Page 95 of Outlaw Ever After

Bale’s witness statement? The Laird of Lyon Tower in Glen Lyon? If MacGregor’s brother had been there, he would have seen the true killer, like Alex had.

“Jesu, man.” MacGregor fumed, then pointed. “’Tis nay just about yer sire. Mine died, too, and just when he was about to see himself reestablished in the peerage with his marriage. Such might have given me rank, too, after his folly before my birth that saw him stripped of it. I also deserve justice.”

“Should we ensure we have the right man or just punish someone to satisfy our bloodlust?”

MacGregor shook his head. “Fine. Proof is what I shall find.” He stormed out of the solar.

Seamus stood for some moments staring at the door. “Might have given him rank…” he repeated to himself.

He looked down at Alex’s missive to Peigi, still clenched in his fist, before discarding it on the desk, then looked straight at the sideboard in which Alex hid.

Seamus landed his stride. Walking toward it, brow riveted, Alex’s blood ran cold. He tallied his rib slitters and sgian dubh in his right boot, achlais beneath his left pit, iron crow wedged beneath his elbow…

The fabric atop the sideboard was brushed aside. A creaking sound as the top…lifted up?

He held his breath as his blood pumped for a fight. Shuffling of parchment rustled over his head. So close, he could hear Seamus’s shifting weight, the soft scouring of his stubble beneath his palm, and his gravelly murmur, “I’ll be goddamned…”

Moments later, the wood above him slammed shut—shite! The door to the cupboard creaked open an inch. Seamus, stepping away, stopped. Silence.

Fok! Had he been discovered?

The door to the cupboard jammed shut. Alex winced, his shoulder wound jarred, crowbar slipping… He pinched his arm tight to hold it!

Seamus’s footsteps thudding away. Crow still slipping… Damnation! The solar door opened. Slipping, Jesu—closed. The crow clunked loose at the moment the lock clanked.

Alex’s heart thundered. Revelations echoed through him like a cannon blast as he held his position for good measure.

Finally, when Seamus’s footfalls dissipated, he unfolded himself and pushed open the cupboard door, the bar clanking onto the floor. Seamus had forgotten the waning taper on the desk.

He snatched it up and turned back to the sideboard. He folded back the runner, hoisted the lid open, revealing a ledger and a portfolio inside.

He picked up the ledger and flipped it open, fanning the pages.

Castle wages going back years? To Jossy? Aulay? Francine and Alpin were included, too, as well as all the folk who kept the castle afloat. Leafing through the pages, it seemed as if Seamus had… paid them to continue their posts? They weren’t bonded here?

With what money when the Grants had been broke? Somehow, Seamus had paid Jossy a small annual salary of one pound, two crowns and three shillings.

How much had Francine made? One pound a year until she’d reached six and ten? And then it had been increased. He totaled Alpin’s, Aulay’s, and the remainder of the staff mentioned until he came to… sixty pounds over the course of the last four and ten years.

Though the salaries had been a pittance a piece, it was still a handsome sum in total. He furrowed his brow. Where had Seamus come by so much?

Could it be…the fourth disbursement of royal loans that have no corresponding renovation reported? It had to be. Seamus had been cagey about that fourth disbursement, mentioning miscellaneous odds and ends and poor recordkeeping he needed to organize.

Was the fact he’d paid them, even when he had naught, why his folk seemed to harbor begrudging tolerance of him? It was… honorable that Seamus had tended to them.

Fok, Alex wanted to keep hating Seamus, but he wasn’t exactly a shite man, just a hardened one, and a worried brother. He seemed to be handling the contest punctiliously. He’d seemed irritated by MacGregor’s suggestion to throw it.

But what had Seamus just read that had made him goddamned?

He shut the ledger and opened the portfolio to find Seamus’s requests for royal loans. A page jutted irregularly from the middle of the stack. Was this what Seamus had just read? He pulled it from beneath the list of disbursements and saw—

Wanted! Caleb Comyn! By order of His Lord the Earl of Morriston, Laird Seamus Grant of Urquhart Castle—

Christ, Alex was unprepared to see the damning flyer from so long ago. He dared to look at the image Uncle Niall had once refused to show him when Alex had found him furiously ripping them off tavern walls and signposts on the high roads.

Should the Outlaw Comyn wish to honor his sire in a burial, he will submit to interrogation in three moons’ time to Laird Seamus Grant and Laird Bale MacGregor—

Bale? Why him?