Page 120 of Enchantment of a Highlander

Alec still held the torch in his left hand, his grip so tight he was surprised the fragile bundle did not crumble away.

The woman had collapsed to the filthy ground, cowering. A spatter of blood showed on her cheek.

She gazed up at him with those savagely frightened eyes, as if seeking some kind of answer.

“I’m here to save ye,” he said quietly. “But I need yer help.”

The man gurgled where he’d fallen face-first into the rushes.

“Save us,” a voice whispered unseen from the darkness. Several others hissed the words in repetition.

Alec looked down where blood pooled beneath the man’s face and the fury of angry disgust lashed at him once more.

He tried not to think of Celia being touched by this man, but thoughts raked through his mind like nails sharpened to wicked points, scoring deep images in his brain he would never forget.

The rushes rustled around them, metal clinked against metal, and voices murmured among one another.

The woman clawed her gown shut and held it pinched between skeletal fingers.

“Will you help me?” he asked again.

Her gaze never left him. Finally, a slow, hesitant nod.

“Help us,” someone insisted in a raspy whisper. “Help all of us.”

All of us.

How many were in there?

Alec slid his sword into its sheath and knelt beside the guard’s body before trailing his hand along the belt.

The band of leather was slick against his fingers, hot where the weight of thick flesh spilled over its constraint.

“Do ye know where Celia is being kept?” he asked.

The woman shook her head vigorously.

Alec lifted the loop of keys from the man’s belt and the woman’s wide gaze fixed on them like a starving dog eyeing a slab of meat. “She was brought in today, no long ago.” He got to his feet.

“I don’t know where.” The woman’s voice rasped from her throat, from either thirst or disuse.

Or screaming.

Alec tightened his stomach against the rush of hurt for her. “She’s here, aye?”

This time the woman nodded.

Hope flickered in his chest.

Another woman pressed against the bars from her cage beside the one where Alec stood. Her fingers curled around the metal like stark white bone and the flesh of her face was drawn tight against her skull, turning her eyes into black, gaping sockets.

“I know that one. She was dragged to the back.” Her tone was quietly frantic, urgent.

Alec fled the cage and ran down the narrow aisle between the walls of prison cells with the woman trailing behind him.

The women were all the same, all bone and flesh and barely alive. All stared with eyes too large in their frighteningly thin faces.

Alec cursed himself for his inability to save the women before now. He reached the last cell. A small frame huddled in the corner behind a tangled veil of pale blonde.