Chapter 18 #2
She could have tried to make a run for it, but she wouldn’t have gotten far. All at once, she wished that she was back in the confines of her chambers. They might have been a prison, but at least they were a prison contained by a man who seemed to care for her in his own twisted way.
As the men closed the distance between them, one took the reins and led her towards the chapel. She was too terrified to fight him.
How many more of them were there? She could not imagine, and it terrified her to think of just how badly outnumbered she might have been.
And then, out of the darkness of the chapel, a man emerged.
It took her a moment to recognize him; he seemed so different from the man that she had known as a boy. The smile on his face was dark and cruel and seemed not to reach his eyes at all; a dark air about him like that spoke more to a monster than a man.
“Malric,” she finally managed to force out, doing her best to keep her voice from giving away the truth of her discomfort. “I thought we would be meeting here alone.”
“I promised no such thing, lass,” he replied with a devilish smile. “Ye thought I would come to a meeting wi’ ye with nothing in the way of protection? Ye must think me a fool.”
His voice was cold, cold enough that it sent a shiver down her spine. She felt tears threaten at her eyes, and she blinked them back furiously, refusing to let him see her like this.
“We were friends, Malric,” she implored him, trying to reach whatever version of him still hid amongst the man she saw before her now. “Ye were my friend. Callum’s friend. Ye traded with our families for years, wool, livestock, timber—”
“Aye, I did,” he agreed. “And my father worked hard to build the reputation that he had wi’ yer clan and all the families in this place. A reputation that yer dear husband and his family were only too quick to destroy when they got the chance.”
“I dinnae ken what ye’re talking about,” she pleaded with him, doing her best to make sense of something, anything, of what he was saying to her. This was the man who had seemed as keen as she to bring an end to this animosity before it had a chance to take place.
“Aye, he wouldnae tell ye, I’d bet,” he muttered. “Wouldnae want ye to hear what he did to us.”
“What did he do to ye, Malric?” she insisted. “I cannae help ye unless I—”
He let out a short, sharp laugh, more like the bark of a wolf than that of a man.
“Ye think that I brought ye here because I needed yer help, lass?” he retorted, making his way towards her, pulling her roughly from the saddle so that they were standing eye to eye.
A lump rose in her throat. If he had not brought her here to help, then…
“The MacDonalds made a mockery of my father,” he growled. “Accused us of selling them shoddy bricks, spoiled grain, poisoning their people. They made my father look like a monster for mistakes that they made, turned it all on us, made us look to be the villains.”
He shook his head, the venom in his voice speaking to how certain he was that he was only telling her the truth. Her mind darted to the village that had been attacked, the one that she had tried to help Tavish with rebuilding.
Was that part of this, or was Tavish lying to her, making it sound as though they were the victims when they were nothing of the sort?
“What choice did we have to try to reclaim our strength?” he muttered. “My father couldnae live wi’ knowing that our reputation had been so badly hurt. He needed to support our people. We needed more land to farm on, and the closest…”
He gestured around them.
“Just so happened to belong to the very people who had broken the alliance in the first place,” he finished up, spreading his arms wide, referring to the very ground on which they stood.
“They had taken our reputation from us, they had cost us men and coin and more. It was only right that they were the ones who paid the price.”
Her breath was stuttering now, coming so hard and fast she could not control it. She felt like an animal with its leg in a trap, desperate to wrench free, but with no way to escape, no matter how hard she tried.
“Callum heard of it, of course,” he went on. “And he was the one who tried to stop us. Tried to force us from the lands, even though we had as much right to them as he did. It was the least his clan, or should I say yer new clan, could do, after they had taken everything from us, so we…”
He caught himself, flicking his tongue over his lips, like he was savoring the taste of those words on his tongue.
“So we took everything fae him, too. Took the finest heir that the clan laid claim to.”
“Ye killed him, ye killed Callum,” she whispered.
She could barely stand to get the words out, as if saying them out loud might make them real in ways that she could not contend with.
He nodded, making no effort to hide or deny it.
“Aye, I killed him,” he replied, a smile curling up his lips. “And now, since ye have so graciously offered yerself, I’ll kill ye too, lass. To make that bastard of a husband of yers see how he copes with having everything taken from him, just like his family took fae my father.”
She tried to move away from him, but his grip was firm on her arm, yanking her back towards him. She swallowed hard. She had been so wrong about everything, about Tavish’s protection, his animosity towards Malric. He had been right all along to hate him.
Whatever chance she thought she might have had of making things right had shattered on the cold ground beneath her—and now, the best she could hope for was that she found some way out of this alive. Even if that possibility seemed to slip from her fingers faster than she could cling on to it.