Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“There,” Barnaby said softly. “Obedience is not so difficult once a man understands what he stands to lose.”
Logan said nothing.
His hands remained open at his sides. He could feel the dagger at his belt like a burning thought, but his arm did not move toward it yet. Not while Barnaby stood so close to her, not while every breath Rose took brushed her throat against the knife.
Barnaby took a step forward.
Rose came with him, dragged against his chest, her body rigid beneath his hold. Her courage had narrowed into stillness now. No rash movement. No panic. Even with fear bright in her eyes, she held herself carefully, because she knew exactly what one wrong motion could cost.
That nearly broke him.
“You Highlanders are all the same,” Barnaby said, his tone almost conversational. “So proud of blood and steel, so certain you cannot be bent. But you are men before you are warriors. Find a man’s weakness, and he kneels like any other.”
Logan’s jaw tightened, but he did not rise to it.
Barnaby wanted rage. He wanted a lunge, a mistake, an excuse to draw that knife across Rose’s throat and die laughing with victory in his mouth.
Logan gave him nothing.
Barnaby’s expression flickered, annoyed by the silence. His grip shifted slightly against Rose’s chest, the knife moving with him.
Rose’s lips parted on a shallow breath and Logan’s blood turned cold.
“Careful,” he said. The word came low enough that it barely crossed the corridor, but everyone heard it.
Barnaby’s brows lifted. “Are you giving me orders still?”
“I’m telling ye what will happen if yer hand slips.”
Barnaby laughed softly. “And what will you do? Bleed on me from across the corridor?”
He stepped forward again, dragging Rose with him.
But something changed in her eyes.
It was only a flicker, there and gone beneath the fear, but Logan saw the sudden sharpness, a spark catching in dry kindling. Her gaze dropped for the smallest instant, lower than the knife, toward Barnaby’s foot.
Logan’s breath stopped before he understood why.
Her heel came down hard on his boot.
Barnaby cursed and lurched, his arm tightening around her as his balance broke. Rose twisted at once, enough to pull her throat a fraction away from the blade. The knife slipped from the delicate line beneath her jaw and flashed sideways instead, grazing only air.
Logan’s chest seized. For half a heartbeat, all he saw was the small space she had made.
He moved.
The corridor became nothing but motion.
He closed the space between them in a single violent rush.
His shoulder struck Barnaby full in the chest, driving him backward away from Rose, slamming him into the wall hard enough to crack his head against stone.
The knife flashed. Logan caught Barnaby’s wrist with both hands and drove it sideways before the blade could find flesh.
Rose stumbled away.
“Fergus!” Logan barked.
Fergus seized her and pulled her back behind him as Logan and Barnaby crashed to the ground.
Barnaby snarled, striking with his free hand, knuckles catching Logan across the cheek. Pain burst hot near his eye, but Logan barely felt it. He slammed Barnaby’s wrist against the stone and the knife clattered loose, skidding across the floor.
Barnaby bucked beneath him. “You savage bastard?—”
Logan drove his fist into Barnaby’s mouth. The man’s head snapped to the side as blood darkened his teeth.
Then Barnaby laughed. Even beneath Logan’s weight, even with blood in his mouth, he laughed.
“She was meant to be mine,” he rasped.
Logan’s hand closed around the dagger at his belt.
The world narrowed to Barnaby’s face, to the smearing blood, to the hate still alive in his eyes.
All the words he might have said vanished.
There was no speech large enough for what this man had done, no curse sharp enough, no sentence that could give back the nights Rose had spent afraid, the bruises on her skin, the broken body of her father hanging in chains.
So Logan did not speak.
Barnaby saw the dagger and for the first time, something like fear cut through his expression.
Logan drove the blade down.
Barnaby’s body arched once beneath him, breath leaving on a wet, broken sound. Logan held the dagger there, his hand locked around the hilt until the last struggle faded from the man’s limbs.
Only then did he pull the blade free.
Silence rushed in after. The bell still clanged somewhere outside, but in the corridor itself, nothing moved.
Logan remained kneeling over Barnaby for one breath too long, his chest rising and falling hard. His hand was wet with blood. His own or Barnaby’s, he did not know.
Then Rose made a small sound.
He turned so sharply that pain shot through his neck.
She stood a few paces away, one hand pressed to her throat, Fergus beside her with one arm half-raised as if to shield her. Her face was too pale. A thin line of blood marked the place where the knife had cut her skin.
