Chapter 18
The chapel erupted.
Carnegie’s guards moved first, drawing blades and surging toward the doorway in a single disciplined wave. Then, the Black Ledger Society met them, and whatever order had existed in the room dissolved entirely into the crash of iron and the shouting of men.
Candles scattered from their stands. The priest stumbled backward into the altar and pressed himself against it with both palms flat, his mouth open and his eyes wide. Pews scraped against the floor as men shoved past them.
Merith’s first instinct was to find Locke in the madness, but before she could move Murdoch’s grip on her arm tightened to something that was no longer a suggestion and became something much harder.
A command, delivered through his fingers, pressing into the flesh of her forearm with enough force to make her breath catch.
He pulled her with him as he backed toward the side wall, keeping the altar between himself and the fighting. His dark eyes were scanning the room rapidly.
She did not struggle. She watched instead, searching the tumult near the door.
She found him quickly.
Locke moved through the violence the way she had come to understand was simply how he moved through everything. An economy of motion that looked almost effortless from a distance and was almost certainly exhausting up close.
He had shed the rope at some point between the Great Hall and here, which told her more about his capabilities than anything she had previously observed.
He was fighting with focused efficiency, working through Carnegie’s men without lingering over any of them. His blue eyes were scanning the room between every exchange.
That was when she realized he was looking for her.
Their eyes met across the width of the chapel, through the smoke and the shouting and the bodies moving between them. The relief that crossed his face was so raw and immediate that it struck her somewhere below her ribs.
Quickly, he began moving toward her, and Murdoch felt the direction of her gaze and understood it immediately. The Carnegie Laird stepped smoothly behind her and brought his arm across her shoulders, turning her so that she stood between himself and Locke’s approach.
A shield.
He is using me as a shield.
Locke stopped. He stood perhaps ten feet away, chest heaving slightly, and a cut on his knuckles bleeding freely. His expression as he looked at Murdoch over her shoulder was the steadiest, coldest thing she had ever seen on his face.
“Let her go,” he said.
“Come a step closer,” Murdoch replied pleasantly, “and I’ll snap her arm.”
The arm across her shoulders tightened fractionally, to demonstrate. Merith felt her pulse spike and then she made herself slow it down.
She had not come this far to panic in the final moments. She had learned too much in the past days to waste it here.
Locke’s jaw was tight. His eyes moved to hers, quick and searching. “Are ye hurt?”
“Nay.” She kept her voice level. “I am perfectly well.”
“How touching,” Murdoch said. “The thief and his prize.”
His voice had acquired an edge she had not heard in it before.
“Ye broke out of the hall,” Murdoch said. “I will grant ye that. But ye’ve accomplished nothing. Ye have no proof. Ye have nothing.”
“Is that so?” Locke’s tone was utterly conversational. The kind of calm that Merith had learned meant he was at his most dangerous.
He reached into his cloak and what he withdrew was not a weapon, but perhaps it was even more dangerous. The book was slim, bound in dark leather, the pages slightly worn at the corners.
He held it up so that the light from the chapel windows fell across its cover, and Merith watched Murdoch Carnegie go very, very still.
“Ye burned the ledger,” Locke agreed pleasantly. “Aye, ye did. Very dramatic, I applaud ye. Unfortunately…” he tilted the book slightly, as if displaying it to an audience, “…ye burned the wrong one.”
Murdoch’s breathing changed. Merith felt it in the arm across her shoulders. The smallest, most involuntary hesitation. But she felt it.
“That isnae possible,” he said.
“And yet.” Locke held the ledger steady. “Every estate. Every fire. Every name. Every figure.” His blue eyes found Murdoch’s across the chapel. “Ye’ve been verra thorough, Carnegie. I’ll say that much fer ye. It makes fer compelling reading.”
“Ye’ve nothing that would hold before any court.”
“Nay?” Locke tilted his head. “Then we’ll let the Crown decide that.”
He did not raise his voice. It carried into a chapel that had grown noticeably quieter as the fighting settled into the outcome that had become increasingly obvious.
Carnegie’s guards, outnumbered and surrounded, had begun, one by one, to lower their weapons.
“Bribes to local magistrates,” Locke said. “Payments to men who set fires on yer behalf. Land transferred to Carnegie holdings within months of those same fires. The names of the families ye ruined.” A pause. “The names of the ones who didnae survive it.”
“Ye’re a criminal.” The words came out of Murdoch’s mouth with more force than was, perhaps, wise under the circumstances. “An outlaw. Whatever ye claim tae have found…”
“Is in the hands of the King’s messenger,” Locke said, “as of this morning. Shona left before dawn.”
The arm across Merith’s shoulders went rigid. She became, in that instant, acutely aware of every point of contact between herself and Murdoch Carnegie.
His forearm was still pressed against her collarbone, and his other hand was near her elbow. The warmth of him at her back that she had always found composed and commanding was now recognized as something else entirely.
A figure appeared near the side entrance to the chapel. Lucas. He looked considerably worse than when she had last seen him in the cell, with a split lip that had reopened and a bruise that covered most of the left side of his face.
However, his grip on the wrist of Carnegie’s steward was steady, and the short blade he held against the man’s throat was steadier still.
The steward had gone the color of tallow.
“The steward,” Lucas said conversationally, “has been most helpful.” He met Murdoch’s gaze over the man’s shoulder. “Most of those figures I couldnae explain? He explained them.”
