Read Chapter 3: Father's Watch

The gatehouse room smelled of damp stone and old woodsmoke, even though the fire had been laid but not lit. Eilidh dropped her duffel on the narrow bed and took stock. Four walls, one window looking out over the inner courtyard, a washstand that listed slightly to the left, and a ceiling that had clearly lost a battle with water at some point in the last century. It was the kind of accommodation her colleagues would have laughed at, but it was hers for six months, and that was all that mattered.

She unzipped the duffel and began to unpack with the efficiency of a woman who had lived out of suitcases for the better part of a decade. Jeans rolled tight, thermal layers folded flat, her steel-toed boots set by the door for morning. Work clothes went in the bottom drawer of the oak dresser, which protested with a groan that suggested it hadn't been opened since the last restoration attempt. She gave it a firm shove and it settled.

At the bottom of the bag, wrapped in a soft flannel shirt she'd forgotten she'd packed, her fingers closed around something hard and cold. She knew what it was before she pulled it out. The weight was unmistakable.

Her father's watch.

It was a sturdy thing, a 1970s Omega with a scratched crystal and a band worn smooth from decades of wear. He'd worn it on every job site, right up until the day he'd climbed down from a scaffolding on a wet Glasgow morning and collapsed on the pavement with a heart attack at fifty-nine. The watch had stopped at 10:47, and the man who'd sold it to him had refused to wind it again. *Let it rest*, the jeweller had said, as if the watch itself were mourning.

Eilidh had kept it in a drawer for two years. She couldn't bear to wear it, couldn't bear the weight of it against her wrist, the way the metal warmed to her skin and reminded her of a hand that was no longer there. But she'd brought it with her here, to this godforsaken castle at the edge of the world, and she wasn't entirely sure why.

She stood in the middle of the room, holding the watch in her palm. The fire was still unlit, and the cold seeped through the walls, but she didn't notice. She was thinking about her father's hands, broad and scarred, pointing at a set of blueprints spread across their kitchen table. *The walls are the bones of the building, Eilidh. You can't just patch them up. You have to understand what they're holding together.*

He'd taught her everything. How to read a mortar joint, how to tell a load-bearing wall from a decorative one, how to listen to a building the way other people listened to music. *Every creak is a story*, he used to say. *Every crack is a confession.*

She set the watch on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. It looked small and lost against the dark stone, but it was there. A marker. A promise. *I'm still working, Da. Still telling the stories.*

She turned away and busied herself with the rest of her unpacking, but her eyes kept drifting back to the mantel. The watch's face caught the weak light from the window, and for a moment she could almost see her father's reflection in the glass, squinting at a wall with a level in his hand.

The thought made her smile, and then it made her chest ache, and she forced herself to focus on the task at hand. She'd come here to do a job, not to wallow. Hamish MacKinnon had made it clear enough that he didn't want her here, and she wasn't about to give him any excuse to send her packing.

She pulled out her notebook and flipped to the page where she'd sketched the anomaly in the east wing. It wasn't a subtle thing—a bulge in the wall that suggested something was behind it, something that didn't match the original eighteenth-century construction. It could be a chimney breast that had been sealed off, a passage, even an old stairwell. Her training said *investigate*; Hamish's glare said *stay the hell away*.

*Structura*, he'd started to say, and then he'd stopped himself, as if the word itself was a door he didn't want to open. She'd never heard a laird talk about his own castle like that, as if the building were a secret he was determined to keep.

She sat on the edge of the bed and began to sketch the wall again, adding notes in the margins. The bulge was roughly three feet wide, six feet tall, centered low on the wall, which suggested a passageway rather than a window. The original blueprints showed nothing there, but blueprints from the eighteenth century were notoriously unreliable, often drawn after the fact or modified by whoever happened to own the property at the time.

She'd need to get into the archives, see if there were any records from the original construction. The castle had been built by Hamish's ancestors, the MacKinnons had held it for over three centuries, and if anything had been added later, there would be a record of it somewhere.

She checked her watch—her own, a battered G-Shock she'd worn since University—and saw it was nearly seven. The light outside the window had faded to a deep, bruised purple, and the wind had picked up again, rattling the loose pane in its frame.

She stood and crossed to the window, looking out over the courtyard. The castle loomed against the sky, dark and massive, its towers silhouetted against the last hint of light on the horizon. Somewhere in there, Hamish MacKinnon was presumably eating his dinner in a cold, drafty hall, resenting her existence.

She should eat too. She'd brought supplies from Inverness, enough tinned soup and packets of oatcakes to survive the apocalypse, let alone a six-month restoration. She moved to the dresser and pulled out her camp stove, setting it up on the washstand with practiced ease.

The soup was heating when she heard it.

At first she thought it was the wind. The castle made all kinds of noises, she'd learned that much in her first twenty-four hours—groans and creaks and the occasional thud of something falling in a distant room. But this was different.

It was a scratching. Rhythmic. Deliberate.

She turned off the stove and stood still, holding her breath.

The sound continued. It seemed to come from the wall behind the fireplace, the east-facing wall of the gatehouse. Scritch, scritch, scritch—pause—scritch, scritch, scritch.

It wasn't the scrape of a branch against stone, and it wasn't the skitter of mice. It was too methodical for that. Too regular.

She crossed to the wall and pressed her palm against the cold plaster. The scratching stopped. The silence rang in her ears.

She waited. One second. Five. Ten. The soup bubbled on the stove, forgotten. The wind howled across the moors and battered the window, but inside the gatehouse, everything was still.

Then the scratching started again, and this time it was louder. Closer. As if whatever was making it had moved, had sensed her attention and was answering it.

She pulled her hand away and stepped back. The wall in front of her wasn't the same wall she'd examined in the east wing—that was in the main building, a hundred yards away. But the gatehouse was attached to the keep's eastern side. The walls shared a foundation.

"Right," she said aloud, the word coming out steadier than she felt. "We're going to have words about this."

The scratching stopped again. She swore she could feel something on the other side of the plaster, a presence that was listening, waiting for her to move.

She didn't move. She stood there for a long moment, her breath fogging in the cold air, the gold watch gleaming on the mantel behind her like a small, patient eye.

Then she turned, walked to her duffel, and pulled out her hammer. She didn't know what she was planning to do with it, but the weight in her hand was comforting. Something solid. Something her father would have understood.

She looked back at the wall.

The scratching had resumed, fainter now but still steady, like a heartbeat. Like a message in a language she hadn't yet learned to read.

She thought of Hamish MacKinnon's face when he'd told her to ignore the bulge in the east wing. The set of his jaw. The way his hands had tightened at his sides.

*What are you hiding?*

The wall didn't answer. But the scratching kept time, rhythmic as a pulse, and Eilidh Grant stood alone in the darkening room, a hammer in one hand and the weight of a hundred questions in her chest, and knew that she had just heard the first word of a story that someone had tried very hard to bury.