, doesn’t lift his mouth, fucking me and biting me and dragging claws down my side in red lines, and I’m not telling him to stop, and he isn’t asking, either.

I come around him yet again, with my blood under his thumb, his teeth in my shoulder, his claws at my hip, and his cold, damp body flush against mine, and it goes through me like a meteorite—fast and obliterating—and he’s still going, still fucking me, the hunger not done with him.

He pulls his mouth off my shoulder. It’s wet, blood at the corner of it, and he looks at me with his fathomless eyes, the discipline he’s held for weeks finally gone, and what’s on top of me now is the part of him that’s been under the surface of the man all along. Lurking just under the water.

“You know,” he rasps.

I make a breathless sound.

“Tell me you know what I am.”

I find my voice. It’s small, barely there, but it’s mine. “I know.”

A long, shaky breath leaves him, and he swears.

Then he comes inside me, hard, with his forehead pressed to my collarbone, and the sound he makes isn’t a word in any language I know, instead it’s primordial, low, dragged out of his chest, the feel of him spilling into me isn’t hot, but the cold of the deep sea.

He stays in me a long time after. The black bleeds slowly out of his eyes, and when he lifts his head from my collarbone, they’re Alasdair blue again. His teeth are blunt, and white, and straight. The points at his fingers are gone into tidy nails. But there’s blood on his mouth, and under his thumb, and a thin, wet trickle of it running down the curve of my shoulder, a reminder of what he is, and can turn back into at any moment.

He doesn’t apologize for any of it. He looks at me and waits for me to say something with all the patience in the world.

I find my voice again. “I know what you are.”

He doesn’t move. “So tell me what I am.”

I swallow hard. “A monster.”

He lets it sit in the dark for a moment. Then he says, “Aye.”

I let out a bitter laugh. “And you knew, you knew this would happen.”

“And I warned you that things would change,” he points out firmly.

“I thought—I thought you’d become emotionally distant if I slept with you,” I stammer. “Not become an actual monster!”

He gives me a careful, albeit bloodstained smile, and his hand comes up and tucks a piece of my hair behind my ear with a softness I’ve felt from him the nights before.

“Oh, I never became a monster, Iris,” he says, melancholy tinging his voice. “I always was one. You just took me off the leash.”

The words hit deep and hard and I’m already wrestling with them.

He was always the monster.

I just took him off the leash.

I took him off the leash, the one that the previous Galloways had held taut for who knows how many centuries.

But while I grapple with the truth, he pulls me in slowly, his arm coming around, his hand at the back of my neck under my hair, folding me into the hard chill of his body, then draws the quilt up over us both. The smell of the bay is in my hair where his mouth rests. Outside, the loch is silent in a way it hasn’t been before.

The bay is silent because there’s nothing in it tonight.

The thing that lives in it is in my bed.

“You’re a monster,” I whisper.

I don’t mean to say it again. It just comes out, the thought slipping loose, said into the dark against the cold of his collarbone, to remind myself of what he truly is.

He hears me. Of course he hears me.

“Yessss,” he hisses against my hair.

It goes through me. It isn’t a word, so much as the shape of one made by something whose mouth wasn’t built for the language.

His hand at the back of my neck shifts, fingers sliding up into my hair, his breath at my temple. “How does it feel,” he begins, “to just get fucked by one?”

I don’t answer right away. I don’t have the words for it; the words I have aren’t the right ones. I feel the slow undoing of every line I’ve drawn for myself since the first time I crossed his threshold, and what I feel isn’t regret, horror, or love. Not yet. It’s something stranger than all three.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never felt so alive.

His hand tightens in my hair, just slightly. Enough that I know he’s waiting.

“Good,” I eventually reply. Because that’s all there is to say. Because it’s the truth.

He goes very still against me. Then his arm tightens around my waist, slow and possessive, and he kisses the top of my head once, soft, the same kiss he’s always given me.

At the same time, it isn’t, and I lie there with my answer in the air between us, but I don’t take it back.

Good.

It feels good to fuck a monster.

Chapter

Twenty-Three

When I wake up, he’s still in my bed.

He’s pressed against my back with his chest against my spine and his arm heavy across my waist, his breath silent, but steady. The loch-sweet smell of him is gone, replaced by that familiar mix of peat smoke, amber, and a hint of clean sea.

The cottage around us is grey-lit and quiet, a wren calling from the brush outside, the wood stove ticking in the kitchen. The clock on the bedside table reads ten past seven. The bay through the gap in the curtains is the dull pewter it goes when the sun hasn’t decided whether to come up properly and perhaps never will.

I don’t move. I lie there with his arm across me and his breath at the back of my neck and I try to calmly assess the situation except there’s no guidebook for this, no So You Woke Up Next to a Monster, Now What?

I glance down at my body and notice what the night left behind—there’s the bite at my shoulder where he broke skin, I feel the throb at my hip where the bruise is spreading. And those thin red lines down my side where his nails caught? They’re real. They’re going to be real all the live long day.

I should be horrified.

And frankly I am horrified, even though it’s buried somewhere deep, which is easy to do this morning when my brain is still half-asleep.

But the more pressing thing right now is that I really need to pee. Some things in life can’t be helped, no matter the circumstances.

I shift. Just a little, to let him know I’m moving.

“You’re awake,” he mumbles, low at my ear.

His voice in the morning is the voice he uses with me in the dark, that low, careful Scots thing, the rich brogue the cadence, the sound of it travels down the back of my neck and into my chest where it makes my heart bloom against my will.

“Were you awake the whole night?” I inquire.

“Aye, foxglove.”

“You should sleep.”

“I don’t, really.”

Of course he doesn’t, really. Part of me wants to ask him if maybe he ever tried sleeping like a dolphin, with one half of the brain working, and the other turned off, but I don’t because I need to pee.

“I have to get up.”

He lifts the weight of his arm off my waist, and I sit up, the quilt sliding off my bare shoulders into my lap. The cold of the cottage hits my skin all at once and I whimper profusely which is the most normal thing about this morning so far.

I look at him.

His hair is dry. Properly dry for the first time in a while, the black silky weight of it loose around his chin, the slight wave to it where it dried against the pillow. The early light from the window is on his face and his eyes are the bright pale blue they’re supposed to be.

He looks like a man. A ridiculously handsome man who happens to be naked in my bed, but just a man.

But he isn’t just a man, I remind myself. Still, how can I believe that when my eyes are telling me otherwise?

I drag my eyes off him before I do something embarrassing. Like climb back into bed.

“I’m gonna pee,” I say, with all the grace of someone trying to get the conversation back on track and the conversation is revolving around bodily fluids.

“Aye, foxglove. You go do that.”

“And then I’m gonna have coffee, and then I’m gonna ask you some questions.”

“Aye.”

“A lot of questions.”

A tinge of sadness comes over his eyes. “I know.”

After I do my business, I come out of the bathroom in Effie’s robe cinched tight, with my hair in a knot, my face washed, teeth brushed, and the marks on my throat hidden under the collar. He’s in the kitchen at the back window, wearing dark trousers and a black shirt that he must have taken off when he came in last night, his back to me, the kettle going on the stove, the French press out on the counter, as well as a tin of tea for himself.

He turns when I come in and doesn’t say anything, just looks at me and once again I’m struck by how normal he looks—how normal and borderline domestic this all feels. How can he be what he is? In the light of day, how can such a thing exist? How can there be monsters?

There can’t be, I decide. At least not right at this moment, and not in my kitchen.

He makes me coffee the way I like, and pulls out the chair for me. I slouch down in it, and he sits across with his tea, dunking in the bag with his slender fingers. The first sip of the coffee is scalding hot, the second is bittersweet and good, and the third one makes me feel like a person again, enough that I’m straightening up in my chair like a pool toy that’s slowly being inflated.

“You’re not having any.” I observe.

“I have my tea. Coffee is an acquired taste, isn’t that what they say?”

I’m not sure who “they” are, but I nod anyway.

“Ask me the questions,” he says quietly.

I take another sip and set the mug down. I’ve got about six hundred questions, and they’re all jockeying for the front of the line. Most of them are terrible, so I pick the boring one, because it’s the easiest to handle.

“How old are you?”

He looks at me a beat. “Older than this cottage.”

“That’s not an answer,” I retort, even though it kind of is because this cottage is at least a hundred years old—that alone should stun me.

“It’s the answer I have, love,” he replies, offering a sympathetic smile. “I don’t know what year I was born—there’s much about those days that I can’t remember. I know it was before the Galloways came to this loch, and I didn’t speak English, but another language. I know I was a man with a life and dreams and then…I wasn’t. And that it was a long time ago.”

I let that sit and have another sip of my coffee. “How did it happen? The…you know. I mean, what happened?”

His face strains, like he’s reaching for a memory worn so thin that he has to be careful not to tear it. “A storm. I was out on the loch in a boat I shouldn’t have been on, in weather I shouldn’t have been on it in. The boat went over and I went under, and…I was under a long time.”

“And then?”

“And then I came up.”

“As what you are now?”

“Aye.”

“And the man you were?”

“Was already drowned by then.”

“Were you drowned…by something?”

“Yes, I think so,” he says with a thoughtful look. “Helped along. But I don’t know what it was. Something like I am now, I suppose. Whoever—or whatever—it was, I never saw them again. But I know I didn’t become this alone.”

I don’t know what to do with my face, so I look down at my coffee instead. “So you are the undead, then. Like a vampire.”

He offers me a soft smile. “No. Not like a vampire. I am not dead, Iris. I am very much alive, as you can see. It’s just that I was brought back as something else, started a second life, that’s all.”

I snort. “Oh, that’s all.”

He shrugs. I suppose he has had a lot of time—centuries?—to become used to these facts and I’ve had, like, a minute.

“Was there anyone for you then? When you were a man?” I ask. “Did you have a family? A wife?”

He’s quiet for a long beat. “There was a lass, aye. I’d been meaning to ask her father if I could court her properly. I’d been saving for the bride-gift. I’d not yet had the conversation.”

“What was her name?”

He presses his lips together and shakes his head. “I don’t remember.”

I look at him.

“That’s the truth of it, foxglove. I couldn’t tell you her name if you held a blade to me. I remember the feeling of wanting her. But the name went a long time ago, and the face after it. That’s what the years do. They take the small things first.” A pause. “I used to think forgetting her would feel like a betrayal. But it didn’t feel like anything, and that was the worst of it. So, you see, my grief isn’t for her. It’s older and stranger than that; grief for the forgetting itself, for being a thing that outlasts everyone it loved and knew until even the loss wears smooth.”

His words sink into me, the tenderness in the tone, that longing. That watching time as it ticks past, never to take you along.

“Did you ever go back? After, I mean. As what you are.”

“To her village?”

“Yes.”

“Once. She was old by then. I stood at the edge of the woods and watched her in her garden, and then I went away again. She never knew what I had become.”

“You let her have her life.”

“Aye. Of course.”

“Even though you…I suppose maybe you had…appetites.”

“Aye, lass. I had appetites, various ones. But I was so much more of the man back then, the MacCoinnich, that there wasn’t too much of a struggle to be…good.”

I have to set the coffee down because my hands are shaking a little. The matter-of-fact way he’s saying things is unnerving to say the least, and even though it still all sounds so preposterous on the surface, the words hanging in the air and defying the known universe, I can feel their truth. And that scares me.

“Okay,” I say. “Okay. New question.”

“Keep them coming.”

“How many other women have you been with since her? Like, in the centuries since.”

He looks at me a long beat. “You’re asking me my number?”

Okay, I’m aware that this question is rather selfish and not really needed but still…I’m insecure and petty and I want to know.

I nod. “I am asking you your number.”

A flicker at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, the closest thing to one I’ve seen this morning. “Are you sure?”

“I want to know.”

“I’m not going to give you a count.”

“Roughly. Give me a rough number.”

“Roughly is worse than a count.” He looks at me, then at the bay through the window, then back. “There’ve been times across the centuries I was with no one for fifty, sixty years. Times I was with one woman for a chunk of her life before she left me. Times I took what I needed, and didn’t keep the names. I’m not going to give you a number, foxglove. The number’s not the thing. The thing is that none of them were you.”

“Oh my god,” I respond, laughing, “that’s such a Hallmark answer.”

“I don’t know who this Hallmark is, but it’s the truth.”

I bite back the smile and shake my head. “Okay, how about…how long had it been since you, um, before we, got together?”

“You mean fucked?” he asks and word sounds so wrong and good and dirty coming from him right now that I can’t help but blush.

“Yeah. That.”

“Ohh,” he says, looking off. “Probably a hundred years?”

My mouth drops open. “Are you serious?”

“Aye. Remember I told you that it was long enough that the asking embarrasses me?”

I do remember that. I thought it was charming hyperbole, though I can clearly see the asking does embarrass him. Which is charming in itself.

“So we both were revirginized, essentially.”

His dark brows knit together. “Did you not say it had been a year for you?”

“Over a year,” I correct.

“Aye,” he agrees, deadpan. “Alright, I can see how that is the same.”

It’s the closest thing to sarcasm I think I’ve ever heard him say.

The days start to run together, like time has been granted extra fluidity. I don’t know if it’s because Alasdair likely experiences time differently because he’s been exposed to it for so long, and that has started rubbing off on me. Or that the seconds, minutes, hours, days all start to slip past when your brain is so focused on making sense out of one-hell-of-a fucked-up situation.

Because that’s all I’ve been doing, other than breathing, eating, drinking and fucking. I’m trying to marry together what I know about Alasdair, the myth and legend, and what I experience in my day-to-day life with him.

And, for the most part, things really do seem normal. The terror I sometimes feel when I remember what he is doesn’t stay sharp. It blurs, the way someone who lives by a railway stops hearing the trains.

The cottage takes him in, in a way I never thought it would. All these decades it has been warded to keep him out, but now that he’s inside, it’s embraced him and made it look like he’s always been here. He has a place at the kitchen table now, the chair across from mine I never used to use. He has a place in the sitting room, Effie’s wing-back by the fire where he reads in the late afternoons. He has a place in the bed, the side between me and the window because he sleeps with it open a crack, the briny scent of the loch filling my dreams.

He keeps the fire going while I work, and he makes me work, reminding me of deadlines that seem to belong to another life, and he makes me coffee in the morning. I take care of breakfast and lunch since he’s fond of kippers. I tried it once, smoked, with a poached egg on top and it was fine, but I never really got into that tinned-fish craze. To be honest, I don’t think Alasdair is much into tinned fish either, I’m sure he’d rather be swimming in the loch and eating them there, but I figure hey, I don’t care what he eats…so as long as it’s not people.

The thing is, none of this feels strange. All of this feels right, like it’s supposed to be this way.

And that’s the part that should worry me, the not-finding-things-strange.

Because there are some little things that remind me of what he is from time to time. For one, he’s often wet for no reason. Not always, and not in an icky uncomfortable way, rather his hair is perpetually damp, and if it’s not, then the hem of his pants or his shirt is. This is how I know Alasdair is not autistic like me, because I would be driven absolutely mad to have continuously wet sleeves. No sensory issues with this guy.

He’s also always cold to touch, his skin soft and smooth but with a chill like he’s just come from outside. He doesn’t seem to sleep at all, not even the dolphin method, he’s often very still, not moving an inch, and I can’t tell if it’s because he’s in predator mode or not. I suppose I should be grateful that what I’m seeing from him is the part of him from the loch, and not the part that is a horse. He doesn’t snort or neigh or eat hay. If I hadn’t known the about the each-uisge, there would be no reason to think he was a horse-man.

Man-horse.

Morse?

He also goes for long swims, for hours at a time. Just walks into the bay butt-naked and dives under and doesn’t come back until later. During that time, I do my best to draw and paint and forage since when he’s back, he’s devastatingly distracting.

Because, yes, I’m still one horny bitch, and if you think him being a monster on the side is enough to gird my loins, you are sadly mistaken. Our desire for each other has only increased, and we spend most of our time naked together, fucking all over the damn cottage.

Which does bring me to the strangest, and certainly most unnerving thing about him now. That sometimes, during the height of passion, especially when he’s being rough—and believe me, I like it rough now, apparently—his eyes do that thing. That all-black thing, where there is no iris, no white, only pupil. It’s like a horse’s eye but a horse’s eye is soft, and his eyes are decidedly not. They are fathomless black pools that have the same pull as a bottomless pit, like a black hole that leads to a never-ending void. Looking into them sometimes I feel like I’m looking past the man—and even past the beast—seeing into time immemorial itself, where great ancient, terrible gods rule the cosmos, rendering all of our little lives pointless and inconsequential.

Suffice to say, when his eyes go that way, I try not to look, lest I fall into them and never crawl out again. And anyway, he’s still able to make me come countless times anyway, so I wouldn’t say it actually puts a damper on things. Who knew I was this freaky at heart?

It’s Sunday now, I realize. Sunday means six nights since he came in through my window. Sunday also means we’re no longer in August.

I open the front door to put out the recycling that gets collected by a rusted old truck twice a month, and the cold hits me in the face like a slap. It’s properly cold, like god (or perhaps that eldritch being in the cosmic void) snapped their fingers. The bracken on the slope has started to turn, copper at the tips of the fronds, the green giving up to bronze. The heather’s past peak, the deep pink fading toward a duller rose and I’m glad I collected and dried and pressed as much of it as I could in early August. The light through the clouds has gone thin and clear the way it does once the season’s shifted in the night, and I feel that sense of melancholy I always get when summer comes to an end.

I stand on the step with the bag in my hand and let myself feel it, the air and the loch and the smell of the moor winding down. Fall has arrived overnight.

I’m not ready for it. I haven’t bought a proper coat or made sure I have enough wood for the stove, and I’m unsure if the heater I bought for the studio will be enough after all.

I should call Maddie, I think.

But I know that it will only remain a thought. The truth is, I have only texted her reassurances this last week but I’ve kept a lot of distance between us. Because what the hell can I tell her that won’t have her on the next plane out here, either to call the police or have me committed? Not a damn thing.

I close the door, put the bag down, and take a breath. The cottage is warm. Alasdair is in the sitting room reading, having gone for a swim earlier. The wood stove’s going, the bay through the windows is slate grey, and the cool wind is making the rowan tree move against the walls.

Things are good for the moment, and I’m trying to concentrate on that.

But I do wonder how long things can stay good when you’re cohabitating with a monster.

That evening at the table, with the bread that Alasdair baked earlier, cheese from the village, and the wine open between us, I ask him a question I’ve been saving—and I’ve been saving a lot of them, choosing to parse them out over the days like nosy seasonings.

“Why only women?”

His blue eyes meet mine over the rim of his wine glass. “Iris,” he says in a warning tone.

The problem is, his warning tone doesn’t work on me much. “Well? Why the drowned wives? Not drowned husbands?”

“They weren’t all wives, that’s just the name the villagers gave them.”

“Why women?” I repeat. “Is it some…sexual thing?”

“God, no. The monster does not have that appetite.”

Thank god. I can deal with him eating people, but I draw the line at him being a rapist.

“So then why do you only eat women?”

He has a long sip of wine and sets the glass down. His gaze fixes on me with utter frankness.

“They taste better.”

I set my own glass down. “Excuse me?”

“I said, they taste better.” His expression is utterly serious.

“That’s…that’s the reason you kill women?”

“That’s the reason I eat women.” A small smile curls the corner of his mouth. “It’s why I eat you. Though I suppose that’s a little different.”

I blink at him. “You’re not joking?”

“I’m not joking. Men taste tough and bitter. Women are softer and sweeter. I’ll kill a man if I have to, but I’m not swallowing a single piece.”

I have to press my lips together to keep myself from either screaming, crying, or throwing up.

I stare at him and he looks back, but his face doesn’t change. He isn’t embarrassed—he was more embarrassed to admit I was the first lass he slept with in a hundred years—and he isn’t contrite. He’s been asked a factual question and given me the factual answer, and now he’s turning the stem of the wine glass and waiting to see what I do with the truth once again.

I let out a weak laugh, then pick up my wine and drink the rest in one go. Think I’m going to need the whole bottle now.

“If it makes you feel any better,” he begins, and I shoot him a look that says I don’t think that’s fucking possible, “it’s not my choice. Not here as the man sitting before you, the man you share your bed with. I prefer fish. Wine. Tea. The occasional venison.”

“So it’s the morse.”

“The what?” he says, his lip curling as in disgust.

“The morse. The man-horse. Or just the horse.”

“It’s not the horse either,” he says, still looking troubled by the use of the word morse. “The horse eats grass. Oats, if he finds them.”

I put my head in my hands. “I’m disgusted and confused and I’m not sure I want to be unconfused but…who is doing the killing and eating here?”

He finishes the rest of his wine and then pours us both more. “All this time, until your Effie passed, it’s been fairly easy to keep myself separate. There is the man, Alasdair MacCoinnich. Eachann, being the word the locals bestowed on whoever lives in the castle. That’s me. Then, there is the horse. And then there is the monster that lives in the loch. I can turn into either thing and those things can turn into each other, but when I am those things, there’s very little of me that is still a man, that still knows right from wrong, that still has some sort of morals. I am all of those things but rarely at the same time, you understand. Altogether, I am the each-uisage. The horse lures; the monster feeds.”

“And what does the man do?”

He holds the glass at his lips and gives me a wry smile. “He fucks.”

I shake my head as he drinks the wine. “You know, you’ve started a quick descent into vulgar language, you know that? What happened to Mr. Fucking Manners?”

I’m joking, because if I’m not laughing, I’m crying, but darkness passes over his features like a storm cloud. Suddenly he seems grave.

“That part of me is something I’m slowly losing,” he says in a quiet voice, and suddenly I’m reminded of what Mhairi said, that over time he would lose himself and his humanity completely and only the horse—and I suppose the monster—would remain. “The crudeness, the…appetite. I’m slipping a little. This year…this year I’ve lost enough of myself that I’ve let the man do the luring.”

I swallow hard, feeling something like worry and fear clawing at my chest.

“Well, we’ll do what we can so that doesn’t happen again,” I tell him. “Though I have to say, I like it when you’re crude.”

I add that last part for some levity, but it doesn’t work. He nods, but he doesn’t look like he believes it.

I’m at the kitchen sink washing dishes when I look up through the window at the loch as I always do, expecting to see Alasdair’s castle across the bay (where he goes, from time to time) and some birds floating on the water near the mussel beds by the opening to the loch.

And while those things are there, there’s also something else.

Three fucking dead women, standing in the shallows at the foot of my spit where the water goes knee-deep at low tide.

Just standing and staring right at me. Their hair is dark and weighted and hangs around their faces in long wet lines, and their shifts are grey with age. Their faces are sunken in, one looking far older and more decomposed than the rest.

I nearly scream and drop my mug. I definitely almost pee my pants.

I feel Alasdair’s presence behind me, silent but heavy and strangely reassuring.

I don’t turn around. “Alasdair…”

“Aye, foxglove.”

“There are three women in the shallows.”

“I know.”

“They’re the drowned wives.”

“That they are.”

“What are they doing? Why are they staring at us?”

“They’re waiting.”

Waiting?

“For what?”

A long beat. “To see if you’ll be one of them, lass.”

I close my eyes, open them. They’re still there. The smallest is closest to shore, her face tilted up at the cottage windows, and I can’t make out her eyes at this distance, but I’ve got the strong feeling she can see mine.

“And what decides,” I ask, my voice shaking slightly, “whether I’ll become one of them?”

He comes closer and stops just behind me, his front near my back without touching, his chest at the back of my head, the cold of him coming through my robe.

“I decide,” he declares quietly. “And they’re not getting you.”

I exhale.

The drowned women continue to stare.

He puts his hand on my shoulder, turns me gently away from the window, and walks me back into the warmth of the kitchen, pulling the curtain across the window over the sink.

Somewhere in the middle of all this I have to face a fact, which is that I’ve nearly stopped being afraid of him, least not like I was when he first broke through the wards and came in through my window in the night.

Back then I was a woman split open and holding the halves of herself together with both hands. Now I’ve placed both hands together, and maybe that resembles hands during prayer, but I think I’m coming to terms with how scary, bizarre, and fucking impossible everything is.

Turns out humans adapt. That’s what we’re good at, and we can adapt at incredible speeds, to circumstances that have no business being adapted to. Because in my case, the alternative is going mad in the kitchen, and going mad in the kitchen doesn’t make the deadlines or get the groceries or let me sleep.

So I drink the coffee and watch the bay and make my sketches of fading fall flowers, and I let the monster who killed dozens of women across this last century, and who knows how many more, pour my second glass of wine, and somewhere around what I think is the ninth or tenth day that we’ve been playing house, I notice I’ve started wanting him again the way I wanted him at the rocks, the way I wanted him before I knew anything at all.

That’s what the accommodation does. It comes back around to wanting. Not just with my body, has never stopped craving, who perhaps only desires him more, but with my heart, too. My poor heart, that has been through so much these last few years, and somehow still wants to take another beating, so to speak.

Which is how I find myself, late on what must be the Tuesday of the second week, putting my pencil down at the kitchen table over a sketch of wolfsbane—or monkshood, but wolfsbane has always sounded more witchy to me—that I haven’t finished drawing in seven days. I walk to the sitting room, where Alasdair is in Effie’s chair with a book of old Gaelic poetry open in his hands.

He doesn’t look up. “You’ve been at the table a long time,” he says, his thumb turning a page. “And the pencil has not moved.”

“How would you know?”

“I know.”

“Don’t be smug.”

“Aye, lass.”

His mouth has done the corner thing again. The book’s still open on his knee, and he isn’t going to lift his eyes from the page until I make him.

I’m going to have to make him.

I cross the room and stop in front of his knees, and he finishes the line at his own pace before he raises his face to mine. His eyes are the pale blue they’re supposed to be, and the look in them is the one I’ve learned over these weeks, the one he gives me when I’ve done a thing he was secretly hoping I’d do.

