Claiming Her

She set down a king. “In any event, when my father died on the block, my mother died of a broken heart. Or perhaps was frightened into death by the queen’s wrath. One can hardly blame her. I was eight.”

Eight. Aodh had a sudden vision of her, her beloved parents gone, alone in the world, with a vengeful queen hovering like a wasp.

“Your turn.”

The gentle prompt jarred him, and he laid down a card without thinking.

“I’m surprised you do not know this history, Aodh,” she said quietly. “It is Rardove’s.”

“Who says I don’t know it?” A flash of lightning could be seen around the edge of the shutters, then a few seconds later, a long roll of thunder rumbled into the room.

“Then if you know it, you must know I cannot turn to you. Don’t you see?”

He wiped his hand along his jaw. “The queen killed your father, so you will be loyal to her. I confess to being confused.”

She shook her head impatiently. “The queen was good to me, Aodh. Kind to me, despite what my parents had done.”

He plucked a card out of the fanned assemblage in his hands and laid it on the table. “And what had they done, lass? In truth, what had they done?”

Her jaw dropped at this assessment in the form of a query, and she stared at him, her cards on the table, her shields dropped, her defenses gone down like a drawbridge hitting the earth, and he simply strolled into her heart, through the pathway of her eyes.

Hurt. Scared. Betrayed. Abandoned.

All the things one was wont to feel after the careless, selfish choices made by others smashed through your heart like a cannonball.

Upon a time, such feelings had lurked within him too. They did not now—he’d gone as cold as the emptiness scalding his heart. But dimly, he recalled them. The horror, the fear. The screams. The endless, aching chasm of loneliness and fear, and knowing you were alone in it, forever alone.

Then, quick as a flash, it was gone, and she was Katarina the Bold again, Katarina the Fierce, sitting tall in her chair and regarding him with an expression pinned at the intersection of affection and desire and anger, which was debilitating in and of itself, to know affection lurked there too, tangled with desire.

The anger bothered him not at all. Katarina was fire. Fire burned.

But she could be won. She must be won.

For her sake, as much as his.

“The queen allowed me Rardove,” she went on softly, perhaps not realizing he’d just seen into her soul. “When my father had been found guilty of treason, and my mother was dead. Allowed it when I’m quite sure other voices spoke against it.”

Oh, aye, they had, he thought grimly. Aodh’s father’s had been the loudest, demanding the return of his ancestral lands. The queen had not listened, as was ever her wont when it came to Ireland. And so the rebellions followed not six months later, turning parts of Ireland—and all of Aodh’s heart—into a cold, bloody battlefield.

“The queen took me in wardship, brought me in from the wilds, to England—”

“But you did not want to be brought in, did you?”

“—and finally sent me back, under my step-brother’s care. And when he died, she allowed me—me, Aodh, a woman alone—to rule her marchlands. She even sent me my father’s steward, Walter, to assist.”

“For that alone you should turn on her,” he said grimly.

She smiled a little. The cards were entirely forgotten now, scattered across the candlelit table, interspersed with gold coins. “You may laugh, Aodh, but when I was younger, Walter was a mighty presence. He wrought precisely what he was intended to. I became a box, he my lock.”

“And what was he intended to lock up?”

She hesitated. “I never did a Humphrey again.”

He laughed. “And the Humphreys of the world are the worse off for it, lass.” But he was pleased. And realized Walter had some purpose in life after all.

“Oh, he brought me alternatives, of course.”

“What alternatives?” Aodh said, stiffening.