Dark Side of the Laird (Highland Bound) (15 page)

“Where is Lady Isabella?”

Agatha frowned. “’Tis another thing… No one has seen Lady Isabella ether.”

My fears were becoming realized. The bitch had done something to Ewan. I felt it in my gut. “Have the guards search everywhere. Ewan must be found within the next half hour. It’s imperative.” I lifted my gaze, catching Agatha’s. “Our laird’s life depends on it.”

The maid nodded frantically and left the room.

“Logan, what am I supposed to do?” I whispered to the ceiling. “We need you.”

I dropped to my knees, pressing my hands together and did something I found myself doing so much more since traveling back in time. I prayed.

And I questioned why Fate was testing us so mercilessly.

Chapter Sixteen

Emma

I
don’t know how many minutes went by but it felt like an hour. No hours! I sat in bed, nerves jumping and every little sound had me reaching for the blade buried beneath me. I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t stop the racing, panic-filled thoughts going through my mind. Staring into the flames of the candle only reminded of that tiny speck of light coming from the keyhole.

Why was it taking so long
for Agatha to find Ewan and Isabella?

I let out a frustrated gro
an and rubbed my hands over my face. If I didn’t hear something soon, I was going to go batshit crazy.

Commotion
came from the courtyard. Muffled calls, nothing more, but it still made me pause. My hands stilled beside me on the comforter and I cocked my head, listening. Waiting. More of the same.

Had they found Ewan?

My stomach plummeted with a sudden fear as to what they’d found. Ewan was the only one who could help me—Logan had said so himself, and now…

Okay, stop!
I couldn’t let myself continue down that line of thinking. Maybe he’d just waltzed in and that was what the commotion was about.

I rushed from the bed and ignored the weakness of my body. Pure adrenaline
propelled me forward. I yanked the shutters open and stared down at the crowd of clansmen forming a walking circle around something as they brought it inside. Icy wind swirled through the open window, ruffling my hair and nightgown, but my skin burned so hot, I barely felt it.

Four warriors carried a makeshift stretcher made from large tree limbs and someone’s plaid. On top of the stretcher was a
prone body. Golden blond hair and a broad brow peeked from beneath a plaid that wrapped tight around a man. There was only one man at Gealach with hair like that.

Ewan.

It was definitely him. I felt it deep in my bones. The same sense of loss encompassed me as it had when I lost my brother the decade before. Like a piece of me was dying with him. My eyes were wide, glued to the eerily still body of the only other man besides Logan that I trusted.

Was he…?

His head rolled the side. Either from his own movements or the jostling of his men. But I took hope that he was alive. Badly injured, but still.
Please, be alive!

No way I was staying here
to wait for someone to come and tell me what had happened. Even if I had to crawl on my hands and knees toward the great hall, I would. I had to know how he was doing, what the prognosis was. He needed a hospital, a doctor, anesthesia and modern treatments. And he wasn’t going to get it.

What had Isabella done? Instinctively, I knew she was the one to blame.

Not bothering to put on a robe, I wrenched open the door, uncaring at the shocked look on my guard’s face.

“Ewan is hurt,” I said.

Instead of ushering me back inside my chamber, where most people thought I belonged, the guard lifted me in his arms and hurried toward the stairs.

I held on
to the fabric of his shirt at his shoulders as he took the stairs down two at a time.

They’d laid him on the table in the great hall
, arms splayed out at his sides. The plaid blanket had been rolled down to his waist as they examined his awful wounds. His linen shirt was torn, showing his flesh shredded and bloody beneath. Blood seeped still from his wounds, creating red polka dots on the floor. He’d been attacked. Viciously.

His eyes were closed in blessed unconsciousness. I stared at his chest, willing it to rise, and it did, but weakly. He was still alive.

The crowd of clansmen parted for my guard, and he carried me up to the table, setting me gently down. Tears blurred my vision and I blinked them back, not willing to let them impede me this time.

After lifting the arm closest to me back to his side and indicating for the blustering fool on the other side to do the same,
I pressed two fingers to Ewan’s neck, checking his pulse. It was faint, which I’d gathered given the tremendous amount of blood he’d lost. He needed a transfusion—something the people here would have never heard of, and I had no idea how to do it.

The world, my world, this world, was crumbling down around me in a pile of steaming shit.

“Where’s the healer?” I shrieked, hearing the desperation in my voice.

Agatha pushed through the people, coming to my side. “She’s coming, my lady.”

“Where did they find him?”

“On the beach.”

“How did this happen?”

Agatha shook her head, looking just as confused as I was. “He was stabbed.”

“More times than I can count,” I whispered, looking back at his quickly paling face, gray lips. If I didn’t see the continual, shaky rise and fall of his chest, I would have thought he was dead. No wonder people were buried alive in the middle ages… “Have they found
her
?”

“Not yet, my lady.”

Damn… Isabella could be anywhere. I heard a guard murmur that Ewan had last been seen trying to find Isabella to confine her in her room.

“Carry him upstairs to the laird’s chamber,” I ordered.

“My la—” Agatha protested, but I cut her off.

“Now.”

Several guards lifted Ewan and carried him toward the stairs, none second-guessing me.

“My lady, do ye require assistance?” my guard asked.

I nodded.

He lifted me once more and we
, too, departed the great hall.

The healer arrived on our heels and ushered everyone from the room. I protested, but she wouldn’t hear anything of it. She did, however, agree to letting Agatha remain behind. Only after my maid swore to bring me news every hour did I retreat to my own room—via the hallway. No need for the added questions of anyone who might intrude when I used the
adjoining panel.

