Chapter One
Blake MacFarlane strode through the stone halls of MacFarlane Keep, not paying any attention to the way servants skittered out of the way and guards instinctively straightened their posture as he walked past. It was easy to ignore, frankly.
The staff of the keep had been treating him that way for years, ever since the no-name guard from a distant branch of the clan had started making himself very well known, indeed.
His stature had helped, certainly. He stood a head and shoulders above nearly everyone else in the keep, including all the guards, but he’d always been rangy. It was when he’d started to push himself further, when he’d grown broader than the rest of them, too…
That was when they’d started growing anxious.
Not just because he was big and strong, but because when he’d thrown himself into training, it had hardened him. Like the way a weapon grew harder the longer it spent over the forge.
And, like steel that had been hammered, tempered, and hammered again, he had an edge. And when he moved, he cut through space like that same blade.
He smiled a grim little smile when nobody even tried to stop him from entering the laird’s chamber. Who would dare?
Blake MacFarlane might not have a drop of noble blood in his veins, but he’d spilled enough blood to award him the same privileges.
If that meant that fear followed him as naturally as his own shadow… Well, that was yet one more tool that he was unafraid to wield.
“Ah, finally,” Laird MacFarlane drawled as Blake stormed into the room. “Ye do ken, Bloodhound, that ye are the sole man who can keep me waiting without consequence, aye?”
There was a faint note of censure in the laird’s tone, but Blake ignored it. If Malcom MacFarlane wanted to criticize Blake, he could do it outright, like a bloody man. These sly little snipes and jabs might have bothered Blake as a lad, but not anymore.
But Brodie MacFarlane, the laird’s heir, did not prove nearly as impenetrable. He scowled openly at Blake, as he always did whenever his father showed that his preference was not aligned with his own blood. Blake ignored that, too.
“Ye summoned me, your lairdship?” Blake asked dryly.
The laird was accustomed to Blake’s ways by now; he barely blinked at his soldier’s gruff tone.
“Indeed I did,” Laird MacFarlane said. Though there was no shortage of seats in the study, he did not invite Blake to sit. He never did. Brodie, lounging nearby, lost his irritated expression in favor of one of smug amusement.
Blake might have built a wall of ice around himself long ago, but he had to resist rolling his eyes. There was just something about Brodie MacFarlane that made Blake want to punch him. Just a little. Until he stopped with the goddamned smirking.
“Ye recall that little Lennox pest, aye?” the laird continued.
Blake waited for a pointed moment. “Aye,” he said.
It was absurd of Laird MacFarlane to call Arran Lennox, a man who had survived the murder of his entire family, lived in hiding for a decade, only to reclaim his name and steal his bride from under the noses of his many enemies “a little pest.” But the laird always had been the kind who would make himself feel bigger by pretending that others were small.
“Good,” the laird said, Blake’s irony apparently lost upon him. “Well, as ye may imagine, Bruce MacBrae is eager to see his wayward daughter returned before that Lennox villain can hold any more undue influence over her feeble mind.”
Anyone who had met Makenna MacBrae could not have managed to call her “feebleminded” with a straight face, unless they were phenomenally misguided.
Blake hadn’t had much interaction with the woman, even though he’d been present at Callahan Keep shortly before she had defected with Arran.
But he’d seen cleverness in the gaze of a woman who had survived years of marriage to the English brute her father had sold her to.
Blake had lacked any sort of vested interest in the scheme—he’d been sent to represent his clan in Alliance negotiations, and he had done so—but even he had felt a flicker of satisfaction when Edmund Ashbourne had breathed his last.
He had never yet met an English nobleman that didn’t deserve a grim death, after all.
For what it was worth, he did not particularly believe that Arran was holding undue influence over Kenna, either.
The pair of them had not been precisely subtle about the longing glances they’d been shooting one another all over Callahan Keep.
There had been widespread surprise when Arran and Kenna had run off together, which really confirmed what Blake had long known—that most people were stupid, blind, or both.
“So, you, my Bloodhound,” the laird said with the smile he always wore when he wanted to feel like he owned Blake, “are going to find them.”
