Page 99 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The rope had three loops left.

Elspeth knew this because she’d been counting, steady and without hurry. And because hurry would show on her face, and her face was the only thing in this room she still controlled.

O’Brien had moved back to the window. The two men at the door were talking low among themselves. The fire crackled and spread its embers outward across the hearth stone, and she watched the nearest ember cool from orange to grey.

Three loops. Three loops, and the knot will give.

And then what, Elspeth?

She pressed her thumbnail into the next one.

Then something. Something is better than sitting here, waiting for Magnus to walk through that door alone into whatever this man has planned for him.

She looked at the window. The fires on the hills had dimmed from orange to a dull smear of light, far enough away that she couldn’t tell if they were growing or dying.

She looked at them and thought about Mrs. McAulay in the kitchen, about Becky folding the green gown for tomorrow, about Agnes solemnly holding a handkerchief at a wedding that was supposed to happen this morning. Her thumbnail slipped and found the rope’s fraying edge instead, and she pressed harder.

Ye walked out alone, said a voice in her head that sounded like her father’s. Ye always were too much. Too much dreaming. Too much reaching. Ye walked into the dark for stars and brought this down on all of them.

She swallowed past the lump in her throat.

Aye, perhaps.

She’d spent her whole life in stories where the heroine’s wanting was the very thing that saved her, where dreaming hard enough bent the world toward something better. She’d believed it with every ounce of her being, the way she believed in the poems she’d copied in green ink at fourteen, the way she’d believed in Katherine’s trust me and the auction and the idea that the right story was still out there waiting for her to find it.

And she had found something. She’d found a man who fixed henhouse doors in the rain and kept a blackened cup because it was all that remained of his father, and who had pressed his forehead against hers in a study two nights ago and undid her in a way she had never imagined.

She’d found something true.

And then she’d gone and walked out into the dark alone to look at stars and gotten kidnapped. Now, he was going to come through that door because he was Magnus Wallace and he didn’t know how to leave a broken thing unrepaired, and whatever O’Brien had planned was going to be waiting for him.

The second-to-last loop gave.

Daenae cry. Crying willnae untie the rope, or help Magnus, or get ye home, so daenae.

Her eyes stung anyway. She squeezed them shut for one breath, two, opened them again, and looked at the hearth.

The embers had spread further. One had caught the edge of a dry piece of bark that had fallen outside the grate, a thin curl of smoke rising from it, fragile and tentative.

She watched it. She thought about the distance between her back and the hearth—three feet, perhaps four—and about the fact that her hands were bound in front of her rather than behind her, which was careless of O’Brien’s men, and which had made the last hour possible.

She thought about the two men at the door.

When the rope gives, ye’ll have perhaps five seconds before one of them sees ye. The hearth is three feet to yer left. The embers are already spreading. Ye daenae have to start a fire. Ye only have to move one.

She pressed her thumbnail into the final loop.

Magnus will come in through that door, and O’Brien will be ready. The only advantage Magnus will have is if something in this room goes wrong first.

So make something go wrong.

The bark caught properly then, a small tongue of flame rising from it, and she watched the light move across the stone floor and thought about the book she’d given Magnus, the one he’d carried in his saddlebag to read at the ruined tower, the one she’d found him holding in the armory the night she’d asked him to stop pretending he didn’t like it.

She’d read him three poems that afternoon, her voice growing soft on the last one because the words had stopped feeling like words and started feeling like something she’d meant.

She thought about his face when she’d told him she wasn’t afraid anymore.