Chapter 29 #2
After all, her father wouldn’t be able to kill her if she were so often trapped behind a locked door. Perhaps the strange punishments were designed to appease their father’s murderous desires, albeit temporarily.
“Why?” was the only word she could muster.
Her father walked around to the front of her, a disgusted sneer on his face.
“I suppose there’s nay harm in tellin’ ye now, when today is yer last on this earth.
” He grabbed a stool from the corner of the cell and sat down, as if he were about to tell her a fairytale instead of the dreadful truth. “Yer maither was a vile wench.”
Ailis blinked, as shocked by his words as by the sting of cold water. “That’s nae what… Kristen and Murdock have said.”
“As if they would ken,” her father scoffed. “I gave that woman everythin’ she could ever want, and she betrayed me with me own man-at-arms. Ye are the result of that wretched affair.”
“What?” Ailis gasped, her heart stuttering.
“I had nay idea at first,” her father continued.
“I loved ye as if ye were me own flesh and blood, even if ye were a worthless girl. Then, I started hearin’ whispers.
Trusted men tellin’ me about yer maither and that bastard.
About ye and what ye truly were: a cuckoo’s egg in me nest. I didnae want to believe it at first, fool that I was. ”
His face contorted into a mask of fury. “I even punished a few of me men for sayin’ such things, but then MacAllister told me he’d seen them with his own eyes. He was determined to prove it to me.”
Ailis knew MacAllister. A weaselly little man, always trying to make an impression on her father, trying to give him the right advice as his councilman. The very kind of man who would tread on anyone to get to a position of authority, who had always looked at her in a way that made her skin crawl.
“He told me that yer maither and her lover would meet in the woods and that she’d often take ye with her,” her father said, pausing as if he could see the woodland before him, the proof of that betrayal.
“I went there and saw them together. Heard the truth with me own ears. Watched that bastard hold ye and kiss yer cheeks and call ye his daughter. Watched me own wife smile and tell him she was glad ye were his and nae mine.”
“Ye were the beast…” Ailis murmured, her heart sinking like a stone.
It was never a wolf or a dog or a boar who had inflicted such savage and fatal wounds on her mother. The beast had been far worse than an animal that merely hoped to feed itself; it was this awful man in front of her.
“I could have killed them both, but I didnae,” he said, almost sounding proud of himself.
“I waited until yer real faither left, then I killed yer maither. I let ye live because, at that moment, ye were still of use to me. I didnae tell yer faither what I kent and savored each moment he mourned when he thought nay one was watchin’.
I delighted in keepin’ ye from him, though he tried to take ye away a few times. ”
Ailis couldn’t breathe, though she was free of the suffocating water. It was all too much to bear, to discover that she had had a father who cherished her and that her mother had died at Laird Ainsley’s hand.
Guilt writhed in her belly, realizing that she was to blame after all. If she hadn’t been born, her mother might still be alive.
“Then, once I’d figured out a use for him,” Laird Ainsley continued, “I led him to the border and killed him. Blamed it on Clan MacNairn and started a war. A war that I’ll win when I tell our clan that Fraser Lennox escaped his cell while ye, generous soul that ye are, were tryin’ to feed him and that he killed ye.
Och, they’ll fight harder than they’ve ever fought before in yer honor. ”
Ailis’s lip trembled as she glowered at the man she had thought was her father. “I’m nae surprised she sought love and affection elsewhere, with ye as her husband. Ye’re monstrous.”
Indeed, Laird Ainsley could blame her mother all he liked, insist that he loved her and the betrayal had made him mad, but she had heard stories of him long before he got married. He had always been cruel and bloodthirsty.
“And ye’re poisonous. A corruption in this clan,” Laird Ainsley shot back. “But Murdock will fall in line once he learns of yer death, or else I’ll do the same to his daughter.”
Clearly, there were parts of the story that Ailis was missing where it came to Murdock, but without her brother there, she couldn’t ask him what Laird Ainsley meant.
And she likely would never get the chance to find out what sort of brother he had actually been for all these years, keeping her safe without her knowledge.
“Yer power is crumblin’,” she hissed, deciding that if these were to be her last moments, she would make them count.
“I only see a desperate, weak man before me. A pathetic creature who would harm bairns and women to make himself feel strong. But ye wouldnae dare to face me husband in a duel. Ye deceive and ye trick and ye play sly games because ye’re too afraid of bein’ shown how measly ye are! ”
Laird Ainsley rose sharply from the stool, fury blazing in his eyes—eyes that were so unlike her own, now that she considered it—and grabbed the back of her head once again. He clenched a fistful of her hair until her scalp burned.
“Aye, go on, drown me,” Ailis taunted through clenched teeth. “What a cowardly way to kill someone.”
A roar of pure rage tore from his throat as he shoved her head into the bucket with such force that her forehead almost touched the bottom.
He yanked her head out a few seconds later, spitting, “Antagonize me all ye want; I’ll still make yer death slow, until ye plead for a blade.”
“And if ye say one more word, yer death will be more painful than any man has ever endured,” a familiar voice growled.
As Laird Ainsley’s grip loosened on her hair, Ailis managed to turn around in time to see Killian standing in the cell doorway, wearing a look so fierce, so terrifying that even the rats fell silent.