How long had they been gone? How long had they had her? How many of them? Reivers usually formed small groups of three or four, but sometimes as many as ten.
Some of them were criminals fleeing their crimes, some were farmers who gave up on working the land hoping for an easy profit from theft and extortion, others were soldiers who had fled battle or been set punishment they couldn’t bear. All of them were cruel and savage.
Gods. Reivers would—
No. He wasn’t going to think of that. Not now, not ever. He was not going to imagine his Keely in their hands. He would get her back. Someone took her up that hill, but he would bring her back down.
“I’ll come with you,” Rafe said firmly from behind him, and Tor spun to see Val and Alanna too.
“So will I,” Val added.
Gods. These men were his true brothers. Standing with him the second he needed them. And they had supported Keely all this time. Would have supported her with the baby—that was what Val had been promising earlier. That was what Tristan had meant when he reminded Tor that they were a family.
He would fix this. He would make it right and give Keely whatever she wanted, even if what she wanted was to be left alone. But first, he had to get her back.
He nodded his thanks to Rafe with a curt dip of his chin, but then he focused on Val. “You can’t come. You have to stay with your wife.”
Val’s frown deepened. “I can help.”
Tor wrapped a hand around his neck, squeezing the aching muscles, holding it like an anchor as he fought to finish this conversation while every cell in his body needed to be moving. “Thank you. Genuinely. But Rafe, Jos, and I have scouted together many times. And frankly, you don’t have enough guards to split them. You need to take Alanna to the barracks at Staith and then come back with more men.”
Alanna wrapped her arms around her belly, holding herself, and Val immediately pulled her closer. Her eyes were soft with distress. “I’m not leaving here until we know.”
Tor shook his head trying to keep his last tiny hold on his rapidly fraying temper. “I’m sorry, but you would be a distraction. You’re using resources we need.”
Alanna drew herself up as if to argue, but he kept speaking, low and resolute. “She would want you safe. She would never forgive herself if something happened to you because you were here. And frankly, we need the men who can’t be spared from your protection.”
Alanna shook her head, her lower lip trembling, but Jos landed beside them before she could argue further. “The ground’s disturbed past those bushes. There’s a path that leads further into the hills, toward the mountains.”
It was all he could do not to take his friend by his shoulders and shake him. “Did you see her?”
Jos folded his wings behind him, battle-ready, as he replied, “I couldn’t get too close without being seen. But yes, I think so.”
“What do you mean, you think so?”
Jos’s eyes flicked to Rafe and Val and then back to his. “I saw two men on horses, traveling fast. A third, smaller, person was holding on behind one of them, covered in a gray cloak. It could have been her.”
Gods. Fuck. She was wearing a gray cloak.
Tor forced himself to think. “Okay. That’s good. She’s alive and… she’s alive.” That was the most important thing. They must have been moving since they grabbed her. All he had to do was catch them.
Catch them. Kill them. Get Keely back and then go down on his knees and make her understand that he hadn’t meant any of the things he’d said. Not in the way that he’d said them.
He needed to explain that she made him feel things that overpowered him with their intensity. That he had been terrified—and had no idea of how to handle that feeling.
Not because she wasn’t enough, but because she was magnificent. Because she was everything.
And the archangels help the men who took her, because their time was almost over.
Chapter Fifteen
Keely came backto consciousness with a surge of acidic nausea and a vicious, stabbing pain in the back of her head. She was crumpled in a heap, her face pressed down into the cold ground and she could hear the men who’d taken her. Bard. Just when she’d thought she’d finally reached rock bottom.
“Fuck. Andred is not gonna like this. Not at all,” said a whiny, nasal voice.
“Not our fault though, was it?” said a deeper, coarser voice.
Stones clattered heavily as if they were being thrown or kicked. She kept her eyes closed and her body still, trying to ignore the clamminess of her palms and the churning in her belly; the need to scream out her fear and pain. She couldn’t afford any kind of weakness in front of these men.
