CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Where is he?”
Ragnar’s voice was calm. Smoke still clung to his clothes, ash dusting the planes of his face, and blood that wasn’t his own darkened the leather across his forearms.
Freyr jerked his chin toward a stone storehouse at the far end of the village—the kind used for salting fish and storing grain through winter, windowless and thick-walled with a single iron-bolted door. Two of his warriors flanked the entrance.
“Bound and bleedin’, but breathin’.” Freyr fell into step beside him, keeping his voice low. “The lads may have been a wee bit enthusiastic when they dragged him in.”
“Good.”
“I heard she almost scratched one of ‘em blind?”
Ragnar’s stride didn’t break. “Aye.”
“Drawin’ blood and everythin’…” Freyr’s voice held something that might have been respect. “Ye married a wolf in sheep’s wool, me laird.”
The cold fury that had settled into his bones since the alley hadn’t burned out. It had compressed—denser, quieter, the kind that made his hands steady when they should have been shaking.
He pushed through the storehouse door.
The interior stank of brine and old blood. A single tallow candle guttered on an upturned crate, throwing weak light across the cramped space.
The captured man sat slumped against the far wall, wrists bound behind him with rope thick enough to moor a longship. His nose sat askew, blood streaming down his face, and the left side of his jaw had already turned purple.
Ragnar crouched in front of him. Close enough that the man had nowhere to look but directly into his eyes.
“I’m goin’ tae ask ye questions,” he said, his tone conversational. “And ye’re goin’ tae answer them.”
The man’s bloodshot eyes darted to Freyr, who leaned against the doorframe.
“I dinnae ken anythin’—”
“That’s a poor start.” Ragnar tilted his head. “Let’s try again.”
“Go tae hell, Viking scum?—”
Ragnar’s hand moved. Not a strike—something worse. He closed his fingers around the man’s broken jaw and applied pressure. Controlled. Deliberate. Just enough to make the fracture sing.
The scream that followed bounced off stone walls and died there.
“Graham.” The word came out wet and mangled through his ruined mouth. “Douglas Graham. He sent us.”
“I ken that already. Why?”
The man’s eyes slid sideways. “I dinnae ken the?—”
Ragnar hit him.
Not with the controlled, calculated pressure of a moment ago. This was something else entirely—his fist connecting with the man’s cheekbone with enough force to snap his head sideways and send a spray of blood across the stone wall.
“Tell me,” he hauled the man upright by the front of his tunic, slamming him back against the wall, “what Graham wants. Wi’ me wife.”
“I dinnae?—”
Ragnar’s fist found his ribs. Once. Twice. Each blow landing with the kind of precision that came from years of knowing exactly how much punishment a body could absorb before it stopped being useful.
“Ragnar.” Freyr’s voice came from the doorframe. Not sharp—steady. “He cannae talk if he cannae breathe, man.”
