Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
MORRIGAN
Morrigan’s lips tingled from the kiss. How alive she’d felt in Aidan’s arms!
As the castle walls loomed up in the darkness ahead, her heart raced.
For the first time, she’d been overthrown by real passion.
It struck like a summer storm, with lightning flashing and thunder shaking the ground beneath her feet.
Morrigan wanted to give and take. To sample and feel. To hold onto him and ask him never to let her go.
Aidan challenged her and—for all his teasing—respected her. He wasn’t intimidated by who she was or what she was capable of doing. And her heart sang every time she was near him. Right now, her body burned, knowing he wanted her. And his words. The hints about matrimony and children.
Her steps faltered. She stopped.
What was she thinking?
Morrigan looked around her in the darkness.
They said that tonight fairies, ghosts, and witches roamed unhindered.
Spirits of mischief playing their tricks on humans.
Making off with souls of the living. Tonight, she was being tricked into believing that she could have a life. Have a future filled with dreams.
But she wouldn’t allow herself to be fooled.
Aidan Grant was special. A man who cared about others.
A barrister. Many hopes were pinned on his success in becoming a member of Parliament.
The Highlanders needed him. And what did she have to offer?
A father with radical views, shot dead by an English officer.
A stepmother with a bounty on her head, married to the man who posed the greatest threat to the Crown in a hundred years.
Her close connection to the rebels of the Highlands and her family presented a life fraught with scandal.
And when the shame of her own past came out, Aidan would be ruined.
She needed to face the truth, she had no place in his future.
She stabbed at the futile tears on her cheeks, and her gaze drifted up to the castle.
A light shone in a window of the ancient tower rising above Dalmigavie’s keep.
The room where Wemys lay dying. As she stared, anger filled her, building on her unhappiness.
That lighted window was just one more reminder that she could never have a future where happiness existed.
Samhain. The night when time lost all meaning. Past, present, and future came together as one. Life and death too. A thin veil separated the world of the living from the world of the dead. At Samhain, the veil dropped away. The worlds merged.
Wemys was dead to her, but she had still a promise to fulfill. A door she had to close.
Morrigan had put it off for nine days. Nine days of fretting, of nightmares, of trying to decide if she should renege on her promise.
Isabella wouldn’t blame her. She’d already told her that much.
Still, she knew she had to go through with it.
She’d go to Wemys and allow him to speak.
He’d agreed to her terms. Done his part.
Now it was her turn. She had to do it, if for no other reason, for Aidan.
He might still need the blackguard’s testimony for his trial.
Only a few people remained in the castle tonight. A watchman above the gate nodded as she raced through the entrance. Most of the Mackintoshes were celebrating in the village. Morrigan headed directly toward the old tower.
Since they moved him here, she’d walked this way every day going up to the parapets.
She’d been testing herself. Morrigan wanted to make sure she could do it and not fall apart.
She’d done fairly well. Grown stronger and harder with each passing day.
But tonight, each step was a stab to her heart.
Morrigan felt her head pound. Cold sweat formed along her spine.
Damn him.
She was back in that small bedroom in Perth, trapped beneath his body. His hand was covering her mouth. She couldn’t breathe.
Damn him.
Damn him.
Morrigan’s knees wobbled as she reached the floor where his room was located. She lunged into the dark corridor and stopped. She pressed her forehead against the cold stone wall and tried to focus on her breathing, waiting for the weakness to pass.
“He can’t hurt me.”
She reached into her boot and retrieved her sgian dubh. The feel of the weapon in her hand was reassuring.
“He can’t hurt me.”
A lamp hanging from the wall cast flickering shadows.
Tonight, the door between the living and dead was open.
Let the spirits pass back and forth. Isabella knew the truth, but this was her battle.
Her future depended on it. This was her chance to shove her own demons back into the darkness.
She would not let them haunt her anymore.
She steeled herself for what she must do. Going to Wemys’s door, she knocked.
Aidan’s clerk, Kane Branson, was down in the village too. One of the serving women answered the door. Morrigan asked her if she could wait in the corridor.
The older woman quickly fetched her basket of mending and stepped out. Morrigan closed the door behind her. A candle flickered on a table next to the chair where she’d been sitting.
As the daughter of a doctor, she’d grown up knowing what death looked like.
What it smelled like. The air in this room reeked of it.
The form of the man lying in the bed, his face pointed at the ceiling, his skin waxy and transparent, could easily have been a corpse already.
Only the irregular rise and fall of his sunken chest showed that Wemys still lived. And the sound of each wheezing breath.
