Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Alba sat tied beside the clearing, surrounded by Malcolm Kerr’s men while rain soaked through her cloak and fury burned inside her.
The rope had rubbed a raw line across her wrists hours ago, and she’d stopped feeling it somewhere around midnight. Rain came down in a steady gray sheet, running off the hood someone had shoved back from her face, plastering her hair flat and cold against her skull.
Around her, Kerr’s men crouched near the fire under makeshift oilcloth shelters, passing a skin of something between them.
“Ye think he’ll come alone?” one of the younger guards muttered, close enough that she could hear him over the rain. He had a thin, nervous face, and he kept glancing at the tree line like it might do something on its own.
“He’s the Beast of Blackthorn,” the older one beside him said, not bothering to lower his voice. “Man’s got a reputation for madness, nae sense. Of course, he’ll come alone.”
“And if he brings men anyway?”
“Then we cut her throat before he’s within a hundred paces, and he watches,” the older guard said and took a long pull from the skin without looking at her once.
Alba kept her face still and hated him for how easily the words came to him.
Malcolm Kerr walked a slow, unhurried path in front of the fire, hands clasped behind his back like a man inspecting his own garden. He had the look of someone who’d already won and wanted to enjoy the last few hours of waiting.
“Ye keep lookin’ at that tree line,” he said, not glancing at her. “He’s nae comin’ before dawn, lass. Even a man in love isnae fool enough to ride a night trail in this weather.”
Alba worked her jaw and said nothing. She’d learned three hours ago that answering him only gave him something new to smile about.
“Quiet women,” Kerr said, crouching in front of her now, close enough that she could smell wet wool and old blood on him, “make poor company. But I suppose ye werenae brought along for conversation.”
“Ye talk a great deal for a man hidin’ in the woods,” she said before she could stop herself.
One of the younger guards let out a short laugh before he caught himself. Kerr’s head turned toward him slowly, and the laughter died.
“She’s got teeth, this one,” the nervous guard said, mostly to fill the silence Kerr had left behind. “MacGregor fancies her.”
“MacGregor,” the older guard said, “is about to find out what it costs a man to want somethin’ this badly.” He said it almost fondly, the way a man speaks of a trap he’s proud of.
Kerr straightened and resumed his pacing, unbothered, and Alba turned her face away and dug her nails into her own palms until the sting gave her something else to hold onto.
Then she heard a horse, the ragged thunder of a single rider pushing a mount past sense, past caution, straight through wet undergrowth that should have slowed any sane man to a walk. Every guard around the fire sprang to their feet at once, blades half-drawn, eyes fixed on the black wall of trees.
“One rider,” the nervous one said, cocking his head to listen.
“Told ye,” the older guard said, already grinning.
Kerr straightened slowly, unbothered, already smiling before the rider broke into the clearing.
Sebastian burst through the tree line at a dead run and jerked his horse to a stop so abruptly that the animal reared, hooves sinking into the mud less than ten feet from the fire.
Mud covered him up to the thigh, his cloak torn along one shoulder, and his hair plastered flat with rain and sweat.
He did not look at Kerr. He did not glance at the ring of drawn steel closing around him.
His eyes found her and stayed there.
Alba’s whole body strained forward against the rope before she could stop it, her wrists tearing fresh against the raw skin, a broken sound catching somewhere in her throat that she refused to let out.
“Sebastian.” His name came out cracked, half a warning, half a prayer.
Kerr crossed the space between them in three strides and closed a fist in her hair, hauling her head back hard enough that the clearing tilted. “Drop yer sword, MacGregor.”
Sebastian jumped off his horse. His hand went to his hilt without a flicker of hesitation. The blade came free and hit the mud with a wet, final sound.
“Release her.”
Kerr laughed, a short bark with no warmth in it at all. “First ye surrender.” He nodded, and four men closed in around Sebastian’s flanks, close enough to grab him the moment he so much as flinched wrong.
“Careful, lads,” the older guard said, circling behind Sebastian with his blade still raised. “I hear he killed six men with his bare hands at Blackthorn.”
“Aye,” Sebastian said quietly, not looking at him. “Six. And every one of them talked less than ye do.”
The guard’s grin faltered, just slightly, before he shoved Sebastian’s shoulder hard enough to make him stagger.
