EVANDER READ ONLY once the message Fiona had sent by dove before he gathered his weapons and headed for the loch. He would be missed, leaving in the middle of the day, but he didn’t care. His mistress’s village had been attacked and burned by the legion, and she the only mortal left living.

Now he could bring her back to Dun Aran, and install her as his mistress. Having done the same with Kinley, Lachlan could say naught to him about it.

Never had Evander felt so powerful while diving into the loch and transforming to flash through the currents. At last he could show his lovely lass all of his secrets, and bring her to the safety of the stronghold. The bubbling water frothed about him, dancing as if it could feel his fierce glee.

As soon as Evander rose from the stream he ran straight to Fiona’s cottage, which he found only a charred shell. The rest of the village had also been burned, and the bodies of slaughtered livestock lay everywhere. He saw no corpses, which meant the villagers had been taken, as the undead would not have disposed of the bodies. Fiona might have thought her neighbors killed, but the legion had likely captured and taken them to serve as blood thralls.

The thought of the same being done to his sweet lass made Evander’s blood boil. If even one of those monsters touched her, he would find it and nail it to the door of her cottage. He should have brought her to Dun Aran, where she would have been protected.

This was all Lachlan’s fault.

“Fiona?” He entered her cottage, and breathed in. He could smell her skin, and blood, and began searching through the scorched rubble. “Fiona, I’m here. Call out to me if you can. I’m here for you, lass.”

A blade tip pricked the back of his neck. “Dinnae move,” a cool voice said from behind him. “Or I will end you where you stand, Evander Talorc.”

He stared at the burnt remains of her standing loom, and felt his heart ice over. “What have you done, lass?”

“Kneel.” When he did she took his sword, dagger and cudgel, and tossed them out of reach. “Hands behind your back. Clasp them together.” Once he had, he heard the clank of irons as they closed around his wrists and latched. “You’re as blind as that druid boy and his auld master. They came calling before you. Now they’re learning what manner of magic the legion wields. I’ll tell you, there’s none blacker.”

When she came around to face him Evander took in her disheveled appearance. She had a dark bruise spreading from her cheek to her eye, and her hair and frock looked as if she’d been dragged through swill. The cunning expression on her face he had never seen, nor the Roman blade she clutched in her hand.

“Am I no’ fetching, my lord?” she demanded, and spread her skirts as if she wanted his admiration. “Your sweet Fiona, here and back from Hell. Och, what’s the matter, sweetheart? Do you no’ wish to fack me now?”

He spat at her feet. “I’d burn off my hands before I’d touch you again.”

“You men do love your fires.”

Fiona went to retrieve something from a singed dresser, swearing under her breath as she plunged it into her washing basin. She removed the small metal box and pried open the lid, peering in at the coins before she tucked it under her arm.

“Counting your silver, Judas?” Evander asked.

“Oh, I earned every penny, from my weaving.” She glanced around the ruined cottage, and tucked her bottom lip between her teeth for a moment. “I never thought they’d torch my father’s house. I’ve done so much for them, and asked so little.” She looked up at the broken, burnt timbers of her collapsed roof. “’Twas the only place in the world I was ever happy, so when they told me about you, I said, I’ll use my Da’s cottage. There, I thought, I could be happy for a time. Until I was finished with you.”

Now he understood why she had kept asking him to bring her to Dun Aran. “You’ve been spying for the legion.”

“Longer than you think,” she said, her voice hardening again. “Did you never wonder why you kept seeing me all pretty and primped at the market, and in the street? ’Tis how they use me, lover. I’m the bait they dangle at the prize catch. That would be you, stupit. You might have ken it, if you’d ever pulled your brain out of your cock.”

Evander thought of how she had peeped up at him, all virtuous innocence, and the trembling of her voice as she had first refused him her bed. “You were no maiden.”

“No’ since that night I was taken. ’Tis an easy thing to feign. Some shaking and blushing, a nick on the inside of the thigh, and lo, I’m a virgin again, and so I have been, five times now.” She brought the dagger to press against the back of his neck. “Stand and walk out the back door. There’s a cart waiting.”

“I’ll no’ let you deliver me to the legion,” Evander told her. “If that is your intent, stick your blade in me.”

She laughed. “Even now, you’re naught but a great thickhead.”

