Page 27 of Highlander’s Torn Bride

With a pockmarked face and gangly figure, the lad was a rather pitiful creature. The pitiful ones, in Alexander’s experience, were either the first to break, or the first to slit their own throats out of blind, misplaced loyalty.

“How many did you find?” Alexander asked Jonah, who was leaning up against the frame of the door.

“Seven. The rest seem to have skipped along home, as this one should have done.”

At the attention, the lad cried out again, and then began to weep.

“Well, laddy, care to tell me what you were on about when you took my wife?”

“I didna, I—ah!” he cried out when Alexander reached forward and grabbed the man’s arm, which had been broken sometime during the fight.

“Tis an unfortunate wound. I’d have my men set it and send you along home to your mum, but you owe me an explanation. You see, you wear my clan’s tartan, yet none of us ken who you are.”

“It wasn’t my idea! It wasn’t, m’Laird!”

“Then whose was it?” Alexander asked. When he was met with silence, he squeezed the arm again.

“Enough!”

The shout came from outside, and Jonah went to find the man who had let up the call so he could be brought before Alexander.

This man was quite a bit larger, though also dressed in Mackay tartan. “I’m the one that carried yer wife off. Talk to me and leave him be.”

“Fine,” Alexander said, letting the other lad be dropped so the blades of the room could be focused on the superior threat. “Why did you take my wife?”

The man was silent now, pressing his lips together.

Jonah stepped forward and smiled at him. “Please tell us, you did say to talk to you. If you canna say anything, my brother will be a bit rude to that other lad again.”

The man’s eyes shifted to the lad on the floor, who was still sniveling and appeared to have wet himself.

“Was it Laird Gunn?” Alexander asked, watching the man’s face carefully. In the hours of searching the forest, wrangling those that they could, and exploring the camp, Alexander had decided that he was the most likely source of this pain. He had caved to the queen’s request to marry his only child off to an enemy so quickly, it should have been suspicious. This, then, was an elaborate scheme to bring her back home.

“We’re usually in the service of Laird Gunn,” the man said, looking a bit nervous at the mention of his laird, “but not this time. We followed another yesterday.”

“Who?”

“The one ye took your lass from, ye filthy Mackay. The one yer lass was promised to before ye and yers came and stole a Gunn away from her happiness.”

Alexander raised his eyebrows, and Jonah gave him a confused look. “Tis my understanding that the marriage order was created in part because Margaret was not betrothed to anyone.”

“Laird Gunn never asked her,” the man replied, spitting into the hay. “Just gave her up.”

“Who was she engaged to?” Jonah asked, his voice sounding like he was more curious than anything.

“His name is Gavin,” the man said, giving Alexander a defiant look.

Gavin.

Alexander dropped everything in his lap and left the building, looking around at the clearing and all of the prisoners tied to the trees. None of them were him.

Alexander remembered the glare Gavin had given him when he had first arrived in Braemore, and the way that he had been looking at Margaret. At the time, Alexander had been pleased with the possibility of taking the object of that man’s affections. He hadn’t thought, though, that things between them had gone far enough to justify him doing this much to take her back.

Or, he thought with a wince, how far she would be willing to go to get back to him.

On the first day that he had met Margaret, when he had offered everything she could have wished for and she had rejected it, he had considered her to be different: immune to senseless wishing. But she hadn’t been, had she? Her wish had just been something he couldn’t give, not while he also became her husband.

“Alexander,” Jonah said, coming up behind him and putting a hand on his shoulder.