Page 21 of A Highland Healer Captured (Scottish Daddies #3)

T here was no gentleness to the way it went, though.

Katie’s fists struck Skylar’s door hard enough to rattle the latch, and when Skylar yanked it open, the maid’s eyes were red and her breath came fast.

“Skylar—” The name broke in the middle. “It’s Grayson. He’s?—”

She didn’t wait for the end of the sentence. She was already moving, bare feet striking stone, hair still damp from washing before bed, and tying an apron knotted half-cocked around her waist.

The corridor blurred.

The solar door stood open like a mouth and the room beyond was all motion: Zander on the bed with the boy in his arms, Katie fumbling with a cloth, the fire throwing wild shadows.

Grayson’s small body was stiff as a pulled bow. His eyes had rolled white, so only crescent moons showed, and his hands jerked in sharp, ugly rhythms.

His breathing came all wrong—then it didn’t come—and then scraped in again. Skylar’s stomach dropped clean through her and found the floor.

“Move,” she said, not loud, not kind, and Zander moved. He laid the boy down exactly as she needed him to, propped, turned, space cleared around him. She slid a folded blanket under his head to keep it from striking, pulled his jaw forward to open his airway, and counted, counted, counted.

“Katie—boiled water. Now. A bowl. Salt. Mustard. The burnt bread from earlier—there is always burnt bread.”

“Aye—” Katie fled.

“Tell me,” Zander said, and his voice was flat with effort. His hands were open at his sides, fingers spread, the posture of a man restraining himself from grabbing the world and shaking it until it behaved.

Skylar didn’t answer him yet. She watched the boy’s skin. Not just flushed, he was flushed and dry.

She touched his cheek. Hot .

The pupils when the eyes flickered down, as if testing her, then rolled again were wide, too wide.

His mouth worked around an invisible bitterness.

And when he did cough, it was shallow and useless. A sheen slicked his lips, but the rest of him was dry. No sweat. No tears.

Her mind ran its fast paths. Nae a simple fever, though, he’d sweat. Nae only a lung’s rage. These were all wrong. Nae a spirit. Spirits didn’t leave pupils.

The bowl thumped onto the table. The clatter of a spoon and the grind of salt rang out through the silence.

Katie returned with shaking hands and a small pile of blackened bread that smelled of apology. Skylar grabbed a cloth, soaked it, pressed it cool to the boy’s forehead, then lifted and sniffed the cup by the bed. Honeyed water.

A trace of something sweet and wrong under it. It was sweet, like old fruit, like a cupboard that had gone bad. She dipped a finger, touched it to her tongue, winced at the bitterness that crawled up and played tricks at the back of her throat.

“Skylar—” Zander again, quieter. He had bent to the level of the child’s face, speaking into his ear even as his eyes stayed on her.

“I’m here, Gray. Breathe, lad. Breathe.” He didn’t get in her way.

He didn’t ask stupid questions. He held his son’s arm in exactly the right place to keep it from banging the bed.

“It’s nae just the lungs.”

Katie made a sound like a bird hitting glass. “What?”

“It’s...” Skylar’s hands moved while her mind named.

“Steady, little one. There.” The spasm peaked and loosened.

She rolled him to his side in case of sick, checked his mouth, cleared what little threat there was with two fingers.

“Something drying, not dampening. Pupils wide; skin hot and dry; pulse fast and foolish.”

“Nae now… nae here,” Skylar snapped, because rage helped no one inside a child’s body.

This is belladonna’s game, or henbane’s …

“But that’s nae—” she started to say, then lifted the cup to her nose again, grimaced.

A berry steeped too strong, a drop too much. A well-meaning fool can dose worse than an enemy with a knife.

“Fix it,” he said. Not an order. A plea built like an order because it was the only language he had.

“I’m tryin’, Zander. It’s just— I cannae…” she looked up and his face was right next to hers.

