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No—not wild—he was carrying a girl and the girl was dragging another girl behind them. The man dropped the girl he was carrying.
No, not girls. Women. Two of them. Neither was Mrs. Wilson.
One of the women was in flames—her skirts lit up. Robbie stepped forward again.
The hand clamped onto his arm yanked him back, the barrel of the pistol jamming deep into his back. “I told ye not to try anything, boy. I'll not tell ye again—yer blood ain’t no bother to me.”
The flames of the torch he still held crackled next to his head and Robby shifted his arm, trying to ease loose of Molson’s grip while ignoring the round barrel of the gun stuck into his back.
Take another step and he was a dead man, depending on how slippery Molson’s trigger finger was.
Dammit to Hades.
The woman writhing on the ground was in flames. Screaming. She needed help.
All of them needed help.
And Molson’s brutes were bearing down upon them, torches in hand, ready to finish the job.
The woman that had just been carried from the cottage jumped onto the skirts of the other girl and tried to dampen the flames. Both of their screams cut through the crackling air as their flesh charred—the agony of it sending wails of unearthly proportions into the air.
The world slowed before Robby, the ash and glowing embers floating through the air pausing, barely moving.
The face of the woman in flames on the ground turned to him, stilling.
A sweet, innocent face contorted into the most tortured agony.
A face he would never forget. Eyes he would never forget. Eyes that pinned him, skewering him with the torture of burning flesh on her legs.
And he couldn't move a muscle. The pistol in his back. The slightest twitch would mean a bullet through his lung.
The man that had just dragged the women out of the cottage turned and ran back into the house.
He was inside for only a second when the roof fully collapsed, sending a deafening roar echoing across the land.
Robby’s look jerked back over his shoulder to Molson. “Tell me Mr. Wilson and his family weren’t in there.”
“They are. Were.” Molson said the words without the slightest bit of remorse.
“You bastard.”
Molson chuckled, the edge of his lip sneering upward. “Ye be looking in the mirror, boy.”
Robby stared at Molson, the horrifying realization settling in.
He was a coward.
A bastard of inaction.
He’d had hundreds of pistols pointed at him over the years, and it’d never stopped him before.
So he was left with this.
He was a coward.
He stepped away from Molson, dropping the torch as he walked in the direction his horse had skittered away to. He didn’t look to his right, didn’t look at the fire, at the women writhing in agony on the ground. Eyes forward, step after step, he left the purgatory of fire and smoke and ash.
He was a coward.