The tip of the dagger left his neck, but as he braced himself for the blow he heard Fiona screech, and turned to see her struggling against the arm Neac had clamped around her waist. Behind the chieftain a dozen Uthars rushed into the cottage, swords drawn and faces grim.

“If you mean to go wenching, Seneschal, you should take us with you,” Neac said and handed Fiona off to one of his men, who carried her out. Then he unlatched the irons and let Evander’s hands loose. “We’ve better taste in lassies.” When Evander would have gone after Fiona the chieftain planted a big hand on his chest to stop him. “We stood outside while she made her confession. We need her alive so we might find Cailean and his master.”

“She’s mine to question,” Evander said and picked up and sheathed his sword. “No one puts hands on her but me.”

Outside, Fiona looked up at him. “I should have facked you and cut off your cock.”

“Aye,” Neac said, grimacing. “I dinnae think anyone will wish to touch her.”

* * *

Evander felt a grim joy as he marched Fiona to the stream. Taking her back to Skye to be questioned and killed instead of installed as his mistress did not make him bitter. Away from any chance of the undead retrieving her, he could take his time with her. He also wanted her to see Dun Aran before he throttled the life out of her. She would weep when he told her that he had meant to bring her to live at the stronghold that day. How close she had been to learning exactly what her masters needed to wipe out him and his clan.

Fiona struggled at the edge of the water. “You’ll no’ drown me.”

“Quiet,” he ordered. He hated pulling her into his arms, and binding her to his thoughts, but it had to be done. As he jumped into the current, he felt her wild struggling as he transformed. But he held her fast as he went liquid and whisked the two of them from the mainland to Skye. When he walked up out of the loch with her flung over his shoulder, she choked out some water and twisted until he put her on her feet.

“What did you do to me?” she shrieked, stumbling away from him and staring in horror at the water. “You pulled me through the stream to here? How?”

“I’m no’ mortal,” he said with a steely grin.

Neac and his men surfaced and strode from the water.

New fear danced in her eyes. “You’ll no’ eat me alive, Evander. Snap my neck and be done with it.”

“That will wait a wee bit. Here’s what you wanted to find for those blood-sucking leeches.” Evander grabbed her and gave her a shove toward the steps leading to the underground vaults. “Do you ken where you are? Behold, the Black Cuillin mountains of Skye. They’ve kept our castle safe for more than a thousand years.”

She wouldn’t look at the stronghold until Evander pulled her head back.

“I dinnae care about where ’tis,” she said. “I never did. Fack you and your castle.”

“Then why were you forever nagging me to bring you home with me? So we could be together, you said. Because you missed me so much after I left you.” He had to let go of her or rip the hair from her head. “How well you played your bed games. When you weren’t spreading your legs for the Romans.”

“Aye, I’ve facked the undead,” Fiona said and smirked. “Are you feeling jealous, my lord and master? Did you think of me as yours alone, a little mortal doll for you to stroke and cuddle and make you feel adored? Has anyone but me ever really wanted you, Evander? I’m thinking no’.”

He was going to kill her, right here and now, in the same place where the Romans had slit his throat. A more fitting place to spill her traitorous blood he could not imagine.

“Do it,” she told him through her teeth. “End me and my miserable life.”

Neac caught his hand up as he reached for his dagger. “No’ yet, lad. You’ll have to tell the laird about her, and what she’s done.”

Aye, and how Lachlan would gloat over his stupidity. “I will,” he told the chieftain, “as soon as I learn what she’s told the legion.”

Neac’s gaze shifted to Fiona’s sullen face. “You’ll learn naught if you beat her to death, Evander, which I think you will the moment you’re alone with her. Allow me–”

“No,” he said through clenched teeth. He felt like an old pot riddled with crazing and about to shatter. In a lower voice he said, “This was my doing, Neac. It must be me.”

“As you say, then.” The chieftain clapped a hand on his shoulder before he turned and called to his men, “Whiskey and ale for the lot of you. Where’s Mistress Talley? I’ve a powerful hankering for her honey and nut cakes.”

Evander lit a torch before he took Fiona down the steps that split off in one direction toward the hot cistern, and in the other to the vaults. In the first years after the awakening the clan had used the big, empty storage rooms as a dungeon for raiders, and villagers who had committed crimes against their neighbors. Lachlan had outfitted the rooms with all manner of torture equipment, claiming the sight of it was enough to scare the truth out of their prisoners.

