Chapter 28 #2
By the time they reached the lower hall, the noise outside had become a roar.
Steel clashed in the courtyard. Horses screamed.
Men barked orders through rain and smoke.
The front doors stood open, and beyond them Logan saw a confusion of bodies and torchlight: Henshaw’s men rallying near the gate, Conn’s force pressing in from the shadows beyond the wall, and then, farther back, more riders arriving hard from the road.
Reinforcements had arrived. But relief did not come yet.
Logan turned to Bram. “Take Lord Algernon behind the cart once we’re out. Fergus, wi’ him. Keep Rose there too.”
Rose’s head snapped toward him. “No.”
“Rose—”
“No.” Her voice shook, but her chin lifted. “I will not leave him, and I will not run blindly while men die around me.”
Logan looked at her then, at the bruise on her cheek, the cut at her throat, the terror she was still holding upright by sheer will.
He wanted to argue. There was no time.
“Then stay behind me,” he said. “And if I tell ye tae get down?—”
“I get down.”
He nodded once.
They stepped into the courtyard.
Rain struck Logan’s face like thrown gravel.
The ground had turned to mud beneath the churn of boots and hooves.
Conn was near the center, fighting with brutal precision despite his limp, his sword flashing in the torchlight.
His men had reached the east wall. The riders Fergus had sent were pouring through the broken side gate, village men with axes and old swords, MacKenzie allies shouting as they entered the fray.
A Henshaw soldier lunged toward Rose. Logan cut him down before the man came within three steps of her.
“Conn!” he shouted.
Conn turned, blood streaking one side of his face. His eyes found Rose, then Lord Algernon, then Logan.
And then Logan lifted his voice over the courtyard.
“Henshaw is dead!”
For a moment, nothing changed. Steel still rang. Men still moved. The fighting continued because men in fear often needed time to understand they were already defeated.
Logan stepped farther into the open, Barnaby’s blood still wet on his sleeve, his sword raised in one hand.
“Barnaby Henshaw is dead!” he roared. “Throw down yer weapons, and ye live. Keep fighting, and ye die here wi’ him.”
The courtyard stilled in broken pieces.
One man lowered his sword first, eyes wide, face pale beneath mud and blood. Another looked toward the hall behind Logan, as if expecting Barnaby to emerge and punish his hesitation. No one came.
Conn seized the moment. “Weapons down!” he barked, his sword angled toward the nearest cluster of men. “Now!”
The reinforcements spread behind him, closing the gaps. Henshaw’s men looked around and saw walls held, the gate blocked, their leader supposedly dead, Rose standing free beneath MacKenzie protection.
One sword hit the mud. Then another. Then several more, until the sound of surrender moved through the courtyard.
Logan did not lower his own weapon until the last man had dropped his blade. Only then did he turn back to Rose.
She stood near Bram and her father, one hand resting against Lord Algernon’s shoulder as if she could anchor him to life by touch alone. She looked across the courtyard at Logan, and whatever remained of his anger faltered beneath the sight of her standing there alive.
Conn came to his side, breathing hard. “We need tae go before English law or Henshaw’s allies come sniffing.”
“Aye.” Logan looked toward the surrendered men. “Bind the ones who fought hardest. Leave the rest unarmed. Take any horses we need.”
“And him?” Conn asked, nodding toward Barnaby’s stronghold.
Logan’s gaze moved to the open doors. Barnaby’s body lay somewhere beyond them, cooling on stone.
“Let him rot in his own hall.”
Conn nodded.
Logan crossed back to Rose. The moment he reached her, she held out her hand. He took it, gripping carefully around her bruised fingers.
Her eyes searched his face. “Is it over?”
His gaze moved over the courtyard, the dropped weapons, the men kneeling in mud, the reinforcements closing ranks, her father still breathing, Barnaby dead behind them.
Then it returned to her.
“Aye,” he said quietly.
Her fingers tightened in his. So he lifted her hand and pressed his mouth to her cold knuckles.
“Come here, lass,” he murmured.
Rose stepped into him without hesitation.
Logan wrapped his cloak around her first, then his arms, drawing her carefully against his chest, feeling the tremor in her body pass into his own hands. She pressed her face into him, one hand curling weakly in the front of his tunic.
He held her and her breath shook once against him.
“For a moment, I thought I would not see you again,” she whispered.
His hand rose to the back of her head, fingers sinking into the damp softness of her hair. “I would have torn every stone from that place tae find ye.”
She drew back enough to look at him, her eyes bright with exhaustion and tears. “I know.”
He had no answer for that trust. It left him still, his forehead resting against hers, his hands careful at her waist.
Then he kissed her.
Softly at first, because of the cut at her throat, the bruise on her cheek, the trembling still moving through her limbs. But Rose lifted into him with a small, aching sound, and the kiss deepened just enough to become a vow neither of them had breath to speak.
When he drew away, her lashes fluttered open.
“To Scotland?” she whispered.
Logan looked past her to where Bram held Lord Algernon carefully, then back to Rose.
Safety was not one place for her anymore. It was not his castle, not her father’s hall, not any wall a man could build and call protection. It was the right to choose where she stood, whose hand she held, what road she followed next.
Even if that road led her away from him.
The thought cut deep enough to steal his breath, but he did not let it show. He only brushed his thumb over her cold fingers and held her gaze, because loving her could not mean keeping her. Not after every man who had tried to decide her life for her.
“First tae safety,” he said, squeezing her hand. “Then tae wherever ye choose.”
Her breath caught.
“And if I choose Scotland?” she asked.
His chest tightened. “Then I’ll take ye home.”
Rose’s eyes filled, but this time her fragile, luminous smile came through the tears.
“With you?” she asked.
Logan’s hand closed more firmly around hers.
“Wi’ me,” he said. “If ye’ll have me.”
She only looked at him, and the morning seemed to hush around them, the rain, the men, the surrendered enemy, the ruin behind them. Then Rose lifted her free hand to his face, her fingers cold against his jaw, her touch trembling but certain.
“I have belonged with you for some time, I think,” she whispered. “I was only afraid to say it.”
Something moved through him then, too deep for relief, too quiet for triumph. He turned his mouth into her palm and kissed it, letting the gesture answer what his voice could not yet carry.
Then Conn called for the horses.
Logan helped Rose mount because her hands were shaking too hard to manage it alone, and this time she let him without protest. When he mounted his own horse, he kept close enough that his knee brushed hers.
Rose looked toward her father, then back at Logan, and he gave her a nod before she could ask.
“We ride slow,” he said. “He’ll make it.”
She swallowed hard. “Thank you.”
“Dinnae thank me fer bringing yer family with us.”
Her mouth softened. “I was thanking you for becoming part of it.”
The words struck him so fiercely that he could only look at her. Then he reached across the small space between their horses and took her hand.
No one spoke as they rode out.
Behind them, Barnaby Henshaw’s stronghold fell into silence. Ahead, the road waited in rain and early light, leading them away from the dead, toward whatever mercy life might still give back.
Rose’s fingers remained threaded through Logan’s.
And this time, when the road turned north, she did not look back.