She kicked blindly, her heel connecting with a shin with a sickeningthud.
A fist knotted in her hair. The jerk was sudden and brutal, yanking her head back until her spine felt like it would snap. Her neck screamed in protest, the skin of her scalp tearing as her vision swam with white stars. She was pinned, exposed, and utterly helpless, her throat bared to the dark like a sacrifice on an altar.
“Hold her,” someone snarled.
Hands changed. Her arms were wrenched behind her with a sickening pop of her shoulder, her wrists seized in a grip that knew exactly where to press to steal her strength. She gasped into the palm over her mouth—a wet, muffled sob of a sound—as hot, salt tears stung her eyes. The terror was a cold tide, but beneath it, a desperate rage began to simmer, a wild, cornered heat.
Who? How?
The questions fractured in her mind. Had the keep been betrayed?
They burst through a side door into the biting night air.
The wind tore at her thin shift, savage and freezing, ripping a ragged cry from her throat that the hand could no longer fully stifle. Gravel bit like jagged teeth into her bare feet as she was dragged, stumbling and blind, across the outer yard toward the black, looming maw of the forest beyond the walls.
Her breath came in ragged, useless pulls. Her limbs felt distant, as if they belonged to a stranger.
Think, she ordered herself, wild and frantic.
Then, the shadows fractured.
One of the men lifted a torch higher, and the orange light spilled across a face that she knew as well as her own.
The world stopped. The ground felt as though it had vanished beneath her feet, leaving her suspended in a void of pure, crushing disbelief.
“Nay,” she choked, the word tearing free from her lungs, raw and bleeding.
The man holding the torch stopped short. The others hesitated, their silhouettes jagged against the firelight. In that sliver of frozen stillness, she saw him with a clarity that felt like a physical wound. The sharp, arrogant line of his jaw. The familiar, meticulous cut of his beard. The thin, silver scar along his brow—a mark she had traced with a sister’s reverence as a child, back when she had still believed a brother’s scars were proof of bravery rather than signs of cold calculation.
The hand over her mouth dropped away, but Enya didn't scream. She couldn't. The air in her lungs had turned to lead.
“Finley.”
Her brother’s name fell from her mouth like an accusation, like a prayer that had been answered by a demon. The hurt was more violent than the grip on her wrists; it was a soul-deep shattering, the full realization that the monster in her room hadn't been a stranger. It had been her blood.
For a moment, no one spoke. The wind howled through the yard, tugging at cloaks and hair, snapping at the edges of the torchlight. Finley studied her with an expression she did not recognize—and yet, it was the only look he had ever truly given her since they had grown up.
Calculation. Irritation. The cold, sterile gaze of a merchant inspecting damaged silk.
The betrayal was a stone in her stomach. She sucked in a breath, her lungs burning in the freezing air, and twisted violently out of the grip on her arms. She spun to face him fully, her bare feet standing firm on the biting gravel.
“Have ye lost what little sense ye were born wi’?” Her voice shook, the tremor a white-hot, jagged fury that made her vision swim. “Get away from me.”
“Enya,” Finley said, his tone sharp with warning. “Lower yer voice. Dinnae be a fool.”
“Lower me—” A laugh tore out of her, brittle and wild. “Ye drag me from me bed in the middle o’ the night, and ye thinkI’mthe fool?”
One of the men behind her shifted, his boots crunching uneasily on the stone. Finley shot him a look that could have curdled milk, then stepped closer, lowering the torch until the fire was a wall between them. The orange light carved his features into a jagged mask of stone.
“I didnae want it tae come tae this,” he said, his voice devoid from even a shred of regret. “But ye’ve been careless, Enya. Reckless.”
The word landed like a blow.
She stared at him, stunned, a strange, hollow numbness spreading through her chest. “Careless,” she repeated softly, the word tasting like ash. “I have given up me life fer yer schemes. I have lived in the shadows of yer silence. And ye thinkthis—this abduction—is care?”
His mouth tightened into a thin, cruel line. “I think ye’re forgetting what’s at stake here.”
“What’s at stake,” she shot back, “isme. Me life.”
