Chapter Eighteen
“In!” the MacFarlane guard barked, pushing Katrina through the door with a hand to the small of her back.
He wasn’t gentle, but he wasn’t so rough that she fell to the floor, even with her hands bound before her.
Still, by the time she regained her balance, the cell door had been slammed closed behind her.
Not that she paid that very much mind, because her brother was before her.
“Katrina!” he cried, trying to surge to his feet. He failed because, unlike her, he was bound at the ankles as well as at the wrists, and his hands were behind his back.
“Edward!” She hurried to his side, looping her bound wrists over his neck in an ungainly sort of hug, but needing to hold him close to her, no matter how awkwardly.
She searched him with her eyes, checking for injury.
He was dirty and sporting a rough patch of stubble that suggested that he had been stuck here for a while but otherwise seemed undamaged.
“What happened to ye?” he demanded as she unhooked her hold and set herself to the task of picking apart his bindings.
“I should ask the same of ye!” she retorted, trying to wiggle a finger under one of the tight knots of his rope. Whoever had tied him up had not been nearly as loose in their work as Blake had been, but it was still a challenge. “When I saw ye last, ye were safe at home at MacAllan Keep.”
Edward craned his neck over his shoulder to give her a dry look.
“Aye, as were ye. I went out searching for ye, of course. As if ye could think otherwise when my wee sister disappears into the night! While I was doing that, I fell afoul of a MacFarlane patrol. I didnae expect them to bloody abduct me, since we were supposed to be allies, so I didnae even think to fight until it was too late.”
Katrina swallowed against the lump of guilt in her throat. She’d long since realized that she had been foolish to dash off into the night the way she had done, but it still roused her shame anew to see how her brother had been forced to pay the consequences of her actions.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldnae have run off but… I couldnae bear the idea of being married off like I was just some toy in men’s games of war. I just…I couldnae bear it.”
Edward’s reply was lost in her cry of triumph as she finally loosened the last knot holding his hands together.
Once he rubbed some feeling back into his wrists, which bore angry red marks from being bound for so long, he made quick work of the binding on her hands before loosening his ankles, as well.
He took a few moments to stretch, wincing as he used muscles that had grown cramped from being too long in one position, and then gave Katrina a proper hug.
Beneath the damp straw smell of the dungeon, he smelled like her brother, like home. Katrina soaked that in. She hadn’t realized how desperately she had missed it until now.
When Edward pulled away, his face was serious.
“Ye were right to run after all, Katrina,” he said solemnly. “After ye left, I was looking for answers… and I found that Father’s so-called ‘neutrality’ has never been more than a pretty lie.”
He looked as though what he was about to say next had broken his heart, and Katrina felt her stomach tie up in knots.
“What did ye find?”
Edward looked away briefly, wiping a hand over his face.
“Before the attacks… Clan MacAllan supplied sedatives. Herbs and medicines, too. I found letters that suggested that Father didn’t do this as part of our usual trade—he gave them to Clan MacBrae in exchange for us being spared from the worst of the slaughter. ”
Katrina’s mouth fell open. There were no words to properly describe the horror she felt.
“Father may not have lifted a blade himself,” Edward went on, and Katrina could see how something had died beneath his eyes—hope, maybe, or trust in a better world.
“But he knew. He knew, and he didnae say anything to Lennox. And that killed them just as surely as any explosion. It was cowardice, not any so-called neutrality, that protected our people while Lennox burned.”
He spat the last words, disgust thick in his tone, and despite everything, despite feeling the idea she’d always had of her father disappear like a puff of smoke from a blown-out candle, Katrina felt a fierce pride in her brother.
He would be a good laird one day.
He would not let anything like this ever happen again.
Suddenly, there was a noise in the corridor, and Edward shoved Katrina behind him, prepared to protect her with the shelter of his body while other weapons were lacking.
Aye. Her brother would never be paralyzed by his own cowardice.
“What do ye want?” Edward snarled as the door to their cell opened, holding Katrina behind him with an arm as she tried to peer around him to see what was happening.
“‘Tis time to go.”
She recognized that voice. With a cry of relief, she darted around her brother to throw herself into Blake’s arms.
He caught her, of course. He always did.
“What in the nine hells?” Edward demanded as Katrina and Blake embraced quickly. Blake ignored him, looking intently down at Katrina.
“Ye are well, lass?” She nodded. She had suffered nothing worse than a few insults. Stark relief flickered in Blake’s expression, replaced quickly by determination.
“Good,” he said. “Right. There isnae time to explain now, but ye were right. Lennox was right. Laird MacFarlane—” He shook his head. “Later. For now, we need to get away from here as quickly as we can.”
“Let’s go,” Katrina agreed. She’d had more than enough of this dungeon, even if she had only been down here for a little while.
Edward, however, was not so easily convinced.
“Now wait a minute,” he said, reaching out to grab Katrina’s hand and trying to tug her subtly back toward him. She shook him off. “Why on earth would we trust ye? Ye are the Bloodhound!”
Blake showed a grim smile and Katrina, recalling several less-than-civil exchanges with Arran, intervened.
“Just trust me, then,” she told her brother. “I say we can trust him.”