“Sebastian, daenae…” The rest of it never left her mouth.
“Quiet.” Kerr’s voice cracked through the clearing like a whip, and even the rain seemed to hesitate. His grip in her hair tightened until her eyes watered, until she went still to make it stop.
Sebastian’s jaw worked once. He held his hands out from his sides, palms open, and lowered himself to his knees in the mud without being told twice.
Kerr’s men swarmed him instantly, wrenching his arms back, one driving a knee into his spine to keep him down. He did not fight it. He did not so much as grunt. His eyes stayed on her the entire time, steady, burning through the rain like the only fixed point left in the world.
A rider Alba had not noticed before nudged his horse forward, calling out loud enough for the whole clearing to hear.
“The agreement stands. The Lady leaves. MacGregor stays.” He gestured toward the dark break in the trees where the road curved away south.
“A man disarmed and unhorsed is waitin’ for the Lady just before the clearin’, to see her safely to the Ridge road. ”
“Generous of ye,” the older guard muttered, sheathing his blade halfway. “More generous than I’d have been.”
“That’s why Kerr gives the orders, and ye carry the rope,” the nervous one shot back, and earned himself a shove for it.
Kerr released her hair and swept into a bow so deep and so mocking it might as well have been a slap. “Yer time to leave, Lady MacLaren.” He drew a small blade from his belt and sawed through the rope at her wrists in two strokes, careless enough to nick her skin.
The moment her hands were free, she started moving, stumbling through the mud toward Sebastian before anyone could stop her.
“Go,” he said, low and rough, not looking away from her face even as two guards closed in on either side of him. “Leave!”
“Absolutely nae.” She dropped to her knees in front of him, hands finding his jaw, his shoulders, anywhere she could touch to prove he was still whole.
“Alba.” Just her name. It cost him something to say it that quietly with Kerr standing three feet away, watching them both clearly enjoying himself.
Guards grabbed her under both arms and forced her upright, pulling her back a step, then another. She fought with everything she had left, twisting, stomping her heel into a shin, and clawing at fingers that only squeezed tighter.
“Sebastian!”
He surged up off his knees despite the men holding him down, close enough for one desperate second that his hand caught her face, rough and hard and shaking, thumb pressed against her cheekbone like he meant to memorize the shape of it before they tore him back.
Then his mouth pressed down on hers, harsh and clumsy, nothing like the slow patience he’d always shown her before. She kissed him back just as fiercely, rain and her tears streaming between their mouths, the entire clearing shrinking to nothing but the desperate, bruising press of him.
“I willnae leave ye,” she whispered against his lips, broken and fierce all at once.
His eyes closed, just for a moment, like the words had landed somewhere deep enough to hurt.
Then Kerr’s men dragged him backward, and the guards holding her yanked her in the opposite direction, causing the distance between them to suddenly widen, with mud, rain, and firelight consuming him entirely.
“Sebastian!” Alba screamed his name until her throat gave out, fighting every step of the way as they dragged her toward the black line of the trees.
The moment they crossed beyond the clearing, the guards patted down the waiting man roughly, found nothing, and shoved him toward her before going back into the tree line as if they had never been there at all.
Alba did not wait to see them go. She spun on her heel and drove herself toward the firelight glowing faintly through the trees, mud sucking at her boots, rain stinging her eyes, every part of her screaming his name inside her skull even as her throat gave out from screaming it aloud.
A hand closed around her arm before she had gone three steps.
“Easy now, lass.”
She wrenched against it, twisting hard enough to nearly go down in the mud, clawing at fingers that only tightened. “Let go of me! I have to go get him out of there!” Her voice cracked apart entirely. “He is still in there! They still have him, I have to go back!”
“Alba!” Hamish’s voice, low and rough, close to her ear. “Look at me.”
She did not give up. She kept fighting him, pulling both of them a full step back toward the clearing before his grip finally prevailed, pulling her against his chest and pinning her arms with a steady, unyielding strength.
Nay… This isnae happenin’.
“I willnae ask ye again to look at me,” he said, quieter now, “because I ken exactly what ye’re feelin’ right now, and I willnae waste breath tellin’ ye to calm down. But ye’re about to run straight into forty armed men with nothin’ in yer hands, and that helps him nae at all.”
