Chapter 18
Chapter
Eighteen
The child’s footprints led nowhere.
Brodie had searched the area around the waystation while I’d tried to stay off my ankle, but he didn’t find anything.
No other tracks, no signs of a camp, no indication of where the child had come from or gone to.
Just those small footprints heading north into the jungle, vanishing where the rain had turned the ground to mud.
“Could be a Maroon child,” he’d said, but his voice carried doubt. “Or someone fleeing the plantations.”
“Alone?”
“Aye. That’s what troubles me.”
We’d rested at the waystation until the rain stopped, then pushed on. My ankle screamed with every step, but I bit down on the pain and kept moving. Behind us, the widow’s men were hunting. Ahead of us, somewhere in those mountains, was safety. A Maroon settlement. Freedom.
If we could reach it.
The second day was harder than the first. The terrain grew steeper, the jungle thicker.
Vines caught at my dress, roots tried to trip me, and the humidity made every breath feel like drowning.
Brodie stayed close, one hand always ready to steady me, lifting me when I couldn’t get over a rock, while he constantly scanned our surroundings.
We didn’t talk much. Talking required breath we couldn’t spare.
By late afternoon, we stumbled onto another waystation—this one larger than the last, with actual walls and a door that hung crooked on leather hinges. Inside, we found supplies: dried fish, hard bread, a clay jug of water that tasted like earth but was blessedly cool.
“The network,” Brodie said, examining the provisions. “Thomas said there were safe houses all along the route to the mountains. This must be one of them.”
I sank onto the dirt floor, too exhausted to care about dignity. My ankle had swollen to twice its normal size despite Brodie’s careful wrapping. My dress was torn in three places. I had blisters on my heels and a cut on my arm from a thorn I hadn’t even felt at the time.
Three days ago, I’d been sleeping in a narrow bed at Ruth and Jonah’s, kissing Brodie for the first time, learning what it meant to trust someone with a dangerous truth.
Now I was sitting in a dirt-floor hut in the middle of a jungle, running from men who wanted to drag us back to the widow in chains.
“Here.” Brodie crouched beside me, offering the water jug. “Drink. Then rest. We’re not leaving until morning.”
“What if they catch up to us?”
“Then they catch up. But ye’re done for the day. I can see it in your eyes.” He touched my face, gently despite the calluses on his palm. “Ye’re running on will alone, and even that has limits.”
I wanted to argue. Wanted to prove I was stronger than he thought, that I could keep going, that a twisted ankle and exhaustion and fear weren’t enough to stop me.
Instead, I drank the water and let him help me to the corner where someone had left a pile of old blankets that smelled of mildew but were better than bare ground.
“Sleep,” he said. “I’ll keep watch.”
“You need sleep too.”
“I’ll sleep in a bit.” He settled against the wall opposite me, the knife loose in his hand. “I’ve gone longer without. Four years at sea taught me how to function on an hour here and there.”
I wanted to tell him that wasn’t sustainable. That he was going to collapse if he didn’t rest properly. But my eyes were already closing, exhaustion pulling me under like a tide.
When I woke, darkness had fallen. He was still awake, still watching, but he’d moved closer. Close enough that I could reach out and touch him if I wanted to.
I wanted to.
“How long was I asleep?” My voice came out rough.
“A few hours. Sun’s been down for a while now.” He glanced at me, and even in the darkness I could see the exhaustion in his face from the moonlight coming in through the cracks.
“How’s the ankle?”
“Hurts less than it did.” A lie, but a small one. “Brodie, you need to sleep. You can’t stay awake forever.”
“I can stay awake long enough to get us to those mountains.”
“And then what? You collapse the moment we’re safe?” I sat up, wincing at the protest from my ankle. “That’s not sustainable. We’re supposed to be in this together, remember?”
Something in his expression shifted. Softened. “Aye. Together.”
“So sleep. I’ll keep watch for a few hours.”
“Maddie—”
“I mean it. You said we’re not leaving until morning, which means we have time. Sleep now, then you can take over later.” I moved closer to him. “Please. You’ve been half-carrying me through this jungle for two days. Let me do this one thing.”
He studied me for a long moment, then nodded. “A few hours. Then ye wake me.”
“I will.”
He stretched out on the blankets, the knife still in his hand, and closed his eyes. Within minutes, his breathing had deepened, evened out. He was asleep.
