The Runaway Highlander (The Highland Renegades Book 2) (18 page)

Elena continued to dig in the hearth for the flint, no doubt mucking up not only her fine dress but her fingers, face, hands. Perhaps that could work to their advantage.

“What secrets do you have, sister?” Elena’s calm voice sang out and Anne hushed her.

“I have been with Broc and Andrew, first off.” Anne knelt beside her sister. “When they escaped, they took me with them.”

“So mother was right?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes, I did go with them willingly. Aedan found me and brought me back.” She turned her face toward him and he could see the rise and fall of her chest quicken.

“I’m so sorry, Aedan,” she whispered. “I waited for you, but you didn’t return. I had to… I had to come back for Elena.”

A pang of regret shot through him. “You didn’t trust me that I would return for you? That I would come for Elena as well?”

“I… I barely know you.” She was crying now. Aedan crossed the hearth and pulled her into his arms. “I thought at first you would return, and I waited for you. I did. But then you didn’t
come back and I couldn’t sleep for thinking what they might be doing to Elena and I just had to do something.”

Her slight body shook in his embrace and he held her tighter. “I know we have only known each other a short time, but I need for you to trust me.”

“I had to come back for Elena.”

“I know.” He kissed her forehead and caught the edge of her hair. Something salty and grainy stuck to his lips. “What in the name of the holy mother is in your hair, woman?”

She laughed. “I’ll tell you, I promise. But first, we must get Elena out of here.”

“We can’t just kidnap your sister, Anne.” Aedan released her as she pushed against him. “This is why I wanted you to wait for me. I wanted to find a way to negotiate with your mother. Or with the Sheriff. Or even your father.”

“We won’t be kidnapping her. We’re rescuing her. I planned to return to my father and show him what the Sheriff had done to me.”

“And your experience with your father has led you to believe that he would side with you against your mother? That he would fight for you if he had to?”

In the tiny shred of moonlight that cascaded through the windows, he could see what his words had done and regretted them as soon as they were out of his mouth. Her eyebrows pulled together and her mouth hung open. She looked like a lost little girl about to start screaming for her mother.

“I didn’t mean for it to sound that way,” he said. “But I need you to see reason. We cannot just take your sister from her mother’s care.”

Aedan paused. Given that he’d just done the same with his own sister, he wondered if that statement was really true. He backed up to the chair and sat, letting the weight of his previous and current actions soak in to his mind.

His father was a drunk and a le
cher. He would never follow his daughter, not after she’d become useless to him. The lie he’d planted about a foreign husband would stop a lazy man like Randal Donne in his tracks.

But Elena was different. Not only was she the pinkest of perfection, but she was docile and kind and obedient. If she didn’t play at insanity, which he w
as relatively certain was an act, she could have her pick of eligible men.

The fact that the Sheriff didn’t mind the insanity, or could see through it, worried Aedan. He was less concerned with Milene de Cheyne laying claim to Elena, and more worried about Simon Alcock. That man was used to being obeyed.

Anne watched Elena pick up bits of charred wood from the hearth and study them. The look on her face made Aedan want to hold her again, but he refrained.

“What if we—”

Aedan heard a scuffle in the hallway and stopped her. “That’s a formation,” he said. He recognized the rote steps of preparation for assault by wave. Someone else had arrived outside the door and they were preparing to treat the contents of this room as their enemy.

“Come here. Both of you.” Aedan held out his arms and hurried the girls toward their dressing area. He secreted them both behind the tall folding screen.

“What about the flint?” Elena wondered, loudly. Anne hushed her with the promise of sweets later.

Aedan
stood in front of the screen and drew both his sword and dagger. Then, with a flash of an idea, he moved to the window instead. “Stay completely quiet,” he warned them.

The rope he’d used to climb down from the tower still hung across the window, quite well-secured to the turret above. It also stretched all the way to the ground from this window.

When the door burst open, Aedan looked out the window and shouted. “Keep going. I’ll fight them off.”

