The others gave them a wide berth as he and Aidan ducked and weaved about the cave. Lachlann kept a keen eye for any opening to end this and take the upper hand, but the man was amazingly agile.
Aidan hunched in his warrior stance. “If ye’re trying to be kind to me because I am an old man, ye needn’t bother.”
Lachlann ignored the jeers instead he focused on the man’s steps. Aidan was shorter and stooped in a defensive posture. A weakness. Feigning a step left, Lachlann hammered the pummel of his sword onto the man’s back.
Aidan arched up and back. Seeing his opening, Lachlann came in close and swung up and around with his longsword. Too late, pain burned into his side. He dropped to his knees.
“Come no closer.” Aidan waved the unseen dagger that had sliced into Lachlann’s flesh as he shouted to Brian’s men before they could move.
Ethne screamed, but Thomas held her fast. Lachlann rolled onto his back.
Aidan stood over him, his sword hovering above him. Instead of plunging the sharp blade into his heart, the man held Lachlann’s gaze. “Do ye doubt I can kill ye now?”
“I doubt nothing about yer cruelty.” He worked to block out the burning in his side.
“I am not cruel. I am what the church turned me into.”
Lachlann scoffed. “Only a weak man blames his failings on others.”
Aidan’s lips curled into a vicious smile. “How well ye remember my teachings.”
“The memories haunt my waking and my sleeping.” Lachlann felt the punch of truth to his gut. He wanted those memories to stop.
“Haunt?” Aidan’s brows rose in skepticism. “They made ye the warrior ye’ve become.”
“I became a warrior of integrity despite ye and yer teachings.” Lachlann sent a prayer to the saints above for intervention. He had to keep Aidan talking. “Would ye actually believe murdering a child would gain ye the power ye seek?”
“I seek power for all of us. ’Tis not just about me.”
“It has always been about ye.”
He sensed Aidan’s angry snarl in the pit of his stomach. He’d pushed the man too far and sweat broke out across Lachlann’s body. He glimpsed Ethne, who sobbed where she stood with the other onlookers. A fair flower indeed. He had let her down in so many ways and now he couldn’t even save the children. Turning to the man holding his life in his hand, Lachlann clenched his jaw tight, and nodded. “Aye, I know ye can kill me.”
“And will ye ask me for mercy?”
“I dinna believe ye have any. Ye murdered yer own brother.” Lachlann was playing with fire, taunting the man when he held Lachlann’s life or death in his hands, but he had to ask, “Think ye any man with a soul could do such a thing as that?”
“The church found my wife unfit for their hallowed ground, all because I had sought other means to heal her. I wanted her to live, damn it! And when they condemned me? My pious brother refused to speak for me. Branan would not even try to change their minds. He agreed with their decision.”
Aidan doubled his hands on the hilt of the well-honed blade. Lachlann forced himself to watch the man about to end his life, searching deep inside himself to find the smallest speck of forgiveness. There was none. He struggled to control his labored breathing while his heart thudded against his ribs as if desperate to escape this fate. He took a breath deep enough to fill his entire body and blew it out in a long, steady flow. When Aidan lifted the blade for a last, powerful thrust, Lachlann rolled clear of the blade. He scrambled to his feet.
Aidan’s face tightened in outrage, but his piercing cry as he lurched awkwardly at Lachlann sounded more like a wounded animal.
“Ye’d kill yer own nephew?” Thomas’s voice boomed as Aidan’s shoulders dropped.
When Aidan crumpled face first to the ground, Thomas loomed over him with wide, tear-filled eyes and a dirk covered in blood. “Ye dinna deserve to live.”
He dropped to his knees beside his father to again jab the blade into his back. “Ye deserve to die.”
And again.
Aidan never moved. No one moved. No one but Thomas. He continued his ranting as the blood sprayed and the cavernous space echoed back the sick sucking and slurping of the blade being shoved into the lifeless body over and over.
Lachlann was the first to edge closer to Thomas until he was able to catch the next downward gesture with a stiffened arm. “Ye’ve finished him, Thomas.”
The stench of the spilled blood surrounded them. Lachlann forced down the bile rising up his throat when his knee squished against something unseen as he knelt beside him. Staring directly in the man’s black, vacant eyes, Lachlann willed him to obey.
“Ye can stop now.”