“Put the book down.”

“What for, foxglove?” he asks, eyes gleaming.

“You know what for.”

Chapter

Twenty-Four

Alasdair sets the book down on the arm of the chair without looking and sits back, folding his hands in his lap, large and pale against his dark trousers. He looks up at me with a careful expression on his face, though I can see the dark hints of desire in the depths of his blue eyes.

“Tell me,” he begs, his voice rougher, raspier.

“I want you to be the thing you are when you’re not being careful with me,” I tell him, and, for a moment, I have to marvel at how confident and brazen I’m being, sexually, anyway. He’s truly unlocked some hidden part of myself that had been dormant for way too long, a side of me I never even knew existed. I suppose it’s hard to know exactly what you want when you spent most of your sexual life being married to a man who didn’t care about your wants in the slightest.

“Aye. Could you be more specific?” he asks, nostrils flaring slightly.

“I want you to take what you want,” I tell him, feeling coy. “I don’t want to be asked. I want you to use me however you want and not check on me. I want it to be the way it was the night you came through the window, but in daylight, and I want you to make me ask for it.” I pause. “And I want you to make it filthy.”

He looks at me a long beat, his lips parting. As always, he’s gone still, nearly frozen, the appearance of a predator about to pounce.

“On your knees, foxglove,” he demands, his voice thick.

I obey before my brain has finished processing the instruction. The hooked rug is hard on my knees. His hands move to his fly, slow and deliberate, the careful, old-fashioned competence he does everything with, and I watch his fingers deftly pull down the zipper, the sound filling the room.

He unbuttons the trousers and pulls himself out. His cock is thick and hard—but seriously, when isn’t it?—and he wraps his hand around the base of himself as he looks down at me on the rug.

“Open your mouth,” he commands quietly.

I open it.

“Wider, lass.”

I do as I’m told.

He slides the head of his cock between my lips and he doesn’t go slow. He pushes in past my teeth, over my tongue, to the back of my throat, and stops there; the size of him fills my mouth until he’s jammed in.

His other hand has come to the back of my head, his fingers splayed wide in my hair, his thumb at the side of my jaw, holding me.

“Christ, look at you, love. On your knees on your great-aunt’s rug with my cock in your throat.”

I make a choking sound around him.

“You like that, aye? I can feel you liking that.”

I can’t answer; he’s blocking the words. I think he wants me to try anyway, so I make another sound.

“There’s the lass who’s been pretending to draw all week. There’s the lass who couldn’t put her wee plant on the page because she was thinking of my cock spilling down her throat. Fuck, foxglove. Take it.”

He doesn’t move his hand and he doesn’t pull my head down on him, just holds me there with him at the back of my throat. The seconds stretch. I’m breathing through my nose in shallow, uneven pulls, the panicking part of me starting to climb up the back of my neck and the wanting part louder.

I make a small questioning sound.

I’m holding, please. How much longer?

I want to suck.

He pulls me off him.

Slowly. He draws me back by the hair until just the thick, purple head of him is at my mouth, and I gasp around him, saliva at the corner of my mouth, my eyes streaming. He looks down at me with a deep, dark pleasure I haven’t seen on his face before, the real pleasure under the careful facade, the one he’s been keeping under the man.

“Good girl.”

The words resonate lower than my belly, and I can’t help but make another sound, this one I’m embarrassed by, my cheeks going hot.

He grants me a small, slightly wicked smile, the late afternoon light illuminating his features, making him look otherworldly—which I suppose he is.

“Aye. You like that, too.”

He pushes back in.

He fucks my throat this time, and just as I asked, he’s not slow, not careful. He sets a pace and holds my head with his fingers wrapped around my hair and uses my mouth, and the only sounds in the cottage are the wet sounds of his cock in my throat, and the small, choked noises I’m making around him, and the low aye’s he murmurs as he watches himself fuck my mouth. He talks the whole time in a voice I haven’t heard out of him before, lower, older, the words slipping into another language.

“That’s it, lass. Take it. Christ, the look of you. You came here for this and you’re going to take what I give you. Aye?”

He pulls back enough for me to speak.

“Tell me what you are, on your knees on your auntie’s rug with my cock in your mouth,” he growls.

I swallow around him, trying to find the words.

“Mine,” he claims, watching me. “That’s what you are. Aye?”

I nod against his hand.

“Say it for me.”

He pulls all the way out, slick, my mouth open and wet and tipped up to him.

“Yours,” I agree, my throat already raw.

“Whose, foxglove? Be specific.”

“Yours, Alasdair.”

“Aye. Mine.”

He pushes back into my mouth and fucks it hard, and I feel his orgasm build—the rhythm faltering, his hand fisting tighter in my hair—and I’m ready for him, leaning into it, taking him as deep as he’ll go. When he comes, he comes down my throat with a low broken sound, holding me there, making me take the first of it, swallowing, greedy gulps that taste of the sea.

Then he pulls out, still going, still spurting lashes of cold cum, and finishes on me, across my mouth, my cheek, my jaw, his hand working himself through it with my chin gripped in the other, watching me wear it.

And I let him. I tip my face up into it because I want it, because some unrecognizable version of me wants to be marked like this, and the look that comes over his face when I do is the darkest thing I’ve seen yet.

“Fuck.” His thumb drags through the mess at the corner of my mouth, pushes it past my lips, and I take that too, swirling my tongue around it. “Now look at you.”

He doesn’t soften. He doesn’t go anywhere. He’s barely finished and his hand is still around himself, and I understand that the thing I asked for in the sitting room is only beginning.

“Don’t get too relaxed. We’re not done. Not by a long way.”

He hauls me to my feet by the elbow and walks me through to the kitchen—his trousers undone at the hips, his shirt half-untucked—turns me to the counter, and leans into me from behind.

“Hands flat on the surface.”

I put them flat.

“Wider.”

I move them wider.

“Oh, that’s a good girl.”

Holy hell.

His hand goes to the small of my back and pushes me forward. I bend over the counter with my chest pressed to the cold surface, and he runs his hand down over the curve of my ass through the leggings I’m wearing, his other hand at the waistband.

He yanks the leggings down to my thighs, my underwear with them.

I’m bent over my own kitchen counter with my clothes at my thighs and his hand running flat over my bare ass, and he’s looking at me with a quiet intensity I can feel without turning around.

“If only you could see what I see.”

He smooths his palm over me, both cheeks, slow, then brings his hand down—not hard, a flat, firm smack—I jolt against the counter and cry out, and he croons, “Aye, foxglove. Aye, that’s the sound I’ve been dying to hear.”

He smacks me again.

Harder this time.

I gasp; the air knocked from my lungs.

“You’re going to take what I give you this afternoon. Do you understand me, lass? You asked for this, remember?”

“Yes.”

“Aye?”

“Yes, Alasdair.”

“And you still want it?” He breathes in deeply. “I can smell how much you want it, how wet and greedy and desperate you are, which makes me think you still want it.”

“I still want it,” I whisper hoarsely. And he’s right, because my cunt is throbbing, and my skin feels like it’s on fire, and I’m bent over the counter just waiting for him. Every second that he’s not pushing into me is a second that feels like I’m wilting on the vine.

“Good.”

His hand goes between my legs from behind. He drags two fingers through me and he’s right, I am wet—embarrassingly wet—which I’ve been since I dropped to my knees in the sitting room. He makes a low sound of approval, slides his fingers into me, and curls them.

“You came over to me to get fucked, lass.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me how you want to get fucked.”

“I don’t know how I want it. I just…you decide.”

His fingers go very still inside me.

“Iris…”

“Yes?”

“You’re sure?”

“Uh huh,” I reply, my breath sharp with anticipation.

His other hand comes up. He reaches across me on the counter, pulls the bottle of olive oil toward him, the green glass bottle I bought in Diabaig, and uncorks it with his thumb.

I go still. Are we…are we making a salad?

“Alasdair.”

“Aye, foxglove.”

“What, uh…what’s the olive oil for?” My voice rises high at the end.

“For you.”

“I think I’m pretty damn wet.”

A pause. “Not everywhere you need to be.”

What?

Oh.

Oh.

“Oh—oh,” I stammer. “Um, I haven’t…I’ve never…”

“I know you haven’t, lass.”

For a moment I think I could be insulted, like how dare you assume I’m not a woman who’s taken it up the ass before?

But he’s right—I haven’t—and yes, he can probably tell.

I tilt my head to the side and watch as he pours oil into his hand, setting the bottle down on the counter. That green bottle, slick with olive oil at the neck, sitting in my kitchen, where I’ll see it every morning for the rest of my life. He rubs his palms together slowly, deliberately, like a masseuse gearing up for a job.

Then his hand goes back to me, sliding his oiled fingers between my cheeks, slow and slick.

“You’ll take it, just how I want to give it,” he rasps.

“I…”

“You’ll take it because you came to my chair on your knees this afternoon, and asked me to be what I am with you. So, I’m being what I am with you. You’ll take what I give you, lass, the way you said you would.”

His finger presses against me.

I inhale sharply, so unprepared.

“Aye, breathe.”

I breathe.

His finger pushes in, slow, the oil slick, the resistance of me giving way to him, and the sensation is nothing I’ve felt before. Ryan asked me once to do anal and I said no and we never spoke of it again, and what I have now is this new sensation and Alasdair’s voice low at my ear and his other hand flat at the small of my back holding me bent over the counter, and the new sensation is more. I want more. Of him. In a place he hasn’t been. The wrongness of it and the rightness of it are cut from the same cloth.

“Aye, you know how to take it, you do. We’ll go slow.”

He works one finger into me, then two, slow and slick. He talks the whole time—that’s it, take it, you’re going to take all of me, lass, look at you opening for me, look at you taking this so well—and the talking alone nearly undoes me.

He pulls his fingers out and oils his cock slowly, the sound wet, taking his time. It’s enough to make me squirm in nervous anticipation.

Then he’s at me.

“You can tell me to stop,” he murmurs, positioning the head.

“Don’t stop.”

“Aye, lass.”

He pushes in.

The slow inevitable pressure of him opening me where I haven’t been opened. The oiled slide. The burn at the edge of it. He goes slow because he’s large and he knows the pace my body will accept, and he gives me that pace with the patience only an immortal man can have.

He stops with the head of him in.

I make a strangled noise, my body hot and tight and feeling like it’s going to explode.

“Aye, breathe through it, you can do it.”

I breathe.

He pushes in further, a slow stretch, and I’m gripping the counter so hard my fingertips are white, the cold of the worktop at my cheek.

He bottoms out.

And I can’t fucking breathe.

He’s in me to the hilt and the feeling…there isn’t a word. Full isn’t the word. Owned is closer. He holds himself in me without moving, his hand on the small of my back and the other at my hip, and he leans over me with his breath at my ear.

“Look at you, foxglove. Look at what you came to me for. Bent over your own counter taking my cock where no man has been. You asked for this. You asked for the man who has been taken off the leash.”

I try to tell him I did but the words are garbled, choking in my throat.

“Tell me you wanted it.”

I breathe in through my nose, out through the feeling of it all.

“I wanted it,” I eke out.

“Tell me you want me to fuck you here, right here in this tight arse of yours.”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“Fuck me, Alasdair. Please.”

He lets out a growl, low and inhuman.

Then he does as I’ve asked.

He fucks me slow at first because he has to, my body needs time to warm up, then faster as I open for him, his hand coming around to my front, between my legs, his fingers working me where I’m already swollen and wet. The combination is going to undo me in a way I haven’t been undone, because the fullness of him in the place he is and the deftness of his fingers on me at the same time is something my body hasn’t been asked to process before.

He talks the whole time. Low and filthy at my ear in his old-Scots cadence—good lass, and take it, and that’s my cunt, that’s my arse, that’s all of you, Iris, that’s the whole of you mine now, and you’ll feel me leaking out of you when you stand up, foxglove, and you’ll feel me in you tomorrow when you sit at this table to draw your wee plants—and I’m crying into the counter, not because it hurts, but because it’s so much and he isn’t letting up.

And then, out of nowhere, I come.

I come hard on his fingers with him buried in me, the orgasm tearing through me, sharper, deeper, the angle making it different than anything before, and I cry out his name which echoes across the kitchen. He fucks me through it, talking through it, taking what he wants.

His pace breaks. His hand goes from between my legs to my hip and he grips, fingers digging in to hold me place. He fucks me harder, his hips like pistons, pumping so hard that my ribs are bruising against the counter with each slam, and I feel him going, the rhythm shortening, the breath at my ear coming faster⁠—

He comes inside me with a low, long sound that isn’t entirely human at the end of it, his damp forehead pressed to the back of my neck, his fingers still digging in, as if he’s afraid to let go, while the rest of him is pulsing, spurting into me, lodged in deep.

He stays in me a long beat, his hand stroking down my back, a little unsteady, his voice at my ear gone soft again.

“My love.”

I make a whimpering sound.

“Look at what you let me do to you.”

He pulls out slowly and I feel him leaving me, the pressure inside me suddenly gone and the slick, wet trail of him down the inside of my thigh. He doesn’t move away; he stays behind me with his hand at the small of my back, waiting for me to lift my head from the counter.

I don’t lift it yet. I can’t. I’m so thoroughly ravaged I’m not even sure who I am anymore.

I lie with my cheek on the counter and stare absently at the bottle of olive oil with his cum cooling on the inside of my thigh.

Eventually, everything quiets, my lungs and my heart returning to normal.

I lift my head.

He helps me up, his hand at my elbow, his other at my waist. I’m wobbly. He’s steady. He pulls my underwear up gently and the leggings after, then turns me to face him and kisses me on the forehead the way he always does, the same kiss he’s been giving me for weeks, the one that fools me every time into thinking he’s some tender gentleman when he’s anything but.

“So…” I manage to say, clearing my throat.

“I know.”

He goes to the sink and washes his hands and dries them on the tea towel, then turns and leans against the counter and looks at me, his trousers still undone at the waist with his cock barely tucked in, his dark hair fallen forward over his face, his eyes that blue that no paint pigment can describe.

“Sit down, love. I’ll make you coffee.”

I sit at the kitchen table, carefully. He makes me coffee.

The afternoon light through the back window has shifted while we did what we did, the bay outside the dull blue it goes before dusk. I sit at the table with my legs uncertain under me and my body still feeling him, and I watch the monster I live with make me a perfect cup of coffee, just the way I like it.

He sets it down in front of me, kisses the top of my head, goes back to the sitting room, and picks up his book.

A few nights later, he comes to bed, which is to say he doesn’t sleep in it so much as occupy it, keeping me company. He lies with his arm over my waist, his chest at my spine, his breath moving slow and silent against the back of my neck. The cold of him has stopped being a thing I flinch from and started being a thing I burrow toward, especially since I naturally run hot. The fire’s banked, and the radiator’s on, and I’m as cozy as can be, considering the circumstances. I fall asleep quickly in his presence, despite the fact that when I was married, there was no way in hell I could fall asleep with Ryan touching me.

I wake at 3:17, the alarm clock glowing red.

And I am alone in bed.

This isn’t new. He does this on most nights, somewhere in the small hours, the weight of him lifts off me and I surface just enough to know he’s gone and then sink again. In the morning he’s back—at the window, at the stove, the wet at his collar, the coffee going—like he never left. The first time it happened, I laid rigid till dawn, wondering, worrying. By now I’ve half-trained myself to read it the way you read a partner getting up to use the bathroom. He’ll go, but he’ll come back. Nothing to pay attention to.

He goes to the loch, I figure. He’s a thing made of cold, dark water, and he can’t be out of it forever any more than I could hold my breath all night. So he goes back to it in the dead hours because he can’t sleep anyway, then returns to me before the light. That’s the story I tell myself; and most mornings the story makes total sense.

Tonight, I don’t move as usual. I keep my breathing long and even. I’ve gotten good at performing sleep, and through my lashes I watch the room in the near darkness.

He’s at the foot of the bed, dressing. He’s already got the trousers on, and he’s pulling the dark sweater down over his head, and he does all of it quietly, not a single rustle of fabric or creak of the floorboard.

And it’s odd, not the lack of noise, because he’s always so quiet, but that he’s getting dressed. That’s why I figured he goes to the loch every night, because he leaves totally naked. Why put on clothes if you’re just going for a swim?

But tonight he’s putting on clothes. Perhaps he’s heading to the castle. He goes there sometimes to bring back some books and supplies.

He pauses at the window, the one I’ve stopped salting because we both know what the salt is and isn’t, and he stands there looking out at the bay with his back to me.

Where do you go? I think, but I don’t say.

I think about saying it, though. About sitting up and asking him why he’s up at three a.m. with his clothes on, like a normal person would. But there are doors in him I can open and doors I can’t, and I’m learning that the difference between the two is the difference between the man and the monster and lying here performing sleep, I can’t always tell which side of that door a given night is on. Most nights it’s the loch. Most nights he’s just going home to the water for a while, to kill time.

But I can’t tell, from here, whether tonight is most nights.

I can’t tell if he’s killing time or…killing in general.

And I’ve decided, in some place deep inside of me, that not knowing is the price of keeping him. That if I asked, and he told me, because he hates to lie to me (so he says), I’d have to do something about the answer.

So I don’t ask. I just pretend to sleep.

He turns from the window and comes back to the bed. He leans down over me, and I keep my eyes shut and my breath slow. I feel the cold of him near my face, and his mouth touches my temple; the same kiss he’s given me a hundred times. He inhales once at my hair. Then he straightens.

I almost give myself away, the desire to reach for him and pull him to me that strong.

But I stay still.

When I crack my eyes again, he’s at the window, and then he’s through it, over the sill in one fluid motion no man with that much height should make look that easy, no hand on the frame, no weight transferred, there and then not. The curtain settles behind him, and the cold comes in off the bay where the window’s open, filling the now empty room.

Chapter

Twenty-Five

Iwake to the smell of coffee and the sound of him in my kitchen, and for one, warm, unguarded moment, I’m just a woman whose man is up before her.

The bed is cold on his side, but the cold has the staleness of a few hours, which means he’s been back a while. He probably never returned to bed. The whole cottage has the particular warmth it only has when he’s tended it, and I lie there in it the way you lie in a bath that’s still hot, knowing it won’t last, stealing the minutes anyway. In other words, I’m being lazy as fuck.

Eventually, though, I have to pee. I reluctantly get up and pull my robe over the marks that are fading now to yellow-green at my shoulder and the dull bruise at my hip, fading reminders of that first time I had him knowing the truth. I feel that once the bruises are gone completely, I’ll settle into full acceptance, whatever that means.

Once I’ve done my business, I pad out into the kitchen, and he’s at the window the way he always is, in a navy shirt, his hair drying in that loose black wave. He turns when I come in and looks me over.

“You slept in again,” he says.

I give him a tired nod and yawn my response. I don’t need to let him know I was up half the night worrying about him.

The thing is, I’ve been up worrying about him ever since he left in the night fully clothed. It’s been two nights since then, and both those nights he’s gone out the window dressed, which means he’s not going to the loch, at least not right away.

So naturally I lie there all night, wondering where the fuck he is going, and when I’m going to find the nerve to ask him.

We’ll see if I find my nerve today.

I sit down at the table while he makes me my coffee and some oatmeal, then he sits across from me with his tea and watches me eat with that steady gaze of his. I don’t know why he likes to watch me eat and drink, but I no longer feel self-conscious about it. I don’t even feel self-conscious when I use the olive oil anymore, and that’s saying a lot.

I’ve drunk about half the mug of coffee and am vaguely awake when my phone goes off.

It’s on the windowsill beside the salt jar. I think about not answering it, when Alasdair gets up and hands it to me.

I thank him and peer down at the screen. Unknown number. Probably a telemarketer, but I don’t get many calls so I answer it anyway, just in case it’s Maddie or Andrew, even though I loathe the phone.

“Hello?”

“Miss Galloway.” It’s Sinclair, that flat careful voice. “DI Calum Sinclair. I’m sorry to ring so early.”

“It’s fine.” I stand, because I can’t sit here like this and talk to a cop. I take the phone to the window over the sink, my back to Alasdair, because of course this is about Alasdair. “Everything alright?”

“I’m making some calls round the south shore, that’s all. Routine. A woman’s been reported missing. Last seen two nights ago at the Torridon Hotel. She was by herself. Didn’t come home, didn’t turn up for her work yesterday or the day before. I’m asking everyone if they’ve seen anything on the roads or the water. Anyone about who shouldn’t be about, if you catch my meaning.”

Two nights ago.

“What was her name?” I hear myself say because it feels like the thing to ask.

“Becca Rhys. Thirty-four. You’ll not know her, I shouldn’t think, she’s not from the immediate⁠—”

“No,” I interrupt. “I don’t know her.”

I don’t really know anyone, except Mhairi and MacLeod, the bartender at the aforementioned Torridon, and, of course Sinclair and MacRae. Not sure if it’s a good thing that half the people I know here are cops.

“Have you seen anyone, Miss Galloway? On your road, the shore? You’re fairly isolated out there. Anyone in the bay, anyone about at odd hours?”

I look at the silver water.

“No, No one. It’s just me out here.”

Behind me, the room has gone a particular kind of still, and, if I didn’t know better, I’d think Alasdair disappeared into thin air.

“Right,” he goes on. “Well, the thing is, I do wonder about you and your neighbor. Alasdair MacCoinnich? I had a talk with him a few weeks ago, and he mentioned that the two of you knew each other.”

“Ah, well we do. Know each other.”

“Okay,” he says, drawing out the word. “So you can vouch for his whereabouts?”

Oh, fuck. What do I say to that?

I turn around to look at Alasdair, as if he’ll give me some guidance, but when I meet his eyes, they’ve gone jet black. It’s enough that I breathe in sharply, the sight of him freaking me the fuck out.

Then his eyes go back to normal, and he gives his head a single shake.

What the fuck is happening?

“Ms. Galloway?”

“Uh, yeah. Hi. Sorry. His whereabouts? Well sir, he’s been with me, and he was with me two nights ago.”

Alasdair frowns, looking normal again, and opens his mouth to protest, but I put a finger to my lips. The thing is, I have to tell the truth. If I tell Sinclair I haven’t seen Alasdair, then he’s going to go straight over to his place again and paint him as a suspect.

But isn’t he a suspect? a voice pipes up inside me. I immediately shush it.

“Right. Well. You’ve my number if anything comes to you. And…Miss Galloway? I’d keep your doors locked out there. Till we know what this is. Maybe don’t…” he trails off. “Just stay safe.”

“I always do.” I hang up.

I lock eyes with Alasdair again and I can’t read a word on his face.

“Two nights ago,” I begin slowly, “he was calling about a woman who went missing two nights ago. Becca Rhys.”

“Iris…”

“You got up, two nights ago.” I try to keep my voice level and calm. “Three in the morning, out the window. I saw you go. I always see you go. I let myself think it was the loch. I tell myself it’s only ever the loch and your little late-night skinny dipping. But that night, two nights ago and every night since, you got dressed before you went out…why did you get dressed? What were you doing? Where were you going?”

“Iris.” He sets the mug down, careful, soundless. “I have not been unfaithful to you. I want you to hear me say that. I didn’t touch her in the way you’re afraid of. Whatever you’re holding in your head right now, it isn’t that. I’ve not so much as looked at another woman the way I look at you since the day you opened that door. On that, foxglove, I am clean.”

I stare at him, gobsmacked. That’s what he thinks this is about? He thinks…he thinks I’m accusing him of sneaking out and being unfaithful, of cheating?

“Alasdair.” My voice has gone very quiet. “What are you talking about? I’m not talking about you being intimate with another woman, I’m talking about you killing another woman. You killed her, didn’t you! You went out and you killed this Becca Rhys!”

He doesn’t flinch or look away.

“Aye,” he admits.

And there it is. No hesitation, no softening, no let me explain. Just aye, the aye that doesn’t know how to be ashamed.

“That’s…” I press the heel of my hand to my mouth, then take it away. “You say that like I’ve caught you forgetting to put the bins out. Aye. A woman is fucking dead. Becca Rhys, thirty-four, she had a job she didn’t turn up to, she has people who reported her missing, and you got up out of my bed and you went and killed her.”

“I didn’t break faith with you,” he reiterates, and the awful thing is that he means it as comfort. He thinks if he can just make me understand that he was loyal, that he didn’t want her in that way, it will make it all better. “She was nothing to me, Iris. She was…” He licks his lips and looks away.

“Food,” I mumble flatly, starting to go numb. “She was food, right? She was just food?”

“Aye.”

“Don’t—” My voice cracks and I let it. “Do not say aye to me again. Not like that. Not when we talk about you murdering people!”

He stops. He goes quiet. And he watches me with that confusion still on him, working at it, genuinely working at it, trying to find the place where he’s wronged me and not finding it, because in whatever ancient reckoning runs under those pale eyes, fucking and food are different books entirely. One of them he understands he must never do. The other is just what he is. He has kept the vow he thinks he made me. He cannot for the life of him see that I’m grieving a woman whose name I only learned ninety seconds ago.

“You know what I am. I warned you many times, and you’ve made peace with it. You know that I’ve killed, what I eat, and that I’ll do it again. Christ, I’ll do it more and more now that the bargain is through, you know I will. I can feel myself slipping, it’s as if the only thing tethering me to my humanity is you, Iris.”

Gee, no fucking pressure!

“You need to stop, Alasdair,” I tell him, the words grinding out. “I know what you’ve done in the past, but that’s behind you now. That’s behind us. If you’re going to be with me, you need to behave. You can’t be with me, live in this house, be in my body, and go out there and take women when you feel like it.”

“I only ate her,” he protests, “just as you eat your breakfast right now.”

