Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sleep released her reluctantly, leaving her skin still humming with the memory of Harald’s heat. For the first time in years, she had let her guard fall, her body heavy with a trust she hadn't known she possessed. The warmth of the room felt like a sanctuary, a soft world.
Harald had walked her to her door himself, his presence a silent, towering weight that had somehow made the world feel small and manageable.
He had lingered for a heartbeat, and she had seen the way his knuckles had whitened as he gripped the doorframe, sensing the raw, thrumming effort it took for him to let her go and remain in the hallway.
Safe behind the heavy oak, Enya had surrendered to a deep, boneless sleep, more comfortable than she had been in years because she truly believed he stood guard over her soul.
Then, the air changed.
It was a shift in the room's weight—a subtle displacement that made the hair on her arms stand up. Her eyes remained closed, her mind desperately trying to crawl back into the safety of sleep.
It’s naething. Just the wind. Just the keep settling.
Her heart began a frantic, sickening thud against her ribs. Her hand moved with agonizing slowness, fingers inching toward the straw mattress, seeking the cold, honest bite of her dagger. She didn't breathe. She didn't move. She just felt the predatory stillness of the person standing over her.
Then, the world shattered.
The mattress dipped violently under a sudden, heavy weight.
Before she could scream, a hand slammed across her mouth, crushing her lips against her teeth with enough force to bruise. An arm like an iron bar pinned her shoulder into the bedding. Panic, metallic and sharp, exploded in her throat as she fought for a breath that wouldn't come.
Nay. Please, nay.
She bucked, her body a blur of frantic, survival-driven motion. She drove her knee upward with enough force to crack bone, but the shadow was ready. It shifted, its weight a crushing mountain that pinned her legs and dragged her half-off the bed, leaving her striking at nothing but thin air.
Fingers dug into the soft flesh of her arm like talons. Driven by a primal, animal terror, Enya lunged her head forward and sank her teeth into the flesh of the hand over her mouth. She bit down until she tasted the copper tang of blood, desperate to tear her way to freedom.
A curse hissed into her ear—low, vicious, and terrifyingly familiar.
"Traitor," the voice rasped, the sound a serrated blade in the dark.
Enya’s heart stopped. The sanctuary was gone. The nightmare had followed her into the one place she thought was safe.
The grip tightened. Her head snapped sideways as she was hauled upright, feet barely finding the floor before she was being dragged forward, her nightdress twisting around her legs. The room spun. Another figure moved near the door, already pulling it open.
Cold rushed in.
Her bare feet hit stone. The shock stole her breath, turned her blood to ice. She tried to scream then, tried to wrench free, but the hand over her mouth never loosened.
The man behind her leaned in, his voice cutting low and brutal against her ear.
“Dinnae.”
She was half carried, half dragged down the corridor, her shoulder striking the wall once, hard enough to send pain flaring down her arm. She clawed at the hand over her mouth, nails scraping skin, but it was useless.
Panic surged, full and violent, crashing through her chest as one terrible thought eclipsed all others.
This is it.
This was the moment every warning, every unease, every night spent staring at the ceiling had been leading toward. Her abduction.
Her heart hammered with a violence that felt like it would crack her ribs, each thud a frantic, suffocating beat.
Her thoughts were no longer words; they were jagged shards of panic, white noise screaming behind her eyes.
She twisted with a strength born of pure terror, her body a whip of desperate muscle.
Another curse, closer this time, hot and wet against her skin.
She kicked blindly, her heel connecting with a shin with a sickening thud.
A fist knotted in her hair. The jerk was sudden and brutal, yanking her head back until her spine felt like it would snap.
Her neck screamed in protest, the skin of her scalp tearing as her vision swam with white stars.
She was pinned, exposed, and utterly helpless, her throat bared to the dark like a sacrifice on an altar.
“Hold her,” someone snarled.
Hands changed. Her arms were wrenched behind her with a sickening pop of her shoulder, her wrists seized in a grip that knew exactly where to press to steal her strength.
She gasped into the palm over her mouth—a wet, muffled sob of a sound—as hot, salt tears stung her eyes.
The terror was a cold tide, but beneath it, a desperate rage began to simmer, a wild, cornered heat.
Who? How?
The questions fractured in her mind. Had the keep been betrayed?
They burst through a side door into the biting night air.
