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And that, I think, is the moment he lost.

Because another drop of blood rolled down my Mate’s throat, and she met my eyes, and I saw the message in those brown depths as clearly as if I could read her thoughts.

Kill him.

John, on the other hand, still thought he had the upper hand.

“Last chance, orc.”

His eyes moved over my shoulder, and I knew before he said it that he’d seen the evidence of what I’d been listening to for the last minute—the sound of a great many feet coming down through the trees.

“Give me the boy and I’ll go, and you can keep your⁠—”

“Nay.”

Vrogul stepped out of the tree line at my right shoulder with his axe in his hand, and behind him came forty of the Battleborn of Islay, the most fearsome seafaring warriors the west had ever known.

And for the first time, fear bloomed in John’s eyes.

“He’s mine,” I growled to my brother, who pretended to pout.

“Och, Maardok, we’ve no’ had a battle in months, and ye would⁠—”

I was watching the way the two humans had shifted their holds on their swords.

“This willnae be a battle, brother. But ye can watch my back, if ‘twould mean so much to ye.”

“Fine,” Vrogul huffed, at the same moment John gave the command I’d been waiting for.

“Kill him.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Cataline

“Kill him,” John said, and I discovered that ‘twas, in fact, possible to still stand upright with a heart that has stopped beating.

Because my God.

I had watched Maardok train.

I had stood at the edge of that field a dozen times since that first afternoon and thought I understood what I was looking at. Maardok’s shouted corrections, the slow patient repetition, the way he took a lad’s wrist and moved it two inches and made him do the whole thing again.

This, though?

This horror, this rush, this explosion was naught like those sparring sessions.

‘Twas fast. That is the only honest thing I could say about the first few moments I watched John’s two fighters attack the male I loved.

‘Twas so fast that my eyes could not keep up with it, and ‘twas loud in a way I had not expected, all grunting and scraping and the flat awful clang of metal that went through my teeth.

The two hired men came at him together, and they were good. I did not need to understand swordplay to see that. They moved apart as they came, one high and one low, working together like men who had done it before and been paid well for it.

And Maardok laughed at them.

“Where did you find these two?” I hissed as I tried to pull from John’s hold.

His arm tightened across my collarbone.