Three more guards fell in quick succession. One with Murdock’s blade through his throat. Another with his skull cracked against the courtyard stones. The last tried to run, but Murdock’s dirk found his back before he’d taken three steps.
And then there was only Keith.
He stood frozen, watching his men fall like wheat before a scythe. The color had drained from his face, replaced by something that looked like dawning horror.
The bastard must have thought he would be weak, wounded, helpless after the torture. But Murdock had never been helpless. Not even when his father had tried to break him. Not even when Keith’s guards had carved his flesh.
Keith’s eyes darted around the courtyard, clearly searching for escape, for help, for anything. But there was nothing. Just six bodies cooling on the stones and Murdock’s cold, absolute certainty.
Then, in a moment of reckless desperation, he lunged. Not at Murdock, but at Leona.
His rage had made him reckless, the need to punish her for her betrayal overriding any sense of self-preservation. He grabbed her by the hair and yanked her toward him with vicious force. A dagger appeared in his other hand, the blade glinting in the moonlight.
“If I cannae have ye,” he snarled, pressing the dagger to her throat, “I’ll make sure nay one can…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. Murdock’s blade speared his back and exited through his chest in one smooth motion.
The steel slid between Keith’s ribs like it was meant to be there, finding his heart with the precision of someone who’d done this a hundred times before.
His eyes went wide with shock. The dagger slipped from his fingers, clattering against the stones. His grip on Leona’s hair loosened, and she stumbled away, one hand flying to her throat where the blade had pressed.
Keith slumped forward, and Murdock caught him only long enough to withdraw his sword before letting him fall. He hit the ground with a wet, final thud.
Silence descended on the courtyard, broken only by Leona’s ragged breathing. She stared at Keith’s corpse, at the blood pooling beneath him, spreading dark across the stones. Her hand pressed to her mouth as if to hold back a scream or perhaps a sob.
Murdock wiped his blade clean on Keith’s tunic. The rage that had fueled him through the fight was already fading, replaced by the cold emptiness he knew too well.
He’d done what needed to be done. Nothing more. Nothing less.
When he straightened, he looked at Leona.
She was staring at him now, not at Keith’s body. Her green eyes were wide, luminous with unshed tears, searching his face as if trying to understand what she was seeing. Who he was. What he was capable of.
And Murdock knew, with absolute certainty, that he couldn’t let her follow him into his world. Into the darkness that had shaped him, that lived inside him like a second heartbeat.
She deserved better than to follow a man who killed without feeling. Better than trusting someone who’d been broken and remade into a weapon.
“This is where we part, lass,” he said, his voice flat. He sheathed his sword and turned toward the stables. “Told ye ye willnae have to marry him.”
4
Murdock was halfway across the courtyard, his bloodied sword still in hand, when the sound of running footsteps echoed through the night. Multiple sets. Leona’s heart lurched in her chest.
More guards.
A figure burst into the courtyard, flanked by at least a dozen armed men, their torches blazing against the darkness. The man at the front was tall and muscular, with long blond hair that caught the firelight as he ran. He wore the same colors as Keith, bore the same sharp features.
Leona’s stomach dropped.
Ragnall. Her other cousin had always been Keith’s shadow.
“After him!” he shouted, his voice raw with fury. “After him now!”
But even as his guards moved to obey, surging toward the stable gates where Murdock had disappeared into the shadows, his attention was already shifting. His eyes scanned the courtyard in one devastating sweep, taking in the bodies of six guards sprawled across the stones, the blood pooling beneath them in dark, spreading lochs.
And Keith’s body, chest still open where Murdock’s blade had plunged through.
“Keith!” The word tore from the man’s throat like a wound, primal and agonized.