I erupt. “Oh, this breakfast?” I pick up my oatmeal and fling the bowl at his head. Of course, he has lightning-fast reflexes and ducks before the bowl goes soaring across the kitchen, crashing against the wall and splintering into porcelain chunks and soggy oat splatters.

He stares at me, wide-eyed, perhaps the most surprised I’ve ever seen him.

“Get out,” I shout, absolutely seething.

His brows raise even further.

“Get out, Alasdair! Out of my house. I can’t…I can’t look at you. Go!”

I expect…I don’t know what I expect. An argument, perhaps. Him telling me again all the reasons I knew what he was when I let him in—which would be true—which is the worst of it, because I did. Something akin to, if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you don’t deserve me at my best.

But he doesn’t do any of that. He stands up from the table and he looks at me with the confusion not gone but set aside, folded away, because I’ve told him no, and honoring my no is the one law he keeps.

For now, anyway.

He goes to the back door and pauses there, one hand on the frame, his back half to me. For a second, I think he’s going to say something, and some treacherous part of me wants him to, wants him to give me a reason to make him stay. But he doesn’t. He opens the door and the cold whips in, ruffling my hair, and then he’s gone, and I’m alone inside.

The cottage is mine again.

It’s the first thing I notice in the silence after, that it’s mine again—the way it was mine before any of this, before the castle across the bay, before the box and the key and the paintings, before I knew there was more to this world than what I was told. Just me and Effie’s life all crammed together into one cottage. And I wanted this. This is what I came here for. The two weeks of a monster at my table, in my bed, and at my back, and some part of me has been quietly screaming for exactly this, the cottage emptied of him, the air gone so utterly ordinary.

Yet I hate it instantly.

The quiet isn’t peace, no, it’s a held breath. I stand in the middle of the kitchen with the broken dish on the floor, and the size of the emptiness is enormous—far bigger than the cottage itself. I understand, with a sick lurch in my stomach, that his presence had been filling something I’d stopped noticing was a hole.

I go to the window at the door, expecting to see him disappear into the water, but the bay is already empty. No pale shape on the rocks. No man, no horse, no sea creature, or drowned wives.

I should call Maddie, but once again, I know I won’t. It makes me feel better, slightly, to know that I could call her and maybe she’d fly over here and make it all better. Maybe convince me to leave. But I don’t want to put her in any danger and, besides, I’m old enough now to pull up my big girl panties—I’m a recent divorcée for crying out loud, that’s some real adult shit—and figure this stuff out on my own, without anyone coming here to save me.

I just hate it, that’s all.

I sigh, my heart feeling like it’s breaking, and I hate that, too. I’m alone for the first time in a long time, and it’s so much worse than I thought it would be.

Chapter

Twenty-Six

Ispend the day not coping in the specific way I’ve gotten good at not coping with things: coffee that keeps going cold, that fucking wolfsbane, and bog myrtle I still haven’t finished, the curtain over the sink open, then closed, and then open again because I can’t decide whether I want to be able to see the bay or not. I’ve kept catching myself listening for him. Setting two mugs out, then putting one back. The aloneness hasn’t softened; it’s calcified into something I carry around the rooms with me.

So when I hear an engine working down the rutted track through the woods, my first feeling, god help me, is hope. Some pathetic part of me leaps up thinking, he’s come back, before the rational part reminds me that though I’ve seen his Land Rover, I’ve never actually seen him drive it here. And, if he were to return, I think he’d come from the water.

But as I peer out the front window, I see it is a car. A real one—grey, and official, and mud-splattered—easing down my drive and pulling up on the gravel beside my rental.

Sinclair.

I watch him as he gets out and looks at the cottage, the rowan by the step, the salt I haven’t swept off the front sill. He looks the same as before, but there’s a weariness about him that’s gone past the professional kind into something that’s eating away at him. A woman’s gone missing on his watch. He’s been driving the south shore knocking on doors. This is getting personal for him, and I need to keep that in mind.

I open the door before he’s halfway to it.

“Detective.”

“Miss Galloway.” He stops where he is and nods in greeting. “Sorry to bother you again—and in person—but I was in the area and I’ve a few more questions, if you can spare the time. About the roads, mostly. Who comes and goes out this way.”

No one comes out this way, I think. One thing comes out this way, and it rarely uses the road.

“Of course,” I say, even though the last thing I want to do is talk to him, but I have to pretend that everything is A-Okay. “Do you want to come in? I can put the kettle on and…”

And that’s when I feel it.

The tilt. The weight in the air. The axis-shift under my skin that I’ve learned means he’s here, except he went out my back door yesterday in a fury of my own making and I told him never to come back. The feeling I have now isn’t the presence of the man whose been in my kitchen. It’s…older than that, colder. It’s the feeling I had the day I walked to his castle and saw a white shape through the trees; that feeling of being watched by something that’s watched this world for a long time.

I look past Sinclair’s shoulder, up the slope behind the cottage, toward the bracken, and the yellow-dotted gorse, and the dark line of the woods.

The horse is there.

It’s standing where the ground rises toward the trees, the pale grey-white of it stark against the turning copper of the bracken. The long mane hangs wet and heavy down its neck even though it hasn’t rained for a few days. The water has run down its shoulder and darkened the coat in streaks. It’s bigger than a horse should be, the way it was bigger in the road, it’s always bigger than the last time. The one eye I can see, turned down the slope toward us, is black. Too black. The black of the loch at midnight, of the bottom no one’s mapped, the black of the cosmos where the elder beings roost.

But the horse isn’t looking at me, that much I can tell.

It’s looking at Sinclair.

“Detective.” My voice has dropped, panic starting to flood through me. “Detective, get in your car.”

He follows my look up the slope, and his tired face does something almost fond. “Ah,” he says. “Now there’s a fine beast. Yours?”

“No. Not mine. Get in the car. Please.”

“Don’t tell me it’s wild; a thing that strong and well-fed.” He’s ignoring me and already turning toward it, and I can see it taking him, the pull of it, the glamour of it. His weariness has dropped off him. There’s a softness coming over his face, an awe. “I grew up with horses, ya know. My father kept Highland ponies, they were beautiful creatures. This one is far too big to be a pony, but it has to belong to someone.”

He takes a few steps towards it with a dazed expression on his face.

“It’s not…no, Detective, please.” I hurry over to him in my slippers and pull on his sleeve. He glances down at me with the mild puzzled patience of a man humoring a frightened woman. “It’s not safe. It’s not tame. It bites, it’s not…look, you don’t know what it is. Please, just get in your car and go.”

“Miss Galloway.” Gently. Like I’m the one who needs handling. “It’s just a bloody horse.”

He takes his arm back. Not unkindly.

And he walks toward it.

The horse shifts its weight, getting ready for something. Sinclair makes a low clicking sound with his tongue, and the horse’s ear flicks toward it, and he’s reading the ear-flick as a totally normal thing a horse does.

I get in front of him.

I don’t decide to, I’m between him and the slope before I’ve thought about it, my arms out, walking backward in my slippers up the rise toward the horse with my body shielding the detective, which is insane and the most useless thing a person could do, and I’m saying, go on, get, shoo, to a centuries-old thing wearing a horse like a coat.

And then it fucking charges.

The horse drops its head and comes down the slope at me, the size of it fills the whole sky. the hooves loud on the turning ground, and I have just enough time to understand that I am going to die, that I have put myself in front of a monster that is going to run me into the dirt, and I manage to throw myself sideways, into the gorse.

It doesn’t hit me.

It checks, pulls up short three feet from where I was, the great white body wheeling while it lets out a loud whinny, and I understand, even as I’m sprawled in the gorse with the breath knocked out of me, that it was never going to hit me. It simply moved me out of the way, the way you’d move a dog out of a doorway with your foot. It wanted me out from in front of the thing it came for.

Now I am out of the way, and Sinclair has stumbled back toward his car at the shock of it. The horse stands between us, breathing wet clouds from his nostrils, and I’m pretty sure it’s already forgotten I exist.

And Sinclair—Sinclair, who grew up with Highland ponies, who just watched a half-wild animal nearly trample his witness—goes to the boot of his car, pops the trunk, and takes out a coil of blue nylon rope.

“No,” I whimper from the gorse, “no, no, no, don’t⁠—”

“It’s spooked, that’s all,” he says in a soothing, competent voice, looping the rope in his hands. “A loose animal like this’ll do somebody harm if it’s left. I’ll get a line on it and we’ll ring round, find who’s missing a horse.” He’s moving toward it slow now, the rope held low and easy, his voice murmuring there now, there, easy, easy. The horse stands and lets him come.

Of course it lets him come.

I get up out of the gorse. My palms are bleeding from the fall, my slippers half on, and I’m screaming now. “It’s not a horse! Detective, it is not a horse, it’ll kill you, please, please get away from it⁠—”

He doesn’t even look at me.

The glamour has him all the way now. He reaches the horse. He lays his free hand flat on the slope of its shoulder, the way you gentle a horse before the rope, that broad confident pat, there now⁠—

…and his hand doesn’t come off.

I see the exact moment it goes wrong, and his face changes. He tries to lift his palm to bring the rope up over the neck, but his hand stays where it is—fixed to the wet shoulder like it’s been set in concrete. Incredulous, he starts, “What the f⁠—”

The horse rears.

It goes up, up, Sinclair’s stuck arm wrenching up with it so his whole body is hauled off the ground. For one frozen second he hangs there, his trapped hand against the rising bulk of it, and then the hooves come down.

The first one catches him low, between the legs, and the sound he makes is one that will stay in the marrow of my bones until I die. The second comes down on his shoulder and I hear it break, a wet wooden crack, the joint going the wrong way. He screams. He’s still alive, and he’s screaming, and his hand is still stuck. The third hoof comes down somewhere in the soft middle of him, and the scream changes pitch into something that isn’t human anymore.

He’s not dead. That’s the fucking horror of it all: it hasn’t killed him. It’s broken him, methodically, hoof by hoof, and left enough of him alive to know what’s happening.

Then it runs.

It drops to all fours and bolts down the slope toward the bay, dragging Sinclair with it, his hand still fixed to its shoulder, his ruined body bouncing and tumbling over the rocks, and the stone, and the gorse. I hear him going over the ground, parts of him meeting the rocks with sickening thumps and splats. I run after them and I don’t know why—there is nothing I can do—my legs moving on their own.

“Alasdair!” I scream his real name at the man that’s somewhere inside there, at the white horse racing toward the water. “Alasdair, stop, stop, please—Alasdair!”

My voice goes out over the bay and comes back to me off the far spit, off the castle stone, Alasdair, Alasdair, thinned, and doubled, and useless.

The horse doesn’t stop, hitting the shallows at a gallop, throwing up sheets of silver. It doesn’t slow at the water’s edge the way a real thing would; it goes in like a homing missile. The detective goes in with it, dragged under in a thrashing grey jacket, and blue rope; the last of his voice cut off in a gurgle as the loch closes over his head.

I stop at the edge of the rocks, not daring to go in. The water’s still heaving where they went under. I can see the white shape of the horse beneath the surface for a moment like a beluga whale, moving fast, going deep, then the dark masses that were the detective and the horse are…gone. Nothing resurfaces, and the bay goes still.

For one held second, the loch is flat and silver and giving nothing back, and I stand on the rocks with my bleeding hands and my screamed-raw throat, thinking it’s over, that the worst thing I have ever seen is over.

Then the water moves.

But not just where they went under, but everywhere.

A flurry breaks across the bay—a dozen lines of current cutting the surface from the deep middle toward the place the detective sank, fast, converging. Along the lines, a head breaks the silver; dark wet hair, the curve of a shoulder, a face turned down toward the depth. It’s the drowned women, surfacing from wherever they wait, coming from every part of the loch at once.

They go down where he is.

And then the water churns and turns.

It blooms red from underneath, a dark stain spreading up through the silver, and the surface starts to roil, a frenzy, the way I’ve seen footage of piranhas strip a thing in a river, that terrible, joyful thrashing. Things break the surface in the churn and go under again. A length of blue rope. A piece of a grey wax jacket. And once—only once—something pale, soft, and unmistakably part of a man, lifted clear of the water for an instant in the grip of a dark-haired woman before she pulls it back down into the red.

I don’t scream; I’m past screaming now. I stand on the rocks with my hand over my mouth in utter horror as I watch the bay eat a man. I can’t look away, because looking away feels like a worse crime than watching it happen.

It doesn’t take long. The frenzy peaks and thins and the crimson blood diffuses, spreading out into a pink that the tide will carry off. The heads slip back under one by one, and the lines of current scatter back toward the deep middle of the loch. The surface closes, and smooths, and stills.

The bay goes silver again. Flat and quiet.

A gull cries somewhere down the shore as if nothing has happened, as if there is not a detective’s car sitting on my gravel with its trunk open, as if the water in front of me is not still faintly pink at its edges where it laps the rocks at my feet.

I stand there for what feels like forever, and maybe it is.

Then I turn and walk slowly, past the cottage, toward the detective’s car, my arms hugging my sides as if I’ll shatter into pieces if I don’t literally hold myself together. The horror and the shock of what I just witnessed isn’t going away, but I have to move through it, move past it, because I’m going to be in some serious, serious shit if I don’t.

I reluctantly go to his car, peering inside it as if it’s some alien creature. The keys are in the ignition, pulled out enough so that the car doesn’t ping, like you’d do when you’re only stepping out for two minutes to ask someone a question, when you have every intention of getting back in and driving to the next person you’ll interrogate. The little fob dangles, catching the last of the light, and the trunk still open from when he pulled out the rope.

He shouldn’t have done that, I think absently, he shouldn’t have tried to tame the horse.

At the very least, maybe I should have insisted he come inside for tea. I could have pulled him inside, locked the doors, and kept the monster at bay. But I know that would have only worked for so long. The horse would be out there when he came out. It would call to him. What was it that Alasdair said? The horse lures, the monster feeds?

Of course, this time, the monster did not feed.

He doesn’t like the taste of men, I recall bitterly.

No, he brought Sinclair into the water to drown him, and then the drowned women fed. They tore him limb from limb and feasted, perhaps Alasdair’s own appetite being passed onto them through death, cursed forever.

What a horrible thing. To die that way, and then, on top of it, become a ghost, a monster of the loch to pull others under. How many people do the drowned wives even take? Men and women? Children? Animals? What is their range?

The questions are dumb and useless, as if I’m cataloging these monstrous creatures the way I catalog the flowers I draw.

I should call someone. The thought floats past and doesn’t mean anything—because call who and tell them what, exactly? I rehearse and it’s painful each time but I can’t stop—hello, yes, a detective came to ask me questions, and a horse came down the hill—and the horse was my, the horse was—the water turned red, and the women…the sentence dies before it’s even fully built.

There is no version of it that ends with anyone believing me, and every version of it ends with me in a room being asked whether I’ve been sleeping enough and if I’m on any medication. They are not Mhairi and the village folk who accept truth like they do the weather. Whoever comes looking for Sinclair will come from the city and have city sense, and city sense knows that if a woman alone on a sea loch says a horse ate a policeman, the next stop is the padded cell.

So I’m not going to call anyone. I work that out standing in the cold, staring at the car, and I stop being a person something happened to, and start being a person who is doing something.

I just don’t know what the fuck that is yet.

What I do know is, from countless TV crime shows, is the car can’t be here.

The car can’t be here, in my driveway, my fingerprints on the door I’ve pulled open. I get in the car and turn the key. The seat’s pushed back for a tall man, so I drag it forward, my hands going through the motions now, acting before I have a chance to give the command. Some practical animal has taken the wheel; it is going to deal with the car first and let me fall apart later, on its own schedule, when there’s time.

That’s what compartmentalization is all about, kids.

But even my subconscious has decided I won’t take the car toward the village. Toward the village is the road out to the world, to people. I take it the other way, around the head of the bay on the narrow road that hugs the shore, toward the dark mass of the far spit and the castle on it, because the only thing better at making things disappear than the loch itself is the thing that lives in it.

And right now, because those eldritch gods have a wicked sense of humor, the thing that lives in it is the only ally I’ve got.

Chapter

Twenty-Seven

Idrive a dead man’s car to the monster’s house.

The road is bad, and the light is going, and I take the bends too fast, the loch black on my right now, the headland rising.

I don’t dare look at the water.

By the time the castle comes up out of the dusk, Caisteal Eachainn, all broken-teeth-standing stone, the part of it that’s still roofed black against a sky going to indigo. My hands have started shaking so badly on the wheel that I have to stop. I bring the car onto the flat scrub below the curtain wall, kill the engine, and the silence comes in.

He’s there.

Alasdair stands at the foot of the wall where the old sea-gate is, where the castle meets the shore, and he’s a man again; naked and soaking wet. The water sheets off him in the last of the light, running down his hair and his shoulders, pooling dark around his bare feet on the stone, like he’s only just come up out of the loch and put a man’s body back on over whatever he actually is—or however the fuck that actually works.

He’s not braced for my arrival. For once I’ve caught him off guard—he doesn’t expect the detective’s car, doesn’t expect me to be driving it, and there’s a half-second where his face is unguarded and I see something on it I’ve never seen before, something close to total dismay.

The fact that he has this emotion at all gives me a bit of courage, like there really is someone in there, someone human, that’s worth saving.

I get out of the car on shaky legs.

We look at each other across the bracken and road, the dead man’s car ticking as it cools between us.

“We have a problem,” I say.

“Aye.” He grunts, hair in his eyes.

“And put on some pants,” I tell him, my voice cracking and absurd. “I can’t talk to you about this with you standing there like that.”

“Aye, foxglove,” he replies, and something in how gently he says it nearly undoes me on the spot. He turns and goes through the courtyard into the dark of the castle, and I stand alone by the car with my arms wrapped around myself, the cold coming up off the water, and, somehow, I don’t fall apart.

He comes back in trousers and a dark shirt he hasn’t bothered to button all the way, his feet still bare and hair still wet, stopping a few feet from me. He doesn’t try to touch me, which means he’s read something off me that’s telling him not to.

Wise man. Must be the abject horror on my face.

“Come inside,” he offers, “you’ve had a shock. I can get a fire going.”

“I don’t want to come inside.”

“You’re shaking.”

“Of course I’m shaking.” And there it goes, the practical animal losing its grip all at once, the whole afternoon coming up my throat. “Of course I’m, fuck, Alasdair, I watched you kill him! I watched it all happen! I stood outside my home and I watched you. You broke him. You didn’t even…you didn’t kill him clean, you broke him to pieces and you dragged him over the rocks while he was still alive. I heard him, I heard the sounds he made, and then they…in the water, they—” My voice climbs and breaks. “And it came at me. Before. On the hill. It came down the hill straight at me, you came at me, you put your, that thing put its head down and it ran at me and I thought I was going to…”

“I was trying not to,” he says quickly, the first fast thing I’ve heard out of him, and there’s an edge under it. “Iris. I was trying not to touch you. I moved you out of the way because if you’d stayed where you were…”

“You can’t control it.” I’m crying now, and I hate that I’m crying in front of him, scrubbing at my face with the heels of my scratched palms. “That’s what you’re telling me. You came up my hill as that thing, and you couldn’t control where it went, or what it did, or whether it ran me down, you just—trust it not to—and⁠—”

“I could never really control it.” His voice is quiet again, and that’s so much worse than the edge. “Iris. Look at me. I’ve not been honest about that, and I’ll be honest about it now, because you’re owed it after what you watched. I don’t decide. Not that shape. When it comes up in me, I can steer it, a little, the way you’d steer a horse that’s already bolted, I can keep it from the worst, but I don’t decide. It decided to take the detective. I didn’t.”

I stare at him. The loch is black behind him. “Oh, so you’re absolved? Well, if you didn’t, then who did?”

“The horse.” He holds my eyes, unblinking. “The creature. The part of me that was never a man. It’s been kept down a long time, foxglove. There was a bargain, and the bargain kept it down just enough. I took what I could to keep it satisfied, but the bargain’s…you know what happened.”

He takes in a deep breath. “I am losing hold of it, Iris. I’ve told you as much. The monster is winning. I am afraid of what’s at the end of that, and I have not been afraid of anything in a very long time.”

The cold goes that through me has nothing to do with the breeze off the water.

Because I came here bracing for a monster who’s done a terrible thing on purpose, but instead I find that the man I…that the man is being eaten from the inside by the monster—and the monster is patient and winning—and somewhere at the end of that road is a version of him with no man left in it at all, loose on this loch.

“Come inside,” he says again, softer. “Please. Before you go to pieces out here in the cold. Let me…let me at least do that.”

Against my better judgment, I go inside the castle.

It doesn’t take long for the fire to build. He sits me in the chair near the hearth and puts a glass of good whisky in my hand, the peat of it sharp and warming. I drink it too fast, down in two swallows, fast enough to make me cough. The heat of it spreads down into me and steadies the shaking enough that I can think. There’s a fine line when it comes to thinking and whisky, and I have to be careful when I toe it.

Alasdair sits across from me, keeping his distance. He holds his own glass and sips it on occasion.

“The car,” I begin, when I feel like I can finally talk. “Someone knows Sinclair was out here. He told me he was driving the south shore, knocking on doors. He’ll have told people that. He’ll have…a detective has a system; they log where they’re going. They’re going to come looking for him, and the last place anyone knows he was headed is out this way.”

“I’ll deal with the car.”

I frown, sitting up straighter. “How?”

“The same way I deal with everything I need gone.” He says it matter-of-factly. “It goes in the loch tonight, out past the headland where the bottom’s never been found. It won’t come up. There’ll be nothing to put him on your land. Nothing to put him here.”

“That’s not…” I press the glass to my mouth and take it away. “That’s not the problem. Or it is, but it’s not the whole problem. Alasdair, I was probably on his list. He came to me twice. There’ll be a record that he meant to talk to me, or did talk to me. When they come, they’ll come to me. They’ll ask when I last saw him.”

“Aye. And that’s when you’ll lie.”

And there it is.

Just a fact. Like, yes, obviously I’m going to lie. I’m going to sit across from some tired officer and look them in the face and say, Sinclair? He never came, I never saw him, I’ve seen no one out here; it’s only me. And they’re going to write it down and believe me, because the truth is unsayable and unbelievable, and I’m just a grieving American with a dead aunt and a quiet life and nothing about me reads as a woman who’d drive a corpse’s car to a castle in the dark and ask a monster to hide the evidence.

“They’d never believe me anyway,” I say, making peace with it already, so easily. My voice has gone flat and far away. “That’s the thing. Even if I wanted to tell them. There’s no version where I tell the truth and anyone believes it. So, I gotta lie. Because lying’s the only thing that sounds sane.” I look up at him, a sneer pulling across my lip. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you? Made people lie for you. Made them⁠—”

“No,” he denies. “Not made. I’ve had folks choose it, across the years, the way you’re choosing it. It’s not the same thing, and I’ll not let you pretend it is, even to hate me cleaner.” A pause. “Hate me for the rest. Not for that. You’re choosing that yourself, foxglove, the same as I chose what I am every time I’ve come up out of that water and not stopped.”

I don’t like it, so I don’t say anything. The whisky and the fire are warm, and across from me there’s a monster who just told me, frightened, for the first time that I’ve ever seen him frightened, that it’s losing the war for its own body.

And yet the pull is there, even now, even through all of it, the awful, magnetic pull toward him that I’m not sure I’ll ever be rid of.

He sees it, the bastard. He sets his glass down and leans forward, his hand coming up toward the side of my face the way it’s come up so many times before.

I let it get an inch from me, my eyes threatening to close, to give in.

Then by some stroke of luck or last-minute courage, I turn my face away.

“No,” I whisper, “not…I can’t. Not tonight. You need to deal with the car.”

His hand stops where it is, hovering for a moment before he takes it back. He doesn’t argue, doesn’t push, just folds it all away and stands. “Wait here where it’s warm. I’ll not be long. Then I’ll see you home.”

“No. You’ll deal with the car, and I’ll see myself home. I want to walk. I want—I need to be by myself. I need a single hour where there’s nothing, where it’s just me and the road.”

He looks at me a long moment, and I stare at him right back in challenge, and his jaw goes hard, like he wants to argue with me.

But he doesn’t.

He just nods. “Lock your door when you’re in.”

I watch him do it from the scrub above the sea-gate, because I find I can’t make myself leave until it’s done, until I know for sure there’s nothing left to be a witness to.

He gets in the car—the first time I’ve properly seen him in one, even though I know he’s driven mine—and drives it down off the flat and along the spit to where the land drops away to deep water past the headland, the headlights sweeping once across the black loch. He takes it to the edge, the car undulating over the rocks, and then the lights tip and go down. The loch takes the car the way the loch takes everything. There’s a brief commotion and then nothing, the automatic headlights glowing green until they dim and disappear beneath the surface as it sinks—one hell of an eerie sight.

He goes down with it until both car and driver are gone.

The surface then closes over, the moon rising and painting it metal.

I turn and start walking home. I walk every step cold and alone in the dark, second-guessing everything, including who I am as a person.

Who is Iris Galloway underneath it all?

I went out today a woman who was sleeping with a monster. That at least had the feel of something that could happen to a person, something done to you. Right? I mean, weird shit happens, monsters are real.

Now I’m walking home a woman who drove the evidence away with her own hands and has already, in the privacy of her own heart, agreed to lie to the police to protect the, the thing that did it.

Nobody did that to me. I did that! All on my own, too. Here’s a gold star for being morally complicit.

The cottage comes up out of the dark at last, small and stone, one lamp burning in the window because I left it on this morning when I was still someone else.

I let myself in and lock the door behind me, standing with my back against the door. I have absolutely no idea who the woman is who lives here now.

But I know what she’s going to do when the police come.

Chapter

Twenty-Eight

It takes Alasdair three days to come back, and I spend all three telling myself I won’t go down to the water when he does.

I’m oh so good at lying now. I’ve had the practice.

