She saw him in her mind with a vividness that nearly pained her. He had to know by now. He would have found her chamber empty. He would not stop, not for the length of a night, nor in front any threat MacKenzie might place before him, not while breath remained in him.
The hope of it was all that kept her upright.
MacKenzie rose again, and when he spoke next his voice carried farther, as if he wished the men nearby to hear him.
“Once ye are dead,” he announced, “I shall turn me full attention tae the clan Grant.”
Elaina went still.
“I have unfinished business there. They have long mistaken survival fer victory.” His mouth hardened. “They slaughtered me men years ago, and fer that they have imagined themselves beyond me reach. I mean tae correct that error. I couldn’t get their lands with war, and ye were me way tae form an alliance that would have allow me tae strengthen me army and take what should have been mine.”
He began to pace before her with the ugly leisure of a man discussing the weather rather than murder.
“I shall destroy them properly this time. Their walls, their land, their people, every trace of them wiped away. Clan Grant should have fallen when I first set me will against it. It will fall now.”
He looked back at her, and for the first time, real hatred entered his face, hot and naked and hideous.
“And he shall watch it happen, if I can contrive it.”
Duncan.
The thought of MacKenzie’s malice fixed upon him made fear sharpen into something even more terrible. Elaina could endure the thought of her own death more readily than she could endure the image of Duncan harmed because of her. Yet she would not let Lachlan see that he had found the place to wound her deepest.
“He will kill ye first,” she snarled back.
It only made him laugh. It was a dreadful sound, harsh and wholly empty of mirth.
“Will he?” he asked. “Then let him come.”
He stepped closer again, until she could see each hard line in his face, each pale fleck in those merciless eyes.
“He will be too late,” he said almost softly.
The words settled over her like a sentence.
For one awful moment, the camp around her seemed to blur and fear moved through her body in cold, brutal waves. She was afraid. She was more afraid than she had ever been in her life, afraid of the dark beyond the fire, afraid of the knife at Lachlan’s side, afraid of dying in that wretched place with no hand to hold and no prayer answered in time.
But even in the midst of that terror, hope did not entirely leave her.
It lived in the memory of Duncan’s voice. It lived in the ribbon still hidden within the folds of her gown, though they had stripped her of nearly everything else. It lived in the certainty that whatever danger stood between them, he would come if he breathed, and fight if he stood, and search until there was no more night left to search through.
Elaina held MacKenzie’s gaze with all the courage she could gather in her fear.
“If I am tae die,” she said, and though her voice trembled, it did not fail, “I shall nae die fearingye.”
For the first time, he seemed displeased enough for her to see that he did not like defiance when it came without pleading. He straightened abruptly.
“Keep watch on her,” he ordered the guards. “If she attempts tae run, cut her down.”
Then, with one last look of cold contempt, he turned away.
Elaina drew breath only when he was gone. It came shakily, and the next after it shakier still. She bent her head for a moment, fighting the dizziness of relief and dread, forcing herself not to weep, not to surrender to the panic clawing at her throat.
And still she waited, because however near death now seemed, however black the forest and merciless the men surroundingher, she could not yet believe that was the end. Duncan would come… he had to.
In fear, moments lost all proper shape. They stretched and collapsed without reason. At some point one of the guards dragged her farther inside the tent and bound her wrists again to a rough wooden support driven into the earth, as though MacKenzie feared despair might make her dangerous. Through a narrow gap in the tent flap, she could still see the edge of the camp.
She tried to pray. She tried to think. In the end, she could do neither well.
