Hector shrugged. “I’ve no need to fight them now.”
“I have one last condition. Ye must return my wife to me,” Rory said. “I know ye took her, and if you’ve harmed her, there will be no deal between us.”
“Now that I know how much she means to ye, I wish I had kept her,” Hector said. “She said that the trouble with the Grants led ye to set her aside in favor of Grant’s daughter. I felt sorry for the lass, ye sending her off in rags with no protection, so I let her go.”
“I did not set her aside,” Rory said between his teeth.
“Then that lass is a damned good liar,” Hector said. “She begged me to let her board a ship that was waiting to carry her to France.”
Rory’s heart lurched, but he kept his expression passive. He told himself that Hector could have invented the story, for it was common knowledge Sybil’s brothers were living in exile in France.
“The ship had some frilly French name. Ach, what was it?” Hector said. “La Fleur, that was it, and it was sailing for Calais.”
Hector could not know the name of the ship and where it was sailing without speaking to Sybil. “She’s here,” Rory said. “I know she is.”
“Ach, ye hurt my feelings with your lack of trust.” Hector spread his arm out to the side. “But you’re welcome to search the house.”
Rory knew exactly where to look. When he was a bairn, his uncle locked him in the dank dungeon beneath the tower and left him there until his mother found him hours later.
He charged down the stairs and through the undercroft, grabbed a torch from the wall sconce, and pushed open the door to the dungeon.
No one was in it. But on the stairs, he saw fresh drops of blood.
***
“Rory is not the man ye thought he was,” Hector said with a satisfied smile. “He’s given up on the chieftainship without spilling a drop of blood.”
Hector had kept Sybil bound and gagged watching from an upstairs window in the tower long enough to see Rory ride up and to hear his declaration. It had broken her heart to hear it. As Rory and Alex entered the tower, Hector’s men hustled her out a back door to her new prison, a small, windowless hut a few hundred yards from the tower house.
Now Hector had come to gloat.
“The man who deserves to lead is the one who can outwit his opponents,” Hector said, tapping his finger against his temple. “Rory is no match for me.”
“If Rory gave up the chieftainship, it was because he knew you’d destroy the clan if he didn’t,” she said. “He put the welfare of the clan before his own ambitions. That’s what a great leader does.”
“That’s a surprise, coming from a Douglas,” Hector said with a smirk, and sat down on the only chair in the hut.
She glanced at Brighde and Lùcas, who were bound together in the corner and had the sense to keep quiet. At least they were still alive.
“He was willing to give up on you as well,” Hector said. “Once he’s gone, I’ll make certain he hears ye chose to be Finnart’s mistress rather than live with him now that he’s a lowly warrior who must earn his living with his sword.”
“He won’t believe that,” she said. “Rory knows I love him and that I’d never go to Finnart. And I won’t!”
“I suppose ye can jump overboard and drown instead,” he said. “But ye strike me as a survivor, so I’d wager ye won’t.”
She would get away somehow and find Rory no matter where he was.
“Which would ye say pains a man more,” Hector asked, “losing the woman he loves to death or to another man?”
Surely death would be harder if he truly loved the woman. She shook her head, unwilling to seal her fate. So long as she lived, there was a chance of escape.
“I can tell ye which is worse.” Hector swirled the whisky in the cup he brought with him and stared into the amber liquid. “If she’s with another man, he has hope that she’ll leave him. Hope is a wound that festers every day, driving him mad.”
“What would you know of love?” she said.
He looked up, as if he suddenly remembered she was there and realized he had spoken his thoughts aloud.
“I want her son to suffer as I did,” he said. “That is the only reason I’m letting ye live.”