The first two days are the worst kind of quiet—me jumping at every noise, waiting to hear a car outside, a knock at the door, a person in uniform showing up and asking if I’ve seen Sinclair.

But nothing comes. The bay sits suspiciously still under a low sky and gives no sign it swallowed both a man and his car whole. The wind has died down—enough that it won’t even ripple the surface—filling the air with silence, like the loch is holding its breath as much as I am.

During those days, I draw nothing, eat little, sleep in bits and pieces.

On the third evening, just as the light goes to that bruised violet it goes now that it’s properly autumn and getting darker earlier, I feel him.

But it’s not him. That’s the weird part. For three days I’ve been braced for the tilt in the air that means Alasdair, the cold weight of his attention, and this isn’t that. It’s something that makes my hair stand on end, but it isn’t him.

One moment I’m at the window with a mug of chamomile tea, and the next I find I’ve set it down without deciding to, and I’m at the back door, and then I’m out on the rocks in the purple-brown light with the cold coming up off the bay, and…I don’t even know how I got here.

The loch is glass-flat and waiting. Across the water the castle crouches black on its spit. And down in the shallows at the foot of my rocks the surface does something it shouldn’t, a slow turning, a darkness rippling under it without a wind to move it, and I feel the pull of it in my chest like a fishing hook set behind my sternum and drawn, gently, seaward.

Come in, the water says. Not in words. In the language under words, the one my body answers before my mind can get a say, conjuring up images of the woman who beckoned me weeks ago.

Come in, come in, the water’s fine, come and be one of us, come and be held.

“No,” I say out loud to the empty shore, though my hands are already at the hem of my sweater.

I take it off. It’s like I’m watching myself do it. I’m fully here, fully awake, fully screaming somewhere behind my own eyes, and none of it reaches my hands, which do things without my command. They pull the sweater over my head and drop it on the rock. They unhook my bra. They push my joggers down over my hips, and I step out of them, naked in the September cold, my skin gone to gooseflesh, and the rational part of me is shrieking stop, stop, you watched this water eat a man, stop, and my feet carry me down the rock to the waterline like I’m a marionette and someone else has the strings.

“Please,” I whisper. I don’t know who I’m asking. “Please, I don’t want to, I don’t want to⁠—”

The first step in is so cold it should break the spell, but it doesn’t. The second takes me to my knees. The pull behind my sternum goes tighter, more insistent, almost tender, and the dark under the surface gathers toward me. I wade out past where I can stand because my legs won’t stop, and the channel drops away beneath me into the black, and then there’s nothing under my feet at all and I feel myself drop.

And then the hands come up.

Cold and soft and many, closing around my ankles, my calves, and they don’t hold me up. They pull me down. The surface closes over my head before I can get a proper breath, and the cold goes total and black. I’m dragged down into the dark by a dozen gentle, waterlogged hands, and I can’t fight them—I can’t even make my arms work—the compulsion’s still on me like a weight. I think, with a clarity that’s almost peaceful, Oh. This is how it happens. This is how they all went.

Then the peace tears, and the animal in me wakes up, and I start to fight.

I claw for the surface. I get my face into the air for half a second, one ragged half-breath, loch water in it, and I scream and then they pull me under again, deeper. The light goes, my chest already burning.

I don’t see him come. I hear it, underwater, muffled and enormous, a splash, a body hitting the loch hard from a height, and then the water around me churns with something moving through it fast.

A hand closes around my wrist.

It’s strong and hard and certain, and I’d know it anywhere. It hauls me up while the drowned hands clutch and drag the other way and for one endless moment, I’m the rope between them—the dead below pulling me down and Alasdair above pulling me up—then he says something into the water. I feel it more than hear it, reverberating through the water, reminiscent of whale song but not melodic, not sorrowful, but angry and commanding.

The soft hands of the drowned wives flinch, and falter, and let go.

He brings me up into the air, breaking the surface.

I come up retching, hauling in breath that’s half water. He holds me against him, treading the black channel with one arm crushed around my back, and his face—god, his fucking face. The careful stillness is gone, blown clean off him. Instead, he’s afraid. The monster that’s watched this coast for centuries is wide-eyed and afraid, and it’s for me.

“I have you,” he says, voice strained and ragged. “I have you, foxglove, I have you, I have you…”

“They pulled me in,” I sob into his throat, suddenly able to speak, to cry. “I couldn’t—I didn’t want to go, I couldn’t stop my own feet, they called me and I couldn’t⁠—”

“I know.” He moves us toward the shallows, and he doesn’t let go of me for a second, his hand spread wide and firm against my heaving back. “I know. I felt it the moment they reached for you. I have never swum so fast in all my years, Christ, Iris, I thought…” He breaks off. His arm tightens until I can’t breathe for a different reason. “I thought I’d come up with nothing in my arms.”

His feet find the bottom. He stands, lifting me clear of the worst of the cold, my legs going around him out of instinct, and we’re chest to chest in the waist-deep shallows with the dark loch all around us, and the last violet light dying out of the sky. Both of us are shaking, his clothes soaked and heavy on him because he came in dressed, he came in just as he was, no thought for anything but reaching me in time.

Because he did just reach me in time.

And the fear turns over into something else, all the heightened nerves, thundering heartbeats, and feverish adrenaline incinerating into want, into need, into desire. That primal demand to prove you’re still alive.

My mouth finds his, and his hand fists in my wet hair. The kiss becomes desperate and deep and graceless, all teeth and breath and relief. He makes a rough, broken sound, and his hands are everywhere on me, my back, my ribs, my face, gripping, checking, like he can’t believe the whole of me came back up with him.

“Never,” he begins against my jaw, my throat. “Never again. You do not go into this water without me, do you hear me? You do not let it call you; you are mine, and the loch does not get to have you⁠—”

“—I couldn’t stop it,” I interject, gasping, holding tight.

“Then I’ll stop it.” His hands close hard on my hips, pulling me against the rigid line of him. “I’ll stop it every time. Nothing takes you. Not them, not the loch, no one. You’re mine, Iris, mine to the bone.”

“I’m yours,” I breathe, and my hands are already pulling the rest of his clothes off him, the soaked sweater, the trousers, dragging them down and off so they sink away into the black beneath us. He lets me, kissing me fierce and deep and possessive, like he’ll devour me if I stop.

Then he thrusts inside me, fast and hard, the full breach of his cock pushing up into me. I cry out and he swallows the sound with his kiss, and he fucks me there in the channel with the cold all through me, his arm locked around my back, holding me up out of the loch like he’ll never set me down in it again.

And that’s when it occurs to me, somewhere underneath the wanting, that there’s no bottom here.

We’ve drifted out past the shallows out to where the channel drops away, and the water’s too deep to stand in, yet he’s fucking me like a man braced on solid ground.

Like there’s something under him.

His hips drive up into me with a power that needs purchase, needs leverage, needs to be standing on something, but there’s nothing there, there’s fathoms of black water there, and he isn’t sinking, isn’t treading, both his hands are on me, accounted for, and we don’t go down.

I make a mistake and look down.

The light’s almost gone, but through the dark water between our bodies, below his waist where his legs should be working, I see the movement is all wrong. His legs disappear into the darkness of the water, but it’s not because of the depth, it’s because…it’s because they’re becoming a different color. A different texture…something sleek and black and⁠—

“Don’t look down, foxglove,” he commands, and there’s that old amusement in it, that knowing, his voice has dropping into the register that is utterly inhuman.

I look at his face and gasp.

His eyes have gone black again. Full black, no blue left, no white, just the depthless dark drinking what’s left of the light, and the hands gripping me have changed, the nails gone long and hard, points pressing into the skin of my back and my hip, just shy of breaking it, the threat of them everywhere he holds me.

Even his cock seems different, harder, firmer, longer, bigger than he has been before. The stretch of him is right at the edge of what I can take, and I feel the difference in him everywhere, the size, and the claws, and the black eyes, and the thing under the water moving to drive him up into me, and I’m wrapped around the whole of it—the man and the monster—and I take it. I take all of it, because I’m too far gone now to do anything but.

“You feel different,” I gasp. “You’re…you feel⁠—”

“Aye.” His mouth drags against my throat, and his teeth aren’t quite right there either, too many edges. “You’re in the deep with me now, lass. This is more of what I am than you’ve had on dry land. Can you take it?”

I nod, because the word yes has become lodged in my throat.

“Good girl.” The claws press. The thing below us surges. “Then take it.”

So I do.

And then the hands come back.

I feel them brush my ankles, my calves, rising again out of the dark, wanting. I jerk against him and cry out in fright. He feels it, and his head comes up, this time, when he speaks to them it’s not a bellow. It’s lower, almost gentle, a long string of that old water-tongue poured down into the deep. The hands go still on my skin, but they don’t pull. They close around my ankles and my wrists and hold me steady, in place, the way you’d hold something for someone else to work on, and I understand with a lurch that he’s bent them to it; that the creatures that tried to drown me ten minutes ago, are holding me open for him now because he is told them to, and they obey him, his dead victims, his drowned women. I’m caught in their cold grip and his clawed one at once, the whole loch’s worth of monstrousness around me, and I’m so far past being able to want anything but this.

“They’ll not take you,” he murmurs in that raw, animal voice, moving in me slow and deep now, the desperation banking into something darker and surer. The black eyes don’t blink—they present me with that cold abyss, that cosmic void. “They’ll hold you for me instead. That’s all they’re good for now. Holding what’s mine.”

And fucking hell, it lights me up, all of it. The dead hands soft on my wrists, and the claws hard at my hip, him stretching me past what I can take, and the thing under the water working to drive him up into me. The man, the horse, and the drowning thing all fused into one creature that has me surrounded and inside and held.

Iris, you’re one sick individual, I think. And I don’t run from it; don’t bat it away. I accept it, because it’s true. There’s something seriously fucking wrong with me if this—this—is turning me on like nothing else.

I think I’m okay with that.

In fact, I think I’m exactly who I was always meant to be.

And what I want, is to get off with this monster fucking me to kingdom come.

“More,” I beg through a gasp, feeling emboldened, “I can take it.”

And so he gives me more, pumping deepening, faster, the water thrashing around us from the violence of our fucking.

I come around him with the drowned women pinning me in place and his black depthless eyes fixed on my face, and it tears through me harder than anything ever has, the worst thing and the best thing welded into one, and I hate how good it is, and I don’t stop, I can’t stop, there’s nothing left of the woman who had any sense.

She’s gone, and I’m not sure she’ll ever be back.

He feels me let go, and something moves through him, relief and triumph and that ancient thing all at once. The last of the light dies out of the sky so there’s nothing left to see but the faint unearthly glow of his own eyes.

“One more,” he commands, his voice is barely a voice now. “I want you to come with me where I belong. Hold your breath, foxglove.”

He takes me under.

Earlier, the water closed over my head, and it was the worst terror I have ever known, my own body stolen, the dark dragging me down to die with the wives’ hands soft and final on my legs.

But now, the same dark closes over me and it isn’t terror at all. He takes me down with his arms around me and himself still buried in deep and I go gladly, sinking into the black because it’s him, because somewhere in the last two weeks I have started to trust the creature that drowns women to drown me and bring me back.

The dead drift pale around us in the dark, held off, watching with their ruined faces. My lungs start to burn but I don’t fight it, I embrace the pain. I keep my eyes open and focused on his, the gleam of them reflecting the bruised sky above. They no longer feel like falling into a black hole because the water around us is the black hole, and that glint in his eye is the only light there is, shining like a beacon to lead me home.

He holds me down in his own element on his own terms and fucks me through the burn, claws at my back, and teeth at my throat, the size of him nearly splitting me open. Right at the edge of everything, life, death, right where the dark went soft and peaceful before, where I’d given up, I come again. And where the wives’ version was death, this is its exact opposite—this is being more alive than I have ever been, down here in the deep with the beast.

Then he brings me up.

Into the sweet air, the indigo sky, and I drag in oxygen in great, tearing pulls and cling to him, and he holds me. I feel the monstrousness ebb out of him by degrees. First, the claws go blunt against my back, then his teeth are safe again when his mouth finds my temple, and the eyes, when I dare to look, are draining back from ink toward that bright ice blue. The thing under the water is just his legs again, or near enough that I can pretend.

He’s just a man again.

But he’ll never be just a man again, not when I have made some peace in knowing the monster.

“There,” he says against my soaked hair, gentling now, the fear finally easing out of him, out of both of us. “There. You’re here. I have you.”

He carries me out of the bay, sets me down on a rock, and gathers my scattered clothes, draping them over me for warmth. Then he wraps his strong arms around me and gently places his chin on my crown. His hands keep returning to my face, my shoulders, the back of my neck, like he still has to keep proving I came back up with him.

I turn my head and glance over at the bay. So much blood and grief and fear in those waters, and somehow, we made something good out of it.

But if I wasn’t wary of the bay after seeing Sinclair get torn to pieces, I’m definitely wary now. As the glow of the orgasms and the adrenaline of our near-death coupling fades, I realize I’m scared. What the women did to me scared me. I felt the loch reach into me and take the wheel, and I felt my own hands undress me and my own feet walk me in to die, and I know now what I didn’t know an hour ago.

They want me.

And they can call me.

And I can’t say no.

Chapter

Twenty-Nine

Well, that was a day, was my second to last thought before I fell asleep last night, utterly exhausted from the day’s events, as if I ran a lot of errands and had a lot of appointments or something. You know, just your run-of-the-mill almost drowning by a bunch of dead women, followed by your run-of-the-mill fucking by the monster in the sea. Boy, that would tucker anyone out.

My last thought though, wasn’t so glib.

I have to fix this.

Because I do. Not just because I came close to dying at the hands of ghosts yesterday—ghosts that seem jealous of me because of Alasdair—I’m also close to being a suspect in a murder case. All because I let him in, and now the bargain is broken, and over time there will be nothing to stop Alasdair from becoming a monster forever.

Unless I do something.

Mhairi had told me that there was something I could do, and that I would have to go back to her when I was ready.

Well, I’m fucking ready. I gather my things and get in the car, grateful I don’t have to explain where I’m going to Alasdair. Last night, he went back to the castle to spend the night there. Part of me wanted him to promise he wasn’t going to kill anyone, but I think I’d feel worse if he told me he couldn’t keep that promise. Anyway, I was still mad at him and I have an awful lot to think about, so I slept alone which was both a joy to fling my limbs everywhere, and kind of lonely. Monsters can make good company.

I decide to go to the Torridon Hotel before I go to Mhairi’s shop, because I have a feeling I might need to be a little less sober before I tackle whatever the hell she’s going to throw at me. And, after last night, I think I need to be around actual people, and not monsters and ghosts.

The pub’s the same as it always is—dark wood, and warm lamps, and that token fire going in the grate—except the fire’s much bigger now that it’s fall and we’re starting to genuinely need it. The smell of peat and whisky and something braised wraps around me when I come in. For a second it’s almost unbearable, how normal it is, how warm. John MacLeod glances up from behind the bar and gives me the nod of a man who’s decided I count as a regular, and I proudly take the corner stool I’ve started thinking of as mine.

“Galloway.” He’s already reaching for the amber ale I had last time. “Wondered when we’d see you. You’ve been keeping to yourself out there, aye?”

“Something like that,” I tell him with a wink. Apparently, I’m a person who winks at people now. I’m really surprising myself these days. “I’ll take the pint. And whatever’s cooking—that smells amazing.”

“Venison stew. Good choice.” He pulls the pint for me and sets it down, and the head settles amber and perfect. I drink a third of it before I’ve taken my coat off, which earns me a look I pretend not to see.

The locals are at their end, the same three as the first time I came here, settled in the way of people who’ve been at this bar longer than I’ve been alive and intend to outlast the building. The ginger-bearded man is in a fisherman’s jumper, grey this time, then there’s the older quiet one with glasses, and the woman, Mary, who told the story of the drowned wives to some curious hill-walkers my first week here and raised her glass to me when she learned I was Effie’s blood, whose own granny said this loch’s always had a tenant or two. Her granny was right.

The stew comes and it’s good, rich and dark with slicks of butter on toast. I eat it slowly and listen, because right now listening is all I’m good for.

It takes ten minutes for the talk to drift to the latest missing woman.

“—that lass, the one from the Shortbread Inn,” the ginger man’s saying, “still nothing. No word.”

“Becca,” Mary admonishes him. “Becca Rhys. She’s got a name, Donald.”

“Aye, Becca, then.” The man looks over at MacLeod. “She was last seen here, aye? Best be letting lone women know to keep their eyes open.”

And at that, everyone turns to look at me.

“Sage advice,” I say through a mouthful of stew.

Mary gives me a steady look, like she’s trying to figure me out. She knows I’m a Galloway, but does she think I’m aware of the bargain already? There’s a hint of respect in her gaze but it’s hesitant, as if she’s unsure I’ve earned it. I immediately finish the rest of my beer.

“They’ll say she wandered off,” Mary continues, and there’s an edge under it, as if she’s talking directly to me. “They always say the women wandered off. As if women are forever wandering off into the sea for the fun of it. No one knows their fate, and no one will bother to look into it, either.”

I have another bite of stew, keeping my eyes down, because I know exactly where Becca Rhys is. Her body is at the bottom of the loch, and I’m sure her liver has floated to shore somewhere—if it’s not been taken by a porpoise or a seal.

“Mary.” The older man, is gentle and final; the same way he shut her down the first time. “Enough.”

“I’ll not be enough,” Mary retorts, quieter. “My granny knew. This makes the fifth one this year. That’s not like it used to be. It’s getting worse.”

MacLeod sets a glass down a touch harder than he needs to, the publican’s signal, and the talk folds and moves off to the boats and the weather. I feel Mary staring at me through the rest of my meal.

I don’t know if she means to make me feel guilt with her probing stare, but I do feel guilty. I am guilty. I know the truth, and I’m going to let the world continue to think these women just went missing when I know exactly what took them: the man I’m sleeping with. I am as complicit with all of Alasdair’s crimes as he is because I’ve turned my face away with no consequences.

Which is exactly why I need to get to Mhairi and figure out what I can do to stop it. If I can figure out a way to tether Alasdair again—even if it means never being with him again, even if it means being relegated to talking through back windows and waving across the bay—I’m going to have to do it.

Even if it leaves both of us heartbroken.

I don’t think I’m ready for it. But life is nothing if not a bunch of hard things you’re never really ready for.

I finish the pint and leave MacLeod too much money. I take one last look at the warm dark room, the fire, the tourists and the locals and the whole ordinary human world of it, some part of me understanding this is a kind of goodbye. Not to the place, but to being a woman who can sit in it without a stone of guilt in her gut.

Then I drive to the village to find Mhairi.

Mhairi’s at the till when the bell goes, tapping on her phone—the sounds it makes make me think she’s playing something like Candy Crush, which I find amusing. She looks up at me as she always does and squints, pushing the phone away. She reads whatever’s on my face and doesn’t ask me if I want a cuppa, doesn’t ask if I want to try the fresh bread they just got in, or tell me she’s ordered me in more oat milk. Instead, she says, “You’re ready, then.”

“I’m ready.”

“Aye. You’ve the look, you do.” She comes round the counter, turns the sign on the door to closed, and the shop goes dim. “And you’ve been in the water since I saw you last. Properly in it. I can see that on you too.”

I blink at her. “How can you know that?”

She gives me a tight smile. “We cunning folk can smell the loch even when it’s been cleaned off.” She studies me a moment longer. “It tried for you, didn’t it, hen?”

“The wives.” My voice comes out flat. “They called me in. I couldn’t stop my own feet. He pulled me out.”

“He’ll not always be there to,” she replies, and that realization makes my chest pinch. “Can’t be everywhere at once. Come and sit. This is the conversation you came for the first time and weren’t ready to have. You’re ready now. Mind you, you’ll wish you weren’t, by the end.”

She sits me in the same chair by the cold radiator, skips the tea, and brings over the whisky, just in case. She takes her stool across from me, leaning in close enough that I can see the glints of gold in her eyes.

“I found something,” I say, getting right to the point. “I found a few more of Effie’s notebooks and letters, same day I saw the paintings. They were locked up in that storage room together. I was so taken back by the fact that Alasdair appeared to be immortal that I kind of pushed it to the side. There was something in them that I didn’t really understand at the time and I still don’t really.”

Mhairi just watches me, waiting.

“She wrote about a binding. Something with his hide. She tried it seventeen times across the years and it never once took. She wrote that she couldn’t do it alone…that he wouldn’t give it to her.” I make myself hold the old woman’s eyes. “I read that weeks ago and it meant nothing to me. I thought it was an old woman’s failed magic. I didn’t know I’d need it.”

“Aye.” Mhairi’s voice is quiet. “You weren’t ready to need it then. You are now.” Something settles in her face, grim and certain. “And there’s the whole heart of the thing in that one line—he wouldn’t give it to her. Not couldn’t be made to. But wouldn’t. Because it can’t be taken, hen. That’s the first thing you have to understand, and it’s also the worst of it.”

She clears her throat and continues while I brace myself. “The binding works on a piece of him, his hide, cut from him while he wears the horse. Not the man, not the in-between thing, the horse. You take a piece of that hide with your own hand and with iron, and you keep it, and so long as you hold it you hold him. He can’t take the water without your leave. Can’t raise the horse or the monster to do his killing, nor can they raise him. Can’t change his shape against your will. The leash is real and it’s yours for as long as the two of you last.”

“With my own hand. Iron. While he’s the horse…” I need it in order, I need every piece of it laid out, reaching for the structure of it even now, especially now. I take out my phone to take notes. “Tell me exactly what to do.”

“I’ll tell you all of it. But first you’ll hear the cruelty in it, because it’s the same cruelty that beat your aunt.” Her clear hazel eyes don’t move off mine. “It must be given, Iris. Freely. He has to stand the horse for you and let you cut him, knowing full well what it costs him, willing. A thing taken by force won’t hold. Effie proved that, apparently seventeen times over. It has to be his consent or it’s nothing at all.” She pauses. “And here’s the damning part—he cannot ask you for it. The creature’s not able to request its own leashing. It’s not in the nature of the thing. He can want it with every scrap of the man that’s left in him, and the words still won’t come. So. you’ll have to be the one to offer, and he’ll be the one to allow it. And there’s a knife’s width between those two, which you’ll be standing in with an actual knife in your hand.”

Oh god. A knife. I actually have to…cut a horse? I press my hands together to keep them still. “Does it have to be the horse? What about the…other thing.”

“Believe me, you won’t last five seconds with that other thing.”

I swallow hard. “And what does it cost him? The cost you said I’d wish I didn’t know.”

Mhairi sets her cup down.

“Bind him, and you make him mortal. The hide’s the deathless part of him,” she tells me. “Take it out and keep it, and the thing that’s not aged a day in all these centuries starts to age. Slow, at first, then like any of us. He’ll grow old, hen. He’ll grow old and he’ll die, the way men do, because you’ll have made him most of the way back into one. That’s the price of leashing the immortal thing. It doesn’t stay immortal.”

The room seems to tilt as I try to rein in what she’s saying. I came in here braced for the opposite. I came ready to lose him, ready for her to tell me the binding meant a wall between us forever, him on his rocks and me at my window, the two of us waving across the bay for the rest of my life and grieving the distance. I’d made my peace with that on the drive over, or started to. Or, at least, introduced the thought to my tired little heart.

I didn’t come ready for this.

“He’d die,” I repeat.

“Eventually, aye. With you, we’re hoping. Across a life, the both of you, into the ground together.” She lets that sit. “I need you to know what that means, because you’ll not be saving him by doing this. You’ll be killing him. Slowly, over years, but killing him all the same. The binding’s a death sentence, Iris. The only mercy in it is that you get to serve it alongside him, instead of leaving him here to take women off this coast for another five hundred years after you’re gone.”

I don’t say anything for a long time. I think of him in the bay, the claws and the black eyes, and the size of him, holding me up out of the dark while his own dead clawed me toward it. Nothing has you but me. I think of his face when he surfaced with me in his arms, the fear on it, the most human thing I’ve ever seen him do. I think of Mary’s eyes on me over the venison stew. Five this year. Getting worse.

“We die together.” I test the shape of it. “Old, hopefully.”

“Aye. That’s the whole of what it buys you. Not separation. Not safety. A shared grave, decades off.” She says it flat, unsoftened, and I understand by now that the flatness is her kindness. “Some would call that a love story. I’d call it the least bad thing on a short list of terrible ones. But it’s yours to choose, and you’re Effie’s blood, so you’ll choose it clear-eyed or not at all.”

I think about the wall I’d built on the drive here, the goodbye I’d been rehearsing. And I think about how fast it’s coming down, replaced by something that frightens me far more, because it’s so much easier to choose.

“There’s one more thing,” Mhairi says, before I can speak, and her voice drops. “About the policeman.”

I go very still.

Oh fuck.

She knows.

“I’ll not make you say it.” She holds my gaze, steady, unflinching. “A man came round these parts asking after the missing women, and now there’s a quiet where his asking was, and I’ve lived on this coast my whole life, I know what that kind of quiet means. So, hear me. If you bind that thing and end the killing, if you stop our women being walked into the loch, then whatever happened to that policeman happened nowhere near you. You came to me for bread that day, and this day, and nothing else. Are we understanding each other?”

“You’d lie,” I manage to say. “For me.”

“I’d lie for the women he doesn’t get to take next year. You’re only the hand on the leash. Don’t go thinking it’s about you.” But there’s no unkindness in it, and something almost like sorrow underneath. “Now. You wanted it exact. Every step, every word, the iron and the hide and the willing. So, listen close, hen, for I’ll say it the once.”

And she tells me.

When I come out of Mhairi’s, the light’s gone dark grey with storm clouds brewing and the afternoon’s half spent. I stand on the narrow road lined with stone walls and quaint shops, the soothing waves lapping the pier. The whole conversation keeps replaying in my head—every step, every word, the iron, and the hide, and the horse, and the willing—the cost of it all sinking in my chest.