As he’
d hoped, the soldiers’ attention shifted to the open window and what little light spilled into the room from the hallway followed the path of the door to the bed and the window and left the fireplace, the dressing screen, and the trunks out of view.

He sheathed his dagger and reached for the rope. The soldiers rushed him
and he pretended to vault the bodies to escape. They caught him by the arms, kicked away his sword, and kept four of the soldiers busy holding him still.

Through the door, sauntered the fat, bald Sheriff, Simon Alcock. Behind him, Milene de Cheyne slipped inside, dressed in the same type of woolen traveling clothes she’d been wearing when she’d tried to buy him.

A dynamic rage took hold of Aedan as the Sheriff approached, or rather, waddled toward him. “They’re gone now, old man. And you’ll never catch them.”

Rather than trick him, Aedan would have preferred to kill the bastard, but the presence of eight soldiers in the room made that unlikely. He couldn’t stop seeing the man in his mind’s eye with his face buried in Anne’s neck. The very act of imagining that moment nearly gave Aedan the power to kill everyone in the room.

He could feel himself growing more incensed with each passing moment and wondered if he could, indeed, take them all. He would claw his way through the untrained guards to get to Simon Alcock. And he would tear him to shreds.

“So you’ve sent them down a rope to their deaths, have you?” Simon crossed the room and looked down the side of the building. “It appears they’ve left you to face the consequences alone.”

Milene de Cheyne followed and mimicked his actions. “Elena couldn’t climb that rope. The height alone would have frozen her.”

“You don’t know your daughters as well as you imagine.” Aedan’s words were as full of spite as he could manage. He struggled against his captors.

The Sheriff pointed in a circle. “You six, you go after the women and bring them here to me. I am going to kill that adulterous little whore in front of her mother and her sister and then they will know who has the power in Berwick.”

Two of the men holding Aedan left with the other four and the Sheriff sucked on his teeth.

“You see what happens to people who cross me, Donne?” Simon Alcock punched Aedan in the face and laughed. “Hold him tighter.”

The two soldiers, already struggling to hold him, tried to widen their stances and firm their grips, but Aedan’s rage grew by the passing moment. He wanted to strangle that fat pig with his bare hands.

The Sheriff punched him again, this time in the stomach first, then one to each side of his face. Aedan tensed with each blow, but his resolve did not weaken. As soon as the assault stopped, he sagged against the men holding him, drawing their weight against his and pretending to be beaten.

Simon Alcock leaned in beside Aedan’s head. His putrid breath coiled around Aedan’s senses like a wet, rotting carcass. “I want you to think about this, when you’re rotting in my dungeon.” He grabbed Aedan’s hair and held his head up. The Sheriff’s beady little eyes narrowed and his face took on a maniacal gleam. “I want yo
u to remember this exact moment when I beat you. That little blonde prize you think you’ve won, I’ve already claimed her. Just like I’ll claim her imbecile of a sister. One to marry, and one to keep chained up in a dark, windowless room to rut with when the stupid one sleeps, and beat when I’m in the mood for a little violence. I’m going to kill that girl, make no mistake, and I’ve given up half my treasury for the pleasure. But before I do, I’m going to use her so violently, she’ll stop expecting you to rescue her and just wish for a quick death. Yes, you memorize this face, because it’ll be the last thing that little bitch sees before I send her to hell.”

He released Aedan’s head. The fire of rage that had begun when the man first stepped into Anne’s bedroom had now become a consuming, blinding blaze. It took every ounce of
control to tamp down his animal instinct and wait for the exact right moment.

Laughing, Simon Alcock turned his back and reached for Aedan’s sword. In one motion, Aedan rocked his weight back, catching his guards off-balance, and shed their restraining arms, grabbed one man’s sword and stabbed the other, then struck the swordless guard in the face with the hilt, sending him reeling backwards into Milene de Cheyne.

