Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Logan turned before the second bell finished ringing.
“Fires!” a guard shouted from above, his voice raw with urgency. “East ridge!”
Logan moved in front of Rose without thinking, his arm angling back to keep her behind him. His gaze found the distant glow beyond the garden wall. Thin orange tongues licked at the black line of the hills. One fire. Then another. Then a third, flaring like signals in the dark.
His jaw locked.
“Logan?” Rose whispered behind him.
Her voice was trying to seem calm, but he heard the trembling beneath it.
He wanted to turn. Wanted to cup her face again and tell her there was nothing in this world that would reach her while he still drew breath.
Instead, he reached for the dagger at his belt and pressed it into her hand. Her fingers closed around it by instinct.
“Stay behind me,” he said, his voice low and hard.
Her eyes widened as she looked from the blade to his face. “What is happening?”
“I dinnae ken yet.” He looked toward the wall, then back to her. “But ye dae as I say. Nay matter what.”
She swallowed, her throat moving delicately in the moonlight. “Yes.”
He hated that she had cause to be frightened. Hated that only moments ago she had been standing close enough to kiss, and now her fingers were curled around a weapon because danger had found its way to his gates again.
A movement flashed above the garden wall. Logan saw it too late to stop the first man from dropping into the far shadows of the courtyard.
For one second, everything in him went freezing cold as he realized the fires were not the threat. They were the lure.
“Rose,” he said, his voice dropping. “Back.”
She moved, but not fast enough.
A shout ripped through the courtyard as one of Logan’s guards saw the intruders.
Steel rang. Boots pounded over stone. The music from the hall faltered, cut off by confusion and the rising swell of alarm.
Men poured from the side passage, half armed, some still dragging blades free from belts that had been loosened for the feast.
The intruders cut toward the garden.
Logan’s blood turned to ice.
“Conn!” he roared.
His voice cracked across the courtyard and carried over the sudden chaos. Conn appeared near the lower steps at once, sword already drawn, his limp more pronounced as he forced speed from a body that pain had never managed to master.
“South wall!” Logan shouted. “They came over the garden side!”
Conn’s eyes flashed toward Rose, then hardened. “Aye!”
The first soldier came at Logan from the left, blade raised too high, his face half hidden beneath a dark hood.
Their swords met with a crash that drove sparks into the night.
The familiar impact climbed Logan’s arm, a pain he understood far better than the tenderness that had undone him a moment earlier.
This, he could do.
He twisted, slammed his shoulder into the man’s chest, and drove him back against the stone border hard enough to crack breath from his lungs.
The soldier recovered fast, lunging low, aiming for Logan’s side.
Logan caught the strike, forced the blade away, and brought his fist into the man’s jaw.
Bone snapped beneath his knuckles. The man staggered.
Logan ended him with one brutal stroke.
“Rose!” he barked without looking away from the next man closing in. “Behind the hedge. Now.”
“I am here,” she called, closer than he wanted.
She was too close.
A guard intercepted one soldier near the path. Another MacKenzie man drove a second intruder back toward the fountain. The courtyard had become a violent tangle of bodies, torchlight, and steel.
Logan cut through it all toward Rose.
He saw her by the hedge, one hand braced on the stone wall, the dagger clutched white-knuckled in the other. Her blue gown caught the moonlight. She looked too bright. Like a flame in a dark room.
One of the soldiers saw her, head snapping toward her with recognition. The man broke away from the guard he was fighting and ran straight for her.
“Nay!” Logan’s voice tore from him, raw enough to burn.
Rose turned.
The soldier reached her before Logan could.
He seized her arm and yanked her forward with such force that she stumbled. The dagger slipped in her hand but did not fall.
She cried out as she twisted against him. “Let me go!”
The sound ripped something open in Logan and the world narrowed to the man’s hand on her.
Logan drove forward. Someone came at him from the side but he barely noted him. He only felt the rush of movement, the threat between him and Rose. He struck hard, elbow first, then blade, not stopping to see the body fall.
Someone came at him from the side. Logan barely registered the blade until it sliced hot across his forearm. He struck hard, elbow first, then blade, not stopping to see the body fall.
The soldier dragged Rose against him, his arm locking across her chest.
“Back!” the man snarled, lifting a short blade near her throat. “Back, or she bleeds!”
Everything stopped.
