Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Me jarl!”
Erik’s horse had barely slowed when the alarm bells started ringing. Not the measured tolling that marked the hours or called men to meals, but a harsh, urgent clanging.
Breach… threat… attack…
The sound echoed off Castle MacLean’s stone walls, seeming to come from everywhere at once.
He galloped to the castle and was off his mount before the animal had fully stopped, tossing the reins to a wide-eyed stable lad. Behind him, Aksel dismounted with the same urgency, his hand already on his sword hilt.
“What’s happened?” Erik demanded of the nearest guard—young Tormod, pale-faced and breathing hard like he’d been running.
“The prisoner—he’s escaped!”
The words hit like a fist to the gut. Erik’s mind raced through implications, through possibilities, through the cold mathematics of threat and response.
“When?” The question came out sharp as a blade.
“Found him missin’ maybe ten minutes past. Cell door was still locked from outside, but the bastard was gone. Vanished like smoke.”
Locked from outside.
Which meant either the prisoner had help, or he’d found some other way out. A weakness in the castle Erik didn’t know about. A passage, a loose stone… something.
Either way, the man was loose.
“Secure all exits,” Erik ordered, already moving. “Nay one leaves this castle. I want every corner searched—storage rooms, passages, cellars, everythin’. Double the guards on the walls and gates.”
He took the steps to the keep two at a time, Aksel on his heels.
Warriors rushed past in organized chaos, responding to shouted orders, weapons drawn and ready.
The castle had erupted into controlled panic—the kind that came from men trained to respond to threats but uncertain where the threat actually lay.
Erik’s boots hammered against stone as he climbed higher, his heart pounding but not with exertion. She’s fine. She has tae be fine. She’s in our chamber with guards posted.
But when he yanked open the door to their chamber, his heart dropped to his feet.
Where in Odin’s name is she?
“Claricia?” He strode through the adjoining chamber, anywhere she might have stepped for a moment.
Erik ran back down, where he encountered two of the guards he’d posted.
“Where is she?” Each word came out deliberate and dangerous. “Where’s me wife?”
The older one paled. “She… me jarl… she asked fer a walk in the gardens. Said she needed air. We followed at a distance like ye ordered, but—”
“But?” Erik’s voice dropped to something lethal.
“But when the alarm rang, everyone scattered tae their posts. We tried tae get her back inside, but in the chaos—” Finn swallowed hard. “We lost sight of her, me jarl. Just fer a moment.”
Erik didn’t wait to hear the rest. He was already moving, taking corridors at a dead run that would have been undignified if it hadn’t been fueled by terror he refused to name.
She’s in the gardens. She’s safe. She has tae be safe.
“Find her!” The roar came from somewhere deep in his chest as Erik burst through the hall. Warriors froze mid-stride, turning toward their jarl with expressions ranging from surprise to alarm. “Search every corner of this cursed castle! I want me wife found. NOW!”
Men scattered immediately, years of training overriding their confusion. Erik kept moving, headed for the gardens, for the most likely place she’d be.
The gardens stretched before him in the late afternoon light—autumn-stripped trees, herb plots going brown for winter, the stone fountain with its carved wolf’s head still trickling water despite the cold. Beautiful and peaceful and utterly empty of the one person he needed to find.
“Claricia!” Her name tore from his throat, raw and desperate. “Where are ye?”
No answer. Just the sound of water trickling and wind rustling through bare branches and his own pulse roaring in his ears.
Erik forced himself to breathe. To think instead of simply reacting. Claricia had been there when the alarm rang. The guards had lost her in the chaos. Which meant she’d either run for the castle like any sensible person would, or—
Nay. When she’s frightened, she daesnae run toward walls.
Erik’s gaze swept the gardens again, this time looking for hiding places instead of obvious paths. And there, in the far corner where the castle walls met at a right angle, half-hidden by overgrown rose bushes that no one had bothered to trim—
A flash of fabric caught his eye, the edge of a shawl.
Relief and fury crashed through him in equal measure, hot and cold and vicious enough to make his hands shake.
Erik crossed the distance in long strides, boots on crushing fallen leaves, to find Claricia curled on a stone bench. A book clutched against her chest like armor. Her head was bent, chestnut hair falling forward to hide her face. She didn’t look up at his approach.