The wind tore at her thin shift, savage and freezing, ripping a ragged cry from her throat that the hand could no longer fully stifle.
Gravel bit like jagged teeth into her bare feet as she was dragged, stumbling and blind, across the outer yard toward the black, looming maw of the forest beyond the walls.
Her breath came in ragged, useless pulls. Her limbs felt distant, as if they belonged to a stranger.
Think, she ordered herself, wild and frantic.
Then, the shadows fractured.
One of the men lifted a torch higher, and the orange light spilled across a face that she knew as well as her own.
The world stopped. The ground felt as though it had vanished beneath her feet, leaving her suspended in a void of pure, crushing disbelief.
“Nay,” she choked, the word tearing free from her lungs, raw and bleeding.
The man holding the torch stopped short.
The others hesitated, their silhouettes jagged against the firelight.
In that sliver of frozen stillness, she saw him with a clarity that felt like a physical wound.
The sharp, arrogant line of his jaw. The familiar, meticulous cut of his beard.
The thin, silver scar along his brow—a mark she had traced with a sister’s reverence as a child, back when she had still believed a brother’s scars were proof of bravery rather than signs of cold calculation.
The hand over her mouth dropped away, but Enya didn't scream. She couldn't. The air in her lungs had turned to lead.
“Finley.”
Her brother’s name fell from her mouth like an accusation, like a prayer that had been answered by a demon. The hurt was more violent than the grip on her wrists; it was a soul-deep shattering, the full realization that the monster in her room hadn't been a stranger. It had been her blood.
For a moment, no one spoke. The wind howled through the yard, tugging at cloaks and hair, snapping at the edges of the torchlight. Finley studied her with an expression she did not recognize—and yet, it was the only look he had ever truly given her since they had grown up.
Calculation. Irritation. The cold, sterile gaze of a merchant inspecting damaged silk.
The betrayal was a stone in her stomach. She sucked in a breath, her lungs burning in the freezing air, and twisted violently out of the grip on her arms. She spun to face him fully, her bare feet standing firm on the biting gravel.
“Have ye lost what little sense ye were born wi’?” Her voice shook, the tremor a white-hot, jagged fury that made her vision swim. “Get away from me.”
“Enya,” Finley said, his tone sharp with warning. “Lower yer voice. Dinnae be a fool.”
“Lower me—” A laugh tore out of her, brittle and wild. “Ye drag me from me bed in the middle o’ the night, and ye think I’m the fool?”
One of the men behind her shifted, his boots crunching uneasily on the stone. Finley shot him a look that could have curdled milk, then stepped closer, lowering the torch until the fire was a wall between them. The orange light carved his features into a jagged mask of stone.
“I didnae want it tae come tae this,” he said, his voice devoid from even a shred of regret. “But ye’ve been careless, Enya. Reckless.”
The word landed like a blow.
She stared at him, stunned, a strange, hollow numbness spreading through her chest. “Careless,” she repeated softly, the word tasting like ash. “I have given up me life fer yer schemes. I have lived in the shadows of yer silence. And ye think this—this abduction—is care?”
His mouth tightened into a thin, cruel line. “I think ye’re forgetting what’s at stake here.”
“What’s at stake,” she shot back, “is me. Me life.”
His gaze flicked over her, quick and dismissive, before returning to her face. “Aye. Exactly.”
Something inside her finally cracked.
It was the sound of a decade of bending. Of shrinking. She had spent a lifetime waiting for him to look at her as his sister instead of a weapon.
“I trusted ye,” she said, voice dropping to a whisper.
Finley exhaled, impatient. “Ye trusted me tae dae what’s best fer our clan. That is me duty.”
“Nay,” she snapped. “I trusted ye tae see me as yer sister. I trusted ye tae love me.”
Silence fell, thick and suffocating. For a heartbeat, something flickered across Finley’s face. It was the annoyance of a craftsman whose tool had suddenly grown a mind of its own.
“I feared ye’d ruin everything,” he said flatly.
The words settled into her bones and she laughed again, but this time there was no humor in it at all. “So ye decided tae steal me like a sack o’ grain?”
“Ye were growing attached,” he said, his eyes narrowing in the torchlight. “Ye’re nae as careful wi’ yer tongue as ye think. Ye look at him too long. Ye defend him too fiercely.”
Her chest tightened painfully.