“That night I thought I dreamed of you.” A chill speared her at the memory, and she had to straighten her spine to keep it at bay. “You were in my bedroom?”
“I tried to warn ye then, woman,” he confirmed. “I told ye to run. I had revenge to reap and ye were in my way. I regret it had to come to this.”
“It still doesn’t have to,” Mena ventured. “You said that night that Liam promised you something. That you felt he owed you.”
“He does owe me,” Hamish insisted, his pressure tightening on her neck, the blade biting into the soft skin right beneath her chin.
“What?” The question sounded shrill and desperate, even to her. “What did he promise you? I’m certain he’ll give it, he’s a man of his word.”
A crack sounded in the woods beyond the feeble reach of the moon. The snap of a tree limb, perhaps?
Mena’s heart caught. Could it be Liam? She both desired and dreaded the sight of his sinister features.
Hamish had heard it, as well.
“I know ye’re out there, brother.” That terrible, almost beautiful laugh vibrated the air around them, and seemed to even disturb the mists now rising past their knees and inching up their thighs as though meaning to swallow them.
“How quick yer woman is to defend ye,” he taunted. “I wonder, Miss Lockhart, if ye would still think so highly of him if ye’d ever seen him as I have. Bathed in the blood of his quarry, drunk on his own rage, the indiscriminate killer. The Demon Highlander.”
A shadow moved in the trees, and Hamish brandished her at the night like a shield.
“Come forward and I spill her blood!” he called, tucking the knife tighter against her, this time nicking the skin. “Stay out there and I’ll spill yer secrets. Ye decide, Liam.”
His hand released her arm from behind her, sliding up her spine with sickening lethargy. Mena didn’t dare move; the blade at her throat rendered her an absolute prisoner.
His hand wrenched her neck to the side so she could no longer scan the tree line in front of them, only the inky darkness that led down to the western sea.
“Ye decide!” He laughed again, this time maniacally. “Either way she dies.”
* * *
At the sound of Mena’s scream, Liam had dropped low into the mist and pulled his dirk from his boot. The blood that simmered with the heat of anticipatory arousal instantly boiled with the lust for vengeance.
His predatory instincts flared, and he prowled forward with all the sleek stealth of a wolf, hungry to rip out the throat of an enemy.
But the blood he would spill was blood he shared.
Hamish.
Skirting the moonlit clearing, Liam ducked errant tree branches and navigated his way through the mist. He processed a multitude of terrors as fast as his disbelieving eyes allowed.
His brother, alive. A scarred mass of rage and retribution. He had Mena. Held a dagger to her throat.
Fury threatened to smother all sense of reason or thought. Primal instinct screamed at him to attack, to lunge forward and slash at his brother until nothing was left of the monster but bones and carnage.
But Mena would never make it, Liam knew. Hamish was a terror with a blade.
Almost as good as Liam, himself.
Moving as close as he dared, Liam conducted a quick assessment of Mena. Moonlight turned her hair into waves of dark crimson, the color of spilled blood. Her porcelain features glowed with an ethereal purity. Through the mist and the darkness, he couldn’t tell if she was injured. Something had made her scream, and there had been pain in the sound. That fact tortured him with a violence he’d never thought possible.
Her voice wavered as she spoke, but there was a calm to it, an evenness that he hung all his hope for salvation on.
Somewhere to the east, the sound of a twig snapping rang through the forest like a cannon blast.
“I know ye’re out there, brother!” Hamish had screamed, as Liam maneuvered to the west, away from the sound, never allowing his head to rise above the line of the gathering mist.
His dirk felt solid in his hand, every bit as sharp and lethal as Hamish’s, but it was useless until he found exactly the right time. He could try to get Hamish from behind, but then he’d lose sight of Mena, and thereby wouldn’t know when to strike.
Then he heard the words that instantly turned his blood from molten iron to shards of ice in his veins.
“Either way, she dies.”
Hamish had no intention of setting her free.
For the first time in his adult life, abject terror threatened to paralyze him. Why Mena? Why now? Hamish had been a morally corrupt man over the course of his life, but then, he’d had to be. Liam had always known that. He was a bastard, the eldest son who would inherit nothing from their father but a taste for blood and fear.
Liam had to calculate the strategy of his next move perfectly, because he would die before Mena became another casualty of his many sins.
Using a trick he’d learned from a Turkish puppeteer, Liam flattened his back against the trunk of an old elm and threw his voice across the meadow, making it seem to vault off the tree line in the east.
“Let her go, Hamish,” he said. “She has nothing to do with this business between us.”
His ruse was successful. Hamish’s neck whipped in the direction Liam had hoped it would.
“We do have business, Liam.” Hamish said his name as though it were a rotten thing on his tongue that he needed to spit out. “Ye didna keep yer end of the bargain. Ye were supposed to die on the battlefield. To leave Ravencroft to me.”
“I tried.” Liam volleyed his voice farther this time, hoping to get Hamish to turn toward it.
He might be trying to distract his brother long enough for him to take the knife from Mena’s throat, but he also spoke the truth. He’d set everything up perfectly to make reparations upon the event of his inevitable demise.
Hamish would overtake Ravencroft Keep and the distillery, and the Wester Ross lands would be kept in trust for Andrew when Hamish died. Rhianna and Andrew would go to London to live with their maternal grandmother, Lady Eloise Gleason, a kindly old woman who was very fond of her tragically ill only daughter’s children. Andrew would become marquess, and would maintain all London holdings.
But Hamish had been killed in that ship explosion, or so everyone had assumed, and Liam had proven damnably hard to exterminate. His recklessness only brought him glory.
“They were supposed to hate ye,” Hamish hissed. “The clan was supposed to think ye cursed by the Brollachan, to turn against ye. But despite my best efforts, it seems ye truly have made some deal with the devil.”
“The fire in the fields and the toppled barrel at the distillery,” Liam realized aloud. “That was ye?”
“Thwarted by a rainstorm and a bit of luck,” Hamish spat. “And it was a pure miracle that carriage didna tumble down the Bealach na Bá with a shorn linchpin.”
“Ye put innocent people in harm’s way just to get yer revenge,” Liam growled. For that he would pay.
“Doona let this so-called Demon Highlander play the hero for yer benefit.” His bastard older brother almost sounded gleeful as he addressed Mena. “Innocent lives have never meant much to either of us. We are similar creatures with different predilections.”
“I was never like ye.” Liam’s hard voice echoed around the glen now, before it dissipated through the canopy of trees.