Read Chapter 3: A Mother's Locket

The cottage smelled of dust and the damp that always crept into Highland houses that had sat empty too long. Iona had swept the kitchen, aired the bedroom, and scrubbed the bathroom until her knuckles ached, but the boxes from Glasgow still sat in the corner of the sitting room like a reproach.

She hadn't opened them in three days.

The first one held her mother's books—old paperback romances with cracked spines, a dog-eared field guide to Highland wildflowers, a leather journal she'd never once seen her mother write in. Iona set the journal aside, telling herself she'd read it later, knowing she wouldn't.

The second box was heavier. She peeled back the packing tape and found the quilt her mother had made the year before she died, squares of faded tartan and uneven stitching that had always embarrassed Iona and now made her throat tight.

Beneath the quilt, wrapped in a tea towel, was a small wooden inlaid box.

Iona didn't remember packing it. She hadn't seen it in years—had forgotten it existed, actually, buried at the bottom of her mother's wardrobe since before the move to Glasgow. Her mother had never explained it to her. Had never really explained much of anything about her past.

The latch gave with a soft click.

Inside: a few strands of dried heather, a pressed photograph of a dark-haired woman who might have been her grandmother, and the locket.

Silver, tarnished at the edges, cool and heavy in her palm. The chain was fine-linked and delicate, and when she turned the locket over, the engraving caught the light—an ancient, spreading tree with branches that reached toward a carved crescent moon nestled in its canopy.

Her mother had never worn it. Never mentioned it. And yet here it was, wrapped in the same tea towel her mother had used for her good china, kept safe all those years.

Iona pressed the tiny clasp. The locket opened to reveal two empty compartments, worn smooth with age.

Empty. Whatever had been in there was gone.

She slipped the chain over her head anyway. The locket settled against her collarbone, cool and strangely comforting, like a hand resting on her heart.

Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the cottage windows. Through the glass, she could see the Blackwood estate hunched on the hillside, dark against the last grey light of the afternoon. No lights in the windows, same as always. The family had been gone since last night. Probably wouldn't be back until morning.

Something about that made her uneasy in a way she couldn't name.

She was still standing at the window when the knock came at her door.

She opened it to find Lachlan Blackwood on her step, rain beaded on the shoulders of his jacket, wind whipping dark hair across his forehead. He looked—not apologetic, exactly, but uncomfortable. Off-balance in a way she hadn't see him before.

"Dr. MacRae," he said.

"Mr. Blackwood. You're not in the mountains tonight?"

His jaw tightened. "I came to apologize."

"For?"

"The way I spoke to you. At the fence." He shifted his weight, and she caught the scent of him—pine, and something else, something wild and animal beneath the rain. "It was rude. You'd just helped my people. You didn't deserve to be chased off with warnings."

"Iona," she said. "Call me Iona. And you were right about one thing."

He raised an eyebrow.

"The rain. I should have gotten better boots." She smiled to show she wasn't serious.

Something flickered in his amber eyes—she noticed them again, catching the light from her doorway, the color of whisky held to a flame. "I'm serious. I was out of line."

"You were protecting your family. I get it." She shrugged. "You didn't know me. I could have been a journalist, or a poacher, or a tourist with a drone. You don't know who to trust."

Lachlan went very still.

"And who do you trust, Iona MacRae?"

The question landed somewhere unhitched and unexpected. She was aware of the locket against her skin, of the weight of it, of the way his eyes had dropped to her throat and then away.

"I trust evidence," she said. "I trust what I can see and prove."

"That must make for a lonely life."

"I prefer it to superstition." She kept her tone light. "The village is full of it. You'd think in the twenty-first century—"

"Is that what you think I am? Superstitious?"

"I think you told me to leave before nightfall and didn't explain why. You'll forgive me if I didn't take it seriously."

The wind gusted again, harder this time, and she shivered despite herself. Lachlan looked past her, into the cottage, and his gaze snagged on the open boxes scattered across her sitting room floor.

"You're unpacking," he said.

"Is that a problem?"

"No." But he'd gone very quiet. "You're staying, then."

"I just moved in. I'm not going anywhere." The cottage was hers now—the practice, the village, the job she'd taken sight unseen because she'd been desperate enough to leave Glasgow and everything there. "This is my home. At least for now."

Lachlan nodded slowly. He looked at her again, and this time his eyes caught her throat, the locket just visible above the collar of her jumper.

"What's that?"

She touched it automatically. "A family piece. Was my mother's."

"May I—" He stepped forward before she could answer, hand extended toward the locket, and something in his manner was almost hungry. "Where did you get that?"

"My mother left it to me."

"Your mother." He said the word like it cost him something. "What was her name?"

"Maeve. Maeve MacRae." She took a step back, uneasy now. "Why?"

Lachlan's face had gone pale. In the doorway light, he looked almost ill—sharp cheekbones too prominent, the amber of his eyes gone dark and clouded.

"That's not possible," he said.

"What isn't?"

But he didn't answer. He pressed his hand to his mouth, stepped back from the door, and shook his head like he was clearing water from his ears.

"I have to go."

"Lachlan—"

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have come." He turned, and in the sudden motion, his scarf slipped from his collar and fell to the wet flagstones of her stoop. He didn't stop to retrieve it.

"Wait—you forgot—"

But he was already striding into the dark, toward the tree line that separated the village from the estate, moving fast, faster than anyone had a right to move on wet ground in failing light.

Iona stood in the doorway and watched him until he vanished into the black arms of the pines.

The scarf lay where it had fallen, wool dark with rain. She bent and picked it up. It was warm, as if he'd been wearing it moments before, and it smelled strongly of pine—fresh and sharp—and beneath it, something animal. Something that reminded her of the young collie she'd treated yesterday, the smell of the creature that had savaged it in the night.

She brought the scarf to her face and breathed in.

Then she went inside, shut the door, and locked it.

The locket sat against her heart, pulsing faintly with her pulse, and she couldn't shake the look in Lachlan Blackwood's eyes when he'd seen it.

Not recognition. Horror. Like he'd seen a ghost.

Her mother's name was Maeve. Just a name. It couldn't mean anything to him.

But the moon was full above the hills, and the Blackwood family was still gone, and something in the dark was watching her cottage from the edge of the treeline.

Iona pulled the curtains shut and did not sleep all night.