I came here ready to give him up. I drove over rehearsing a goodbye, bracing to be told the only way to stop the killing was a wall between us forever.

And I’d have done it. I’d have grieved him across the bay for the rest of my life and called it the right thing to do, and I would have hated it, and then myself, because who hates themselves for doing the right thing?

Instead, I’ve been handed something worse, because I don’t have to give him up at all. He’s the one who has to give it up, give everything up. I only have to take a blade to him while he stands there and lets me. He has to want it and can’t ask for it. And when it’s done, he’ll start to die. I mean, so will I, eventually, as everyone does, as I already have been since the moment I was born. But it will be the both of us together, into the same ground, into that same end.

And that’s the happy ending. That’s the best version on offer. That’s the thing I’m going to drive home and lay in front of him like a gift.

I just have no idea if he’ll see it as a gift.

Because who am I, really, to ask a man to give up his immortality? I’m just Iris Galloway. Plant nerd, young divorcée, an immature, chronically ill, neurodiverse weirdo who kind of stumbled upon this next stage of life. I didn’t know what I was doing before I got here, and I certainly don’t know what I’m doing now. And somehow, I have to ask Alasdair to give up being the incredible—albeit terrible and bloodthirsty—creature that he is, his eternal life, all for meeeeee. I mean, would I be willing to give up being a horse for him? He’s living out all my childhood dreams.

I take a deep breath of sea air and get in the car. My hands are steady now, which is somehow worse than if they shook. Like I know exactly what I have to do, because I do.

I have to go home and tell him I’ve found the way.

And then I have to find out whether he’ll stand the horse for me, and let me cut it loose.

Chapter

Thirty

The rain starts before I’m even out of the village, a fine mist at first, the kind that doesn’t fall so much as hangs in the air and waits for you to walk into it. By the time I’m on the road that hugs the loch home, it’s turned to something with weight, drumming the roof of the car, smearing the headland into grey.

I drive half-paying attention to the road, half drowning in my thoughts about what I have to do and how the fuck I’m going to convince Alasdair to do it, so that I don’t see the blue lights until they’re right behind me.

My stomach drops straight through the floor of the car.

This is it. They found the car, they found Sinclair, they followed me from Mhairi’s, they know.

Every catastrophe arrives in my brain at once, and my hands go slick on the wheel as I pull onto the verge with the rain coming down in earnest. I watch in the mirror as a figure gets out, hunches into the weather, and comes up alongside me. I put the window down and the cold, misting rain comes straight in, beading on my sleeve, on the dash.

It’s Constable MacRae. The one who first came out to see me after I made a complaint about someone chasing me down in the woods. My god, that feels like a lifetime ago.

“Evening.” He dips to my level, rain running off him. “Miss Galloway, if I remember? From the Galloway cottage out the headland.”

“That’s me.” My voice comes out almost normal. I’ve gotten frighteningly good at almost normal. “Nice to see you again.”

“Aye. Didn’t mean to put the heart across you with the lights.” He says it almost apologetically. “It’s just your nearside taillight’s out. Back left. You’ll not have known, but it’s a wee bit dangerous on these roads in the dark, especially in this.” He tips his head at the rain. “Will only get worse as we head into a proper autumn.”

The relief is total, a rapid loosening behind my ribs that leaves me lightheaded. A taillight. It’s just a fucking a taillight.

“God, no, I had no idea. Thank you. I’ll get it fixed ASAP.”

“You do that.” He glances past me into the car, the back seat, the way they do, and I’m suddenly aware of everything that could be in a car. In fact, I have the library books in the backseat since they’re already overdue; I just keep getting distracted. Story of my life.

Luckily, he doesn’t seem too interested in the mythology books. “This a hire car?”

“It is, yeah.”

“You’ll want to ring them about the light, or get the registration shifted to your own name if you’re stopping for good and they make you an offer. You’ve been here a wee while now.” A long pause, a squint of his eyes. “Folk tend to buy a runabout, once they know they’re staying. Cheaper than the hire in the long run.”

“I’ve been meaning to sort out something more permanent.”

“Aye.” He straightens, then bends back down, and his expression turns troublesome. “You’ve not seen DI Sinclair about, have you? Out your way? He’s not checked in to work for some time, and it’s not like him to do so. I know he said he was going to ask after some people, and I know your name was on that list.”

The rain seems to be heavier all of a sudden, the sound of the drumming on the roof becoming a cacophony.

“No,” I reply smoothly while my heart has turned into a machine gun. “Not since he stopped by to ask about the missing woman. Few days back.”

“Ah, well, you take care on that road, Miss Galloway,” he says, though there’s hesitation in his voice. “Get the light seen to.”

He raps the roof of the car twice with his knuckles and goes back to his own vehicle, and I pull off the side of the road with my hands shaking so hard I can barely hold the wheel. I watch him in the mirror the whole way down the track until the bend takes him, and even then, I’m not sure he’s stopped watching me.

By the time I get the car parked at the cottage, the rain’s gone torrential, hammering the bracken flat, sheeting off the slope. I run for the door with my coat over my head and burst in soaked anyway.

The moment I step inside, however, I know Alasdair is here. I feel it.

I take off my coat and hang it up, then go into the kitchen where he’s been standing at the window, staring out at the bay.

“Where were you?” he asks flatly. No hello or anything like that, though I suppose he’s never been much for pleasantries.

“The shop,” I tell him, putting my purse on the counter. “The village. I needed to get out of the house, get some supplies.”

He turns toward me, his eyes blue and piercing.

“You’ve got no groceries.”

Ah, yes. Fuck.

“You went to the village and came back with nothing in your hands,” he says, his voice quiet and careful, which in turn tells me to be careful. “You don’t go to the shop and come back empty, foxglove. You at least always have a tin of biscuits with you. So, I’ll ask you again—and I’d have you not lie to me—because you know I wouldn’t do the same to you. Where were you?”

The cottage is very quiet under the drumming rain.

“Fine,” I respond with a sigh. “Fine. I did go to the shop. But I went to talk to Mhairi. I went to ask her what I could do. About you. About all of it. About the killing, and the slipping, and the women in the loch, and the fact that I’m one bad night away from being one of them…I went to find out what to do about you, Alasdair. There. That’s the truth. You wanted it, there it is.”

The confession hangs heavy in the air between us, but at least it’s no longer weighing in my chest anymore.

Alasdair swallows hard and I watch his expression slowly change. It’s not anger, not really. It’s something worse, something cold and calculated, temperature of the room dropping by degrees. “Behind my back.” His tone is pure ice.

“It’s not like that,” I protest.

“You went to a cunning woman behind my back to find a way to deal with me.” He takes a step, teeth bared at me. They’re not pointy, but it’s generally unsettling nonetheless. “Like I’m a thing to be managed. A problem at your table.”

“That’s not—” I start, but where’s the lie? He’s right. I try to give him a placating smile. “You’re scaring me right now; do you know that? This is exactly the⁠—”

“I’m scaring you?” He laughs, but it’s cold, and bitter, and devoid of all humor. “After everything—after I came up out of that loch faster than I’ve moved in a hundred years because I couldn’t bear the thought of pulling you up dead—now you’re scared? Scared because I have some feelings about what you’re doing now, sneaking behind my back?” He’s closer now, the chill coming off him, and his eyes have gone too bright, too fixed, his pupils like tiny pin pricks.

“I just mean, I know you’re angry about all of it, but I was just trying to help.”

“Help? So now you go to Mhairi to find the leash. Was that the plan, then?”

“It wasn’t like that⁠—”

“Then what was it like, Iris?”

We’re almost touching now, both of us breathing hard, the rain roaring on the roof, and the air between us has that charge it always has, the terrible magnet of it, fury and want indistinguishable, and I don’t know which of us moves first.

His mouth crashes down on mine and I’m against the wall before I’ve drawn breath, his body pinning me there cold and hard, the kiss all teeth, furious. My hands find his hair, and his hands are already at the button of my jeans, shoving them down past my hips. His deft, cold fingers find me, and I’m wet for him because of course I am, because I’m broken in exactly the way that wants this, and he makes a low sound against my mouth when he feels it.

“Even now,” he breathes. “Even scared of me. You’re wet as sin.”

His other hand comes up to my throat.

He’s done it before. The grip there, the press of his thumb at my pulse, the dark thrill of it. It’s the rough thing I’ve learned to crave, and I tip my head back and let him have it, and his fingers close, and the pressure builds, and it’s good, the edge I like.

Until it goes past the edge.

Harder. Then harder.

Last night, when he held me under the water, I felt equipped to handle it, but now I feel unsteady, like I don’t know where we stand, now I feel like he’s not quite here the way I want him to be. Because he’s angry and hurt, and he’s not listening the way I’m used to him listening and…

My air thins. I make a choked sound and open my eyes hoping to see those glacial blues, the color that means he’s with me, that this is the game and⁠—

His eyes are black.

That bottomless dark abyss is here, and there is nobody behind them. That’s the thing my whole body understands in one cold plunge, that this isn’t the monster in the deep with his arm around me keeping me safe in his element, this is the monster surfaced up through the man, in my kitchen, on dry land, his hand crushing my throat, the man gone out of his eyes.

And the pressure doesn’t stop. It builds. My hands scrabble at his wrist but his wrist is cement. The edges of the kitchen start to soften and go grainy and far, and from somewhere in that lightless face a voice comes, that inhuman, gravely ancient voice.

“You think you can just be rid of me?”

I understand, even with the grey coming up at the edges of everything as I feel myself slipping away, that Alasdair is gone. He’s not the one talking. The thing that’s talking is the thing the binding kills, and it heard what to do about you through the wall of him and knows exactly what that means. This monster is not going to stand in my kitchen and wait to be put down.

I can’t get air to speak. I can’t fight him; his wrist won’t move. So I do the only thing left, which is stop fighting. I go still under his hand, my fingers going soft on his wrist, and I let the tears come because they’re coming anyway. I try to say his name even though all it does is move my lips.

Alasdair.

It feels like a last-minute prayer.

Then something detonates behind the black, some violent surfacing, and the blue comes flooding back into his eyes from the center like a blooming cornflower and his hand springs off my throat like he’s been burned. I drop against the wall, sucking in a great whooping breath and coughing, my hand at my own neck, and he stumbles back from me with his face coming apart in real time.

He looks at his own hand, then looks at me, at my throat, at the marks I’m sure he’s left. The horror on his face is both heartbreaking and a relief because it’s human. It’s the man, fully back, fully here, understanding precisely what the thing wearing him just did with his own fingers.

“Iris—” he rasps, his voice cracking.

I can’t answer. I’m still dragging air, one hand on the wall, watching him.

“I didn’t—” He stops. He can’t even finish it, because I didn’t is a lie. He did, even though it wasn’t him. But he still did.

He backs toward the door. He’s shaking now, and I’ve never seen him shake before, not like this.

“Don’t,” he commands, and it’s only half to me. “Stay there. Don’t come near me. I can’t⁠—”

He turns and wrenches the back door open, running out into the roaring rain, out across the slope toward the bay, his figure swallowed by the downpour before he’s halfway to the loch, to the thing that’s winning. Because, in this moment, it’s the only place left that he can put himself where I’m not.

The door bangs in the wind. The rain comes sideways through it, soaking the floor.

I slide down the wall and sit on the cold floor, my hips overwrought and tired, my neck burning, and I breathe, just breathe, in and out, while the kitchen goes grey and cold with the open door and the storm.

When I can finally think again, what scares me most is that the thing inside him wasn’t wrong.

You think you can just be rid of me?

I went to Mhairi to find out how to take a blade to him and keep the piece that makes him deathless. The cunning folk like her call it a binding and I’d been calling it saving, but the monster doesn’t hear it in those diplomatic words. The monster hears the truth under them, which is that the binding ends it. The each-uisge dies. I keep Alasdair. Alasdair keeps me. But the thing that came up through him just now and crushed my windpipe with a man’s hand, well that fucking thing will be gone, and I fear it’s not going to go without a fight.

I think of Mhairi in the back of her shop weeks ago, telling me how it would go. Some night the man will sit at your table, and you’ll look up and not be sure for a second whether it’s even a man anymore.

She was wrong about that.

It wasn’t at the table. It was against the wall, with his hand down my jeans and his mouth on mine.

I sit on the floor a long time, the rain blowing in, my throat aching with every breath. Across the bay, somewhere in the black water is the man I think I’m falling in love with, and the thing that wants me dead, and they live in the same body. I’m the one who has to decide what happens next.

I get up and shut the door against the storm. I throw the bolt that’s never kept anything out.

And I have no idea, none at all, what I’m going to do.

Just that I know I have to do it.

Chapter

Thirty-One

It rains all night and into the next day until the sound becomes background noise, and the cottage has taken on a new feeling of damp that a roaring fire does nothing to dissipate.

I don’t go to Alasdair. I don’t text Maddie. I don’t do anything but tend the fire and drink cup after cup of coffee that I barely taste. A ring of faint purple bruises circle my throat, and I sleep badly and wake aching. I spend the day preparing, in the way you prepare for something there’s absolutely no way to prepare for. I read over the notes I made at Mhairi’s, the steps and words in order, and wish to hell there was some book on the shelf called So, You’ve Decided to Bind an Immortal, which would probably be right beside So, You Woke Up Next to a Monster, Now What? But alas, no such luck. I do find Effie’s old sgian-dubh in the trunk, the little black-handled knife, and I test the edge of it against my thumb to find it sharp enough to draw blood. Iron, Mhairi had said. With your own hand, with iron.

And I think about him out there in the loch, or in the castle, wondering what he’s thinking. Wondering if the monster will win. Wondering if, when I do this, there will be a struggle, or if it’s me who might die in the end.

But I try not to think about that part too much, and if I do, well that’s what whisky is for.

By evening that following day, the rain has mercifully stopped, but what comes after it is worse: fog. It rolls up the bay just before dusk, thick, and white, and absolutely still, swallowing the far spit, the castle, the water itself, until the world outside my windows ends fifty feet from the glass. This is the kind of fog that scary stories are built around.

I dress in warm layers and put the sgian-dubh in one coat pocket and the small jar of salt in the other, repeating the words in my head. I look at my car keys hanging by the door and leave them there, because the taillight’s still out and the last thing I need is MacRae coming down the headland road to find me driving to the monster’s castle at night. So, I walk. It’s been a while, anyway.

It’s three miles around the head of the bay, and my body lets me know about every one of them. The fibro’s been quiet for weeks. Or not quiet, exactly, just shouted down, drowned out by adrenaline and dread and a monster in my bed, all of which turn out to be excellent painkillers right up until they aren’t.

Tonight, with the damp in the air, and the cold coming off the water, the weight of the last two days sitting in my tissues, it comes back up with a deep ache in my hips first, then my hands, then that tightness in my skin where clothes start to hurt. Of course. Of course, my body picks tonight—the night I have to do the hardest thing I’ve ever done—to remind me that it’s failing at being a body. I walk through it the way I’ve learned to walk through it, slow and steady, and some bleak corner of me notes the irony: I’m on my way to ask an immortal to take on this? Decades of fucking this? A body that aches in fog and cold. That’s the gift I’m bringing him. What a trade-off.

The fog holds the world so still that my own footsteps sound like an unnatural intrusion. There’s no wind. No birds. The loch, somewhere to my right, makes no sound at all, and the ferns stand beaded and motionless. The further I get from the cottage, the stronger the feeling grows that I’m being watched. Not the prickle of one set of eyes but something wider, the whole drowned dark of the water paying attention. I decide to keep my eyes on the road. I don’t look at the trees and I don’t look at the loch.

Halfway around the bay, where the track passes the little lochan in the woods, I see her.

A woman in white, standing at the edge of the water, in among the birches. Pale dress, dark where it’s wet at the hem, a stillness to her that nothing living has. My heart goes off like a flushed bird and I stop dead in the track with the fog moving slow between us, and I stare, and then…

Then the figure begins to resolve, or perhaps dissolve. It’s a birch. Just a stunted birch, white-barked, leaning at the water’s edge with a rag of old mist caught in its branches.

Just a birch…right?

I stand there another moment anyway, because the fog shifts and for half a second the proportions are wrong again, the trunk too soft, the lean too deliberate, and I think about the wives and how they called me in once already, and how they’re losing him tonight too, in their own way.

I walk faster. I don’t look back at the lochan. If the birch is still standing there in the morning, it was a birch.

The castle comes up out of the fog all at once, not approaching but appearing, the black bulk of Caisteal Eachainn suddenly above me with its broken crown lost in the white. There’s no light in it, no smoke from the chimneys. I go in through the courtyard with my heart beating loud and my hands aching and no idea at all what I’m going to find—the man, the monster, the wreckage of both? It’s hard to say since it feels empty inside, the great hall is empty and cold, the hearth dead, and I stand in the dim of it and listen.

And…I think I hear him. Above me. A voice, low, rising and falling through the stone.

I climb the spiral stair to the next floor, past the corridor that leads to the tower he’s never shown me, and I follow that low cadence to the chapel.

It’s a ruin of a room, the roof half down at the far end, the tall window over the altar still holding most of its stained glass, saints’ colors gone to lead-grey in the dark. Tonight the fog is coming in through the broken panes in slow ropes, moving along the floor, pooling in the corners, and kneeling in the middle of it, in front of the bare stone altar, is Alasdair.

He’s on his knees and his head is bowed, his hands folded in front of him, and he’s speaking, low and steady. I assume it’s the language he learned as a boy—the one no one speaks anymore, the one that has no one left to hear it—and the fog moves around him like it’s listening because maybe it is.

He’s praying.

This centuries-old monster is on his knees in a ruined chapel, praying, and while I have no idea who he prays to, I know desperation when I hear it. I stand in the doorway and my throat closes, and I almost turn around. This wasn’t meant to be seen.

But I didn’t walk all this way through the fog on a flaring body to turn around.

“Alasdair,” I say quietly, hating to intrude but needing to all the same.

The prayer stops. His shoulders go still and it’s that total stillness, the animal one.

“I’ve come to ask something of you,” I announce.

He doesn’t turn around. The fog ropes between us like snakes, as if sniffing me out. It’s colder than it should be, almost corporal in its form.

When he finally speaks, his voice is wrecked low. “You shouldn’t be here, Iris. You shouldn’t be anywhere near me. You saw what—” His breath drags. “You’re wearing what I am on your throat.”

“I know what I’m wearing.” I come into the chapel, slow, my footsteps loud on the old stone. “And I know what you are. Which is why I went to Mhairi…and you were right, you know, I went behind your back. I did and I’m sorry for the back part but not for the going part. Because she told me what Effie knew. She told me about the binding.”

His head lifts, just slightly. He still doesn’t turn.

“The hide,” I say. “Cut from the horse, with iron, with my own hand. Given, never taken. I know Effie asked you, Alasdair. Seventeen times across sixty years, she tried, and you denied her every time. I read it in her own hand. He will not give it to me.”

“Aye.” Barely a word at all. “I denied her.”

“Why?”

A long silence. The fog moves through the dead saints’ window.

“Because Effie was my keeper, and I loved her the way you might love the wall that holds the sea back,” he says finally. “She kept me, and I honored her, and she asked me to die for her…because that’s what it is, foxglove—whatever soft words the cunning women wrap it in—and I looked down all the years I had, all the years I’d ever have, and I couldn’t put them in an old woman’s hands. There was always more time. There was always another keeper coming. That’s the truth and it’s an ugly one. I let her go to her grave a failure because I was a coward with eternity in my pocket.”

I swallow hard, his truth feeling so raw and honest and real that it nearly makes me doubt my decision to come.

“And now?”

He turns toward me and he’s a wreck of a man.

I’ve never seen him like this, hollowed, his eyes red-rimmed and human, so human, and his gaze goes straight to my throat and he flinches as if those very bruises burn him.

“And now I’ve felt the thing inside me close my hand on the woman I love, and I couldn’t stop it, and next time I won’t surface in time, and there will be a next time, Iris. There is no version of the slipping that doesn’t end with you dead in my hands and me wearing your blood and not even grieving, because there’ll be no man left in me to grieve.” His voice breaks. “So, ask me, please. Ask me the thing I cannot ask of you.”

But I’m still stuck on what he just said, that he can’t close his hand on the woman he loves.

He loves.

He…loves me?

I take a breath, trying to hold myself steady because right now is the absolute wrong time to start going gooey at the knees because Alasdair just told me, in a roundabout way, that he loves me.

The words I rehearsed all day are suddenly nowhere, so I use the ones underneath them.

“Mhairi has a name for you.” I manage, ignoring the butterflies in my chest. “The old one, the one the old people used.” His face goes very still. “The Lord of Drowning. That’s the thing the binding ends. Not you…it. The lord goes down and the man stays up, and the man grows old, and the man dies, in fifty years or sixty, in a bed…” I give him a steady look. “With me, because I’ll be growing old and dying right alongside you. That’s what I’m asking. I’m asking you to let me cut the deathless part out of you and keep it in my pocket and walk you into the grave with me.” My voice cracks and I let it. “And I have no right. I know I have no right. I’m nobody, Alasdair, I’m a plant illustrator in a dying industry with a failed marriage and a body that already doesn’t work. I’ve known you half a summer and half an autumn out of all your hundreds. And I’m standing in your chapel asking you to trade eternity for…for this.” I gesture at myself, bruised throat, aching hips, all of it. “So, you can say no. You’ve said no before, as is your right. But I had to come and ask—because you can’t ask—and because if I didn’t ask, I’d be letting the thing win, and I⁠—”

“Iris.”

He gets to his feet in one smooth motion and crosses the floor, the fog parting between us, and stops in front of me, close, not touching, his hands at his sides like he doesn’t trust them yet, maybe won’t ever fully trust them again.

“Effie offered me a leash,” he murmurs. “You’re offering me a life. They were never the same asking.” His eyes search mine, glacial blue, all the way human. “I cannot say the words. You know I cannot. The thing in me holds my tongue on it and always will. So, hear what I can say.” He bends slowly and rests his forehead against mine, cold against my fever-warm skin. “I’ll stand for you. Tonight, before my courage goes. Bring your iron and your salt, mo ghràdh, and do what the Galloway women were always meant to do.”

We go down through the fog to the flat ground between the castle and the shore, where the old grass grows short over what might once have been a yard, or a church ground. He tells me where to stand, and how it has to go.

“You’ll turn your back,” he instructs. “What happens when I change is not a thing you need to see. You’ll turn your back, and you’ll keep it turned no matter what, and when it’s time, you’ll know.”

So I stand in the wet grass with my back to him and my eyes shut for good measure, the sgian-dubh in one fist and the salt jar in the other, and I listen to him walk away from me across the grass, and then I listen to the fog wisp around me.

There’s no sound of his transformation, which is odd and a little creepy. I braced for the sounds you’d hear in a low-budget werewolf movie and there are none. No tearing, no animal noise, nothing, only a long, drawn-out stillness in which the temperature drops around me by degrees, the deep smell of the loch washes over me, the hair stands up my arms and the back of my neck, and something behind me becomes large. I can feel the size of it on my skin. I can feel it breathing.

When it’s quiet—a different quiet, a settled one—I open my eyes and turn around.

The horse stands in the fog ten feet from me, white as the birch, huge, and terrible, and staring at me with the patience of something that has existed before time. Its mane hangs wet down its neck, and the wet runs in streaks along the shoulder, and its eye—black, depthless, the loch at midnight—is on me, and there is nothing of Alasdair’s anywhere in it.

I stare at the horse for a moment and it stares at me and I feel that pull that Sinclair did, the one that lead him to his death, and I’m suddenly reminded that we don’t have much time, that Alasdair is doing his best to keep him here.

I get to it. I pour the salt in a wide circle around the both of us, the way Mhairi told me, sunwise, closing us in together. It feels silly, like so many magic-based things do, but it works. The fog actually stops at the salt, pressing at the ring of it like breath on glass, and somewhere inside me a door I’ve been leaning on my whole life quietly opens. Because I’ve played at this since I was a girl—the candles, the tarot deck I lazily pull from while half-believing, the wannabe witch with her crystals in her bedroom—and I always knew I was pretending.

But standing here in a salt circle, in the fog, with a knife in my hand, the words rising up in me sure and ready, I know that I’m not pretending. I never was. It was waiting for water and blood to call it up. Effie’s line runs through me like a vein of quartz through rock. I am cunning folk. The recognition resonates so calmly it actually frightens me.

With this newfound confidence, I walk to the horse. It doesn’t move. Up close, the size of it blots out the fog, the cold pours off it, and its breath clouds against my face, smelling of the deep loch and seagrass. I lay my left hand flat on its shoulder, the shoulder Sinclair touched.

My hand does not stick. It rests there, on the wet hide, softly.

I say the words.

“Eachann, that the old folk named. Alasdair MacCoinnich, that the man was born. Each-uisge, water-horse, the Lord of Drowning—I name the whole of you, and I ask what cannot be asked, and you stand for me, and the standing is your answer.” My voice doesn’t shake. My hands don’t shake either. “By iron and by salt and by my own hand, freely offered, freely given. Each gu uisge—the horse to the water. The man to me.”

And I set the little black knife to the hide of his shoulder, and I cut.

It doesn’t hurt him. I’d braced my whole soul for it to hurt him—for a flinch, a scream, blood sheeting down the white—and there’s nothing, no blood at all, barely even a wound. The hide parts under the iron like wax from the seal, like something that was only ever resting there waiting for the right hand to lift it. A piece half the size of my palm comes away whole and clean, white on one side and silver-dark on the other, and where it came from the hide beneath is already smooth, unmarked, as if there was never anything to take.