Morrigan moved closer, until she could stare at his face. As she watched him, his cheek twisted and trembled as if he were being tortured in his sleep. She hoped he was being lashed or racked, tormented by devils in a horrible place where people like him burned and suffered for all eternity.
His face was blotchy and wrinkled. One would think he was ancient, though she knew his age could not be much past forty. Forty years of villainy. What a waste of life.
A cough erupted in his chest, thick and painful. He gasped for air and moaned, and suddenly his eyes opened. They filled with fear as he realized it was Morrigan standing over him. She stared back at him. A look of resignation settled over his features.
She felt no fear. He couldn’t hurt her. No longer. She was not a defenseless, twelve-year-old child anymore.
“You’re here. That’s a blessing.”
“One you don’t deserve.”
Wemys tried to push himself up in his bed, but he was too weak. He sank back on his pillow.
“You have no audience now. It’s only you and me and your maker. Say what you have to say and be quick about it.”
“Maker,” he scoffed. He looked around the room as if to make certain she was telling the truth, that they were alone. His gaze lit on the weapon she held in her hand.
“Did you come to kill me?”
She lifted the dagger. The candlelight glinted along the polished blade. “I can give you no death as painful as the one that awaits you.”
Another cough wracked his body, and Morrigan slid her sgian dubh back into its sheath.
Suddenly, a feeling of calm descended over her.
Looking at this sorry excuse for a human being, wasted and too weak even to raise himself in his bed, she realized he was finished.
There was nothing this man could do to hurt her again.
There was nothing she could do to make him suffer more.
The desire for revenge she’d harbored for so long lifted.
“I’m only here because we had an agreement. You revealed a name. And you will testify at court if Mr. Grant calls on you. I’m here now, as I promised, and you will get this chance only once. Now speak.”
A fit, intense and painful, jolted him. He rolled weakly to the side, coughing up bloody phlegm. A cup of water sat on a table by his bed. He drank it down and waited for the attack to subside. He settled back, weak and exhausted.
“I’m dying,” he said finally, pushing out the words between gasps for air. “They offered to bring me a priest. But the forgiveness I seek cannot come from any churchman.”
“That’s nothing to me,” Morrigan replied, hearing the hardness in her own voice. She forced down the bile rising in her throat. This was what this man did to her. On that night, he robbed her of something soft, forgiving.
“I did you great wrong. I admit it. You were my sister’s child.
And you trusted me. But I was young. That night, when I came in from the tavern .
. .” Emotion took hold of him again and he squeezed his eyes shut.
“I was lost. My parents had refused to help me any longer. They took back their offer to allow me to continue studying art, saying I wasn’t fit.
They said I should enlist, fight the French, become a man.
A lass I was courting heard about it. She shut the door in my face. I was drinking.”
“Stop!” Morrigan’s temper boiled over. She could take no more of his excuses. “Say what you did to me, to a girl not yet a woman. I want to hear you say it. What you did. You. Not your hard luck. Not your drinking. Not your failures. You.”
Her anger sparked in the air between them, hanging like a cloud of fire.
“Say what you did to me. The child of your dead sister. I want you to say it out loud. Admit what you did to me.”
He threw his arm over his eyes.
Morrigan waited. Tears of rage ran down her face, and she dashed them away. Finally, she could wait no more.
“Coward.”
She turned to leave, but he called after her.
His words came, weak and rasping, slowly at first. Tears streamed down his face, staining his pillow. He broke down several times as he spoke, gasping and coughing. Morrigan waited and listened until he said out loud everything that he’d done to her that night.
To hear it from his lips as he sobbed with shame had a calming effect on her. A blade slid out of her heart, slowly but steadily withdrawing from a painful, ever-present wound that had festered and never healed, no matter how hard she tried to ignore it.
Once he was done talking, she turned toward the door.
“I did you grievous wrong. But please . . . please forgive me,” he begged. “We’re family. Look at me. I’m dying. Give me peace in my final days.”
Morrigan shook her head. “You robbed me of my childhood, of my innocence. You stole my belief in goodness, in love of family. I did nothing to deserve what happened. You are the one responsible for this moment. When you held me down, when you hurt me, you felt no pity, no compassion. I was not your sister’s child, your own kin.
I was nothing. You took away my ability to feel pity or compassion for you. ”
Wemys gasped for air.
“What is forgivable is a sin one person commits toward another. But I was not a person to you that night. And I cannot forgive you because I may never be whole again. I’ll never forgive you.”
He started to say something, but a fit of coughing overtook him, and his wasted body shuddered. He reached a trembling hand for the cup by his bedside, but it was empty. He motioned toward a pitcher on the table across the room.
Morrigan ignored him and walked out. She couldn’t bring herself to lessen his misery. Not for a single moment.