Logan forgot Barnaby existed. He rose and crossed to her, each step too fast but not fast enough.
“Rose.”
She swallowed, her hand still pressed to her throat, then lifted her eyes up to his. “I am well.”
He caught her face between his hands, careful despite the way his fingers shook. His thumb hovered near the cut at her throat and stopped before touching it. “Ye’re bleeding.”
“It is nothing.”
“Dinnae say that.” The words came harsher than he meant them to. Her eyes softened at once, and that nearly undid him.
“It is only a scratch,” she whispered.
His gaze moved over her face, her cheek, her mouth, her throat, the places he could see and the ones he could not. “Did he hurt ye? Rose, look at me. Did he hurt ye anywhere else?”
“No.” She lifted her hands, still trembling, and closed them around his wrists. “Logan. No.”
The sight of the blood at her throat had opened something terrible in him that could not be shut again by words alone. He had seen the knife. He had heard Barnaby threaten to open her throat. He had watched her stand there trying to be brave for him while death rested against her skin.
His breath broke. “Rose.”
She stepped closer, forcing him to focus on her. “I am here.”
His hands tightened faintly, then loosened at once, as if he feared even his relief might bruise her. “I shouldnae have let him get near ye.”
“You did not let him do anything.” Her voice shook, but she held his gaze.
“I dropped the sword.”
“You saved my life.”
He swallowed.
The corridor seemed too narrow, the torchlight too bright, the smell of blood too thick. Barnaby lay dead behind him, Lord Algernon sagged unconscious over Bram’s shoulder, and men waited outside. The stronghold was waking around them.
And all Logan could do was stare at the woman before him and count each breath she still took.
Rose’s mouth trembled, then curved into the smallest, softest smile.
“I told you I would listen,” she whispered.
Something inside him folded.
He let out a breath that nearly became a laugh and nearly became something worse. “Aye. By stamping on the bastard’s foot?”
“It seemed the correct moment.”
“It was.”
Her smile grew faintly, putting life back into her face. He bent his head before he could stop himself and kissed her.
It was not like the kisses from before. This kiss was fragile and shaking, his mouth brushing hers, confirming she was truly there, truly breathing. Rose kissed him back at once, her fingers tightening on his wrists, and the small answering pressure of her lips struck him harder than any blow.
He drew back only because the world demanded it, but for one more second, he kept his forehead against hers.
“Dinnae ever dae that again,” he murmured.
“Save your life?”
“Frighten me like that.”
Her eyes glistened, but she did not look away. “I shall try.”
He wanted to hold her until the tremor left her hands. He wanted to carry her from this place and never let stone walls or English roads touch her again. But the bell outside was still ringing, men were shouting, and steel rang somewhere beyond the corridor.
Nay more time.
Logan straightened, though it cost him. He wiped his blade on Barnaby’s dark velvet, then bent to snatch up his sword from the floor. When he rose, his face had settled again.
“Move,” he said. “We get tae the courtyard.”
Fergus stepped ahead. Alasdair took the rear. Bram adjusted Lord Algernon across his shoulder, his jaw clenched beneath the weight, though he gave no complaint.
Rose looked at her father at once. “Is he breathing?”
“Aye,” Bram said, surprisingly gentle. “Still wi’ us, me lady.”
Rose’s shoulders shuddered with the breath she released.
Logan placed one hand at the small of her back, guiding her forward. “Stay close.”
“I will.”
They moved.
The passage ahead opened into a wider hall, where the stronghold had fully erupted into chaos. Men shouted from above. Doors slammed. Someone ran across the far end of the corridor and vanished before Fergus could reach him. The air smelled of smoke, blood, wet wool, and fear.
This place did not yet know its master was dead.
They reached the stairs that led toward the courtyard. Halfway down, two of Henshaw’s men appeared below, one with a spear, the other with an axe. They looked up and saw Logan, saw Barnaby’s blood on his sleeve, saw Rose at his side.
The man with the axe shouted and charged.
Fergus met him first, driving him back against the wall.
Logan descended behind him, sword raised, keeping his body between Rose and the fight.
The spear thrust toward him, quick and desperate.
Logan knocked it aside, stepped in, and struck the man across the temple with the hilt of his sword hard enough to drop him.
“Keep moving,” he said.
They pushed downward.