“Please give me some room,” She murmured softly as she continued to mix salt and a spoon of mustard into the hot water until it clouded, then let it cool with impatient blows between her teeth. “If it’s been long, this might help a little. If it’s recent?—”

She didn’t finish. She slid an arm under Grayson’s shoulders, propped him, coaxed the rim of the cup to his lips. “Small, Gray. Small sips, little hawk.”

He choked, swallowed by reflex, coughed, swallowed again.

The body wanted to hold its poisons like secrets; she coaxed it to tell.

When she had given enough, she laid him back and waited, rubbing his back slow as she would for a colicky babe.

Zander’s hand hovered above the boy’s shoulder like a benediction he didn’t dare land.

“Char—” Skylar caught herself; there was no neat jar labeled charcoal within reach.

But there was burnt bread. She crushed it with the heel of her hand between cloths, turned it to a rough powder, stirred it into milk Katie had brought without being told, and made that into a slurry a child might tolerate.

“This will bind what it can,” she told Zander because telling the father a plan steadied the healer as much as him.

“Vinegar cloths—cool him, but no plunges.”

Katie obeyed in terrified silence. Zander did too. Saints, she could have wept with gratitude for that.

It came all at once: a shudder; a gag; the body’s surrendered secret.

Katie turned away, but Zander did not.

Skylar kept her face neutral and her hands efficient. The mess said what she needed. Skins, dark and slick. Two small, unmistakable seeds, black like polished beads.

Skylar’s vision went sharp-edged. “Good lad,” she whispered, because ye thanked a body for giving up its wreckage.

She wrapped the beads in a cloth and tucked them away in her pocket before she wiped him up, rinsed his mouth, set another cool cloth, and fed him the blackened milk a spoon at a time.

“There. There, me brave little hawk. Rest.”

The worst of the convulsions ebbed. His pulse, still headlong, slowed by degrees that she could feel under her fingers. His eyes returned to show too much white and then, mercifully, the dark settled, and the lids came down. Not all the way. But enough.

Skylar didn’t breathe until the room shifted from crisis back to ordinary danger. Only then did she look up. Zander had a hand over his mouth, and his eyes were not on the boy. They were fixed on her.

“What is it?” he asked.

She kept her voice low so the boy’s sleep would not hear the fear in it. “I ken only that it’s been more than once this has happened. The cough, the faint spells, the way his body tired in ways that didnae match his lungs—that’s nae acting like any illness I’ve ever kent.”

Skylar looked at the black smear on the cloth and then met Zander’s eyes again.

“Come,” he said with finality, as if sensing what she was about to tell him. “We’ll speak outside.” His tone deadly and low.

Katie’s chin trembled. “I’ll stay just here?”

Skylar gentled. “Watch him now. If his breath goes fast again, call. If he sweats, good— Just keep the cloths cool.”

Zander’s hand flexed once at his side, a muscle seeking a sword that wasn’t there. “Where?”

“Me chamber,” Skylar said. “Yers has ears.”

He didn’t argue. He stepped close enough to brush the boy’s hair back once—only once—and then followed Skylar into the corridor, his silence a weapon more dangerous than any he wore.

In her room, the candle caught quickly. Skylar shut the door and leaned a moment against it, feeling her heart finally demand the breath she’d denied it.

Zander stayed standing. He always seemed too large for any indoor space; now he felt too quiet for one, too.

He looked like a man who had swallowed the world.

“Say it,” he said.

Skylar had the words gathered neatly on her tongue. Each one arranged with a healer’s care, the way she laid tinctures on a tray so none would spill or sour, when Zander cut across her with a single, low “Wait, daenae… I cannae...”

It wasn’t loud.

It was the kind of plea that seemed to make the air tighten as if the room itself obeyed him. He stood in the small space between her bed and the shuttered window, too large for the chamber, too restless for the quiet.

The candle threw an amber shine across his cheekbone, and the rest of his face was shadow and strain.