The words landed somewhere past the roaring in her ears. Alba went still, chest heaving, rain running down the back of her neck.
“He kissed me like he wasnae comin’ back,” she said, and hated how small it sounded.
“Aye, well.” Hamish’s jaw worked once. “Men say all manner of foolish things when they think it’s the last thing they’ll ever say to a woman.”
She turned in his grip, finally, and looked past his shoulder, and stopped breathing entirely.
They were everywhere.
The hillside that looked empty and black an hour ago was now alive with men, dozens of them, crouched low along the ridgeline and hidden within the deeper shadow of the trees, plaid and steel catching faint glints of moonlight and firelight between the rainy mist.
MacGregor colors. MacKenzie colors. And beyond them, further back where the hill rose steepest, a third banner she recognized instantly, even soaked through and hanging limp.
The wolf’s head of Dunalasdair, Alasdair MacRae’s own men, standing shoulder to shoulder with the others as if they had always meant to.
“What?” She turned in a slow circle, taking in all of it, the sheer scale of it, men she had not known existed an hour ago now standing not fifty yards from where she had been tied to a rope. “What is this?”
Hooves squelched through the mud behind her, and Fergus rode up alongside them already in full mail, sword drawn, his face set in a grim, focused look.
“Fergus.” Alba stared at him, then past him at the ranks of waiting men, then back at him again like she could not make the pieces sit together. “Ye had a plan?”
“Of course we bloody had a plan,” Fergus said, not even glancing down at her, his eyes fixed on the faint glow of Kerr’s fire through the trees. “Ye think that man rode in there alone because he’d nae thought further than the front gate?”
“He surrendered his sword. He went to his knees in the mud, and he let them take him.”
“Aye, and he’ll have both hands back around that sword’s hilt within a quarter of the hour,” Fergus said. “Kerr thinks he’s won because a desperate man does desperate, foolish things. Sebastian’s spent three days makin’ certain Kerr believed exactly that.”
Alba’s mouth opened, then closed.
The letter.
All of it rearranging itself in her head into a shape she had not let herself see until this exact moment.
“He let me believe he was walkin’ in unprepared,” she said slowly, something hot and furious rising behind the fear now. “He let me watch them drag him to his knees and say nothin’.”
“Because if ye’d ken the truth, ye’d have fought harder to stay, and then Kerr would have ken somethin’ wasnae right the moment ye stopped fightin’ so hard to leave,” Hamish said, releasing her arms at last now that she’d stopped trying to run.
“Ye played yer part better for believin’ it, lass. So did he.”
A horn sounded, low and long, somewhere off along the Ridge, and every man on the hillside came up onto his feet at once, a slow ripple of movement spreading through the dark like something waking.
“That’s the signal,” Fergus said. “Kerr’s men will be lookin’ to the trees any moment now.”
Hamish had already turned to the horse he’d led out with them, hauling a blade free from where it hung against the saddle, and he held it out to her without a word of explanation, hilt first.
“Now stay behind us,” he said.
Alba’s hand closed around the hilt before he’d finished the sentence, the weight of it settling familiar and right against her palm for the first time since Kerr’s men had stripped her of everything at the road.
“I am still Lady MacLaren.” She swung up into the saddle before either man could argue, ignoring the mud-slick stirrup, ignoring the ache in her wrists where the rope had worn through skin.
Her eyes found the faint orange glow through the trees, the place where Sebastian still knelt in the mud, believing she was already safely away. “And I am nae leavin’ him there.”
Fergus opened his mouth—to argue, she was certain, some careful reasoning about a lady’s place being well behind the line of battle—and then seemed to think better of it, something almost like approval flickering across his rain-streaked face instead.
“MacGregor’s going to have his hands full with this one,” he muttered before wheeling his own mount around to face the hill.
“He kent that the day he came to take her Castle,” Hamish said, swinging up beside them both, already reaching for the reins of his own horse. “Didnae stop him.”
The horn sounded again, closer this time, and along the ridgeline, the first ranks of men started moving down through the trees in near silence, steel faintly glinting with each step.
Alba tightened her grip on the sword, rain cold against her neck, and kept her eyes on the fire glowing through the dark trees ahead.
“Then let’s go get him.”