Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
"Get down."
The stranger’s forearm struck her chest like an iron bar before the command even cleared his lips.
The second explosion ripped through the air, not from the shattered warehouse wall this time, but from deep within the bowels of the storage row.
The concussive blast unleashed a rolling wall of pitch-black smoke and burning debris that swept across the dock, swallowing a cluster of fleeing workers whole.
Muire was shoved hard against the rough crates, her spine jarring against the wood. The blistering heat skimmed her face like an open hand, singeing the stray hairs at her temples.
Around them, the harbor became a hellish gauntlet of fire, suffocating smoke, and sprinting bodies, none of them moving in the same direction.
Men around bellowed tactical positions through the haze, but the words fractured and died against the roar of the flames. Tamhas had been mere yards to her left only a heartbeat ago. Now, the soup of grey-black smoke ate the edges of everything past ten feet.
She slammed her palms against the stranger’s unyielding arm, forcing it down as she straightened her spine.
"Me faither was right there."
"He moved." His eyes never stopped tracking the fog, looking for things she couldn't see. "I saw him. He’s back from the pier edge."
"Ye saw him? Through this?"
"Aye."
She wanted to snap back, to tell him he couldn't possibly have tracked one aging merchant through this madness. But the cold certainty in his voice wasn't meant to comfort her. She clamped her mouth shut and followed his deadly focus.
Six men.
She counted them through the shifting haze before the realization truly settled.
They had slipped from the southern warehouse mouth, the exact path the unmarked barrels had taken.
They weren't running with the wild, flailing limbs of panicked dockworkers.
They moved low, close together, and deliberate, using the billowing smoke as a cloak, cutting a lethal path toward the dock's eastern exit. The six men stopped short.
The leader turned, and Muire watched the vicious calculation harden on his face. Behind them was a wall of fire, ahead was a line of braced shields, and on either side, the timber planks ended in deep, icy water. He muttered a short, brutal command to the man nearest him.
They fanned out, drawing cold steel from beneath their cloaks.
"Stay behind me." The stranger didn't look at her. The low rasp of his voice was nearly a growl.
He didn't wait for her defiance. He was already gone.
What followed was no clumsy tavern brawl. This was fast, silent, and sickeningly efficient.
His men struck the outer flanks of the six attackers simultaneously.
The noise of it, the dull, heavy percussion of steel biting into leather and bone, made Muire's stomach violently contract.
She gripped the splintered edge of the crate behind her, forcing her eyes to stay open.
Looking away felt like an invitation to die.
Three of the attackers went down in a spray of red. One of the veterans took a brutal elbow to the jaw, staggering back but keeping his feet. The remaining two broke sideways, scattering in opposite directions, and four guards peeled after them with the practiced sync of wolves hunting prey.
That left the leader.
He was broad-shouldered, with a long, angular face and pale, empty eyes. He had watched his men die with a terrifying stillness. He wasn't panicking, which made him the most dangerous bastard on the dock. Muire’s gaze locked onto him just as his pale eyes snapped directly to her.
She didn't move fast enough.
His heavy, leather-clad arm violently whipped around her neck from behind. The hard crook of his elbow crushed her throat, cutting off her gasp as the momentum spun her around. Her back slammed against his chest, trapping her body between the killer and the advancing laird.
The icy, biting edge of a blade pressed flat against the soft skin of her jaw.
"Back," the man spat. "Back, or I open her face."
Muire’s heart slammed so hard she felt the pulse thudding in her back teeth. The arm choking her throat wasn't tight enough to kill her yet, but enough to make each short breath a desperate negotiation. She kept her hands pinned to her thighs, her body rigid, her eyes locked forward.
The stranger had frozen into stone.
He wasn't looking at the man holding the knife.
His grey-blue eyes were fixed entirely on her face.
His expression had undergone a terrifying change.
Everything behind it was instantly buried.
One of his hands hung open at his side, the fingers twitching.
The other held a short, wicked dirk she hadn't even seen him draw.
"Let her go," he said. His voice was incredibly quiet. Almost conversational.
"I'll let her go when I'm off this bloody dock."
"Ye willnae be leaving this dock alive." He took one single step forward. It was slow, heavy, and absolute. "But she will. Let her go now, and I give ye me word ye'll have a clean death. Keep hold of her, and I willnae."
