Read Chapter 5: The Laird's Demand

The morning light was weak and grey over Castle Kintail, the kind of light that made every crack and crumbling stone look worse than it did in honest rain. Eilidh had pinned her survey drawings to the trestle table in the great hall, anchoring them against the draft with two chipped mugs and her father’s watch—she’d brought it with her, a small habit she was trying to break, and failing.

She was sketching a repair note on the south elevation when the door slammed open.

Hamish MacKinnon stood in the frame, a black oilskin coat dripping at the hem, his boots leaving dark prints on the flagstones. His jaw was set so hard she could see the muscle working beneath his beard. Behind her, the two members of her team—Callum, her assistant, and Morag, the surveyor—froze mid-task.

“I want to see your plan,” he said. Not a request. A demand.

Eilidh lowered her pencil, keeping her voice steady. “You’ve seen the plan. You attended the preliminary briefing.”

“The summary,” he said, striding toward the table. “Not the drawings. Not the detail. I want the full scope of what you intend to do to my home.” He stopped on the other side of the trestle table, a solid wall of Highland resentment, and planted both palms on the paper. “Now.”

Callum and Morag exchanged a look. Eilidh gave a small shake of her head—*stand down*—and pulled the top drawing free from beneath Hamish’s hands.

“This is the proposal for the east wing stabilisation,” she said, unrolling it. “Repointing the east-facing masonry, replacing the corroded header ties, and addressing the damp ingress along the parapet. Morag’s survey indicates the wall has moved roughly three centimetres off plumb, which is within tolerable levels if we—”

Hamish’s hand shot out. He grabbed a red marker from the cup between them and dragged it across her drawing before she could react. A thick, violent slash down the entire east wing.

“No.”

Eilidh stared at the line. Then at his face. “What are you doing?”

“Crossing out what I’ll not allow.” He made three more marks, faster now, savage streaks across the parapet, the header notes, the careful annotations in her own hand. “You will not touch the east wing. Not the stonework, not the ties, not the ingress. None of it.”

Callum shifted his weight. Morag had gone very still.

“Mr MacKinnon,” Eilidh said carefully, a cold fury building behind her ribs, “the east wing is part of the commission. It’s a listed structure and the survey indicated active deterioration. If we don’t stabilise it, the wall will come down within the decade.”

“Then let it come down.” He said it flatly, no hesitation, as if the thought gave him comfort.

The silence that followed was deep enough to hear the wind moan through the broken great-hall window behind them. Eilidh looked from the slashed drawing to his face, trying to find the logic, the reason, anything beneath the granite surface of his refusal.

“Why?” she asked. Two words, heavy.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he reached for her marker again, and she caught his wrist.

The contact was electric, unexpected. His skin was warm despite the cold, the bones beneath the cuff of his jacket thick and solid. She felt his pulse against her thumb, faster than she’d have guessed, and saw the surprise in his eyes that she would dare to touch him. Her own heart was hammering, though she refused to let it show on her face.

“You don’t get to destroy six months of work with a marker and silence,” she said, her voice low. “I have a contract. The council has a schedule. You don’t get to change it because you have a sentimental attachment to a crumbling wall.”

“Sentimental.” He laughed, a bitter, clipped sound. “You think this is sentiment.”

“Then tell me what it is.”

They stood there, her hand locked around his wrist, his fingers still clasping the red marker, the ruined drawing between them. She could smell rain on his coat, woodsmoke from somewhere, and beneath that, something clean and sharp—soap, or heather, or just him. His eyes were the grey-green of the storm-tossed corrie she’d driven past on the way in, and just as unreadable.

“The east wing was unstable long before I was born,” he said at last, very quietly. “It has been unstable for four centuries. Whatever you do to it will make it worse.”

“That’s not structurally true.”

“I don’t care about your structural truths.” He pulled his wrist free of her grip, not roughly, but with a finality that said *don’t touch me again*. “You’ll work the main block of the castle. The outer fortifications. The gatehouse, if you must. But the east wing remains exactly as it is, and if you attempt to preserve it, I will revoke your team’s access entirely.”

“You can’t revoke the commission. It’s from the estate trust.”

“The estate trust is me.” He stepped back from the table, rolling his shoulders as if shaking off her presence. “I’m the laird. The trust answers to my name. If I say your work ends, it ends.”

Eilidh’s hands were shaking, she realised, with fury and something she refused to name. She pressed her palms flat against the table, leaning in. Her face was inches from his now, the red marker’s cap still between them, and she heard her father’s voice in her head, the one that said *never back down from a man who thinks he owns the ground you stand on.*

“I didn’t drive a car into a bog in a storm, walk twenty minutes in the rain, and agree to live in a drafty gatehouse for six months just to be told I can’t do the one job that matters,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “So either you tell me what you’re really afraid of, Mr MacKinnon, or you stand aside and let me do my work.”

For a long moment, neither of them moved. She watched his throat work as he swallowed, saw the flicker of something in his eyes—not anger, not entirely. Fear, perhaps. Or memory.

Then he blinked, stepped back, and the moment shattered.

“Do what you like with the rest of it,” he said, turning toward the door. “I’ll inform the trust of your revised scope.”

He left without another word, his boots ringing on the stone, and the heavy door swung closed behind him with a sound like a verdict.

The hall was quiet. Callum exhaled a long breath. Morag clicked her pen, several times, nervously.

“Well,” Callum said. “That was pleasant.”

Eilidh didn’t answer. She was staring at the door, at the empty threshold, and something she’d caught just before he turned away. The oilskin coat had swung open as he walked, and in the inside pocket, half-hidden, she’d seen it. A small, faded photograph, creased from years of handling, its edges soft and worn. A woman’s face—she’d only caught a glimpse, oval-featured and dark-haired, in a frame from perhaps the 1950s or 60s.

Not his wife, she thought. She hadn’t seen a single trace of a woman in the castle—no clothes, no photographs, no soft edges in the austerity of his great hall.

Someone else. Someone he kept close but hidden.

She looked down at the ruined drawing beneath her hands, the red slashes bright as wounds, and felt the shape of the mystery click into place. Hamish MacKinnon wasn't just obstructionist. He was haunted. And whatever lived behind the east wall of his keep, in that Lady’s wing built for a woman who’d defied her men four hundred years ago, was somehow still alive in him.

She picked up her father’s watch from the table, held its weight in her palm, and made a decision.

“Morag,” she said quietly. “Cancel the afternoon site work.”

“Why?”

“Because I have some reading to do.” She slid the damaged drawing into her folder and looked up at the east wing’s dark, sealed flank through the window. “And some walls to understand.”