“Claricia.”
Her head snapped up at his voice, and the expression on her face—terror giving way to recognition giving way to something that might have been relief—made his chest tighten painfully.
“Erik.” His name came out breathless, shaky. “I—”
“Ye should have stayed where I could bloody find ye.” The words came out harsher than he intended, edged with the fear still coursing through his veins like poison.
She flinched at his tone, and part of him immediately regretted it. But the part that had just imagined a hundred different ways he might find her hurt or worse couldn’t seem to gentle his voice.
“I didnae think—”
“Nay. Ye didnae.” Erik stepped closer, looming over her without meaning to, his shadow falling across her face.
Claricia stared up at him, and he watched understanding dawn in those blue-green eyes like sunrise breaking over the sea. Watched her see past the anger to the fear underneath. Watched her expression shift from defensive to something softer, something that made his breath catch.
“Ye’re angry,” she said quietly, her voice steadier now, “because ye were worried about me.”
“Of course I was bloody worried!” The admission tore from him, raw and unfiltered.
“The castle’s been breached, there’s a dangerous bastard loose somewhere in these walls, and ye—” He dragged a hand through his hair, the gesture violent with frustration.
“D’ye ken what went through me head when I found that empty chamber? Every possibility, every cursed—”
He couldn’t finish. Couldn’t voice the images that had clawed through his mind like demons.
So he did the only thing that made sense.
Erik reached down and pulled her up from the bench, hauling her against his chest with enough force that the book tumbled from her hands to land with a soft thud in the dirt.
His arms came around her—one band of muscle across her back, the other hand cradling the back of her head—and he buried his face in her hair.
She smelled like herbs from the garden and the wool of her shawl. Her heart beat against his chest, rapid but steady. Her hands came up tentatively to clutch at his tunic, fingers curling into the fabric like she was afraid he might let go.
Alive. Whole. Safe. Mine.
For the first time since those alarm bells rang, Erik could breathe properly.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered against his chest, the words muffled by his tunic. “I didnae mean tae frighten ye.”
“Ye did more than frighten me.” The words came out rough, scraped raw. “Ye scared me half tae death, woman.”
They stood like that for a long moment—warrior and wife, Viking and Highlander, two people learning that some fears cut deeper than swords. Erik held her like she might dissolve if he loosened his grip, and Claricia let him, her breathing gradually slowing from panicked to steady.
She feels safe with me.
The realization settled in his chest like coals burning slow and steady.
Finally, Erik forced himself to pull back enough to look at her properly. His hands moved to frame her face, thumbs brushing across her cheekbones as he searched for any sign of injury, any hint that someone had hurt her while he wasn’t there to stop it.
“Are ye hurt?” The question came out gentler this time, the anger burned away to leave only concern. “Did anyone—”
“I’m fine.” She reached up to cover one of his hands with her own, the gesture small but grounding. “I swear it. I just—when the bells started ringin’ and everyone was runnin’ and shoutin’—I panicked. I couldnae breathe in all that chaos, so I came hid where it’s quiet.”
“Ye came tae the furthest corner of the gardens where nay one could see ye from the castle,” Erik corrected, though the edge was gone from his voice now, replaced by something that sounded dangerously like tenderness. “Where ye’d be completely alone if someone was huntin’ ye.”
Claricia’s face paled as the implications sank in like stones in water. “I didnae think of it like that. Finn was here with me, but he ran off to see what was happening, ordering me to go right back to the castle. But when I tried tae get up, I found I couldnae move.”
He let his hands drop, though every instinct screamed at him to keep touching her, keep confirming she was real and whole. “But ye need tae think of it like that now, little bird. Ye need tae understand that there are men who’d hurt ye just tae hurt me.”
“What happened?” she asked quietly, her voice barely audible over the wind. “The alarm—why was it ringin’?”
Erik bent to retrieve her fallen book—some volume of Greek histories he’d ordered from the mainland—and handed it to her. She clutched it against her chest again, that unconscious gesture of self-protection that made something in his chest twist.
“The prisoner escaped,” he said bluntly, watching her process the words. “The one we captured from the ambush. The one we kept in the North Wing.” Understanding dawned in her eyes. “The cell door was still locked from the outside, but the bastard was gone when the guards checked on him.”
“How is that possible?”