And yet, how could she marry a stranger? Just to feed the mad cow that is her family’s legacy?
Her brothers would be expected to take over the massive DunBroch distillery. She is merely a means to funnel money back into it.
To birth children, to create a paper life with a match at her back, always.
To pick her future from the faces of strangers.
“How am I supposed to know?” she whispers into the foggy air, surrounded by the standing stones that have always decorated the land. Large stones that tower over her and tell her that beyond them, she’d no longer be on MacQuarrie property.
She gasps when it answers back.
“Knowledge is arrogance.”
Her heart hammers in her chest and doesn’t slow, even when a dark silhouette reveals itself.
He brings himself to the light, but it’s as if he’s snuffing it out by his mere existence.
Moira hadn’t known a beauty so dark, so otherworldly sinister, like his eyes had stared into the devil’s and came back to tell the tale.
“Who are you?”
“Perhaps your salvation,” he answers, pausing before shrugging. “Perhaps not.”
He doesn’t speak the way she does, with vowels that seem heavy.
His r’s caress, as softly as his s’s do. And even if it weren’t for that, she’d know he wasn’t from here. Everyone else is milky and ruddy, soft and pliant.
He is olive and rigid, even with his languid steps as he circles her.
Only she doesn’t know if she is the sun or his prey.
“Don’t waste your worry on me,” he tells her, but it feels like a trick.
Like when her brothers offer a distraction while one swipes something from her.
There’s a smile hidden in his eyes and it distracts her from the word whispering from her core.
Run.
“What is your name?”
Her question causes him to step away, his back now facing her. His hair, so dark, sits at the nape of his neck, even as his head angles down.
“What’s yours?” he asks instead of answering.
“Moira.”
She should leave. But what awaits her is far less intriguing.
When he turns back to face her, his gaze confirms it.
He is nothing like she’s seen before.
“Moira. You should go home. To your warm bed and your worried parents.”
Are her parents worried? Would they ever be, for her?
“Do you…know them?” she asks, wondering if he’s some sort of hired help. Wondering if he’ll tell them he’s seen her.
“The MacQuarrie family knows me well,” he murmurs, his dark eyes waiting until the very last second to look away as he slinks back into the mist.
Where does one go after they’ve caused your hair to stand on end and your heart to dust off and quiver with life?
Moira wishes she knew as she heads back to the edifice looming at the bottom of the hill.
She’d been told of a time when this place housed family members of the noble kind; ones who’d entertained kings and queens of old.
If only those far gone could see what’d come of this place now, brimming with electricity and made into a prison for a daughter no one ever gets to see.
3
“Where’ve you been?”
The question called from the hidden corner of the corridor has Moira’s breath catching. When her brother Thomas steps out into the light, he takes a bite of an apple, the slurping sound of it causing her to press her lips together.
It’s a sound that makes her want to slap it from his hand.
But the boys were afforded the grace to eat as though they were fed from troughs. There were no stinging slaps to keep them from acting as animals.
Jealousy stirs as she rolls her eyes at him. “I’ve just finished my archery lesson,” she lies, watching as her other brother Reynold, with his short hair, reveals himself.
“You weren’t there,” he says before snatching the apple from Thomas and taking a large bite.
Their smiles don’t adorn the way they should; the treacherous terrors they’d come to be makes it hard for Moira to see them as anything less than sinister.
“I’ve just come from the stables. Not a soul in sight for the better part of an hour,” she tells them.
She may have gotten her mother’s coloring, but they’d inherited her lust for dominance and fear. It grows larger as the days pass.
“What’s it matter?” she asks, impatient to be free of their presence.
Alec, the youngest of the three, joins them then. “It doesn’t. To us,” he says, catching the apple Reynold tosses in midair. “Mother would likely want to know.”
“I recommend you not keep her waitin’ then.” Moira smiles a mirthless smile before turning.
“She will whip you,” one of them says, loud enough to cause her to pause.
She will. And you will wear the marks far longer than this brief interlude with these hellions.
Moira straightens and glances over her shoulder. “What is it you want, then?”
“Tell us what you saw in the woods,” one of them demands.
“I saw nothing,” she answers.
“You saw him, did’nay you?”
“I saw no one.”
“You lie.”
And she isn’t sure why she does, but she remains quiet, not taking their bait.
“Is he a friend of yours?” another asks.
“I have none.” All through the questions and answers, Moira’s back remains turned.
“Aye, that part is true,” one of them, likely Thomas, says with a laugh.
She squeezes her eyes shut, wishing to be in her room, a place the three of them will leave her be.
The one rule in this place that runs in her favor: only women are allowed in Moira’s wing of the house.
“There are whispers of a demon in the woods. Men go in and never come out.”
“I pray the three of you go,” Moira whispers.
She gasps when something hits the back of her head. The mostly eaten apple rolls along the floor, just as one of the maids rounds the corner.
“Moira, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Come, lass. It’s time to get ready,” she says, her words lilting with song.
When she takes Moira’s hand to lead her away, a twisted scowl aimed at the young men behind them, Moira keeps her head down.
To them, their sister is bowing with shame and defeat. But her mind tumbles over its silent prayer to the demon in the woods.
Eat them. All of them.
4
“Sit still, child,” Eleanor MacQuarrie chastises from where she sits, centimeters of merlot decorating the thick glass of her goblet. It glints in the light, in all of its Baccarat glory.
Is this how she stays so cold? Moira wonders to herself. Drinking a liquid that stains like blood?
She’d likely never know.
Swift hands make easy work of her hair, an elegant updo in progress. Moira shifts in her seat again. A hiss releases from her lips at the surprise of pain.
Her mother leans toward her still, after pinching her thigh. “You’ll sit still now, won’t you, lass?”
She grits her teeth and tries to keep her eyes trained on her mother. But movement in the mirror has her watching the woman doing her hair.