Rose’s eyes found his. They were wide, but not broken. Her chest rose and fell too quickly against the soldier’s arm. A strand of hair had come loose from its pins. The blade at her throat pressed close enough to draw a thin white line against her skin.
Logan’s grip tightened on his sword until the leather bit into his palm. “Let her go.”
The sneer on the soldier’s face faltered.
“She comes with us,” he said, dragging Rose half a step back.
Logan’s gaze flicked once to the man’s stance, his grip, the angle of the blade, the way Rose’s right hand had fallen near her skirt, still holding the dagger.
“Who sent ye?” Logan asked.
The man laughed, but there was fear under it now. “You know who.”
“Ye’re in me castle,” he said, taking one slow step forward. “Surrounded by me men. And ye think ye’ll walk out wi’ her?”
The soldier’s face tightened. His blade pressed closer to Rose’s throat. Her lashes fluttered, but she did not make a sound. That restraint nearly killed him.
“I said back,” the man snapped.
Logan lowered his sword a fraction and the soldier’s eyes dropped to follow the movement.
Rose struck. She drove the dagger backward into the man’s thigh with every bit of strength she had. He screamed, his grip loosening for one fractured heartbeat.
Logan crossed the distance in two strides.
He seized the soldier’s wrist, wrenched the blade away from Rose’s throat, and drove his fist into the man’s face. Rose tore free and stumbled aside. Logan shoved her behind him, then caught the soldier by the front of his tunic and slammed him down onto the stone path.
The soldier lunged for a hidden knife at his boot.
Logan ended him.
The body went still. A heavy, ringing silence followed in the small circle around them, broken only by Logan’s breathing and Rose’s faint, shaky inhale behind him.
He turned at once.
She stood a few paces away, the dagger still in her hand, her face pale in the moonlight. She was looking at the dead man, but not as though she saw him. Her gaze had fixed somewhere past him, into whatever memory his hands had dragged up.
Logan reached for her before he remembered the blood on his hands, but then stopped himself.
“Rose.”
Her eyes snapped to his. That, at least, brought breath back into his chest.
“Are ye hurt?”
She swallowed, her grip on the dagger loosening only when he carefully took it from her. Her fingers were cold when they brushed his.
“No,” she said. “No, I am not hurt.”
Logan reached for her arms, careful despite the violence still pounding through him.
His hands closed around her gently, thumbs brushing over the wool of her sleeves as he checked her.
One sleeve was stretched where the soldier had yanked her, but he saw no blood.
He moved his gaze to her throat. The mark there was shallow, only a scrape from the edge of the blade, but the sight of it made his stomach turn with a cold, sick pressure.
“Yer hands,” he said roughly.
She blinked. “What?”
“Let me see yer hands.”
She obeyed, though her fingers trembled as she lifted them.
There was a small smear of blood across her palm, but not hers. He turned her hands over anyway, searching, pressing lightly along her fingers, her wrists, her knuckles. She stood still under his inspection, though he could feel the fine tremor running through her.
“I told you,” she whispered. “I am all right.”
He drew in a breath and it caught halfway down. “Ye had a blade at yer throat.”
“But it did not cut me.”
“It disnae matter.”
“Logan,” she said quietly, eyes softening. “I am here.”
His hands stayed on her arms. He could not seem to let go.
Around them, his men were dragging bodies into a line near the wall. Conn was giving low orders, as someone called for the healer. Someone else shouted that the ridge fires were being watched and had not spread. The courtyard began to take shape again, panic turning into work.
But Logan’s world had narrowed to Rose’s face and the faint red line at her throat.
She is here. She is standing.
Only then did he let out the shaking breath trapped in his chest.
Rose’s gaze moved over his face, and a tenderness entered her expression that had no place in a courtyard full of dead men.
“I am all right,” she said again, softer this time.
He pulled her to him, drew her against his chest and locked her there. There was no thought in it. No permission asked, no careful distance kept, no concern for the eyes around them.
Rose went still for the length of a heartbeat, then her arms came around him.
Logan shut his eyes.
The relief was so sharp it bordered on pain. He bent his head, his cheek brushing the soft crown of her hair, and for a few breaths he allowed himself the weakness of feeling her warm body against his.
She had nearly been taken from him.
His hold tightened before he could stop it.
Rose’s fingers curled into the back of his tunic. “Logan,” she whispered, and there was something unsteady in her voice now.
“I’ve got ye,” he said into her hair, the words rough and low. “I’ve got ye.”