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“One I’m happy to continue.” He pulled a second pistol from his coat. “Shall I indulge again?”
“Not if you want to learn what you came for.” He touched his side. Sticky with blood, but healed. As always. He climbed slowly to his feet. Straightened against the afterflashes of pain. All under the watchful, angry eyes of Sabrina’s brother. “St. John is gone. Otherwise he’d be dead by m
y hand.”
That obviously wasn’t what Kilronan had expected. His brows contracted on a scowl. “Leave none behind to lead us to your master?”
“My enmity is my own, not Máelodor’s.”
Kilronan cursed, stalking the room with angry, crippled strides.
“Be warned,” Daigh said. “Máelodor hunts Brendan Douglas.”
“For what reason?”
“For the stone. The Sh’vad Tual. Douglas hid it. Máelodor seeks it. The last piece in his quest to resurrect Arthur. The Great One will break your brother, and Douglas will give up the stone’s hiding place. He will have no other choice. Then, if he’s lucky, he will be allowed to die.” He clenched a jaw over the pummeling of recovered memory. The torture. The brutality. Never ending no matter how much he screamed. “If he’s very lucky.”
Kilronan’s gaze narrowed with suspicion. “Why tell me this?”
Daigh spread his arms in a surrender gesture. “My own reasons.” He allowed himself a wry twist of his lips at Kilronan’s snort of disbelief. “Believe me or no. It matters not.”
Kilronan’s voice came low and caustic. “The Amhas-draoi think Máelodor is fiction. My attempt to distract them from Brendan’s plotting.”
“Máelodor has done well in concealing himself. Throwing Scathach’s army off his scent. If Douglas dies, the Amhas-draoi will believe the threat is over. None will question how he died. Nor what information he surrendered before he was killed.”
The two remained locked and unmoving. Neither one prepared to attack or give way. Cold frosted their breath. Rain beat against the windows. Shadows moved across the floor.
Kilronan spoke first. “You tried to murder me. You did kill my cousin.”
A man’s hatred. A woman’s pleading.
Jack O’Gara didn’t deserve to die the way he did. He shouldn’t have been trying to play hero.
Daigh’s hands shook as blood roared in his ears. Drowned out the evidence of his crimes. “I was not free to resist. But that is little comfort against your loss.”
“And you and Sabrina . . .” Kilronan’s words caught in his throat with a strangled oath. “For that alone, I should—” His hand jumped on the trigger, his whole body crackling with violent energy.
“If it eases your pain.” Daigh closed his eyes in expectation of yet another display of Kilronan’s hatred. Conjured again the image of Sabrina standing welcoming and warm upon the shore. Instead he saw her lost in pleasure, her face tilted up to his, the silky feel of her skin, the sweet of her lips, the beauty of their joining. The exquisite pain that followed ripped through him as sharply as the earlier pistol shot.
“I don’t care how Sabrina defends you, I don’t trust you or your motives.”
Sabrina defended him? What was wrong with her? He’d worked to earn her hatred. Why wasn’t she behaving as she should? Damned infuriating, pig-stubborn, brave-hearted, gallant woman.
“What the hell are you grinning at?”
Daigh opened his eyes on Kilronan’s expression of frustrated temper. “Paradise denied.”
“You’re mad. I’d kill you if I could,” Kilronan ground out through clenched teeth.
“And since you cannot?”
“Stay away from my family, Lazarus. Far, far away.” Kilronan’s gaze flickered and went black, the Unseelie within so close to the surface, the man seemed to almost shift with a gruesome light. “I’ll do whatever I must to protect them.”
Daigh lifted a solemn and stony face to his adversary. “As you wish, my lord.”
“And if you find St. John before I do?”
“Aye?”