Laird MacFarlane had set Blake plenty of tasks in the past ten years, as Blake had savagely fought his way up the ranks of soldiers. He’d never refused, and he didn’t plan to do so now.
Duty was what he had.
Duty, and the resolve to do what needed to be done—whatever that was.
But finding two people who could be anywhere in Scotland, and who would likely be hiding, was an absurd task.
Blake only smiled.
It had been ages since he had been given a proper challenge.
“Can blood be shed?” he asked. It was the only question worth asking, really.
The laird laughed. “I would never deny my Bloodhound his sport,” he said, his vicious pleasure palpable. “Keep the girl alive; her father wants to deal with her himself. And once I deliver her, Bruce MacBrae will have no choice but to finally give MacFarlane the lands and power that is our due.”
Blake let his laird talk. He didn’t care about lands and power for the clan. That was the business of lairds and their ilk, and Blake was just a tool. The sword, not the hand who directed it.
It just so happened that he was a damned good sword.
“I’ll see it done, my laird,” Blake swore when his laird was done pontificating on the glories that would be his once MacBrae saw his true potential. Blake’s mind was on the chase itself, not whatever came after.
“I ken,” said the laird. “Ye never fail, Bloodhound.”
Nay, Blake never did fail, except for the one time when it had counted the most.
And he did not intend to ever let such a thing happen again.
It was early when Katrina MacAllan slipped from her bedchamber.
Dawn barely kissing the horizon to announce a new day. Even so, Katrina was fully dressed in a dark cloak suitable for moving about undetected and for keeping off the lingering chill of the night.
She hadn’t left anything about this day to chance. Not when so much was resting upon the actions of the next few hours.
It had taken Katrina some time to decide how to approach the letter she’d received a fortnight ago. As daughter of the clan’s laird, she knew all too well that every one of her actions carried weight.
Beyond that, she knew that her clan’s position was a precarious one.
MacAllan was a clan of healers. They did not have great martial prowess, and they did not have vast stores of wealth.
They were not helpless, of course. They had warriors just like everyone else.
But they did not have quite so many warriors as everyone else, and that meant they did not have the luxury of deciding rashly in matters of war.
And it was looking, day by day, more as though war had come to the Highlands.
In the end, however, the letter had asked Katrina for her help, and Katrina was a healer to her core, like a dozen generations of MacAllan women before her. She had never been able to ignore a cry for help—least of all one that came from a friend.
Thus, despite her misgivings, she’d sent back a date, time, and place to meet, and then had begun hatching.
She made her way down to the yard, making certain that a few of the maids and cooks—all too busy with their own early morning chores to pay her much mind—saw her carrying her basket, the one she often took with her for carrying herbs.
If anyone happened to notice her absence that day, they would recall seeing her going off foraging, a common enough activity for her that nobody would think twice about it.
Instead of slipping out the back gate that led to the best foraging areas, however, Katrina looped around to the stables, where one of the young stablehands had already readied her a mare with bridle and saddle.
She knew that this lad in particular would not say anything against her; Katrina had been brewing his mother a tonic for her chronic cough for years, and the boy practically worshipped Katrina as a result.
Katrina did try to avoid taking advantage of such things. She was a skilled healer, it was true, but that was something that ought to be given back to others, not a tool for her own self-aggrandizement.
This was an extraordinary circumstance, however.
“Thank ye, Archie,” she said, accepting the reins. “Tell your ma that I hope she’s doing well and to come see me if her breathing gets bad again, aye?”
“Aye, Lady Katrina,” the lad said, stars practically shining in his eyes at having his name remembered.
She slipped the lad a coin and a sweet. Because adoration was all well and good, but a little extra bribery never hurt, and he was a good lad who deserved something nice for himself. Then she mounted the mare and rode out of the keep.
The tension in her shoulders relaxed with every hoofbeat that took her away from MacAllan Keep. She didn’t have to go far from her father’s lands before she became just like any other young woman riding along toward the market day that was happening in a nearby village.