Aedan coiled, ready to pounce on the bastard who now faced him, his sword up. He prepared every image he could muster of this worthless waste of space hurting the woman he loved. Simon Alcock had to die. To protect Anne. Aedan would rot in a dungeon, just as the man had predicted, but he would do so knowing that the two women he loved the most, his sister and Anne de Cheyne, would be safe from the men who could torment them.

But before he could strike, a small hand slipped on
to the Sheriff’s forehead, drawing his chin up, and another slid across his throat with the accompanying flash of steel. Dark fluid squirted from his neck as his lips moved, soundlessly, and he sank to his knees.

Behind him stood Elena, wild-eyed and panting. She held the bloody weapon out as though ready to pounce again.

Anne cried out and rushed for her sister, but stopped when Elena turned to face her, dagger still at the ready. The young woman’s eyes were so wide and dangerous, Aedan feared even for Anne’s life.

“Elena,” he whispered.

Her head whipped around and she fixed those eyes on him, eyes that now filled with tears. Aedan laid his sword carefully on the ground and kept his hands wide.

“Elena, it’s all over now.” He slid the same melody into his words that he would have used to calm a headstrong stallion. Her arm dropped almost imperceptibly, and he tried again. “Please, Elena. He’s dead, I promise. He can’t hurt Anne any
longer.”

She blinked and looked around the room. Tears slid down her cheeks and she sniffed, but the knife remained in attack position.

Anne took a step forward and again, Elena focused on her. “See, Elena. He can’t hurt us anymore.”

“But he can.” Elena pointed at the still and silent old man, dead in a pool of his own blood. She used the dagger to focus attention on her mother. “Her. She will find another one like him.”

Milene de Cheyne lay under the unconscious guard, still, but her face carried the wide, frozen fear of guilt in a reckoning. She tried to sit up and Elena moved toward her, slashing out with the knife.

“No, Elena.” Anne’s voice was strong, commanding. Now that Elena had moved farther into the room, Aedan stole his chance to get his arms around Anne. He pulled her into his chest and held her, sighing into her hair.

“I’ll get the knife from her,” Anne whispered, trying to pull away from him. But Aedan had anticipated this and his lock around her was tight.

“She doesn’t know you right now. She doesn’t know anyone but your mother.” Aedan put his hand on Anne’s head and held her to his chest. “Please, don’t.”

“But I have to. She’ll kill my mother.”

“Anne.” He pressed his lips into her hair and felt the floor cave under his heart. He couldn’t lose her. “Please.”

Elena took another step toward her mother and Aedan pulled Anne behind him, walking slowly into the door’s light so Elena could see him. She jerked around and aimed her knife at him.

“Elena, it’s Aedan.”

Her voice came out squeaky and small, like a tiny child. “Anne’s Aedan?”

He smiled and nodded, reaching for the knife. “Yes.”

“You heard the man.” She slashed her dagger through the air to point back at the dead Sheriff. They’d now moved several feet away from him, and from the dead guard and the sleeping one. “He paid her for us.” The knife point now faced Milene again.

“He did, lamb.” Anne’s voice sung out from behind him. Aedan held his arms out so she wouldn’t rush her sister. “He paid her for us, but look. He’s dead. He doesn’t have us.”

Anne tried to draw Elena’s attention to the Sheriff by bending down over the man and gesturing widely. “He’s dead, Elena.”

Milene de Cheyne edged around the bed. Aedan kept his eye on her in case there was a weapon hidden nearby. He wouldn’t put it past her to stab her own daughter to preserve her life.

“You need to stop moving, Countess.” Aedan put all the command he could muster into his voice. “You’re making this worse.”

And she was. Elena’s knife now swung around each time a new person spoke. Her eyes had widened to their previous mad roundness, and she now shook visibly.

“I need to make sure she can’t do this again.” Elena faced her mother and took a large step forward. Thankfully, Milene still had a little room, and she backed up against the wall. But when Elena saw she hadn’t gone far enough, she moved to take another step.