The horse breathes out, long and shuddering, and the breath goes through the fog and through me, and something in the night changes pressure, like the whole bay swallowing. I exhale in the same way, the thought of hurting an animal, let alone Alasdair, had rested heavy on my soul for days.

But it’s done. It was that easy and at the same time, it was that enormous.

The hide is warm, for some reason. The night has dropped in on us, freezing. and the horse itself is as cold as the loch, but the piece of him in my hands is warm as a living thing, and I wrap it in the cloth I brought and put it in my inside pocket, against my chest, feeling the weight of it settle there like a second heart.

I break the salt circle with the toe of my boot, the way she taught me, and the fog comes rolling back in.

We walk to the water together, the horse and I.

It walks beside me, down the long flat ground to the seaward shore, past the castle, slow, matching my failing pace, its great head low, and the fog parts ahead of us and closes behind us Neither of us is in any hurry, because both of us know what this walk is. The loch appears out of the white at the last moment, flat as poured metal, silent and waiting.

At the waterline the horse stops.

It turns its head and looks at me with that black eye, and there’s no asking in it—the binding is done, it goes nowhere now without my leave—and that’s exactly why it’s looking at me. Waiting. For permission to do the last thing.

“Go on,” I whisper. My face is wet, and I don’t know when that started. “Go home one more time.”

The horse walks into the loch.

It goes the way it has always gone, unhurried, the water rising up its legs, its chest, with no splash and no sound, the surface folding around it, rather than breaking. The white of it grows dim in the black water, and then it’s swimming, then it’s a slash of cream, and then the loch closes over the place where it was and the fog drifts across the water and the bay is empty.

The horse never comes out again.

I stand on the shore a long time, my hand pressed flat over the warm weight in my coat, and I watch the still water, and I let myself understand what I just watched: that was the last of it. The thing that has come up out of this loch for centuries, the terror of this coast, the lord of all its drownings. I just watched it go under for the final time, and no one will ever see it again unless I decide it.

Somewhere out in the fog, the man is in the water. Or the man is becoming possible. I don’t know how it works from here, Mhairi’s instructions ended at the cut and the keeping. So I do the only thing left, which is turn around and start the long walk home and trust that what comes up out of the loch tomorrow, or tonight, or whenever the water is done with him, will be Alasdair.

Mortal.

Mine.

And aging from this hour forward, because of what I did to him with my own hand.

The fog stays thick on the walk back and the fibro comes up with every step now that the ritual’s let go of me, my hips grinding, my hands throbbing around nothing. I walk through it and I cry on and off, quietly, in the undramatic way you cry when you’re alone, and maybe partly pretending you’re an actress in some foreign film festival entry.

Because here’s what I keep circling back to: who am I, that he did that?

I asked and he stood. A creature older than the village let me cut the eternity out of him, and for what…for me? I’ve known him for just shy of two months. We’ve never even said the word love. He might have said so earlier in the keep, but he didn’t really tell me, it was just a fact to him, an aside.

Love. I think it and flinch, because what if this isn’t that? What if this is glamour, or loneliness, or two broken beings mistaking their fitting for fate? What if in ten years he wakes up in an aging body next to an aching woman and understands what he traded, and hates me for asking? What if I deserve none of it? Not the binding, not the man, not the line of cunning blood that lit up in me tonight like it had been waiting?

I don’t have answers.

But the hide stays warm against my chest the whole way home, warm as a heart—his heart—the deathless piece of him keeping me company through the cold, and the cottage finally comes up out of the white.

I go inside, and I bolt the door out of habit, and I put the piece of him in that box Effie left me, buried under the floorboards of her secret storage room.

Then I go downstairs and look out at the darkness of the bay.

“Come back to me,” I say to the fog. “Come back a little older.”

Chapter

Thirty-Two

He doesn’t come back that night.

I don’t sleep so much as float near the top of it, surfacing at every sound the cottage makes, and the cottage makes a lot of them: the wind finding the eaves, the stove settling, the rowan scratching the wall like a request to come inside. Each time, I’m up on one elbow with my heart going before I’m even awake, and each time it’s nothing. Each time I lie back down, and put my hand over the place on the quilt where the warmth of the hide would be if I hadn’t buried it under the floorboards with Effie’s things, where it belongs, where I already miss it in some strange (and a little fucked up) way.

And he doesn’t come back the next morning, either.

I do all the motions of an ordinary day: shower, get dressed, have breakfast, attempt to read a book, attempt to sketch and paint, but more often than not I stand at the back window watching the fog burn slowly off the bay, and the water that emerges from under it is just water. Flat, grey-blue, ordinary. No pale shape on the rocks of the far spit. No dark head in the shallows. I don’t want to see a damn thing, but I’m afraid if I don’t watch it, like a watched pot that never boils, then that’s when the loch will come alive with monsters again.

By afternoon I’ve invented several catastrophes, each with full supporting detail.

The binding didn’t work and he’s still down there, horse forever, and I leashed him to a woman he can never come back to.

The binding worked too well and the man drowned with the horse, because the man was never separable, because Mhairi missed something, because the books were wrong and I said the wrong word.

The wives took him.

The loch kept him.

He surfaced somewhere down the coast with no memory and is wandering the A896 in wet trousers, about to be picked up by MacRae.

He’s fine, and he’s not coming, because now that the pull is cut, he’s under no obligation to want me, and what I felt go under with the horse was the only thing that ever brought him to my door.

It’s that last one that gets me. That’s the fear I keep, the one I feed with my anxiety-ridden obsessive spiral.

Because here’s what I haven’t let myself look at until now, pacing my kitchen on a flaring body with a monster’s heart upstairs: the pull is gone.

I mean, it’s hard to argue with because I did feel it go. Somewhere on the walk home, or in the night, or maybe the moment the loch closed over the horse, but the hook behind my sternum that’s been set since August, the tide-tug toward the bay, the thing that turned my feet toward the water and my eyes toward the castle a hundred times a day is now…gone.

I stand at the window and look at the far spit and feel nothing, no lean, no undertow, just a majestic view of a loch in the Highlands. It’s the quietest my body has been in two months and it’s terrifying, because I no longer know which of my feelings were mine.

Was any of it mine?

The wanting at the rocks, before I knew?

The walking into the water?

The way his voice went under my ribs and squeezed its way into my heart?

Glamour is a word for a thing that makes you feel what serves it. I’ve been inside a glamour the way you’re inside the weather, and now the weather’s passed, and I’m standing in the wreckage of my own life trying to piece it all together.

Maybe I loved him. Maybe I only weathered him.

I don’t know. That’s the truth I walk around the kitchen with all afternoon. I don’t know, and until yesterday I couldn’t have known, and there’s no test for it except the one coming for me whenever that door opens.

If it ever opens.

It opens at dusk.

Not the window. Not the bay-side darkness, not the tilt in the air, none of the old announcements. A knock—a knock, knuckles on wood, polite as the neighbor he used to be—and I cross the kitchen like lightening, pulling back the bolt and opening the door.

Alasdair stands on my step.

He’s wet, as usual, his dark hair plastered to his skull, but he’s wearing dry clothes, probably found somewhere in the castle, and he’s shivering.

That’s the first thing I notice. Before his face, before anything. Alasdair MacCoinnich is shivering. His shoulders are hunched against the cold, his jaw is tight with it, a tremor running through him that he can’t suppress because the cold is new to him now.

“I’d have come sooner.” His voice is hoarse, and there’s something underneath it I’ve never heard there before, and it takes me a second to name it because I’ve never had to—it’s effort. He’s slightly out of breath. From the walk over, from whatever adjustments becoming mortal he has had to make. “It took—the water held me a long while. And then I had to learn to swim again.”

“You had to what?”

“I’ve never had to before, not since after the loch took me,” he says. “It always carried me. It doesn’t carry me now. I went under at the castle shore and it was just…water. Cold water that wanted to kill me, same as it’d kill anyone.”

His eyes come up to mine, and they’re his, the glacial pale blue, but something’s different in them too and I can’t place it yet. “I nearly drowned, foxglove. Me. I had to remember arms and legs like a bairn. I crawled out at the point and I lay on the stones and my heart was going like a hammer and I—” He stops. His throat works. “I could feel it. My own heart. It’s beat all this while—you’ve laid your head on it; you know it better than I do—but it was never mine to notice. The loch kept it the way it kept everything, quiet and far off, like the tide. Something done for me, somewhere below. And now it’s mine, and it’s going like a fist, and it won’t stop, and it’s so loud, Iris. How do you all live with the noise of it?”

At that, I burst into tears, the stress of two whole days comes up and out of me at once, ugly and hiccupping. He doesn’t reach for me, I think he still doesn’t trust his hands, which hang at his sides with the fingers curled, so I must do the reaching. I grab two fists of damp wool and pull him over the threshold he hasn’t needed permission to cross in weeks, and I shut the door behind him against the cold that can hurt him now.

“You’re freezing,” I manage. “You’re actually freezing, you’re going to get hypothermia, you can get hypothermia now, oh my god, get by the fire⁠—”

“Iris.”

“I mean it, this is a real problem now, this is a medical⁠—”

“Iris.” And his hand comes up, slowly, watched by both of us, the hand that did what it did against that wall, and it stops short of my face, hovering, asking. I lean my cheek into it the last inch myself.

It’s warm.

Not warm like a normal man’s hand, not yet, since he’s still half-frozen, but under the chill of the skin there’s heat moving, blood moving, a temperature where there was always the loch’s cold, and at his wrist, against my jaw, I can feel a pulse. Small and fast and human, tapping away at me.

We stand there a long moment, his hand on my face, his pulse against my jaw.

“You’re warm,” I whisper.

“Aye.” His voice cracks down the middle of it. “It’s everywhere. I’m fucking freezing but I’m inside I’m actually warm. The warmth, the heart, the breath…I can’t stop any of it, it just goes and goes, it’s like living inside a bell that won’t stop ringing. Christ.” He laughs—shaky, winded, human—and then his face dissolves into anguish.

“I didn’t know if you’d open the door. I stood out there the whole walk telling myself you’d not open it. You’d seen what I—” He stops himself. Starts again, carefully. “The thing that used to make it easy is gone. You’ll have felt that. Whatever was in the air between us all this time, whatever it did to your wanting, it went down with the horse. So, I stood on your step and I knocked like a man, because that’s all I am now…and I don’t need to tell you, but a man can be left standing on a step.”

So he feels it too. The absence. The terrifying quiet where the pull used to be.

“I almost didn’t recognize my own kitchen today,” I say, swallowing thickly. “Everything’s so still. I kept looking at the bay and feeling nothing and thinking…what if it was all the glamour and only the glamour? What if I never, what if you never…” I can’t finish either. We’re both standing in the same fear from opposite sides.

“Aye. What if?”

The world seems to close in on us now, in the utter normalcy of the cottage with the logs settling in the wood stove and the fridge humming on.

Yet neither of us moves, because the next thing that happens between us will be the first thing that ever happened between us unassisted. That means no pull, no glamour, no bargain, no leash. Just two people, two humans, deciding how they feel about each other, deciding what to do next with their very mortal lives.

Two humans deciding to get to know each other, for real this time.

It’s the most frightening doorway I’ve ever stood in. Every other time, the water did the deciding, or the thing in him did, or the broken, yearning thing in me did. There’s nothing to blame it on now. If I go to him, it’s because I want to, and if he reaches for me, it’s because he wants to.

I look at him, really look, the way the illustrator in me has always looked, except even that feels different now, almost uncurated…it feels all mine.

I note the wet wool clinging to shoulders that are tense not still, at the hollow of his throat where a pulse is visibly going, at the water that soaks his hair black, and down a face that is tired—actually tired—with faint shadows under the eyes like a man who fought a loch and lost and yet lived. In a way he’s less beautiful than he was, as strange as that is to say. Whatever burnish the glamour put on him, that shimmery sheen of otherworldliness, has gone down with it, and what’s left is just a very fine-looking, handsome man in his apparent late thirties/early forties with a strong facial structure, a great body and good hair, shivering in my cottage, mortal as any day of the week.

And the wanting comes anyway.

It comes up slow, from somewhere real, no hook. It comes up the way warmth comes back into cold hands, painful and undeniable but mine, and I could cry with relief, because there’s my answer, there’s the damned test result. With every supernatural thumb off the scale, standing in plain lamplight looking at an earthly, dripping, breakable man, I want him. Not the lord of anything. Him.

And nothing and no one else.

I go to him, as I always will.

“You’ll catch your death,” I say, and start pulling the damp jumper up his body, and he raises his arms to let me, obedient, watching my face the whole time like it’s the only thing keeping his heart going at its terrible new speed, “and I’ve put far too much effort into keeping you alive this week to lose you to a chill.”

The jumper hits the floor with a slap. His skin is cold and underneath it, the warmth is rising as I run my hands everywhere. “I need you to know something before…if we…” He swallows. “I don’t know how to do this. As this. I’ve taken women to bed for centuries with the water in my veins doing half the work, and I don’t…” he trails off, licks his lips. “What if I don’t do it right? My hands are going to shake. My heart’s going like a bloody rabbit’s. I’m cold and I’m clumsy in this body and I’m frightened of my own grip, and you’ll be getting no creature tonight, just⁠—”

“Just a man,” I fill in, unable to keep from grinning. “Just you.”

“Aye.” Barely a sound. “Just me. And I don’t know if just me is⁠—”

I kiss him before he can finish that sentence, because that sentence doesn’t deserve finishing.

And it’s different. God, it’s different. His mouth is careful where it was always certain, and it tastes of rain and nothing else, no cold metal, no deep-water mineral, none of the loch’s signature under his tongue, just a man, just warmth and salt and him. He lets out a whimper against my lips, helpless, completely without management, and his arms come around me and they tremble. Not with restraint. With feeling, with cold, with a body that’s brand new at being only a worldly body.

I take him to bed. I lead him by the hand through my own cottage like it’s the first time, and in every way that counts, it is.

We undress each other slowly because slow is all his shaking hands can do, and I find the changes as I go, the skin warming under my palms by the minute as the radiator and the blankets and I do our work. His heartbeat everywhere, in his chest, his throat, his wrists, the inside of his thigh, the whole length of him ticking with it like the struck bell he called it. And the breath that catches when I touch him. It catches. Audibly. Several hundred years of composure and his breath stutters because my mouth found his collarbone.

“Sorry,” he mutters, mortified, and I laugh into his skin.

“Don’t you dare apologize. I’ve been making embarrassing noises for two months. Welcome to the body.”

“The body,” he says in a faint, gruff voice, as my hand moves down him, “has opinions—” and then the rest of it goes out of him in a rush, because the body does have opinions, loud ones, and he’s never had to hear them before. Now I can tell that every sensation is arriving at him raw and unbuffered, no creature’s vast indifference to dilute it. I watch it happen. I watch him feel things, my hands, my mouth, the heat of me, as if he’s hearing music for the first time. He’s overwhelmed—almost in pain with it—his eyes squeezing shut and flying open like he can’t decide whether looking makes it more bearable or less.

“Stay with me,” I whisper, and his blue eyes find mine and stay.

When he finally moves over me, slow and carefully, his weight on his forearms, he pauses at the threshold of me the way he paused at the foot of my bed the night of the window.

“Ask me in,” he says, his voice rough and raw. “Not because anything in me needs it now. Because I’m asking to be asked.”

“Come in,” I plead. “Alasdair, come home.”

And he does. He pushes inside me slowly, shaking, breathing my name. The heat is there, slower and deeper and stranger than it’s ever been, a heat with no hook in it, climbed instead of fallen into. His eyes are locked with mine. Present. Inhabited. Nobody else surfacing behind them, no endless void for elder gods. For the first time since August, I am making love with one single person, and he is here for every second of it.

“It’s you,” I gasp, somewhere near the edge, and I don’t even know what I mean by it except everything. “It’s just you, it’s actually you⁠—”

“Aye.” His forehead drops to mine, his breath ragged, his heart slamming against my chest like it wants into mine. “It’s me. God help you, foxglove, it’s only ever me from here, it’s—” his words drop away, replaced by a primal groan as he pushes into the hilt, sweat falling from his brow and dripping on me from the exertion.

I come undone with my arms around a shaking mortal man, and for once it doesn’t feel like a tidal wave or a rip current pulling me under, instead it’s a pushing up into the sky, it’s surfacing, it’s air after submersion, and he follows me over that edge with strained muscles and a ragged grunt, his face buried in my neck.

Then he collapses. He lies on me heavy and spent and breathing hard, utterly wrecked, and I hold the weight of him and stare at the ceiling and feel his heartbeat slowly, slowly come down, and I realize that’s the difference—he finishes like he just came home from a battle.

“Well,” he says eventually, muffled, into my neck. “That was—” He lifts his head. His hair is a ruin. His eyes are heavily lidded in a way I’ve never seen, and it takes me a moment to understand what I’m looking at.

He’s sleepy.

“You’re tired,” I remark in awe.

“I’m—” He stops, assessing, a man taking inventory of a new country. “Aye. That’s what this is, then. It’s like sinking. Pleasant sinking.” He frowns, fighting it, lashes already losing. “I don’t want to. I’ve things to say to you. I’ve two days of things⁠—”

“I’m sure you’ll remember.”

A yawn takes him by force, cracks his jaw, astonishes him. He looks at me with such offense at his own body that I laugh out loud. “How do you people get anything done?”

“We mostly don’t,” I admit, biting back a smile.

He gathers me in, and his arms around me are warm now, warm all the way through. His chest rises and falls under my cheek. His heart taps at my ear, slowing, slowing. The most uncanny man I have ever known is falling ordinarily asleep underneath me, breathing like anyone, and outside the window the bay lies dark and silent and separate for once—just scenery, just water, no part of it in this bed, and no part of this bed in it.

“Iris,” he murmurs, nearly gone into dreamland now.

“Mmmm?”

“The wanting.” His words are slow, sleep-heavy, deliberate, like he’s spending his last waking coins on them. “When the horse went down, I felt everything go with it, the pull, the lure, all the old…machinery. And I lay on those stones with my new heart going and I thought, now I’ll find out. Now I’ll find out what’s left when the myth is gone. Was it the creature wanting her or was it me?” He exhales, long but steady. “And then I stood up and the first thing I knew, the very first thing, before the cold, before the fear, was you. Plain as hunger. No machinery to it at all.” His arm tightens around me, drowsy, certain. “It was always going to be you, Iris. The monster…just got there first.”

He’s asleep before I can reply.

I lie awake a long time listening to him breathe and I look at the dark window where the bay used to pull at me, and I feel nothing from the water, and everything from the man.

I don’t know yet if this is love. I’m done pretending I know things before I know them.

But it’s mine. Whatever it is, every ounce of it is mine, freely chosen, and for the first time since I crossed an ocean with my life in two suitcases, that feels like enough to build on.

The man in my bed breathes in. The man in my bed breathes out.

I close my eyes and join him in sleep.

Chapter

Thirty-Three

Iwake up before he does.

On the first morning of his mortal life, Alasdair MacCoinnich sleeps in, and I lie on one elbow in the grey early light and watch him do it like it’s the eighth wonder of the world, because in my little world it is. He sleeps like he fully embraced the act of it—flat on his back with one arm flung up over the pillow, his mouth slightly open, his chest rising and falling in long, slow swells, and every so often he makes a small sound, half a snore, and I have to press my hand to my mouth so I don’t laugh and wake him up before he’s ready.

Not long ago I shared a bed with a creature that lay in the dark with its eyes closed, performing rest, its chest barely moving. And now there’s a man in my bed snoring slightly, dead to the world in the way only the living can be, and I could watch it for a year.

And I do. I’m starting to feel a little Edward Cullen-y in watching him when his eyes slowly flutter open at just past eight. He blinks confusion contorting his brow, the moment he doesn’t know where or possibly what he is, and then he finds me watching and it washes over all at once.

“I slept,” he mumbles, his voice graveled with it, astonished.

“You snored,” I point out with something like glee.

“I never.”

“Little ones. Wee baby snores.”

He stares at the ceiling, that look of astonishment still present. “I dreamed,” he whispers. “I’d forgotten what dreams were. I was in a boat. Someone was singing somewhere over the water and I couldn’t find the shore, but I wasn’t afraid.” He turns his head on the pillow to look at me. “Is that a normal one?”

“That sounds pretty nice, actually. Mine are usually about having to use the toilet except all the bathroom stalls are dirty and the doors are too low and they don’t lock. Or I’m back in high school or college and I forgot to attend one class all year and it’s the day of the exam and I’m about to fail. I’d rather have your dream.”

“Aye. Yours sounds like a curse.”

“It’s called having an unregulated nervous system, you’ll see.”

And then his stomach growls, audibly, a long, whining complaint, loud enough that we both look down at it, and his expression is so deeply affronted that I lose the battle and laugh until I’m crying. That’s how the first morning starts, with the former terror of the western Highlands being betrayed by his own digestion.

So I make eggs and toast and leftover stew, and he eats like a teenage boy, reminding me of the way my lanky brother used to demolish the kitchen when growing up. He eats my toast too, only after I offer it, of course.

“It’s demanding,” Alasdair says, shaking his head. “This bloody body. It just goes on wanting things. Heat, food, sleep…you—” he catches himself, and there it is, faint color along his cheekbones. He can blush now, how delightful. “It’s a wonder any of you get anything done.”

“You keep saying that, and I keep telling you. We don’t. Welcome to the human experience, where you’ll be a slave to a never-ending to-do list.”

Though at least in his case, he doesn’t have to become a slave to capitalism, which makes that list lighter. Not that I’ve had a lot of time to figure out what life looks like for us going forward, but he’s got a castle that, sure, could use some renovating but is still a fucking castle, and I’m sure somewhere in those hallowed halls he has things he could sell, or perhaps a large sum of money to lean back on. I mean, vampires always end up being rich because they’ve had centuries to save and invest, and maybe it’s the same with him.

At the very least, I have the cottage, which I will most definitely be inhabiting for a year now, so it will be mine and I still have my career (um, kinda, I’m really behind on a few deadlines now). All this to say, Alasdair can be a kept man. All he needs to do is continue to fuck me and look pretty and we’ll call the whole thing even.

I refill his tea, and for a while we just sit with the steam coming off our mugs, and the pale autumn light, and the dark bay through the window. I could live in this morning. I know part of me is looking to the future, but I’m also more than content to stay here in the moment and live in this morning indefinitely.

Which is when he sets his mug down and says, “There’s something I have to show you, foxglove.” And the grave look on his face tells me that maybe the morning and the moment are over. “It’s at the castle. And I’ll warn you now…you’ll want to hate me for it, and I’ll not blame you if you do.”

Okay, now the morning is definitely over.

We walk to the castle, because of course we do. The day’s already showing signs of the strange warmth it’ll open into, the sky rinsed clean after all that fog and rain, and the track around the head of the bay is the same three miles I walked two nights ago with a knife in one pocket and salt in the other, except everything about it is different now, because the fog is gone, and the dread has changed, and the man beside me keeps stopping to look at every damn thing.

He stops for the smell of the bracken warming in the sun, dragging it in through his nose like he’s never been allowed it before, and maybe he hasn’t, maybe the creature smelled everything through six feet of cold water its whole long life. He stops for a wren singing in the gorse. He crouches at a burn we’ve both crossed a dozen times and puts his bare hand in it just to feel the cold as a thing that bites instead of a thing that belongs to him, and he comes up grinning like a boy, shaking his fingers, saying, “It’s sharp. Iris. The water’s sharp now. I’d forgotten how it felt, to feel such things as a man.” I am so in love with this idiot it’s a wonder I can walk in a straight line.

But I’m also on edge, and the edge sharpens with every bend in the road that brings the castle closer.

You’ll want to hate me for it.

He won’t say more than that—I tried twice, got “you’ll see it whole or not at all,” which means that cryptic way of talking is definitely an Alasdair trait—and so my brain, which loathes not having answers, decides to fill it in. With everything. The possibilities scroll past like a slideshow from hell, each worse than the last.

Like, what if there’s a woman in the castle, a live one, kept, some lass from decades back he couldn’t bring himself to drown, gone strange in a tower room like Bertha in Mr. Rochestor’s attic, fed on tea and kippers for fifty years, and now that he’s mortal she’s my problem too.

Or there’s another one of him, a brother, a spawn, a younger thing he’s been keeping below the waterline like a man-eating seal, and the binding only leashed one of them.

Or the wives aren’t the only dead in his keeping…no, there are children. There were always children, little terrors with black eyes and teeth that run up my limbs and bite me and that’s the thing I’ll want to hate him for; that’s the thing no binding fixes. I’ve never wanted to be a mother, and by proxy, I’ll be a mother to literal tiny terrors.

By the time the trees start thinning I’ve imagined numerous terrible scenarios, including him keeping Sinclair’s reanimated corpse as a butler, and I have to physically shake my head to clear it, like an Etch A Sketch.

We’re maybe half a mile from the castle, where the track runs along the bottom edge of the woods, when he stops again, differently this time, his head coming up, and I follow his look into the trees.

The brown horse is standing among the birches.

The real one. The ordinary, and what I have always assumed is a non-shapeshifting, horse that he rode down to see me a lifetime of weeks ago.

Still, I can’t help but be a little wary, considering.

“It’s all right,” Alasdair says quietly. “She’s only a horse. She was only ever a horse.”

He clicks his tongue gently and she moseys on over to us, picking her way through the birches, unhurried, and walks right up to him and puts her big whiskered nose against his chest and breathes him in, one long deep investigation, and I watch him close his eyes.

“She always knew what I was,” he states, his hand moving up her neck and scratching at a spot hidden beneath the mane. “Horses do. She’d carry me anyway, though I never understood it. Kin recognizing kin, I thought.” The mare lips at his jacket, finds nothing, and sighs deep in lack-of-carrot disappointment. “I’m not kin anymore but I suppose she still thinks I’m true.”

