Read Chapter 20: The Price of Help

The morning light through Duncan’s window was thin and grey, the colour of faded bandages. Iona sat on the edge of his bed, pressing two fingers to the pulse at his wrist. Steady. Strong. The tremor that had wracked his body during the full moon had faded to a fine, almost imperceptible shiver in his hands.

“You’re healing faster than any human I’ve treated,” she said, more to herself than to him.

Duncan gave a weak laugh from the pillow. “Comes with the territory. Don’t tell anyone I said so, but it helps having a proper vet around. The last time I was this bad, Lachlan tried to stitch me with fishing line.”

“The locket,” she said, touching the cold metal against her collarbone beneath her shirt. It had burned her chest when she used it, a searing brand that had faded to a dull ache, but the wound was gone now. The skin beneath was unmarked. That worried her more than the burn itself.

“You used it on me.” Duncan’s voice was quiet. “I remember. The pain stopped—like something had a hand on my shoulder. I don’t know what you did, but thank you.”

Iona nodded, turning the locket over in her palm. The silver was warm now, almost alive against her skin. In the weak light she noticed something she had missed before—a hairline seam running along the side, barely visible, as if the casing had been milled in two pieces. She had examined this locket a dozen times since her mother died, traced every engraving, every curve. She had never seen that seam.

“Duncan,” she said slowly, “do you have a magnifying glass?”

He gestured toward the desk by the window. She found one wedged between a stack of veterinary journals and a half-empty bottle of whisky. Under the lens, the seam was unmistakable.

Her fingers found the edge. It didn’t give at first. She pressed harder, feeling the metal shift with a soft click that was not the clasp but something deeper, something concealed. The locket split open along the hidden seam, revealing a compartment she had never known existed.

Inside lay a tiny photograph, creased and yellowed at the edges, no bigger than her thumbnail. She lifted it out with shaking fingers.

A woman with dark hair and a familiar, stubborn set to her jaw. Her mother, younger than Iona had ever seen her, maybe twenty-two, twenty-three, laughing with her head tilted back. And beside her, an arm around her shoulders, a man with the Blackwood colouring—dark hair, sharp cheekbones, eyes that crinkled at the corners.

She did not need to ask who he was. The resemblance to Lachlan was unmistakable. But this man was older, weathered, with grey threading through his hair and deep lines around his mouth. Not Lachlan’s brother. Not Lachlan.

His father.

Iona’s hand closed around the photograph. The world tilted, briefly, like standing on the deck of a boat.

“What is it?” Duncan asked, struggling to sit up. “Iona? What did you find?”

She couldn’t answer. Her mother had never spoken of a Blackwood. Never mentioned the Highlands at all beyond a vague, dismissive “a long time ago, a different life.” She had arrived at the estate in 1980 pregnant, and left with a locket that was never hers to take.

Lachlan’s father had been alive then.

She heard footsteps in the hall a moment before the door opened. Lachlan stepped in, his face drawn with the weariness of a man who had not slept properly in days. He took in the scene in an instant—her white face, the photograph in her trembling hand, the open locket on the bed beside Duncan.

“Iona?”

She held up the photograph without speaking.

He crossed the room in three strides and took it from her fingers. His face went through a series of changes—confusion first, then recognition, then something worse, something that drained the colour from his skin.

“Where did you find this?”

“Hidden compartment. In the locket.”

He stared at the image for a long moment. The laughter in the photograph seemed obscene now, a captured joy that had curdled into something else entirely.

“That’s my father,” he said quietly. “And that’s your mother.”

“I know.”

He looked up at her, and she saw the calculation in his eyes—the same terrible arithmetic running through her own mind. The dates. The pregnancy. The stolen locket, taken because it was the only thing that could have stopped Duncan’s transformation, or because it was a reminder of something she couldn’t keep?

“Iona.” His voice cracked. “If my father—if they—” He couldn’t finish the sentence.

The word hung between them, unspoken but deafening.

*Siblings.*

He took a step back, then another, as if proximity itself had become a danger. His hands were shaking. “I didn’t know. I swear to you, I didn’t know.”

“You think I did?” She heard her own voice rising, sharp with fear and something that felt dangerously like grief.

“I think your mother came here carrying secrets, and I think she left carrying more.” He ran a hand through his hair, a gesture she had seen him make a hundred times, and now she wondered if it was a Blackwood habit, if it was in his blood, if the same blood ran in hers. “And I think the universe has a cruel sense of humour, because I have spent weeks falling in love with a woman who might be my—” He stopped, unable to say the word.

From outside, the sound of raised voices reached them through the window. Shouts, and the unmistakable ring of metal on metal. Lachlan moved to the glass, his face going hard as he looked down the long drive.

A group of villagers was marching toward the estate house. Armed with shotguns and pitchforks, torches lit against the grey afternoon, their faces set with the ugly determination of fear.

“They’re coming,” he said quietly. “They’re coming for us.”

Iona looked from the photograph in his hands to the mob on the drive, the two devastating truths of her morning colliding like storm fronts.

She had come to this village to escape a failed life, and now she stood at the centre of a war she had never asked to join—a war over blood, and secrets, and a love that might be a sin she hadn’t known she was committing.