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Trust him when he could have been very well lying to her all these many days? Trust him when that bitter coldness had set his face into stone?
Trust him?
Not that she had any other choice. She’d asked for this—begged him for it—and now she was in it.
The logical part of her understood that if he’d seen the men approaching, he’d had to do what he did—throw her on the horse. But not once in the entire ride did his iron clamp around her waist loosen to where it wasn’t on the edge of pain.
The last of the four cutthroats—all of them dirty, unkempt brutes she had to suffer downwind of the entire ride—entered the castle and stood at the door, looking back to them with impatience on his face.
They wanted to share in the glory of delivering her to this wretched place.
Rafe grabbed her upper arm, forcefully dragging her a step behind him into the castle. The man slammed the front door behind them.
One of the brutes—the smallest one that talked the most—stood far ahead of her, flicking his forefinger toward them to move forward. “Falsted is in here.”
She stumbled in her steps and Rafe jerked her forward.Falsted?Where had she heard that name before?
Falsted.
Falsted.
Falsted.
Eva’s stepfather.
Lord Falsted.
The evil bastard that had ordered the clearing on Torrie’s family farm long ago. The one that was responsible for the fire that killed Lachlan and Sloane’s eldest brother along with Torrie’s family. The one that had beaten Eva near to death again and again before she escaped his clutches with Lachlan.
He was the one behind this?
The bile that had been sitting just below her throat during the ride to the castle surged upward, hitting the back of her tongue.
That man was the sickest sort of evil.
Reiner had shown Lord Falsted mercy once—when he, by all rights, should have killed the blackguard. And this was how Falsted repaid that grace?
Her eyes closed from fear of turning the corner into the side room and seeing what awaited her.
Rafe harshly yanked her around the corner, dragging her deep into the room before he stopped.
She opened her eyes.
She’d didn’t remember Falsted, even though he’d been to Wolfbridge on a number of occasions when she was quite young. But there was no doubt the man standing in front of her, stroking his chin, was Lord Falsted.
Not a big man, his grey eyes held deep, soulless pits, the very curvature of his thin lips twisted in a macabre fashion. They stood in a library of sorts. A library without any books. Just rows and rows of empty shelves. And the space was cavernous—large enough for thousands of books that must have once been lovingly shelved. This castle had either been abandoned long ago, or all the books had been sold off one at a time.
Funny how fortunes turned. Beyond the initial mercy, Uncle Reiner would have seen that Lord Falsted was destroyed in all the ways that mattered.
Falsted glanced at his four men helping themselves to drinks at the sideboard and then looked from her to Rafe. “You brought me the girl. Good. She’ll do well as insurance in bringing the men to heel.”
Rafe’s fingers dug deep into her upper arm as he looked at Falsted, his bored gaze eating away at the man. “I have her and she’s worth it. Any one of them would trade their lives for her. Where do you want her?”
Falsted’s lips pursed for a long moment as his gaze ate away at her clothes, her body. The mere set of his eyes on her made her skin crawl. “Perfect. She is a specimen, this one. You had trouble getting her here?”
Rafe didn’t flinch. “The trouble was curbed easily enough. Where do you want her?”
Falsted turned away from them and moved to a side table by a worn settee near the fire where a thick-cut glass full of amber liquid sat. He picked it up, taking a sip as he stared at the two of them. “I am not quite ready for her departure just yet.”
