For one terrible instant he did not move. He simply stared, his whole body seized by a horror so complete it left him breathless. Then he crossed the distance in a stride and pushed the door open.
The room was empty.
No candle burned. No voice answered. The bed-curtains stirred faintly in the draught from the window, and the room bore all the signs of her previous haste: garments half-packed, linen cast aside.
“Elaina.” He said her name as though he could still summon her back by speaking it. But only silence met him.
Duncan turned sharply, searching the room with a desperation he could not master. He crossed to the window, then back again, his gaze taking in every disordered surface, every abandonedarticle, every useless detail. He knew, even as he looked, that she was gone.
His chest tightened so violently that for a moment he could scarcely draw breath. Then footsteps sounded behind him, and Iain appeared in the doorway.
“Catriona is safe,” he informed him at once. “She was coming tae look fer us when I found her, tae tell us that Elaina was taken. By two unknown men with nay recognizable colors.”
“Elaina is gone?” Duncan whispered.
It was not the voice of a laird giving report. It was the voice of a man dragged to the edge of a black and fathomless abyss.
“MacKenzie’s got her.”
Duncan’s hand tightened around the hilt of his sword until the leather bit into his palm. “A diversion,” he realized, and each word was cut from fury. “He meant tae draw us away from her. He never meant tae take the castle. He meant tae takeher.”
The truth of it blazed now with awful clarity. Every moment spent in the yard, every order given, every second he had believed her safe upstairs was useless. It was as if Duncan himself had delivered her into MacKenzie’s grasp.
A savage self-reproach rose in him.Hehad sent her away.Hehad commanded her to her chamber.Hehad believed stonewalls and locked doors could protect what MacKenzie desired most.
He had been wrong.
Duncan drew a hard breath, forcing the fury into purpose.
“Prepare the men,” he gave the order.
Iain did not move at once. “Duncan?—”
“Prepare them,” he repeated, and now there was such deadly calm in his voice that no man who knew him would mistake it. “Every rider who can sit a horse. Torches. Hounds, if they can be roused quickly enough. I want the grounds searched, the walls checked, the river watched, and every track beyond the gate examined before the moon rises higher.”
Iain gave a single sharp nod. “Aye, me laird. We will find her.”
Duncan stepped once more into the center of the room, his gaze falling briefly upon the things she had left behind. It was evidence of how near she had been to fleeing him, only to be stolen away before he could make all right between them. The sight only drove the blade deeper.
When he spoke again, his voice was low, but no less terrible for it.
“Aye, we are going tae find Elaina,” he echoed. “And Lachlan MacKenzie will at last receive what he deserves.”
There was no heat in the words now and no wildness. All Duncan had was a resolve so absolute it seemed beyond anger.
Iain held his gaze and understood, then he turned and went to gather the men. Duncan remained one moment longer in the empty chamber, surrounded by the silence her absence had made unbearable. He inhaled deeply, then left the chamber at once. There was no more time for grief.
Only the hunt.
Duncan began where she had last been seen, in the corridor outside her chamber, and worked outward from there with the patience of a man who understood that haste, if not governed by reason, might cost him the very life he sought to save.
The castle was in uproar still, though the worst of the attack had been contained. Near the outer wall, not far from a stretch of shadow too deep to have invited casual notice, he stopped.
There.
At first glance the ground appeared no different from any other patch of trampled soil, but Duncan crouched, studying it with the concentration of a hunter who had learned young thatthe land, if properly read, always spoke. There were faint and hurried marks, badly disguised.
Boot prints, several of them, were impressed into the softer earth and then obscured in a clumsy fashion, as though their makers had trusted darkness to finish what carelessness had begun.