The horse looks at him a long moment with one dark eye, a horse’s eye, soft and warm, nothing terrifying in it, and then she butts her head against his shoulder hard enough to stagger him, the way you’d shove an old friend. He breaks into a grin that’s half-joy, half sorrow, perhaps a bit of grief for what he was. As I told myself before, it would have been my childhood dream to be able to turn into a horse so I don’t blame him if he feels that loss.

“Aye,” he says thickly. “Aye, well. Good lass.”

She stays with us a few minutes, walking alongside like it’s nothing, nudging at our pockets, and then some private horse business calls her and she peels away up the slope and is gone into the trees. Alasdair watches the place she was for a moment before we walk on.

“Still friends, then. Even off the leash.”

“Seems so.” He pauses, giving me a wan smile. “I thought everything would leave with it. The water, the horse, the…the whole world I was kin to. And the water’s left, right enough. But she stayed.” He shakes his head slowly. “She was never mine because I was a monster. She was mine because I scratched the right spot.”

Then the trees give out and the castle is there, its grey bulk against the bright morning, no fog to soften it today, every broken tooth of it sharp in the sun. Whatever’s in it that I’m meant to hate him for is in there waiting for me, and Alasdair’s expression darkens. He leads me in through the courtyard and the stones of the great hall, now cold with a dead hearth, up the spiral staircase, and down the corridor. We go straight to a door I noticed the first time he ever walked me through the castle, one I assumed was just a guest bedroom.

He stops with his hand on the iron ring and doesn’t turn it.

“I built this room before your country existed,” he says, as if that sentence isn’t blowing my mind. “I’ve kept it longer than anything I’ve kept. And until this morning, I’d have told you it was the best of me. But I know better now. So look at all of it, and then let me explain, and if you want to walk home after and not see me for a time, the door down there will let you out.”

Oh, okay then.

He takes in a deep breath and opens the door.

I brace for horror.

What I find is…another chapel.

Not literally, not like the one I found him praying at. There’s no altar, no crucifixes. But as I stand in the doorway and take it in, I’m filled with that same feeling of reverence. First of all, it’s a round stone room rising the full height of a tower, which means it’s probably the tower part I can see from the cottage. It’s lit by three narrow windows, and around every curve of wall, floor to as high as a tall man can reach and even beyond that, are shelves. Dozens and dozens of them. Each one shallow, each one holding a small arrangement of objects, and each one with a name cut into the wood beneath it in careful, antique letters.

A comb, bone-backed, gold teeth. A ring. A spectacles case. A hair ribbon pressed flat under a smooth stone. A locket, open, the portrait inside long faded to brown shadow.

I count them.

I get up to seventy-two before I give up.

And the names…Mary Beaton. Sileas. Una NicRath. Pavlina. Margaret Brodie. Catriona Carmichael.

I stop at Catriona’s shelf. A brooch sits on it, thistle-shaped, and a bus ticket, 1962, gone soft as cloth with age, and I think of Effie at her kitchen window writing he knows I know it was him, and my nose burns with the threat of tears.

“You kept them,” I say, my voice echoing. “All this time. You kept…why? What is this, Alasdair? Is this guilt or are these trophies, because I need to know which room I’m standing in…”

“It’s neither.” He moves into the room slowly, and his eyes go shelf to shelf the way mine went, except he doesn’t have to read the names. “Every woman the creature took, the man came up here after, set down something of hers, cut her name into the wood, and said it aloud. Every year on the day of her taking, I’d come and say it again. Some of these names I’ve said four hundred times by now.”

He stops in the center of the room and turns to face me, his expression frank. “It was how I stayed a man, Iris. The monster doesn’t mourn. It can’t, there’s nothing in it that knows what it takes. So the man mourned for both of us, deliberately, like tending a fire, because I learned early what happened when I let the fire go out. The remembering was the discipline. The grief was the leash before there was a leash.” His voice drops. “I’d have told you this room was my conscience. I’d have been proud of it.”

“And now?”

“Now.” He looks at the floor, and then makes himself look back up, whistling through his teeth. “There’s a thing I knew and didn’t let myself know. The women in the loch, foxglove. My drowned? You’ve seen them, you’ve felt their hands.” I go cold, and he nods at my reaction and continues. “They’re not in the water because the water keeps them. They’re in the water because I do. The bones, what the creature didn’t eat, what remained. I gathered them, all these years. They’re below this room, in the old well-chamber, laid out properly. I told myself it was burial. It was the only burial I could give them.”

He runs a hand over his face, and sighs. “But the dead stay where their bones are kept, lass. That’s old law, older than me. As long as I held them, they couldn’t go. The mourning that kept me a man kept them in the bay. Every woman whose hands pulled at you in the dark is down there because my grief wouldn’t open its fist. I rented my soul off their backs for centuries and called it…remembrance.”

The room goes quiet and still. I look at him standing in the middle of his conscience finding out what it cost, and the funny thing is, that I don’t hate him for it. While there is horror in this makeshift museum of the dead, it pales compared to the worst of what I imagined on the walk over here. What I find instead is the size of the grief in this room, centuries of a man reciting names so he could stay tethered to humanity, and the wreckage of the women who paid for it.

“Will you show me?” I ask gently. “The well-chamber?”

“You want to see the bones?”

“Aye,” I say and the word comes naturally, and I wonder if I’ll eventually have a Scottish accent one day. “I want to see them. I think…I think perhaps we could do something for them.”

He looks at me a long moment, and then he nods and takes the lamp from its hook by the door.

We go back out and down the same spiral staircase we came up, except we keep descending, past the level of the great hall, and the stairs keep going, turning down into the rock the castle stands on. The walls change around us as we go, dressed stone gives way to rougher courses and then to raw rock, dark and damp-sheened in the lamplight. The air changes too, colder with every turn, and wet, and carrying the mineral smell of the loch.

“How deep does this go?” I ask.

“Not deep. It can’t.” His low voice sounds hushed in the stairwell. “We’re on a sea rock, lass, the water’s everywhere under it. Another few feet and you’d be digging into the loch itself. The old builders cut down just far enough to reach the spring. Every castle needs its well, for the sieges. This one’s needed it for…other things.”

The stair ends at a doorway with no door, and he stops, and lifts the lamp, and lets me look.

The well-chamber is a low round room cut whole out of the rock, the ceiling close enough that Alasdair has to stoop, and in the center of the floor is the well itself, a dark mouth ringed with worn stone. And from it comes the sound of water, moving, somewhere just below, not the drip of a cistern but a slow breathing slosh, rising and easing, rising and easing.

“It feels the tide,” he explains. “The spring’s fresh, but the loch presses on it from below. When the tide comes in, the well comes up. They were never out of the water here, Iris. Not really. That’s how I held them to the bay without ever letting myself understand that I was doing it.”

And around the well, on the dry margin of stone between the dark mouth and the curved walls, laid out with terrible care, are the women.

Dozens upon dozens of their bones. Each one wrapped in old linen gone grey with years, each bundle laid straight toward the well like spokes around a hub, like sleepers around a fire, and at the head of each a flat stone with a name scratched in it. The oldest linen has gone the color of the rock, while the newest…is still white.

I look at the white one for a long time.

“Becca Rhys,” I declare.

“Aye.”

The lamp shakes a little in my grasp. The cold down here is total—the breathing of the well goes on and on—and all around me are the bones of the women he’d killed. Yes, it was the monster who did the eating, but Alasdair did the luring.

And he also laid them out like this with so much care that it’s almost heartbreaking. Horror and grief are side by side in this place.

“Let’s get them out of here,” I say, when I can. “All of them. Today.”

“And take them where?” he inquires.

“I’m not sure,” I admit. “But I’m sure you will, when you think about it.”

We work for the better part of an hour, mostly in silence. He brings the canvas bags down from the hall, and we lift the women two-handed, one at a time. They weigh almost nothing since they aren’t complete skeletons but random bones he managed to scavenge, and yet it’s the weight of the moment that feels the heaviest.

The last thing Alasdair does, when the chamber is empty and the bags stand waiting by the stair, is take the lamp around the circle of name-stones one final time, reading them. His lips move as he repeats them to himself.

Then we climb up out of the rock toward the daylight, carrying the dead between us, and the well goes on breathing in the dark behind us, holding nothing anymore but water.

“If you we take the bones away from here, can they move on?”

“Aye,” he confirms with a nod, “just can’t be in this loch. We can bury them somewhere, but I would worry they might be dug up since I’m not about to bury them here. But we can take them past the headland, where the loch gives onto open sea. Beyond the reach of the bay, beyond my keeping. The sea takes what the loch can’t hold.”

“Then it sounds like we need a boat.”

He frowns. “We?”

“Well, of course I’m going to help you.”

“It’s not a small thing I’m asking. You’ll be handling⁠—”

“Bones?” I gesture to them. “Listen, these ladies mean well, but let’s not forget they tried to drown me not long ago. I want them out of the loch as much as you do. They need to move on, and we do too.”

He rubs his lips together. “Well, it may not surprise you, but I don’t have a boat. I’ve never needed one.”

“Yeah, well luckily that’s something I happened to inherit.”

Chapter

Thirty-Four

The outboard motor that belongs to the skiff on the beach is in my mudroom under a tarp, where it’s been since the shed became my studio. I don’t know a lot about motors aside from when my father and brother and I would go lake fishing when I was young, but I know this one is ancient enough, a four horsepower of stubborn 1980s engineering. We bring it to the little skiff that we’ve dragged into the water and Alasdair clamps it to the stern. It starts on the third pull, loud and roiling, which brings out a wide grin from both of us.

The day, as it has turned out, is now unbelievably beautiful as we head out along the water. It’s sunny and warm and the sky is swept clean of clouds, that saturated blue that early autumn brings. The loch is a deep green for once instead of its forty shades of grey, and we motor out down the long arm of the bay with canvas bags resting in the bow like sleeping passengers.

I sit facing backward watching the cottage shrink and the castle slide by on its spit, and the further out we get, the more the waves slosh and the wider the world gets, the loch opening its mouth to the sea, the headlands peeling back until the horizon arrives all at once. I can see the great blue shoulders of the Isle of Skye off to the southwest, and beyond, faint as breath on glass, a low pale smudge that Alasdair says is the Outer Hebrides, and beyond that nothing but Atlantic until Canada.

“We should go somewhere,” I say, surprising myself. “When this is done. I’ve been in Scotland long enough, and I feel I’ve barely seen anything.”

“Where would you go?” he wonders, piloting around a piece of floating driftwood.

“Everywhere. Skye. I heard that place is lovely, these fairy rocks and pools and all that…” I trail off and squint into the sun at him. “Wait, don’t tell me fairies are real.”

He grins, his face looking stupidly handsome. “The fae are more real than the people are here. You should know this by now.”

Right. I suppose he is kind of fae himself.

Or was.

“Where else?”

“Oh. The islands. Shetland, of course, for the ponies.”

“You still like horses after all this?” he asks wryly.

“Ponies!” I repeat. “They’re a different kind of demonic hell creature—any six-year-old horse girl would tell you that. Oh, and Edinburgh. And then maybe the north coast. There’s a road, I read about it, it goes all the way around the top of everything. We could take a trip.”

“A boat trip?”

“No. No boats. A road trip. Car, land, tarmac, gravity. No boats, no water, not ever. I have had enough water, Alasdair, I have had a lifetime supply of water, you can show me Scotland from sea level or above, but never again from in it.”

He laughs, a beautifully human sound, and says, “A road trip, then, mo ghràdh.” The engine putters us out past the last of the headland, the floor of the sea dropping away beneath us into true deep.

He cuts the motor and the silence comes in like something that’s been waiting.

The swell out here is long and slow, the open sea breathing under the hull. Skye stands blue off the quarter, and the sun lays itself across the water in a hammered sheet, and Alasdair sits there looking at the bags in the bow for a long moment with his hands open on his knees.

Then he begins.

He takes them one at a time, draws each long bundle of linen-wrapped bone from the bags and holds it across his two hands and his eyes go somewhere in thought and then he says, quietly, who she is.

“Una.” A pause, the swell lifting us, setting us down. “She sang. Before. I heard her from the water, that’s how—” He stops himself; the how isn’t for today. He holds the bundle a moment longer. “She sang.”

The linen goes over the side with both his hands, lowered, not dropped, and the white of it wavers down through the blue and is gone.

“Margaret Brodie. She fought me. Hardest of any of them…she, she nearly reached the rocks.” He takes Margaret’s bones over, lowers them and then they’re gone. “Sileas.” Gone. “Mary.” Gone. A dozen more, some only a name, some a single sentence.

She had a dog that waited on the shore three days.

She was walking to her sister’s wedding.

She was with her child, and I let the child live.

The sun moves slowly on the water as I sit in the stern with my hands folded in reverence, letting the names go past me like a current. Somewhere in the middle of it I stop being horrified and start being something else, something more like a witness, which I understand now is what I’m out here to be.

Maybe I always was the witness. Maybe that was another Galloway job.

“Catriona Carmichael.” His voice catches its edge on this one. “Your Effie’s friend. She’d missed the last bus from Shieldaig.” He looks at the bundle a long moment, and then across at me. “Your aunt watched this water for decades knowing Catriona was in it, never able to say so to a living soul. Whatever else today is…it’s for Effie as well.”

“For Effie,” I say through a broken voice, and Catriona Carmichael goes down through the sunlight in her linen, to wherever the sea sends what the loch can’t hold.

The last bundle is the one with the newest linen.

“Becca Rhys,” he says, and then nothing else, because there’s nothing he can say about her that isn’t an indictment, and he knows it. He holds the bundle and he looks at me—the only other person on this earth who knows the truth of her, the woman I lied to two police officers about, the name I’ve been carrying like a stone since the morning the phone rang—and something passes between us across the boat that isn’t forgiveness, because some things don’t get forgiveness. It’s just the truth, held in the open air at last, between the two people responsible for it being hidden.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her bones, because it’s the least I can do for my role in all of this. “The sea will hold you now. I’m so sorry.”

She goes down through the depths like all the rest.

And then the bags are empty, and the boat rides a little higher from the waterline. Alasdair looks at the water with a frown. “There’s words for it. There should be words. Something should be said. A prayer.” Then he straightens and starts reciting in the old language. I can’t understand a word of it, but after some time he stops, frustrated, because apparently neither can he.

“I’m sorry,” he says, giving me a tired look. “I can’t seem to remember any prayers for this situation or…I don’t know what to say that seems fitting.”

“I do,” I say, and pull a folded piece of paper out of my coat pocket.

He stares at me dumbfounded.

“I figured something like this might happen,” I explain, waving the paper. “Or that there’d be a…I didn’t know what the protocol was, okay, there’s no book for this, so I looked some things up and I wrote out something. It’s a bit Celtic blessing, a bit sea burial, a bit that I pulled from my witchy books. It’s probably wrong but it does feel kind of right.”

He’s still staring at me. “You looked some things up?”

“I googled it, Alasdair. While we were walking back from the castle and you made a joke about me having two different sets of eyes.”

A long pause. The boat lifts and settles on the open swell.

“Googled,” he repeats, tasting the world.

“Yes. Welcome to the real world. Do you want the words or not?”

“Aye, foxglove. Say the words.”

So I say the words, which sound pretty and hope mean something more.

“Go out with the tide and not back with it. What was taken from you, the taking is ended. What was kept of you, the keeping is done. No name of yours is held in any stone, no bone of yours in any well; the bay forgets you, the sea receives you, and the door is open. Go home by the western water. Be done with us. Rest with love.”

The sea breathes under the boat.

And I swear the water lightens, like a cloud comes off the sun, and the whole field of the water around the boat goes one degree brighter, clearer. The swell flattens a little and far off toward the headland, where the loch’s mouth opens, something like a long exhale moves across the surface and is gone.

Alasdair makes a sound I’ve never heard from him.

I look over and he’s bent forward over his knees, his hand pressed flat to the middle of his chest. For one lurching second, I think, heart, mortal heart, something’s wrong, he’s having a heart attack. But then I see his face and it’s not pain, not physical anyway.

He’s…crying. For real. Shoulders going, the way someone cries when the crying has been waiting longer than the body’s been able to hide it, a cry I know too well. The weight is coming off him, centuries of it, shelves of it, and a well full of it. All of that weight now gone, sinking to the depths with the bones of his victims.

“They’re away,” he manages with an astonished gasp. “Iris. I can’t feel them. The bay’s been full my whole…the whole expanse of my monstrous existence. There’s always been the weight of them in the water, like stones in a coat, and it’s…” He lifts his head, tear-streaked and absolutely wrecked, and light. “It’s just water. It’s just water now.”

I shuffle along on the boat and wrap my arms around him, holding him, and the boat rocks under us, and he cries into my shoulder in the middle of the bright empty sea. I look out over his shoulder at the place where the women went down and the place beyond it where Skye stands blue and the Hebrides lie like damp breath on the horizon, and I say nothing at all, because witness is still the job, and I think I’m pretty good at it now.

We don’t start the motor for a long time. There’s no reason to. The day stays warm and the swell stays kind and the boat drifts and Alasdair comes back to himself little by little, washing his face with a handful of the cold sea. Away from the looming mountains that make up the western Highlands, things feel open and bright and we share the tea from the thermos I brought and the chocolate from my pocket, and the silence between us is full and comfortable.

And maybe it’s the fullness that does it. This comfort that has now become easy between us. Or maybe it’s the damn emotional rollercoaster I’ve been on for the last two months finally evening out at the end.

And maybe it’s because I’m nosy, and I don’t forget things and I don’t want him to forget them either.

“So,” I begin, clearing my throat. “Two nights ago. In the chapel.”

“Mm.” He’s leaning back against the bow bags; eyes half shut against the sun.

“You were telling me why you’d never stand for Effie, and you said—and I’m direct quoting here, because I’ve thought about it a million times since—you said you’d felt the thing inside you close your hand on the woman you love.” He stiffens slightly. “And then you just kept going, like it was a fact you’d mentioned. Sea’s cold, castle’s old, love this woman, yadda yadda yadda. And it occurred to me, out here, that everything you said back then, the glamour was still doing its thing.”

I keep my eyes on the horizon, because I’m brave, but I’m not that brave. “Soooo I find myself curious how the fact is holding up. Now that it’s just you in there. And me here.”

The boat lifts on the swell and settles.

“Look at me, foxglove.”

I look at him. And even though I’ve looked at him countless times before, sometimes as this otherworldly creature, sometimes as this incredibly handsome man, all I can think is that it’s him and he’s beautiful and no matter what he says next, he is, in some way, still mine.

“I love you,” he says, and my ribs seem to contract around my heart, or maybe now my heart is too big for my ribs. The feeling is so immediate and all-encompassing I can barely breathe.

“It held,” he goes on, when it’s apparent that I’m speechless. “It was the first thing I checked inside me. I went looking for it the way you’d go looking for the one thing you’d want out of a burning house, and it was there, and it was mine. No lure in it, no pull, no creature’s wanting wearing my face. Just a man’s love, the ordinary kind, the kind that dies when I do or perhaps lives on in the stars.” He says it steadily, plainly, like coordinates. “I love you, Iris Galloway.”

I’m grinning at him like a fucking loon.

“And you…?” he prods, and is that a touch of red on his cheeks?

“I love you too,” I say, though I would rather drag it out for drama. “I have no idea when it started. Somewhere between the kippers and the binding, in one of those moments in between. But it’s mine too. I checked the same as you did, that whole horrible day you didn’t come back. I stood in my kitchen with all the glamour gone and went looking for what was left, and it was all still there, Alasdair. It turned out that I loved you, and there was no one else to blame for it.” I wipe my face with the heel of my hand, because of course I’m crying now like a sap. “So, there it is. Verified on both ends. Love, the ordinary kind.”

“The ordinary kind,” he agrees, but it’s the voice of a man agreeing to a miracle.

And then he crosses the boat to me, carefully, mortally, one hand on the gunwale because he can drown now and we both know it, and he kisses me in the middle of the bright water, and there is nothing in the sea but fish, and nothing in the man but the man, and nothing in the kiss but us.

Chapter

Thirty-Five

The snow comes in the second week of December, which delights me because I’m one of those weirdos that love snow. But Alasdair seems to take the cold personally.

It’s not even proper snow; just a light dusting overnight, the kind that sugars the heather and lies in the seams of the drystone walls and is gone from the road by noon. But it’s enough that he stands at the back window with his tea, glowering at it like it owes him money, and announces, “It’s inside my feet, Iris. The cold. It’s gotten inside my feet.”

“That’s called poor circulation. Wear the socks I bought you.”

“I survived the bloody plague.”

“Not in this mortal body, you didn’t. Wear the damn socks.”

He wears the thick wool socks I picked up at the Torridon gift shop, and the second jumper I bought for him when we went to Inverness for a few days, and he’s developed a relationship with the wood stove that borders on courtship—feeding it, tending it, angling his chair toward it. Not to mention every single day this body of his presents him with some fresh outrage, like hunger at inconvenient hours, or a crick in his neck from sleeping wrong, and every single day he files his complaints with me like I’m his manufacturer. The thing is, he likes to complain. He delights in the action, but he also—secretly—delights in having a mortal body, even if he’s slowly turning into a grumpy old man.

Two weeks ago, he caught a cold. His first in centuries, picked up god knows where, the village, probably, the shop, some child’s sneeze in the queue, and you’d have thought from the gravity of him that it was the plague come back. He lay on the couch under two blankets with his nose running and his eyes streaming and said, in a voice of genuine wonder, “There’s no managing it. It just does what it does to you and you wait.”

And then he sneezed nine times in a row and I laughed so hard my pelvic floor barely held on, and he glared at me over the blanket with his red nose, this ancient terror of the western seas, the eldritch Lord of Drowning, and started laughing too, which turned into coughing, which set me off worse.

He’d never been sick before, least not since he was turned. But he’d never been better before, either. A week later the cold lifted, and he woke up clear and bright and lay there marveling. I got to watch a man discover recovery, the ordinary miracle of a body fixing itself, and he held my hand under the quilt and said, “It comes back. You go down and you come back,” like he’d worked out the whole point of the design. I couldn’t help but kiss him, the utter naivety of it all.

I found his first grey hair on a Sunday.

We were in bed, late morning, no reason to be up—there is shockingly little reason to be up, in December, on a sea loch, when you work from home, when you’re stupid in love—and the light, streaming through the curtains, caught his temple and there it was, one bright thread in all that black, and my heart did something so complicated I had to close my eyes for a second.

Because it’s working. That’s what the grey thread is. It’s the binding keeping its terrible promise, time getting its hands into him at last, the clock I started with a little black knife in October ticking where I can see it.

I didn’t say anything. I just touched it, lightly, and he caught my hand and held it there against his temple, and he knew. Of course he knew, he examines his face in the mirror every morning like a vain little beast.

“One,” he said, a warning tone.

“One,” I agreed.

“It suits me, I’d say. Gives me a distinguished, flair. A silver fox, as they call them.”

“It’s one hair, Alasdair.”

“Aye. And I earned it.” He kissed my palm and put my hand on his chest, over the heartbeat he’s stopped being startled by, and we lay there with all that hard-won time in front of us, spending some of it on nothing at all.

Winter keeps its thumb on me too, of course. December on a sea loch is not, it turns out, fibromyalgia’s favorite climate (who would have thought!?). The damp gets into my hips the way the cold gets into his feet, and there are mornings my hands wake up before I do, aching around nothing, and I have to run them under the hot tap before they’ll hold a pencil. But now, when I flare, instead of soldiering through it alone, there’s a man who’s learned my body’s weather better than his own, who has the hot water bottle filled before I’ve finished admitting I need it, who rubs my hands by the stove without being asked, and without making it a Thing, who simply adjusts the day around the bad days the way you’d adjust sail.

“The body has opinions,” he states, handing me my heat pad, quoting himself. Honestly, between the two of us and our complaining carcasses, this cottage is one ailment away from a convalescent home.

The work’s gone quiet with the season, the way it should. There’s not much to press this time of year since the moor’s gone over, the heather’s done, everything sleeping under the frost, and I’m glad now I gathered like a madwoman in August, because the flower press in the studio is full of summer: heather, and bog myrtle, and harebell, foxglove, wolfsbane, yarrow, flattened and waiting. I’m behind on the deadlines I’m always behind on, but the sketchbook’s filling anyway, studies of bare branches, the architecture of dead bracken, rosehips going wrinkled and brilliant on the bush by the gate. Winter botany is surprising and it turns out there’s plenty to draw once you stop waiting for things to bloom, which is either a discovery about illustration or about my entire life. Probably both.

The cottage is practically made for Christmas, like it belongs in one of those little ceramic town sets my grandmother had in her living room growing up.

I found Effie’s decorations in November, in a trunk in the mudroom filled with tissue-wrapped glass baubles, a tangle of lights that miraculously work, robins and tartan ribbon and a hand-stitched angel gone soft with handling. It was so wonderfully vintage Christmas kitsch, each item packed with nostalgia for eras I never lived in, that unpacking them felt like being handed one more inheritance, the gentlest one yet. The tree’s a small one from the lot outside Shieldaig, that got strapped to the roof of the runabout and dragged in the front door with a lot of swearing and needles everywhere, and it stands in the corner of the sitting room now wearing sixty years of Effie’s Christmases, and some evenings I catch Alasdair just looking at it with his tea. I don’t blame him. One of my favorite things to do is just drink whisky and stare at the tree and dazzling lights.

The runabout, for the record, is a fifteen-year-old beige Vauxhall, bought off a sheep farmer past Torridon. It rattles, it smells faintly of both dog and sheep, the heater has two settings—off, and surface of the sun—and I love it without reservation because it’s mine. The rental car went back to Inverness in November, taillight fixed, every trace of my old provisional life handed over the counter with the keys.

