His brother sighed. “Ye would be the cause of keepin’ yer father here? He willna leave withoot ye.”
“Then the sooner you take me to Torin, the quicker we can go home.” Her eyes sparkled and her chin lifted with challenge.
The commander looked her over in her saddle from boot to flaxen crown and smiled again, shaking his head. “My brother never stood a chance.” Then he laughed.
“All right. Come with me,” he gave in to her. Then Cain looked at her father and brother. “Ye two stay here. I will help her if she needs it.”
Braya appreciated his words. Yet again. Perhaps the savage wasn’t so bad after all.
Her father pleaded with her not to go, but he was in no condition to stop her. Surprisingly, Galien remained still and promised to take him home.
She followed on Archer and caught up to the commander quickly. “Is the warden dead?”
“Aye, and in hell,” he said, slowing down.
She didn’t bring Bennett up again, letting him stay dead. She realized he was responsible for not only Torin’s suffering, but for Cainnech’s and Nicholas’ as well. She was sorry for them.
But the commander seemed a bit more light-humored than his brothers. At least more than the earl. Torin had begun to laugh of late.
“But you live,” she remarked with a knowing hint in her eyes.
“Some of us do.”
She knew he was speaking of his brothers. She couldn’t help the poor widowed earl, but… “Your brother, Torin, will be fine after today, I think.”
“How d’ye know that, lass?”
Lass.It was what she dreamed Torin had called her. “He killed his ghost.”
He nodded then shrugged his broad shoulders. “And now he will have a new one.”
He meant her. She didn’t deny it. It wasn’t her fault. “If he had told me the truth, I would not have given him a chance to feel anything for me.”
“He is a soldier, whether ye like it or not. He had a duty to his king and he didna sacrifice his entire mission fer love. That is what a soldier does.”
“But I did sacrifice everything,” Torin said from beneath a giant oak, where he waited for them atop Avalon. He caught Braya with his gaze as she passed him and she stopped. The commander smiled and continued on.
“I let you distract me by playing with you,” Torin told her, dismounting and coming toward her. “By hearing from my victims’ parents what my deeds had done to them. I let you turn my eyes from my task and change my heart from revenge to mercy.”
“But not to honesty?” she asked him, slipping from her saddle.
He moved to catch her. She pushed him away. “No, Torin. You…you took me,” she whispered and lowered her chin, too ashamed to look at him. “You would have never had the chance if I had known who you were.”
“Torin MacPherson,” he said softly, dropping his hands to his sides. “If I had known who I was, I might have made better decisions.”
She didn’t want to pity him but how the hell could she not? He had no one who cared about him during his upbringing. No one who taught him how to love, how to…play.
“Are you saying you could have resisted me if you had known you were a MacPherson?”
He smiled at her and then closed his eyes and raked his fingers through his curls.
“Who would believe me?”
“No one from around here. That’s for certain,” she assured him with a chuckle. Then she sobered. “Are they all dead?”
“The guards? No. None of them are dead.”
“What do you mean, none?” The army had ridden straight through those gates. Surely they had killed the guards—