“How lovely to ken that someone can.”
They all spun at the sound of this new voice, but it was too late.
In the instant after Brodie MacFarlane spoke, the iron gate to their cell slammed shut, trapping them all securely inside.
Blake surged forward, but even the mighty Bloodhound was no match for the unyielding iron bars. Brodie didn’t even flinch, instead smirking as he stood just out of reach.
“I wondered when ye would finally bite the hand that feeds ye, dog,” he sneered, shaking his head as he looked Blake over. Then, his eyes darted to Katrina. “Perhaps it shouldnae surprise me that it was your… baser instincts that led ye there. Though I would prefer a real woman, myself.”
Blake slammed his hands against the bars. “Dinnae speak of her that way. And open this door immediately. Where is the laird?”
A very nasty look crossed Brodie’s face. “Och, do ye mean our father?” he asked lightly, then grinned, waiting as the impact of that explosion shook them all.
Katrina crept closer to Blake’s back, not quite daring to touch him in front of Brodie—he clearly did not need any more ammunition—but needing to provide some form of support.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Blake asked in his most dangerous voice.
Brave with a wall of iron between them, Brodie laughed.
“Are ye really so surprised?” he asked, apparently delighted.
“I should have known that ye were too stupid to ever guess it.” He kicked back against the wall like he was settling in to tell a story.
“Aye, ye were Father’s mistake. A bastard, gotten on some common woman.
A stablewoman’s son sharpened into a weapon.
A gift to me, or so Father always insisted.
So that I never need dirty my own hands. ”
“Until now, I suppose,” Blake said, his words hard and bitter. Katrina took another step forward, pulled in by the inexorable gravity of his clear pain. She was a healer, after all. Every part of her ached to soothe him.
Brodie’s look of amusement didn’t fade.
“Certainly not,” he said. “I’m nae a fool, brother,” he spat the word as if it disgusted him. “I brought friends.”
He beckoned, the gesture almost lazy.
And, as one, several armed guards all clad in MacBrae brown and green stepped into the light.
Katrina sucked in an alarmed breath and stepped close, pressing her hand to Blake’s back as a sense of doom threatened to swamp her.
Kenna gnawed anxiously at her lip from where she and Arran were hidden in the trees until he tugged it free from between her teeth, worried that she might actually draw blood in her distracted state.
“What do we do now?” she fretted as they watched MacBrae guards swarm MacFarlane Keep.
Arran knew that it was the sight of her family colors—something she’d come to associate with ill tidings—that bothered her as much as the dawning realization that MacBrae and MacFarlane had formally allied with one another.
Inwardly, he cursed himself. Ever since marrying Makenna, he had brought her nothing but worry and fear and uncertainty. He knew that she still loved him, of course, and he did not intend to let anything short of death separate them.
But he wanted to have more to offer her.
Yet increasingly he feared that death was the more likely ending to their story.
“I have to go in,” he said, hugging his wife to his side as she let out a little sound of dismay. “I ken, lass, but I must. I cannae leave Katrina in there, nor Edward MacAllan.”
He couldn’t believe he was about to say this, but…
“And I think,” he went on, “that we may even find that the Bloodhound is more an ally than an enemy.”
Kenna was so visibly surprised by this assessment that it would have been humorous in any other circumstance. Arran understood her completely. He felt much the same, and he was the one who had said it.
“Really?” she asked. “Ye think so?”
He nodded.
He really did. Aye, he and Blake had come up against one another as enemies of late, but the Bloodhound hadn’t revealed Arran’s true identity when Arran had still been in hiding at Callahan Keep.
And the soldier had seemed genuinely affronted by the suggestion that his laird had contributed to the carnage ten years prior—offended, but not entirely disbelieving.
If Arran could convince Blake that MacFarlane was culpable, the Bloodhound might very well change his mind. And there was little more convincing than the current swarm of MacBrae guards.
Besides, Arran had seen the way Blake looked at Katrina. He’d seen the way the man had abandoned a battle to pursue her. He recognized that look.
It was the way he looked at Kenna.
“I have to try,” he told Kenna, ignoring the way the tears brimming in her eyes tore at his heart. “Kenna, mo graidh, ye ken that I love ye, aye?”
Kenna shook her head, but not in refusal of his words. “Dinnae talk like that,” she begged. “Like ye arenae coming back.”
He smoothed a strand of her golden hair back from her face. She really was the most beautiful sight in the world, as far as he was concerned.
“I will do everything in my power to return to ye,” he promised. “Always. But if I dinnae… ye must leave the Highlands. Go far from here. Live.” He pressed his forehead to hers. “Ye must promise me that.”
Her throat bobbed, but then she nodded. It was faint, but it was there.
“Aye,” she said. “I promise. But ye need to come back and not hold me to it. Do ye hear me, Arran Lennox? Ye come back to me.”
He kissed her, pouring all of his love and his hope and his fear into the kiss. He pressed hard enough that it would bruise his lips, that it would let him carry the feel of her with him into whatever lay ahead.
“I will come back to ye,” he said.
Then he headed toward MacFarlane Keep, praying that it was a promise he would honor.