Page 114 of Enchantment of a Highlander

His hands were spotted with age, but clung with strength to the reins. If she tried to escape, he would stop her.

Instead she stared at the ring, the blood red now an eerie purple in the dark of night.

She should have left when she saw him near Duart. She’d known he was a Highlander all those years ago when he’d come to North Berwick to help with the execution of witches.

No Lowlander spoke Erse. No Lowlander had such a strong brogue.

She should have fled when she saw him, but she hadn’t and now she paid the price.

Without Alec’s ready help.

At first, she thought he had feigned his betrayal, but then he’d struck down Duncan. She winced at the way the adolescent had fallen to the ground. He’d been trying to protect her.

The poor boy had been taken away by one of Alec’s soldiers and sent back to Duart to be handled when Alec was free.

She looked to her right where he rode beside them.

Her heart flinched at the sight of his stoic gaze fixed straight ahead. He sat with a straight back, his body confidently relaxed with the sway of the horse. All as if he felt no guilt for what he’d done.

Had he truly betrayed her?

Was this the price she paid for rejecting him?

A massive castle came into view, dark and menacing in its overwhelming size. It stretched so high its top blended somewhere unseen with the night sky.

Wide circles of blackened earth stood out against the moonlit grass and Celia’s pulse went into a wild, erratic thrum.

She knew what those circles meant.

There’d been fire there.

Women accused of witchcraft had been burned there.

“Ye know what those are, aye?” MacDougall whispered in her ear with a reedy voice. “And ye’ll join them.”

They stopped in the courtyard. Fear blotted out logic and comprehension. The clattering of too many horses filled her ears, the night air blew cold against the sweat plastering her hair to her brow, the rough lurch of being pulled from the horse.

She was shoved toward the entrance of the castle, to a place where stairs did not go up but down.

Dungeons were down.

Her panicked breath echoed off the stonework around her, high-pitched and fast.

Her feet were forced down the stairs curling down into hell, the hand on her arm like a grip of iron, forcing her where she never wanted to go again.

Then the smell rose up, and with it too many memories to fight off.

The choking odor of burning tallow, the stink of unwashed bodies and excrement, the stink of impending death.

“No,” Celia said sharply.

The men did not listen.

They pushed her ever forward, making her stiff knees bend with each stair descended.

“No,” she said again.

Everything wiped from her mind, save the memories. Blood, rats, torture, starvation, cold.