“Daenae,” he said again, and this time the sound frayed. “I cannae listen to ye say he’s—” The word wouldn’t come, so he made another, more physical sentence: his fist shot out and slammed into the stone beside the door.

The sound snapped through her chest like a bowstring. Stone did not move; the laird’s knuckles did. Skin split in two sharp lines and blood welled, swift and dark, then sluiced over the ridge of his hand and tracked down his wrist.

“Saints,” Skylar breathed, already moving.

Not because he was laird. Because he was human and bleeding and she was what she was.

Her palm closed around his forearm, heat under skin and muscle like a rope drawn taut, and she tugged him toward the table where her small stack of linens waited.

“Sit, Zander. Sit,” she ordered, the way she would scold a shepherd who’d elbowed a stall door in anger and paid with his skin.

He sat because he didn’t seem to know what else to do with his body.

“I cannae listen to ye say it,” he repeated, softer, staring at the blood like it had betrayed him. “That he’s— That I’ll lose him?—”

“Ye willnae because I willnae,” she snapped, and the bite of her voice startled both of them. It steadied her, too.

She caught his torn hand in both of hers and rinsed it with the last of her water, thumb sure as she teased grit from the cuts. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t look away, either. He watched her work the way a man watches a blade he’ll have to use.

“Zander,” she said, deliberately choosing his name. She wrapped a strip of linen once, twice, anchoring it with a deft twist. “Ye’re going to listen to me. Carefully. Nae because I want to hurt ye. But because truth keeps children alive.”

His jaw flexed. Fury and fear moved under his skin like storm light. “Then say it,” he ground out, voice low.

“Grayson was poisoned. Has been continually poisoned, I believe.”

There: the word, clean and terrible and useful. She didn’t flinch from it. She watched it land on him, watched the way his pupils thinned, the breath leave his chest in a hard, quiet rush.

“What?” he managed, as she worked the knot tight.

“Slowly,” she went on, pulling the beads wrapped in the cloth from her pocket and showing him.

“Over weeks. Maybe months… I’m nae sure if this is the main cause for his illness these years past, though.

Small doses that didn’t match the coughs.

It’s why none of my work has helped him.

Today— the dose was too much. His body told me what it could.

We answered as best we could. Now we have to wait. ”

He didn’t speak.

He folded his bandaged hand into a fist and opened it again, once, as if testing how much of himself was left.

When he looked up, she saw the change in his eyes.

Not tears. Not the glazed shine of a man slipping.

A terrible clarity: the laird focused to a point.

If he’d drawn steel it would have looked as unavoidable as that.

She hated it, she realized. Not the strength. She had no quarrel with a man strong enough to hold walls. But the death that had just lit behind his gaze.

She loathed that someone had put it there by touching a child’s cup. She loathed that the world kept drawing men like him to edges where the only language left was ruin.

“Daenae,” she said, softer now because she needed to blunt him a fraction before he went to find a throat.

“Nae yet. We’ll count who’s come near him.

We’ll look at gifts and cups and syrups and who carried which tray on which morning.

We’ll find the hand. But if ye march out now and set the keep on fire with yer rage, the one who did this will vanish into the heat. ”

“Ye saved him.”

She shook her head once. “He saved himself. We only told his body how to choose.” She drew back a step because being close to him with the fire of that look in his eyes felt like standing too near a forge.

It was warming and dangerous all at once.

“And now,” she said, grabbing the thread of control before it could spool away, “I’ll hold ye to what ye promised me. ”

His brows dipped. “Promised?”

“Our bargain.” She folded the remaining linen, precise movements against the rise of her pulse. “I kept me end. Yer son’s breathing. His pulse steadied. I’ll keep working to keep him that way. But ye’ll keep yers. Ye’ll let me go.”

The silence startled her more than shouting would have. He didn’t pace. He didn’t swear. He simply stood, bandaged hand hanging at his side, and studied her as if trying to decide whether she knew what she’d asked.

“Nay,” he said at last.