Read Chapter 20: A Fiery Argument

The storm had been building all day, a low pressure system pressing down on the glen, and Eilidh felt it in her bones as she climbed the main staircase toward Hamish’s study. The photograph was tucked inside her jacket pocket, the family bible’s revelation burning in her mind like a brand. She had rehearsed this conversation a hundred times since Morag had slipped her the image, but now that the moment had come, her words scattered like startled birds.

She found him at his desk, head bent over estate accounts, his reading glasses perched low on his nose. The fire had burned low in the grate, casting long shadows across the walls lined with MacKinnon ancestors—all men, she realized now, all crowned with the same stubborn jaw, the same wary eyes. Finella’s absence from that gallery was a wound she could finally name.

“Hamish.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt.

He looked up, and something in his expression shifted when he saw her face. He removed his glasses slowly, like a man preparing for bad news. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I have,” she said, crossing the room to stand before his desk. “Her name was Finella. And she’s been erased from this castle’s history so completely that no one even remembers her portrait hung on that wall.”

Hamish’s jaw tightened. “Not this again.”

“There’s no ‘again.’ I haven’t told you everything.” She pulled the photograph from her jacket and laid it on the desk between them, face up. The woman in the image stared out at them both—Eilidh’s own cheekbones, her own sharp gaze, her own unruly hair pinned back in a style a century and a half out of fashion.

Hamish looked at it, then at her, then back at the photograph. His hand hovered over it but did not touch it, as if the paper itself might burn him.

“That’s not possible,” he said quietly.

“It’s her. Finella, Lady Kintail.” Eilidh pressed her palm flat against the desk. “Born 1820. Died in an asylum in 1845, at twenty-five years old. Her name has been scratched out of the family bible. Her portrait was removed and whitewashed over. Her diary—” She stopped, realizing she had said too much.

Hamish’s eyes snapped up. “Her *diary*?”

Eilidh hesitated. The silver box was still hidden in her room, wrapped in oilcloth beneath the loose floorboard she’d discovered in the corner. She had meant to reveal it at the right moment, but now the secret sat between them like a wall.

“I found it,” she said, her voice dipping lower. “In the pit where I fell. She wrote everything down—how her cousin Alasdair spread rumors about her mind, how she feared her brother would destroy every proof of her inheritance. She was the rightful Lady Kintail, Hamish. She was *erased*.”

“You’ve been reading some dead woman’s ravings and you think that makes you an authority on my family?” Hamish stood, pushing his chair back with enough force that it scraped against the flagstones. “You think you can come into my home, dig through my history, and tell me that everything I was raised to believe is a lie?”

“I’m not telling you it’s a lie. The records are telling you. The photographs are telling you. *She* is telling you.” Eilidh gestured at the image of Finella, who stared up from the desk with Eilidh’s own determined expression. “Look at her, Hamish. She could be my sister. My mother. *Me.* Does that mean nothing to you?”

“It means someone in your family had a passing resemblance to someone in mine,” he said coldly. “It happens. Bloodlines echo.”

“This is more than a passing resemblance, and you know it.” Eilidh’s voice rose, and she hated how raw it sounded, how close to breaking. “Morag knew. She gave me this photograph knowing exactly what it would mean. Your own aunt knew, and she kept it secret for decades.”

At the mention of Morag, something flickered in Hamish’s eyes—hurt, or betrayal, or both. “Morag is an old woman with old grievances. She never forgave my father for selling the eastern farmland. She would say anything to tarnish his memory.”

“His memory doesn’t need tarnishing—it needs examining.” Eilidh stepped closer, close enough that she could see the pulse beating at his throat. “Your father knew about the sealed chamber. He had it bricked up himself. Why would he do that unless he had something to hide?”

“He was protecting the castle!” Hamish’s voice cracked through the room like thunder. “Protecting our legacy from vultures and fortune hunters who would pick apart its bones for a story. The walls of Kintail have stood for six centuries. Do you think I’m going to let you tear them down because of some hysterical woman’s diary and a faded photograph?”

The word hit her like a physical blow. *Hysterical.* The same word that had been used to condemn Finella. The same weapon wielded by the men who had stripped her of her inheritance and locked her away.

“You sound just like them,” Eilidh whispered. “The people who put her in that asylum. The people who scratched her name from the records. You’re still doing it—still erasing her, one dismissal at a time.”

Hamish’s face went pale, then flushed with anger. He rounded the desk, stopping barely a foot from her, his breath coming hard and fast. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. No idea what it costs to carry a name like mine, to hold a place like this together when everything is crumbling around you.”

“Then tell me,” she said, and her voice broke on the words. “Tell me what you’re so afraid of.”

For a long, suspended moment, neither of them moved. The fire crackled. The wind moaned against the windows. And Eilidh saw something in Hamish’s eyes that she had never seen before—not anger, not pride, but raw, unguarded fear. He looked at her the way a man looks at a cliff edge, knowing he could fall.

His hand came up, cupping her jaw with a gentleness that belied the violence of their argument. His thumb traced her cheekbone, and she felt herself lean into the touch, felt the heat of him through the cold air between them. His gaze dropped to her lips, and her heart seized in her chest.

“You’re dangerous,” he breathed. “You’ve been dangerous since the moment you walked into my castle with your ladder and your questions and your refusal to let the past stay buried.”

“Buried is not the same as dead,” she whispered.

He pulled her closer—or she pulled him, she couldn’t tell—and for one electric heartbeat, she felt the ghost of a kiss, the brush of his breath against her mouth, the tremor running through his hands.

Then he let go.

He stepped back as if burned, his face closing over like ice forming on a loch. “You’re dangerous to my family.”

He walked out without looking back. The door slammed behind him, rattling the frames of the ancestors who had watched the whole scene with their painted, silent eyes.

Eilidh stood alone in the study, the photograph still face-up on the desk, Finella’s gaze fixed on her with something that felt almost like understanding. The tears came then—hot and sudden and unwanted, spilling down her cheeks as she sank into Hamish’s chair, into the lingering warmth of him, and let out a sob she had been holding since she first read Finella’s final entry.

She had come to Kintail to restore its walls. Instead, she had unearthed its ghosts. And now the man who held the keys had told her to go.

Her hand drifted to her jacket pocket, finding the hard edge of her father’s watch. The inscription from Murdo Grant seemed to pulse against her fingers: *For her who will finish what I began.*

Finish what he began. But how could she finish anything when the truth was still buried, when Hamish had just thrown her away like the history she was trying to save?

Eilidh pressed the watch to her lips and made a decision. She would not leave. Not yet. Not while there were still stones left unturned, still letters hidden, still a woman whose name deserved to be spoken aloud in the halls that had once been hers.

Even if it cost her everything.