I nodded to my guard in the hallway then stepped through the door, shutting it behind me. As soon as I turned around, Isabella stepped out of shadowed corner, a smile peeling the corners of her lips back.
I sucked in a breath, pressed my back to the door as though its sturdy build would protect me from her.

“What are you doing in my room?” I hissed, anger fueling my blood to boiling.

“Waiting for ye. I suppose ye saw my warning?”

“Warning?” I crossed my arms over my chest, forcing myself not to stare toward the bed whe
re my blade was safely hidden beneath the pillow. I’d like nothing more than to slice this bitch up.

“Your precious little puppy dog.”

“I don’t own a dog,” I said, feigning boredom.

“Och, nay, sweet Emma, ye own nothing. This puppy follows ye around hoping for a chance to rut on ye like his laird.”

I narrowed my eyes, her vulgar words so offensive and shocking they didn’t register. “What?”

She rolled her eyes.
“Ewan, ye half-wit.”

I rolled my eyes
back, with an extra oomph of exaggeration. “You’re a very bad judge of character. Though I’m not surprised. Ewan is like a brother to me.”

She walked over to my window and gazed outside before closing the shutters. My stomach turned in knots. Was she about to slice me up like she’d done to Ewan?
How had she overtaken a massive warrior?

“Th
en ye sin in more ways than one,” she said, a smirk on her lips.

“You think you’re so clever.” I took three steps forward
, anger fueling the impulsive move. “But there’s one thing you forgot.”

“What’s that?”
she asked, tapping her fingers on the table near the tray where the tea cup I’d found with the weird herbs had been.

“Y
our warnings mean nothing to me,” I ground out.

Isabella pressed her fingers to her lips, mock surprise in her expression. “Oh, dea
r. Poor Ewan will be so disappointed to hear that. Ye know I lured him to the beach by telling him I’d seen ye run down there.” She pursed her lips, her eyes looking off in the distance, a gleam coming into them that sent a shiver careening down my spine. “Convinced a guard to go along with it.” She laughed and snapped her fingers. “Off he went when I brushed my hand over his cock.”

I
tilted my head to the side, refusing to let her see my pain. It was hard to hide hit. Hard to act calm when all I wanted to do was rush screaming toward her and strangle the breath from her evil body. But Isabella was a rabid dog. Who knew what she had up her sleeve. So, I took a deep breath and forced myself to act as rationally as I could when I asked, “How can you live with yourself?”

Isabella looked taken aback for a mere second or two
, her mouth opening a fraction of an inch, eyes connecting with mine, before she regained her composure. Like a mask, that vile person she was swiftly suppressed her brief stagger.

“The difference between you and I, Emma, is that ye care too much. Ye care too much for others, and ye care too much about your own soul.” She smiled cruelly. “I dinna care for anything other than getting what I want.”

“Pity, then, that I’ve made it my life’s ambition to see that you get nothing you desire.” I sneered. “Evil will not triumph.”

Isabella threw her head back and laughed.
A bone-chilling evil sound that made my heart leap into my throat. I was mesmerized, horrified, watching her. It was unreal. She shook her head and wiped at her eyes.

“Pity,” she mocked, “that ye dinna have the power to see your
pathetic threats realized.”

Isabella held her hand out and wiggled her fingers, showing me the ring
settled beneath her middle knuckle. It was hard to keep my mouth from dropping when Logan’s ring gleamed from that long, dagger-like appendage.

“Ye see it?”
she asked, her voice overly excited.

I glared at her, refusing to speak.

How had she gotten his ring?

Any trace of soul—if there’d ever been one—
left her face, evil coming into her eyes, flattening her lips. “Ye’re too late. Your laird is dead. Gealach is mine.”

There were no words to express the severe panic and pain that wrenched itself viciously through my body. There was no other way
she could have gotten his ring, than if he was dead. He never took it off, joked that it had permanently become a part of him he’d worn it so long.

I started to shake. And no amount of trying to still my trembling body worked.

“That’s a forgery,” I said through bared teeth as they, too, had started to chatter.

Isabella chuckled. “Ye may wish it were so, but that will not make it be.”

She held it up closer, and I could see where a deep groove in the gold near the ruby had been cut—just like in Logan’s. He’d sustained it during a battle, nearly lost the finger. A small detail like that… Could it have been forged? Or would something like that have been missed. Was this ring his? Was he…dead?

Numbness filled me. “Get out,” I said, coldly. “Get the fuck out of here.”

Isabella laughed her way to the door. Rage, raw and reckless took hold and I lunged toward the mattress, frantically searching for the blade so I could cut her throat.

“Looking for this?” she taunted, holding up the dagger. “Dinna even think,” she spat, “of trying to kill me ye little bitch.”

The door slammed shut behind her, and she issued orders, loud enough for me to hear, that the guard was not to let me out.

“Fucking bitch,” I said through gritted teeth. Would have screamed it, but my voice escaped me.

I collapsed onto my knees upon the soft carpet at the foot of my bed. The one Logan and I had made frenzied love on more than once. I fell to my side, curled up in a ball and let the tears that I’d been fighting fall. My entire body shook with my grief. It was too late. I’d not been able to save him.

Even if he wasn’t dead yet, he would be soon. Isabella had seen to that by butchering Ewan alive.

God. I was crushed, devastated. Ruined.

Logan was gone to me forever. And I’d been the one to push him away. I’d encouraged him to go seek out the king, to make his own way in this wor
ld. In essence, I’d killed him.