Chapter 1: The Wedding
The carriage wheels crunched over gravel, a sound that had been grinding into Isabel’s skull for days. She pushed a heavy curtain aside and Edinburgh Castle loomed against a bruised twilight sky, all jagged stone and impossible weight. It wasn’t a home. It was a fortress eating the horizon.
“Remember your posture,” her father said, not looking at her. His knuckles were white on his knee. “And for God’s sake, don’t embarrass me.”
She let the curtain fall. The light pink wool of her travel dress was stained from the road, smelling of damp horse and cold earth. Her hair was a tightly pinned ruin beneath her hood. She’d imagined a bath. A moment. Just a single moment to become something resembling a bride.
The carriage lurched to a halt. The door was wrenched open before the step could be placed, a blast of freezing air hitting her face. A man in a dark plaid stood there, his expression blank.
“He’s waiting,” the man said. It wasn’t a request.
Her father climbed out first, then turned to offer a hand she didn’t want. Her limbs were stiff, every joint protesting as she descended onto the flagstones. A retinue of her father’s men and her single lady’s maid shuffled behind, a pathetic cluster against the soaring castle walls. They were ushered not toward the great oak doors leading, she presumed, to some hall or chambers, but through a narrow side archway, into a passage that smelled of mildew and old smoke.
“Where are we going?” she managed, her voice thin.
“The chapel,” the guard said, walking ahead without turning.
Panic, sharp and acrid, rose in her throat. “I must change. I cannot be wed like this.”
Her father’s hand clamped around her upper arm, squeezing tight. “You can and you will. This isn’t a pageant, Isabel. It’s a transaction. The papers are drawn, the priests are ready. He doesn’t want a display. He wants the deed done.”
They moved through the dim corridor, their footsteps echoing. She focused on the patch of her father’s cloak directly in front of her, the greasy wool, a loose thread. Anything but the reality coiling around her. The chapel door was iron-banded, studded with nails. It opened with a groan.
The space was small, crypt-cold, lit by smoking torches that danced shadows over stark stone walls. The air was thick with the smell of tallow and damp. At the far end, before a simple stone altar, stood a man.
The first thing she noticed was how large he was.
He wasn’t just tall. He was broad, shoulders stretching the fabric of a dark doublet, filling the space around him with a physical weight. His hair was auburn, tied back, but strands had escaped near his temples. His face was all angles—a blade of a nose, a strong jaw shadowed with stubble. He wasn’t looking at the priest, or at her father. He was looking directly at her. His eyes were the flat, dark grey of the winter sea she’d crossed to get here.
He didn’t move. He simply waited.
Her father propelled her forward. Her legs moved mechanically. The pink of her dress felt absurdly bright in the gloomy space, a joke. She stopped a few feet from the man, this stranger. Lachlan. The name felt foreign, a sound with no meaning.
A priest, ancient and trembling, began to speak Latin. The words washed over her, a meaningless river. She heard the rustle as her father produced the signed contracts from his pouch. She saw Lachlan’s man produce a duplicate. An exchange of parchment, not glances.
“Isabel.” Her father’s voice was a hissed prompt.
She looked up. Lachlan was still watching her. He extended his right hand. It was scarred across the knuckles, capable of completely engulfing her own. She placed her chilled fingers in his palm. His skin was rough, warm. His grip was firm, not crushing, but absolute. She felt the calluses.
“Repeat after me,” the priest said in heavily accented English.
The vows were short. Brutal in their efficiency. She spoke her lines, her voice a ghost of itself. He spoke his, his voice low, a rumble that vibrated in the cold air between them. There were no rings. No mass. Just the words, the signatures on the documents, and the tightening of his hand around hers.
“It is done,” the priest said, closing his book with a soft thump.
Just like that. The entire process had taken less than ten minutes.
Lachlan finally released her hand. The absence of his grip left her fingers feeling strangely exposed, cold. He nodded once to her father, a curt, businesslike dip of his head. Then those grey eyes returned to her, scanning her from the messy crown of her head down to her muddy boots and back up. His gaze held no warmth, no approval, no disapproval. It was an assessment. Of a newly acquired asset.
“Your chambers are prepared,” he said. His voice wasn’t unkind. It was simply factual. “You’ll be shown the way.”
He turned and left the chapel through a different door, his men falling in behind him. He didn’t look back.
Isabel stood rooted, the stone floor leaching the last warmth from her feet through her thin soles. The torch smoke stung her eyes. She was a wife. She was the queen. She was standing in a borrowed, stained dress in a cold castle chapel, and the man who was now her husband had just walked away without another word.
Her lady’s maid, Elsie, touched her elbow gently. “My lady?”
Isabel blinked. She looked at her father. He was already rolling the marriage contract carefully, securing it with a ribbon, his part complete. He met her gaze for a second, and something flickered there—maybe pity, maybe just relief—before he turned to speak with one of Lachlan’s stewards about the stabling of their horses.
“This way, my lady,” a different guard said, holding the main chapel door open.
She walked out, Elsie at her heels. The corridor beyond was slightly warmer, but no less impersonal. As she followed the guard, the reality settled into her bones, heavier than the castle stone. It was done. There was no going back.
Somewhere in this vast, cold pile of rock, her husband was walking away, and she was being led to a room she’d never seen, in a life she could no longer imagine. The only thing she could picture with perfect, jarring clarity was the size of his hands, and the utter finality in his eyes.