Page 53 of Highland Ruse

She disregarded the warning in his gaze and stooped to lift the book. The leather was worn smooth on either side of the spine where the book had been held often.

Kaid straightened. “Leave it, Elizabeth.”

Hearing him call her the wrong name again turned the dagger in her heart.

“I’m not Elizabeth,” she reminded him harshly.

Remorse showed in the defeated anger on his face.

She turned from him then and lifted the top cover.

A drawing sketched in smooth strokes of black showed the side of a castle and people milling about in its shadow. She turned the page and saw a market scene where people bustled with baskets tucked against their hips. The next was of the edge of a loch with the sky stretching long and unending overhead.

She frowned and flipped through several more scenes. They were all drawings.

Her fingers froze on a new page. This scene portrayed the village again, but frozen in a tale of violence. Men ran with swords at the ready toward a woman whose face expressed her terror. In the far right corner, lying on the ground, was a dismembered hand.

Delilah’s pulse thumped faster in her veins.

Another image showed a woman held between two men, one with a sword, thrusting it through her stomach.

The smooth strokes from before had given way to frantic streaks of thick, heavy black. A nightmare scratched over a life once beautiful. Each picture was more graphic, more horrific than the last. And yet she could not stop. Not until she got to the one with a child.

An indistinct cry escaped her throat, and the book tumbled from her grasp. Its pages fluttered toward the ground, where it landed face down atop a crumple of pages.

Her heartbeat came too fast, her breath too shallow.

Was this what he’d seen?

Her knees lost their strength and she sank into the dirt, crushed beneath the horror of what Kaid had drawn.

If she’d had any doubt at his story, she would no more. Every awful word of what he’d said—and even what he hadn’t—all evidenced themselves in his horrific drawings.

Nausea churned in her stomach. If he had not lied about what he’d witnessed, then surely he was not lying about his purpose.

And if he was being honest about his purpose, the success of her mission would damn his people.

Chapter Fourteen

Delilah had wished she’d never looked at Kaid’s book. She wished she’d never heard his story.

But she had, and now she would need to press on regardless.

She reached for the book with a trembling hand and let her fingers part the pages near the back. Her gaze wandered toward the sketch there to find a woman, not being tortured or killed, but up close and drawn with such great affection it made her chest squeeze with jealousy.

The woman was drawn with the same striking quality as the previous work. The smooth strokes were beautifully poetic.

Page after page revealed the woman—different angles, different facial expressions, everything different but the woman herself.

Delilah’s fingers barely touched the page to turn to the next. The woman again. Her face turned up, her dark eyes wide and full of emotion.

Delilah’s pulse flickered.

On the cheek of the woman, below the side of her mouth was a freckle.

Just like hers.

She leaned forward to examine the drawing. Perhaps it was only a fleck of charcoal. She blew at the drawing gently, but the mark remained. She scraped the edge of her fingernail against it and still it remained.