“For loving me children.” The words were barely a whisper. “I thought I did right by bringing them here, to their faither’s home. I… I was afraid. I watched from the trees, at the market, at the lake. I saw ye with them. Laughing. Holding them like they were yer own.”
Tears stung Kristen’s eyes as the image of the children in a basket flashed before her. She could still hear their cries like it was yesterday. Hell, she could almost hear Lachlan’s orders as he asked the guards to go search for whoever had left the babies.
For the woman now lying before her, about to take her last breath.
“Thank ye,” she said again, her voice weak.
“Ye have nothing to thank me for, do ye understand?” Kristen’s voice broke. “Ye did the right thing, ye hear me? Ye did.”
The woman’s lashes trembled, and relief softened the panic on her face. “Tell them…” she whispered. “Tell them that their maither loved them, even though she was a coward until the end.”
“Ye arenae a coward,” Kristen said, fierce and tender all at once. “Ye were failed by men who should have stood between ye and harm. I swear I will keep them safe. Always.”
A small, tremulous smile touched the woman’s mouth, and her gaze began to drift.
“Stay,” Kristen begged. She pressed harder, as if sheer will could hold a soul in a wounded body. “Stay. Please. Look at me.”
The woman drew a last, shuddering breath, and her fingers loosened on Kristen’s sleeve. Her eyes glazed over.
For a heartbeat, the courtyard faded away. There were no torches. No cries. No guards. Only the sudden weight of a life gone.
Memories she had thought were long buried suddenly rose to the surface. Her father’s voice bellowing from old rooms.Men deciding.Women bleeding.
She could see Neil on their wedding night, setting cold rules with colder eyes, a shield hard as iron. She saw the bandit’s knife drive home without mercy.
Her tears fell on the woman’s face as she brushed her dark hair from her cooling brow with shaking fingers.
“Rest,” she whispered. “I will tell them for ye.”
The noise rushed back, a wave that crashed over her. Someone sobbed behind her, and the wind whistled through the arch.
Kristen looked down at her hands, bloodied to the wrists, and something inside her snapped. Grief sharpened, heated, twisted. Rage slid into the space it left.
She rose so fast that she almost slipped. A hand caught her elbow. She pulled free without seeing who it was.
“Kristen,” a voice called.
Neil, or Davina, or some guard who thought to steady her. She could not bear the touch.
She wiped her palms on the ruined front of her dress. The blood smeared.
It did not matter. None of it mattered if this was the world they wanted her to live in, a world where men laid down rules and blades and called it order.
She looked once at the woman. “I will keep me word,” she muttered under her breath. A promise to the dead and a vow to the living.
The crowd pressed and shifted, hungry for vengeance and direction. Kristen could not breathe in it.
She needed the stone walls.
She needed answers.
She needed to move before the fury swallowed her and turned to helpless sobs.
She turned away from the circle and made for the archway, ignoring the calls. The air in the corridor was cooler, a hard line against overheated skin. She took the steps two at a time, her breath sawing in and out, the tang of fear and anger bitter on her tongue.
Something was wrong.Not only the bandit’s cruelty, or the woman’s plea to keep taking care of her children.
No, something was wrong at the roots. Wrong in the way the night had turned and turned again until it landed on a woman’s blood.
