The shadow on the canvas waswrong.
It pressed too closely. It held absolutely still but the weight planted behind had nothing to do with anyone needing medical care.
The fine hairs along the back of her neck rose, one by one. She had barely drawn breath to call for Liv when the canvas split open. The hand came through the canvas seam—palm flat across her lips, fingers clamping around her jaw, an arm slamming across her chest like a bar dropping into a latch.
Then the ground was moving under her heels, hauling her backward into the alley, her heels cutting furrows through the dirt, and then there was only smoke and stone walls and a man’s forearm crushing the air from her chest.
“Stop yer squirmin’.” His voice was low, breath rank with ale and smoke against her hair. “Dinnae make this harder than it needs tae be.”
He’ll come. He kens where I am.
She had to stall. So, she did the only thing she could think of.
Isolda went limp. Every muscle at once, completely and instantly—head dropping forward, knees folding, her full dead weight hitting the man’s grip without warning.
“Och, fer the love of?—”
“She’s fainted! Just haul her over yer shoulder!” A second voice, further back.
“I’mtryin’—”
His arm loosened just enough for her to twist sideways in his grip and go for his eyes. She didn’t hesitate, just spread her fingers, nails angled outward, palm flat and raked her nails across the skin beside his eye socket. She felt the catch and drag of it, the warm slick beneath her fingernails, and he made a sound low in his throat and wrenched backward.
“Grab her!”
The second man was bigger and had been watching. He caught her wrist before she could turn and twister her arm up behind her shoulder until the joint screamed protest, his arm slinking over her throat.
She bit down on his forearm, sank her teeth in, jaw locked, the salt-iron taste of him flooding her mouth—and the sound he produced was high and raw and bounced off the stone wall of the outbuilding in a way that had absolutely no dignity in it.
“Ach! Ye wee bitch!”
She hit the ground on her hands and knees, tasting copper, ears ringing, her mouth too sore to make a single sound despite her instincts screaming at her.
“Feisty wee thing…” He was pressing his palm to his cheek, staring at the blood on it. Then, he turned to someone she hadn’t yet seen, “Cormac! Get her arms.”
Heavy footsteps approached. A bigger man, with a length of rope already in hand and the brisk, businesslike bearing of someone who had done this before.
Then, the air in the alley shifted.
Ragnar’s massive shape appeared through canvas at their backs and Isolda felt the man’s grip go rigid with surprise.
She stopped fighting and held perfectly still.
Ragnar crossed the narrow space between them with that particular unhurried certainty, the way he moved when he already knew how something would end, and she had long since learned to find it both the most frightening and the most steadying thing about him.
His eyes found hers for one fraction of a second, and then the savage rampaged.
Ragnar caught a swinging arm at the elbow, stepped past it, and drove the man face-first into the timber support post. The sound it made was not something Isolda would forget quickly. The man folded at the knees and stayed down.
Cormac drew his blade. “Back off, heathen scum. Come any closer and I’ll?—”
“Choose yer next word like ye mean it.” Ragnar wasn’t moving. Loose-handed, perfectly still—the stance of a man who hadalready accounted for every outcome and found none of them particularly concerning. It was, Isolda thought from the ground, the most frightening thing she had ever seen on a human face.
Cormac lunged.
Ragnar moved and then he had Cormac by the collar, pivoted, and walked him into the stone wall of the outbuilding with a controlled force that shook the mortar dust from the joints and drove the air from the man’s chest in a single grunt.
Cormac scrabbled at the grip around his collar. Ragnar waited patiently for him to stop squirming.
