“Just take me home,” she pleaded again, smaller now. “Please, Flynn. I can’t do this right now. I can’t… think about her in that water and still stand here.”
He didn’t argue. Didn’t try to talk her out of it. He just opened the passenger door and guided her in, tucking her coat around her like she might shatter from the cold.
The engine turned over, a low, familiar rumble. Flynn pulled them back onto the road, the loch sliding away behind them, swallowed by fog.
Heather pressed her forehead to the window. Trees slipped past in wet green smears. Her chest hurt. Her stomach hurt. Her head hurt. Thinking hurt most of all.
Flynn kept his eyes on the road, jaw tight, hands steady. He didn’t reach for her this time. Didn’t fill the silence with jokes or comfort. He just drove, solid as bedrock beneath everything shifting in her.
“I’ll take ye home, mo chridhe,” he said at last, voice low and certain.
“Just drive,” Heather said, her voice barely above a whisper.
She shut her eyes, but the image wouldn’t leave her: black water, gray sky, and the thought that she’d been standing on the shore of where her mother perished without even knowing.
Her father hadn’t just lied about how Eilidh died.
He’d moved the story to another continent and expected her never to find her way back.
Chapter 10
Fiona Cameron—Inverness, 1746
The river carried too many ghosts.
Fiona Cameron stood at the edge of the River Ness, boots sinking into the sodden bank, and watched the slow curl of the current as if it might somehow return what the moor had taken. The surface looked calm—polite, almost—with morning sunlight smoothing ripples into silver. But Fiona knew what lay beneath:
Currents that twisted, dragged, swallowed.
Cold that seared like iron.
Depths that did not give back what they claimed.
A breeze skimmed the shoreline, stirring the heather and carrying the faint clatter of carts from town, but none of it reached her fully. All she heard was the silence where her brothers’ voices should’ve been.
Six Cameron sons marched with the Prince.
One had crawled home long enough to grip her cheek, blood slicking his fingers as he whispered—
“Find the Mackenzie of Glenoran… he carries what might save us still.”
Find him.
Trust him.
Help him finish what the rest had died believing in.
Then he was gone, dragged away by redcoats with the others taken for questioning. She never saw any of them again.
Fiona closed her eyes. The wind lifted her ginger curls, tangling them across her cheek like a shroud.
“Enough,” she whispered to the water. “I’ve nae tears left.”
She straightened, steeling her spine, wiping her cheek with the heel of her palm.
Culloden had ended their cause.
But it had not ended her.