The man let out a short, humorless bark of a laugh. The blade shifted against her skin, the sharp steel catching the delicate line of her jaw. A tiny, hot bead of red swelled against the metal. Muire stopped breathing entirely.
Then, the panic cleared, and she dropped her entire weight straight down, letting her knees buckle, becoming sudden, dead iron.
The arm across her throat gripped nothing but empty air. The killer lurched forward into the space she had just vacated, his balance shattered, and the stranger was already there.
It was over in three heartbeats.
Muire hit the damp dock planking, her palms slapping into the wet soot.
Her pulse was a deafening roar in her ears as she watched the stranger straighten his massive frame.
The attacker was flat on his back. He wasn't dead, his chest heaving in ragged gasps, but he wasn't moving again.
The stranger stared down at the broken man for a fraction of a second, then his gaze snapped down to her.
"Are ye hurt?"
Her jaw was stinging, a hot line of fire spreading near her ear. She touched the wound with her fingertips and pulled them back to see a thin smear of crimson. Shallow. She’d cut herself worse on heavy ledger parchment.
"Nay," she managed, her voice steadier than her knees.
The stranger reached down. His hand was enormous, his palm rough and calloused against hers as he wrapped his fingers around her wrist and hauled her to her feet in one effortless, fluid motion.
For a fraction of a second, the momentum pulled her too close.
She was pressed near his chest, close enough to see the fine, hard lines etched at the corners of his eyes and the dangerous clench of his jaw.
The scent of rain, leather, and raw masculinity washed over her, making her dizzy.
Then, as quickly as he had taken her, he released her hand and stepped back into the cold.
Around them, the harbor was quietened by degrees.
The fire in the storage row still crackled hungrily, but some men had already organized lines of workers, throwing buckets of seawater across the smoking timbers to check the spread.
Three of the attackers were on their knees, hands bound behind their heads.
One had been thrown into the black water.
The other two had slipped past the eastern gate before it shut, and the distant, echoing shouts of pursuit drifted back over the stone harbor wall.
Muire looked down at her hands, covered in thick soot and a raw scrape across her right palm from the rough decking. Her ledger was gone, likely reduced to ash in the debris behind them.
She looked back up at the stranger.
He was speaking in low, clipped tones to one of his trusted commanders, his eyes never leaving the sealed warehouse entrance. The exchange lasted less than half a minute before the warrior saluted and moved off. He turned his full focus back to her.
"I owe ye a thanks," Muire said, crossing her arms to hide the slight trembling of her hands. "Twice over now." She paused, her green eyes searching his hard face. "I'd like to send something to yer household to acknowledge it properly. I didnae catch yer name before the fire."
He looked at her for a long beat, his expression entirely unreadable.
"Roddy," he said simply.
The name snagged briefly in her thoughts. The only Roddy she'd ever heard spoken with any weight in this territory was the laird himself, but that was a foolish leap to make over a single name.
She gave a small nod. "And yer clan?"
He said nothing for a second. Around them, the burning harbor groaned and settled, the timber of the southern storage wall giving way with a long, exhausted crash.
"Mackenzie," he murmured.
Muire heard the word. The name rearranged every single detail she had just witnessed.
The way the hardened guards moved around him without a word spoken, the way the desperate killer had tried to bargain with him rather than dismiss him, the way he had looked at the burning docks from the very first second as if every stone and splinter belonged to him.
Laird Mackenzie.
The master of the territory had dragged her from a falling roof, taken down the man with a knife to her throat, and hadn't even deemed it necessary to mention his title.
She held his grey-blue gaze and dipped her chin. "Forgive me, me laird. I didnae ken who ye were."
He didn't offer an apology for the omission. She hadn't expected one from a laird.
"I need tae find me faither," she said, bracing her posture against the deep ache spreading through her shoulder and the sharp sting on her jaw. "Thank ye, Laird Mackenzie. Truly."
He gave a single, curt nod.
She turned, walking away into the thinning, acrid smoke toward the distant, familiar baritone of her father's voice.
She forced her boots to move forward and did not let herself look back, though the skin between her shoulder blades burned with the distinct, heavy weight of his gaze until the shifting crowd finally closed between them.