I watched him in the moonlight—the sharp angles of his face, the way his hair had come loose from its tie and fell across his forehead, the faint scar on his jaw I’d never asked about.
Twenty-one years old. Younger than me by two years, though he carried himself like someone much older.
Someone who’d seen too much, lost too much, survived too much.
And somehow, impossibly, he loved me.
Or was falling in love with me. We’d both said it now, in different ways, at different times. The words were out there between us, real and terrifying and true.
I loved him. Completely. Recklessly. The kind of love that made you follow someone through centuries and jungles and impossible odds.
The kind of love my father would have understood.
The realization stopped me cold. My father, who’d died three years ago, and left a hole in my life I’d been trying to fill with hiding from the world. With safe choices and careful plans and a determination never to hurt that badly again.
And here I was. In love with a man from another century. Running through a jungle. Risking everything.
Dad would have loved this. Would have loved Brodie.
Would have sat him down and asked a thousand questions about 1693 and privateering and Scotland, his historian’s mind hungry for primary source material.
Would have looked at me with that knowing smile and said, “When you know, you know, Mads. Don’t overthink it. ”
I wiped at my eyes, surprised to find them wet.
“Maddie?” Brodie’s voice was rough with sleep. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you.”
He sat up immediately alert despite having been asleep for maybe an hour. “Ye’re crying.”
“I’m fine. Just thinking about my dad.”
“The historian.”
I’d told him about my father during one of our conversations at the plantation, back when we were still circling each other carefully. Before the escape, before the kiss, before everything changed.
“He died three years ago. Heart attack. Just... gone. One day he was planning a research trip to Scotland, and the next day he was dead.” The words came easier in the darkness, with just the fire between us.
“My mom died when I was in high school… sixteen. I fell apart. And I dealt with it by hiding. By playing it safe. By choosing a life that wouldn’t ask too much of me or hurt too much if I lost it. ”
“And then ye fell through time.”
“And then I fell through time and met you and suddenly I was fighting for my life every single day and I couldn’t hide anymore.
Couldn’t play it safe. Had to choose whether to trust you, whether to run with you, whether to tell you the truth about who I was.
” I looked at him. “Had to choose whether to love you.”
“And did ye? Choose it?”
“I don’t think love works like that. I don’t think you choose to fall in love. You just... do. And then you choose what to do about it.” I shifted closer, closing the distance between us. “I choose you, Brodie. Every time. In every version of this story. I choose you.”
He pulled me into his arms, careful of my ankle, and held me close.
“I choose ye too, Maddie Carter. Even though ye’re from the future and I dinna understand half the things ye talk about, especially about computers and such.
Even though loving ye means I might lose ye if ye find a way back to your time. Even though—”
“I’m not going back.” The words came out firm, certain. “Even if I could touch that stone again, even if the door opened, I wouldn’t go through it. My life is here now. With you.”
“Ye’d give up everything? Your friends, everything from your time?”
“I already did. The moment I touched that stone, I gave it all up. I just didn’t realize it yet.
” I pulled back enough to see his face. “My friends will move on. In my time, I’ll be the woman who disappeared in Jamaica and was never found.
But here—” I touched his face, traced the line of his jaw.
“Here, I get to build a new life. With you. And that’s worth everything I left behind. ”
“Scotland,” he said quietly. “When this is over, when we’re free—I want to take ye to Scotland.
Show ye the Highlands, the sea, the land that made me.
Want ye to meet Connor and Cameron, if they’ll see me.
Meet my sister, Elspeth. Want ye to walk the halls of Bronmuir and stand on the cliffs and understand where I come from. ”
“You think Connor will forgive you?”
“I dinna ken. He’s hard. Unforgiving. I betrayed the clan for a lass who sold me for coin.
That’s not easily forgiven among the MacLeods.
” His arms tightened around me. “But I have to try. Have to face what I ran from, make it right if I can. And if I canna—if he turns me away—then we’ll build our life somewhere else. Together.”
“Tell me about Scotland. What it’s really like.”
So he did. Told me about mountains that touched the sky and lochs so deep and dark they seemed bottomless.
About heather that turned the hillsides purple in late summer and rain that fell sideways more often than not.
About the great hall at Bronmuir, where his father had ruled with an iron hand and his mother had died.