Page 109 of The Splendor of Fire
The words would cost him, and he blinked against the tears forming in his eyes. “I think you’re right. This won’t work. We want different things. We need different things. It’s time to put away what we had.”
Hurt washed over her features but she kissed his cheek. He held her close and looked into her eyes one last time. “Promise me, Moira. Don’t risk your life.”
Wiping away her tears, she nodded. Something swam in her eyes.
“What is it?”
It’s truly over?
He nodded and looked away, unable to say the words out loud.
Léo heldonto his composure as the door to Moira’s chamber clicked shut, but the sound of it echoed in his ears, filling him with a sense of loss. They were done. It was over. Legs heavy, he climbed the stairs tothe garret and pushed the door open. Picking up the candle on the table, he crouched beside the hearth and lit it within the dimming embers.
Fatigue weighed on his body and heart as he went through the motions of preparing for bed. All he wanted to do was sleep. To get through the next four days and the uprising. He needed his son. He needed France. He needed to get out of here.
Anger and grief wound him into knots, and he threw his estoc across the room. It collided with the wall and a shower of moldering plaster followed it to the floor. Ripping the pillow off the bed, he screamed into it, releasing his grief and rage. He’d wanted to save his little bird, but instead she’d mounted upon her wings and flown away from him, leaving him all alone.
Throwing the pillow at the broken plaster, he released a growl and ran his hands over his face, helpless to stop the tears of grief that formed in his eyes.
Sleep. He needed sleep. Unsure what to do next, he collapsed on the bed. Something crinkled beneath his cheek. Wiping his eyes, he noticed crushed Michaelmas daisies and a folded square of paper half-tucked beneath the folds of his mother’s ivory quilt, almost invisible to the naked eye. He turned the square note over in his hands and recognized Moira’s handwriting.Chief Léonid Cormac MacKinnon.
He crumpled the paper in his fist and moved toward the fire. Crouching beside the hearth, he blew into the embers and stacked a new brick of peat inside. When it sprang to life, he chucked the paper into it. It hit the stone and bounced across the room.
Read it.
The voice he’d come to depend on in prison suddenly made itself known in his heart.
“She doesn’t want me, Lord.”
Read it.
“She said it is for the best if I don’t.”
Read it.
“She’s leaving me. Just like Maman. Just like Théa.”
Read it, Léo.
Growling in frustration, he got to his feet and walked to the side of his bed. Picking up the note, he smoothed the crumples out of it andstared at his name and title for long minutes, moving it around and around in his fingers until the urge to read it overcame his weariness. Unfolding it, he looked at the feral slant of her handwriting and began to read.
Her story unfurled before him, her earliest memory, the dolphin, the raised voices, the fall into the water. Pictures of the small four-year-old girl being sucked through the waves, by the grace of God saved by driftwood, colliding with the boat of Father Allen.
Léo froze. She called him Father, not Da. Father. For Father Allen.The first day in prison crystallized in his fevered memory.‘Came down ill after a spell in the sea when she weren’t but four years old. Took her voice away.’She knew he wasn’t her natural father.
He got to his feet, knowledge crashing over him.
She could remember the day she fell in the water, could remember her Christian name, and that she’d had a family, but didn’t know anything else. But he did.
The argument. On Staffa.Léo remembered the story of Hector’s lost sister. A story Hector had drunkenly shared after a particularly brutal skirmish with the English.Hector and Lachlan had sailed to Staffa to try and steal some MacKinnon treasure and discovered a stowaway onboard. Hector wanted to turn around and go home at once, already overcome by guilt at the thought of stealing. Lachlan had accused him of using their sister as an excuse and called him a bairn. Hector jumped on his brother, four years younger, but already bigger than he. They fought—until Hector saw their sister go under the water. They went in after her and nearly drowned themselves.
Things fell rapidly into place. The spirals of her hair…Hector’s curls, and Lachlan’s coloring and refined features. The aqua eyes that the brothers, and their sister, shared. Her height—all of them six feet tall or taller. Their expressions, their battle movement, the high angles of their faces that made Hector look like a sinister, otherworldly monster, and made her a stunning, otherworldly beauty.
Their care of others, the heart they shared for the team, and their selflessness. When he’d thought in his prison cell they’d met earlier in his life, it was Hector and Lachlan his mind recognized.
The night at the clearing, when she’d said in the heat of her anger…stop calling me Moira. She’d been ready to tell him but hadn’t when he botched giving her the message from her father.
Reading her closing words of love, Léo finally understood what she was asking of him. She needed to be herself. It was woven into the very fabric of the soul God gave her, since she was four years old and stowed away on her brother’s skiff, wanting to be a part of their mission. She was asking him to accept her as the woman God made her to be, and to keep her safe.