Constable MacRae himself waved me through the village last week, friendly as he ever is—which, I mean, isn’t saying much. Sinclair’s case went where cases go when the loch is involved—the file is open, the way Catriona Carmichael’s file is open, which is to say cold. The police came in late October, two of them, from the city, and sat at my kitchen table while I told them my one lie for the last time. They wrote it down and thanked me for the shortbread. Mhairi’s kept her side. I’ve kept mine. The loch keeps everything else.

I thought I’d carry it heavier than this, like I thought it would weigh me down with each minute, hour day. And maybe someday it’ll get heavy again. But the women are out past the headland where the sea takes what the loch can’t hold, and no one else will ever join them. And when I weigh the lie against that, the scale doesn’t even move. Not a wee bit.

Maddie calls on a Tuesday evening while I’m elbow-deep in mince pie filling, so Alasdair answers the phone.

The phone calls are a thing now—as is my baking as I find myself slipping dangerously close to trad wife territory. It started last month when Maddie rang while I was in the bath, and he made the unilateral decision that letting it ring would be rude—he’s been a regular phone-user for roughly eight weeks and treats the device with the formal courtesy of a man receiving guests, which is a source of contention for sure—and by the time I got out, wrapped in a towel and dripping with dread, they’d been talking for twenty minutes.

She grills him. Every call. She’d deny it’s grilling; she’d call it, “taking an interest” or some shit like that, but I’ve heard her side of these performances and I know an interrogation when I’m adjacent to one. What does he do for money? (Land, inheritance, “old family holdings,” which is all true, because he’s loaded.) What are his intentions? (Permanent resident of the Galloway cottage.) Why does a man his age live alone in a ruin? (Well, he doesn’t anymore.)

And he answers everything in that low, careful brogue, and the thing is, I’m not sure Maddie really cares about the questions or the answers. She just likes the accent. She makes him say words. Last week I listened to my sister-in-law, a grown woman, a mother, ask my boyfriend to pronounce, “purple burglar alarm,” and then scream with delight (okay, so I also laugh until I pee when he tries to say it).

Tonight I can only hear his half from the kitchen, which is its own entertainment.

“Aye, she’s here, she’s up to her elbows in—what is it, foxglove?—mincemeat, aye, for the mincemeat pie.” Pause. “No, there’s no actual meat in it. I had the same confusion.” Pause. “The weather’s been…aye, snow, a wee dusting she says…” and then he holds the phone slightly away from his ear, and even from the kitchen I hear the pitch of Maddie hitting the word SNOW like a gameshow contestant, because Chicago is getting murdered by lake-effect and she’s coming to Scotland in six days, and if there is not a white Christmas she will be filing complaints with the government.

Six days. They land in Inverness on the twenty-third—Maddie, Andrew, and Rosey, who is six and who has, per Maddie, asked the following questions about me and my life, verbatim: Does Aunt Iris live in the castle? Does the castle man have a horse? Does the horse live in the castle? Is the castle man a king? And who, apparently, now demands a turn on every call, because there’s a shuffle and Alasdair’s voice changes entirely, goes soft and serious, the voice of a man addressing a visiting dignitary.

“Good evening, Rosey.” Pause. “Aye, it’s me, the castle man.” Pause. “I do know a horse.” Pause. “She’s brown. She lives in the woods, she’s her own horse, she belongs to no one—” Pause. “…Aye. I’ll ask her. I make no promises on her behalf; she’s a lady of independent mind.” Pause, longer, and then, gravely: “That’s a fine question. The castle has forty-two rooms, and I have counted them myself.” Pause. “No, no dungeons.” A beat. His eyes come up and find mine across the kitchen, and something passes over his face, quick and rueful, gone before it lands. “Not anymore.”

I go back to my mincemeat.

The visit is sorted, mostly. They’ll have the cottage’s guest room for Rosey and the foldout in the sitting room for themselves, because the castle—Maddie lobbied hard for the castle, “we’re not flying five thousand miles to NOT stay in the castle, Iris”—is many things, but it is not yet a place you can put a radiator, and I’m not sure they can tend to any of the fires without burning the whole place down. They’ll get the tour instead. The hall, the chapel, the view off the seaward wall.

Not the tower, and definitely nothing below ground.

What the castle becomes is a conversation we keep having in circles and not finishing, which I’ve decided is allowed. I mean, this is all so new to both of us. There’s talk, his talk, mostly, late at night, thinking out loud with my head on his chest, of the heritage people, of letting the historical trusts at it, of Caisteal Eachainn standing open someday with a gravel car park and a wee laminated guide. Built in the thirteenth century. Seat of the MacCoinnichs. Local legend speaks of a water-horse.

He finds the idea funnier than I’d have guessed. “Let them charge four pound fifty to stand in my bedchamber,” he says. “I’ll donate the audio tour. I’ll narrate it myself; I’m a primary source.” But then other nights he goes quiet about it, and I understand that too, for there’s one room in that castle that was never built for the public, at least seventy-two names that aren’t legend, and whatever the castle becomes has to become it around them. So, maybe the trust. Maybe a museum. Maybe just the birds and the weather and the occasional sleepover, the way it’s been for centuries.

We don’t have to decide. That’s the thing I keep arriving at lately, is that we don’t have to decide. We have time. We bought it at a terrible price and it’s ours, an actual future, sprawling out ahead of us in undecided years, and there are days the size of it catches me and I have to stand still and let it pass through me. We could do anything. We can do nothing. The man is going to grow old at the rate I grow old, and the castle can wait, and the road trip can wait until spring (it’s planned now, mapped, argued over a plenty—he maintains Skye will be “crawling with tourists” and I maintain he’s been antisocial since the Plantagenets; in the end, I win) and the only deadline in this whole house is mince-no-meat-pies for the twenty-third.

I pull the first batch out of the oven, and the cottage smells like Christmas, and across the bay the castle stands in the last grey light with the first stars over it, just an old building on an old shore.

Just scenery. Just part of home.

After dinner, with the fire built up and the snow starting again outside the window—fat slow flakes this time, the kind I hope mean to stay awhile—I get out the tarot cards and we settle into the sitting room, sitting around the coffee table.

This is also a thing now. It started as a joke, or I told myself it did, this deck I’ve owned for fifteen years and pulled from lazily, half-believing, the wannabe witch’s deck. Except I’m not a wannabe anymore, not really. I’m a woman who closed a salt circle in the fog and felt it hold, and the deck knows it. The cards come up different now. Or I read them different. Mhairi says there’s no difference between those two things.

Alasdair takes tarot extremely seriously. He sits on the couch with his drink and his sleeves pushed up, elbows on thighs, frowning at the spreads like they’re charts of a coast he intends to sail, demanding rulings.

Tonight he wants to know about the visit.

“The wee one,” he says, “pull for the wee one’s visit,” because he is nervous about Rosey. Which I find absolutely adorable, this man who faced down centuries, terrified of a six-year-old’s verdict. I mean, if she doesn’t get to see a horse, that child is gonna be pissed. And so I shuffle, and the fire roars, and the snow comes down past the black window, and I lay three cards.

The Ten of Cups. The Sun. And the third card sticks.

It genuinely sticks, two cards clinging as one, which I know happens with an old deck, and dry winter air, and static etc. And when I go to slide the doubled card apart, the loose one gets away from me entirely, skates off the table edge on a draft I don’t feel, and lands face-up on the floor by the dresser. By Effie’s dresser, where I’ve arranged a lot of her things to stand watch.

It’s the Queen of Pentacles.

The card I have privately called the Effie card since the first week I lived here, the practical queen, the keeper of the hearth and the land, the woman who tends what’s hers, it’s face-up on the floor of Effie’s sitting room, in front of her dresser, having jumped the coffee table to get there.

Neither of us moves for a second.

“The draft,” I try to explain. “The window’s got a gap, the heat off the stove makes a current, cards are light⁠—”

“Aye,” Alasdair says in a wry tone. “The draft.”

He gets up. He picks up the card with both hands and looks at it a long moment, and then he stands it upright on the dresser shelf, leaned against a ceramic figure of a duck playing bagpipes, facing the room.

“She wants to see the tree,” he says. “Just her way of letting us know.”

So the Queen stays on the dresser, looking at the tree, and I deal the third card—the Nine of Cups, the wish card, of course it is, the deck is clearly showing off now—and we finish the reading, which says, in summary, that the visit will be happy, that the year ahead is gold, and that somebody here is getting everything he wished for, which makes him insufferable for the rest of the evening because of course this ends in me giving him a blowjob.

Later, after banking the stove while he locks up—he locks up now, the man checks the doors and windows like he’s paranoid and it never stops being ironic—I stand a moment outside our bedroom, under a certain spot. Just above, under floorboards in Effie’s closet turned binding workshop, in a dead witch’s box, there’s a piece of horse hide that lies warm in the dark. I checked it once, alone, lifted the lid and found it exactly as I’d left it, warm as a sleeping animal, and I understood standing there that checking was the wrong relationship to have with it. It’s not a prisoner. It’s a promise and it will be fine on its own. It’s the only thing in this house with more time than we have, and it can mind itself.

What I think instead, standing there with the fire settling and the snow falling softly at the window and Alasdair’s footsteps doing their nightly human round, is the thing I’ve been arriving at all month, the thought the whole year has been walking me toward.

We loved each other before the binding. I know that now. It’s kind of fucked up, considering the circumstances, but it’s true. But neither of us could have sworn to it, not with the glamour in the air and the pull in the water and the monster at the wheel half the time. And a love you can’t swear to isn’t love yet…it’s hope. Hope under threat, hope holding its breath, hope with salt on the windowsills. That’s what we had, as summer bled into autumn: two people hoping in the haunted dark, with no way of knowing what feelings were true.

And then the horse went under, and the threat went with it, and what was left standing in my kitchen was just hope. Plain hope, with cold feet and a heartbeat.

Hope, with the threat gone, turns out to be another word for a life.

Alasdair comes back in, rubbing his hands, declaring the night “bitter as a bailiff,” and finds me standing outside the bedroom doing nothing.

“What is it, foxglove?”

“Nothing. Just counting my luck.”

“Aye?” He gathers me in, warm right through, smelling of woodsmoke and the cold outside air. “And how’s it tallying?”

“Rich,” I tell him as I hold him back. “Embarrassingly rich.”

Epilogue

ALASDAIR

Twenty years later

The body keeps a tally, and I’ve learned to read it the way I once read water.

I’m sixty, or thereabouts—we settled on a birthday years back the third of October, the binding’s day. I was nearly forty when I first stopped being a man and died, so we just ignored the centuries after that, and picked up on the third.

So, therefore, I’m sixty. The black’s gone silver at the temples and is losing the war everywhere else, there’s a knee that moans in wet weather, and my eyes want the cheaters now for the small print, which Iris finds so funny she’s hidden three pairs around the cottage like Easter eggs, so there’s always a set within reach of my outrage.

And I am, she informs me regularly, holding up indecently well. “It’s not fair,” she says, watching me split wood that morning with my sleeves up. “You’re going to be one of those silver-fox pensioners. Women at the heritage site ask about you.”

I tell her centuries of practice ought to count for something, but the truth is simpler: the body’s sixty, but I’ve only been using it twenty years. Everything on me is original parts, low mileage. The first half of my life put no wear on the machine at all.

Twenty years mortal. Twenty Christmases, twenty springs, that first road trip to Skye and the eleven road trips after, Edinburgh and the ponies and one regrettable ferry to Orkney that Iris has never let me live down—no boats, she said, she was clear about the boats—and her hair’s gone its own handsome grey now, and her hands hurt more than she admits in the cold months, and I rub them by the stove on the bad nights and feel the years in them and would not trade a single bloody one. That’s the thing I could never have explained to the creature I was. It hoarded time like a dragon on gold and never once spent any.

I’m spending mine. It turns out that’s what it’s for.

The loch lies grey and well-behaved below the window, and has for twenty years. Just water, disturbed only by the storms that blow in from the northwest and lash the shore with great drama. The castle stands across the bay with its new gravel car park and its wee laminated guides—the trust took it in the end, all but the tower, which is structurally unsound, per the engineer’s report I paid a good deal to have say so—and five pounds fifty buys you the great hall and the chapel and a recording of local legends narrated, the guide pamphlet says, by a member of the MacCoinnich family.

And this morning, up the path from the road with a rucksack the size of a sheep and boots that have seen three continents, comes a Galloway woman to the cottage door.

I’d know the walk anywhere. I watched it for sixty years on Effie and twenty on Iris and there it is again, third generation I’ve witnessed of it, that particular Galloway way of arriving at this shore like the shore had better explain itself.

Rosey.

She was six when I first met her, a small, loud dignitary who interviewed me about horses down a telephone and approved me on the strength of my answers. She’s twenty-six now, finished with her degree, “feral,” per her mother, which Maddie says into the phone the way other women say terminal. Six months backpacking with no fixed itinerary and no fixed plans after, and she’s washed up here for a fortnight on her way to wherever’s next. She comes up the path dressed entirely in black, black coat to her ankles, black boots, silver rings on every finger, a pentacle at her throat, eyes done dark as a selkie’s, hanging off her shoulder a camera older than her mother.

Iris takes one look at her niece and falls in love on the spot.

“Maddie said you’d gone goth,” she exclaims, hauling the girl into the kind of hug that rearranges a spine. “She said it like it was a disease. ‘She’s gone goth, Iris, she has a tarot deck, talk to her.’”

“She wants you to fix me,” Rosey says dryly.

“Oh, I’m going to make it so much worse. Come in, come in. Alasdair, look at her, she’s perfect.”

She is, rather. She’s got the Galloway look under the eyeliner, the bones of it, the watchfulness, and over the first pot of tea she lays her tarot deck on our kitchen table next to Iris’s like a young gun laying her pistol beside the marshal’s, and the two of them are off, trading spreads and significators, and I sit by the stove with my whisky listening to a witch and her apprentice, or possibly two witches, two cunning folk, the line not so much continuing as compounding. And I hear Maddie’s despairing voice in my mind, and I think, Ah, Maddie. You sent her to the one house in the world where this was always going to catch. Didn’t you know what you were doing?

She fits the place eerily. That’s the word, eerie, and I’m a fair judge of it. She’s up before us walking the tideline. She finds Iris’s old pressing frames in the studio and asks if she can use them. She photographs everything, from the film camera—always the film. “Digital lies,” she says, “film has to be somewhere, it has to have actually happened.”

On the fourth evening she asks about the loch.

“It’s strange here,” she notes, not troubled, just noting it, the way her aunt notes things. “Good strange. The water feels like it’s…” she hunts for it, “…paying attention.”

Iris’s eyes come to mine over the teapot, just briefly. Twenty years and we’ve a whole language for these looks. This one says steady, hold steady.

“It’s an old loch,” Iris says. “And this is a very old land. Old things hold an atmosphere.”

“Mm,” hums Rosey, unconvinced and unbothered, and deals another card.

The fifth day, Rosey takes the camera down to the shore for the late April light, and stays.

It’s not till the light’s nearly gone that Iris looks up from her drawing board and says, “She’s been a while.” And while there’s nothing in her voice that should cause me concern, there’s something in the air, and I find I’m already up and reaching for my coat. All these quiet years and the old sense still lives in me somewhere, in whatever room the creature used to keep, and it has just, very softly, for the first time in two decades, knocked.

We go down the path together, not hurrying, but almost.

Rosey is in the water.

Only to the ankles though, her boots on the rocks behind her, trousers rolled, standing in the shallows where the spit runs out, the camera hanging dead weight at her side. She’s staring out across the bay at nothing, absolutely still, stiller than the young ever stand, and the late light is going to pewter and rose all around her and the loch is flat as glass to the far shore.

“Rosey.” Iris’s voice. “You’ll freeze. You all right?”

She doesn’t startle. She turns, and her face is…well, it’s not frightened. It’s rather lit. Wide open under all the dark paint, the look of someone who’s been shown something.

“Yes. I think so. It was the weirdest thing.” She looks back out at the water. “There was a horse. Swimming. Right across the bay…I watched it for ages, it was huge, and then it just—” she lifts her hand, lets it fall, “—went under. It never came up. I waited and it never came up. Look, you can still see the ripples where it went.”

And you can. God help us, you can, out in the middle distance, on water with no wind to stir it, a wide ring spreading slow and patient from a center where nothing now is, the way water folds over something that has gone down deliberately.

And hopefully means to stay down.

Iris’s hand finds mine with cold fingers. The grip says everything, her face says nothing at all.

“A sea lion, most likely,” Iris says, in the mild voice she keeps for police and tourists. “Big bulls this time of year. They come into the bay after the salmon farms, the mussel beds. They’ll look enormous in low light. Come on out of that water, you mad child, your mother will have me extradited. There’s tea on, and Alasdair’s whisky, and you can show us the photos.”

“I got two frames,” Rosey says, wading toward us, her eyes still going back over her shoulder. “At least I think I did. The light was—” and then she’s up on the rocks pulling her boots on and talking shutter speeds. She’s twenty-six and luminous and entirely unaware of what she is, which is a Galloway woman, ankle-deep in this particular water, who looked at something older than God and felt it look back.

They start up the path ahead of me, dark head and silver, Iris’s arm through her niece’s, their voices mingling. I stand a moment where the rocks meet the water and look out at the bay.

The ripples have nearly closed. The water lies down, smooths, goes back to keeping its own counsel, the way I remember it doing from the inside. Somewhere below the painted pewter and the rose, in the cold dark fathoms where the bottom’s never been found, something is settling itself into the deep with its long patience, the way you settle into bed for sleep.

So. The loch’s let a room again.

I should feel dread, I suppose. There’s a version of me that would have, the new man, twenty years ago, frightened of every shadow in the water. But I find what comes up in me instead, standing here in the last of the light, is something closer to recognition. The villagers have always said this loch has a tenant or two. It had one for hundreds of years, and the women of one stubborn family stood on this shore and kept the ledger and salted the sills.

And in the end one of them did what the others could not, which was walk into the fog with an iron knife and ask the question I was finally ready to hear. The loch is patient, but so, it turns out, are the Galloways. There’s a fresh one up the path right now that asked the water for its picture.

Whatever’s down there now, it’s young at this. It’ll learn the shape of the bay, the old rules, the smell of rowan and iron coming off a certain cottage. And someday—not soon, these things move at the speed of centuries, the speed that rocks evolve at—it’ll come to the edge of itself and look up the slope at a lit window, the way I once did.

Aye, well, let it look. The house it’ll find has a witch in it, and the witch has an heir, and the heir will be back, one day.

“Alasdair!” Iris, from up the path, the whisky-and-tea voice. “It’s getting dark, mo ghràdh!”

“Coming,” I call, and I mean it the way I’ve meant everything for twenty years.

I give the loch one last look over my shoulder, old neighbor to new, and then I turn my back on the water and climb the path home to the women and the fire and the rest of my one good life.

THE END

If you’re looking for more spooky and/or gothic and horror romance reads from yours truly with the same vibes as Bonetide, might I suggest:

Grave Matter (Dark academia gothic horror romance psych thriller)

Death Valley (Dark cowboy horror romance)

Hollow & Legend (Gothic horror romance MMF Sleepy Hollow retelling duet)

Nocturne (Serial killer noir with a vampire twist, inspired by the Black Dahlia murder)

Afterword

This book is very, very important to me but it’s for reasons I can’t really distill. Part of it has to do with the fact that it just came to me out of the blue one day, like being hit by a bolt of lightning. The catalyst? I saw the book cover posted by Fable and Ink on Threads, an account I hadn’t even followed before, and I just…knew. I had to have it, it had to be a book, and it had to be my next book (sorry to the other book I was working on at the time).

And while I was trying to dream up what story would fit the cover (this is not usually how I work, mind you, I’m usually inspired by a whole whack of things from songs to movies and TV shows to other books to articles I read, even from dreams, but I’ve never been inspired by a cover) I recalled a book I had started and abandoned many years ago that could fit it with some tweaking.

So tweak I did. And the story just flew out of me and I finished it in three weeks (which for me is not abnormal, by the way----when I first started publishing in 2011, I was averaging 6-8 releases a year because that’s just how I roll with my hyperfocus ADHD, and also not having kids, having a husband that helps out, etc). Also it helped that during those three weeks I was off social media entirely.

Anyway, the book was done and I was so excited for this book to be a surprise release! I was just going to drop it one day with nary a cover reveal or a blurb or any arcs and say “Surprise, here you go!”

But alas, my contractual obligations to my publishers put a stop to that just when I was about to hit publish. And things got kind of complicated and some hard life choices had to be made but in the end, all I could think about was: do not let go of this book. Self publish this book and do it now. Do not let anyone take it. Do not let it go.

So I fought tooth and nail for Bonetide and it was an extremely stressful June (which would have been my surprise release month). But I stuck to my gut instinct which was to not let it go.

And here it is. I didn’t let go. I don’t know why I felt so compelled to fight for this book, it’s not like it’s some life-changing stuff in these pages (I mean, a MORSE??), it’s not like I felt like this book itself would change my life. It’s just that deep down I knew it had to come out on my terms (that’s not to say it wouldn’t have been the same book with the publishers, my lovely editor adored this book so much and wouldn’t have changed a thing). Hell, maybe it’s just that it had been a very long time since I felt that lightning in a bottle feeling during writing, especially when all of 2026 was nearly all one big frustrating writer’s block, and I was just so happy to find an outlet in my life during a very stressful time. So this book is a product of finding joy, really.

And it’s mine.

Acknowledgments

There are a lot of people I need to thank with this book, if not for their actual helping hand with it, then for lending me an ear while I grappled with the book’s murky outcome. For those listening to me whine and giving me some great advice whilst also supporting me: Kathleen Tucker, Claire Contreras, AJ Vrana, Julie Johnson, Demi Winters, Jen DeLuca, Sarah Hawley, Kylie Main, Charissa Weaks, Alicia MB, SSB, Sandra Cortez, Becca Syme, and my agent Taylor Haggerty. Also, Lynette, Ziggy Astrology and Christina Rooney for your perception and insight.

And for their invaluable help with the book itself: Laura Helseth, Cydney Humphrey, Lex Marquez, Lauren Cox, Jess Carbajal, Fable & Ink, Milk & Cookies (Ann & Brianna), and all the talented artists that have brought Iris and Alasdair to life.

And biggest shoutout ever to my husband Scott (and pup Perry) for really being put through the wringer with this one! I know it was rough, but I think it will be worth it in the end. Fortune favors the bold!

Also by karina halle

DARK FANTASY, GOTHIC & HORROR ROMANCE

Black Sunshine (Dark Eyes Duet #1)

The Blood is Love (Dark Eyes Duet #2)

Nightwolf

Blood Orange (The Dracula Duet #1)

Black Rose (The Dracula Duet #2)

A Ship of Bones and Teeth (Nightwind #1)

Ocean of Sin and Starlight (Nightwind #2)

Hollow (A Gothic Shade of Romance #1)

Legend (A Gothic Shade of Romance #2)

Grave Matter

Death Valley

Nocturne

Realm of Thieves

Bonetide

River of Shadows (Underworld Gods #1)

Crown of Crimson (Underworld Gods #2)

City of Darkness (Underworld Gods #3)

Goddess of Light (Underworld Gods #4)

Darkhouse (EIT #1)

Red Fox (EIT #2)

The Benson (EIT #2.5)

Dead Sky Morning (EIT #3)

Lying Season (EIT #4)

On Demon Wings (EIT #5)

Old Blood (EIT #5.5)

The Dex-Files (EIT #5.7)

Into the Hollow (EIT #6)

And With Madness Comes the Light (EIT #6.5)

Come Alive (EIT #7)

Ashes to Ashes (EIT #8)

Dust to Dust (EIT #9)

Ghosted (EIT #9.5)

Came Back Haunted (EIT #10)

The Devil’s Metal (The Devil’s Duology #1)

The Devil’s Reprise (The Devil’s Duology #2)

Veiled (Ada Palomino #1)

Song For the Dead (Ada Palomino #2)

Demon Dust (2026)

CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE

Love, in English/Love, in Spanish

Where Sea Meets Sky

Racing the Sun

The Pact

The Offer

The Play

Winter Wishes

The Lie

The Debt

Smut

Heat Wave

Before I Ever Met You

After All

Rocked Up

Wild Card

Maverick

Hot Shot

Bad at Love

The Swedish Prince

The Wild Heir

A Nordic King

The Royal Rogue

Nothing Personal

My Life in Shambles

The Royal Rogue

The Forbidden Man

The One That Got Away

Lovewrecked

One Hot Italian Summer

All the Love in the World (Anthology)

The Royals Next Door

The Royals Upstairs

ROMANTIC SUSPENSE

Sins and Needles (The Artists Trilogy #1)

On Every Street (An Artists Trilogy Novella #0.5)

Shooting Scars (The Artists Trilogy #2)

Bold Tricks (The Artists Trilogy #3)

Dirty Angels (Dirty Angels #1)

Dirty Deeds (Dirty Angels #2)

Dirty Promises (Dirty Angels #3)

Black Hearts (Sins Duet #1)

Dirty Souls (Sins Duet #2)

Discretion (Dumonts #1)

Disarm (Dumonts #2)

Disavow (Dumonts #3)

Vanguard

About the Author

Karina Halle is a screenwriter, a former music & travel journalist, and the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author of River of Shadows, The Royals Next Door, and Black Sunshine, as well as 80 other wild and romantic reads, ranging from light & sexy rom coms to horror/paranormal romance and dark fantasy. Needless to say, whatever genre you’re into, she has probably written a romance for it.

When she’s not traveling, she, her husband Scott, and their pup Perry, split their time between a possibly haunted 120-year-old house in Victoria, BC, their sailboat the Norfinn, and some sunny destination elsewhere in the world. For more information, visit www.authorkarinahalle.com

Find her on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, BookBub, Amazon, and Tik Tok.