The mask came apart rapidly after that.
It did not shatter dramatically. It simply fell away. Not in an instant, but in pieces, one layer at a time, until what remained was not the generous laird or the charming suitor or the patient and composed man she had been handed off to by her family.
Murdoch’s eyes widened and he released her. It was a shove rather than a throw, but abrupt enough to send her stumbling sideways into the edge of a pew, her shoulder striking the wood with a dull impact that rattled up through her arm.
She caught herself on her palms and found her footing and looked up to find that Locke was already beside her, one hand at her elbow and the other braced against the pew, his body between her and the direction Murdoch had gone.
“Merith.” His hand tightened on her arm. “Are ye—”
“I’m fine.” She straightened. Her shoulder ached and she did not care. “Go.”
But it was too late. With a roar, Murdoch charged the men who tried to stop him and slipped through a door half-hidden behind the altar hangings that the priest had presumably used for his own retreat.
By the time two of the Society’s men reached it, it opened onto a corridor already empty.
A moment of frustrated silence fell across the chapel.
“He’ll run,” Lucas said from near the side entrance. “He’s lost everythin’ here. He knows it.”
“He’ll be found,” Locke said. “He has nowhere left tae go that the ledger hasnae already reached.”
Merith released a breath she had been holding, it felt, since the previous morning.
The chaos in the chapel had settled into the aftermath that followed a decisive battle.
Men were checking their injuries, the scrape of weapons being sheathed, and the Society was moving through the space with the brisk and purposeful ease of people accustomed to the moment after.
Somewhere deeper in the castle she could hear doors opening, voices, the sound of Carnegie’s household beginning to understand that the balance of things had shifted.
She understood that the looting had already begun. It was not something she could bring herself to object to, not in this chapel where she had nearly become someone’s property.
Gradually, she understood that Locke had not moved away from her.
He stood an arm’s length away, watching her with an expression that was difficult to read precisely because it contained too many things at once.
Locke was still breathing harder than usual. The cut on his knuckles had dripped a small dark spot onto the chapel floor. He looked like a man who had arrived precisely in time and was still not entirely certain he deserved to have done so.
“Merith,” he said. “I am sorry.”
The words were straightforward and unadorned, which was not always his way. And she believed them completely.
“I know,” she said.
“I should have told ye the truth from the beginning. The ambush. All of it.” His jaw worked briefly. “I told myself it was fer the mission. That it didnae matter what ye thought o’ me as long as the work was done. I was wrong.”
“Aye,” she agreed. “Ye were.”
Surprise flashed on his face, perhaps at the directness of it. Then the corner of his mouth moved, and she recognized it as the thing he did when he was trying very hard not to smile at an inconvenient moment.
Against all reasonable expectation, she felt something similar happening to her own expression.
“Ye’re nae going tae make this easy fer me,” he said.
“Why would I?” She held his gaze. “Ye didnae make any of this easy fer me.”
“Fair.” He exhaled. “Utterly fair.” He took a step toward her. “I’m also sorry I took so long getting here.”
“Ye arrived precisely when I needed ye tae,” she said.
He stopped. The chapel light fell across his face, catching the auburn in his hair and the blue of his eyes and the particular expression he was wearing now, which was not the charm she had first encountered on a Highland road and not the careful distance he had kept between them for days afterward but something she had only glimpsed in unguarded moments.
It was open, uncertain, and entirely without performance.
“Merith.” His voice was quieter now. “I should go. The Society needs tae move. The steward has tae be delivered, and there’s still—”
“Locke.”
He stopped.
She took two steps forward and closed the space between them. She looked up at him, and she said the thing she had been trying not to say since the moment she had stood in the Great Hall and heard him call her name. “I cannae let ye leave.”
He blinked. “What?”
“I tried.” She kept her voice steady. “I thought if I was sensible aboot it. If I was practical, I could simply… let ye go and continue on.” She searched his face. “I cannae do it.”
Something shifted in his expression. “Merith—”
“Ye stole something from me,” she continued, and his mouth closed. “And I cannae let ye run with it.” She held his gaze. “Ye stole my heart, Lachlan Reid. And I would very much like ye tae stop standing there looking guilty and do something aboot it.”
The uncertain expression on his face broke open into something that looked, briefly and completely, like joy.
He crossed the remaining distance between them in two strides and his hands came up to frame her face with a gentleness that was entirely at odds with everything that had just transpired in this chapel, and he kissed her not caring about who watched.
His thumbs traced the line of her cheekbones and his forehead dropped to rest against hers when they finally separated.
“I believe,” he murmured against her temple, “that makes me the worst kind o’ criminal.”
“The very worst,” she agreed, and she felt him smile against her hair.
Behind them, from somewhere near the chapel doors, came the sound of Lucas clearing his throat with pointed emphasis. “When ye’re quite finished… the steward isnae going tae deliver himself.”
Locke laughed. It was a real laugh, and the sound of it moved through the chapel like light.
He drew back from Merith just far enough to look at her, his blue eyes clear and certain in a way she had not seen in them before.
“Come with us,” he said. Not a plea. An invitation, offered plainly, with no conditions attached.
Merith looked at the chapel… at the scattered candles, the shoved pews, the altar she had nearly made a vow at… and then she looked at him.
“Aye,” she said simply. “I will.”