Fiona seemed blind to the cobwebs that draped the corners over the stretching racks and hanging rows of iron Brank’s bridle masks. He touched the whipping post, and traced some old, dark stains streaking the wood—likely chicken blood painted on it to make it seem realistic. To Evander’s knowledge not a single prisoner had ever been harmed since the building of the castle. His mistress would be the first when he beat her to death.

He took down one of the iron masks, and toyed with the spiked flap meant to be inserted in the mouth, so the tongue and palette would be pierced every time the condemned spoke.

“Mayhap you should wear this while we speak. It may remind you to be truthful.”

“Takes a brave lad to torture a helpless wench unable to defend herself,” she countered. “You’re more like the undead than you think.”

“Do you want to die?” he demanded hotly.

“I dinnae want to live anymore, that’s for certain.” Her shoulders sagged as he approached her. “Just go on and break my neck. I’ve earned that much.”

“Earned?” He threw the mask across the room, where it struck a Catherine wheel and clattered to the ground. “You hoored yourself for the undead, you treacherous vulture.”

She nodded, and slowly looked around the chamber to inspect the devices, as if she were in a garden admiring flowers.

The only question Evander truly wanted answered could be asked with one word. “Why?”

“’Twas a better prospect than ending as one of their blood thralls. I’d have lasted no more than a week after they murdered my Da and took me.”

Evander peered at her. “Took you?”

“I was but a girl the night they came. Came straight inside while we slept, and killed my da, and carried me off.” She fell silent for a moment, and then jerked her shoulders. “One of them took me back to the cottage. I kept Da dead in my house for a week before I called for the grave diggers. By then he’d swelled and blackened enough to make them think he’d died of plague, instead of being drained by the undead.” She smiled at him. “That’s what Quintus told me to do when he freed me. He’s clever, that one.”

“The legion released you,” he said and uttered a sour laugh. “Of course they did. Did they bring you posies, and walk you to church every Sabbath as well?”

Fiona leaned back against a wall to watch him. “You McDonnels have no understanding of what the undead do to the mortals they take. They bind us, and drag us down into their tunnels, and pen us like animals. We were not fed or given water. Some of the others scratch and bite at the new ones, hoping the smell of our blood will save them from being chosen.”

Despite his anger, his stomach churned to imagine a girl being forced to endure such horrors. “Chosen for what?”

“Attention. The Romans come every night to choose a thrall to feed on, and fack, and do whatever else they wish.” She met his gaze. “I was a maiden when they took me, so they drew lots over who would have me the first time. Quintus Seneca chose me the second. He didn’t fack me while he drank. Of course I was still bleeding from what Marius did. Would you like to hear that? What a full grown man does to a virgin?”

Evander stared at her. “And you were taking me to them, as you did the druids? ’Tis what you wished for me?”

Her laughter echoed around them. “No, you blind bastart. Dinnae you see? I kept the cart packed and ready so I could flee to England when I had the chance of it. They’d never have followed me all that way. I’m no’ so important to them. They’d just teach another thrall how to take my place.” She hung her head. “I’m a hoor, aye, but I’m a good weaver. I would have earned the coin to keep us. We’d have been safe.”

“We?” he said, surprised at how hard the word was to say.

She raised her head and looked him in the eye. “But I had to tell you what I’d done. I couldnae have it ‘tween us.” She grimaced. “And then your friends showed up.”

“You meant to take me with you,” he said, as something flickered deep in his chest.

Tears welled up into her eyes. “The tribune told me I was to kill you. Quintus said I must cut off your manhood, and bring it back to them as proof.” She started to say something else, and then shook her head. “Please, Evander. I’m so tired now, and I’ve naught more to tell. If you ever felt anything for me, make it quick.”

He remembered the moment she took the knife from his neck.

“Why couldn’t you kill me?” he made himself ask, almost afraid to hear the answer.

“Because it would be like ending myself.” She inhaled a sob. “Because I’m in love with you.” She covered her face with her hands.

Like thin loch ice under a careless boot, something inside him cracked. He saw now how the legion and the clan had made them enemies. He could no more beat her to death than she could have ended and mutilated him. She was not the woman he’d known. But he was not the man she thought him.

He watched her cry into her hands, the great sobs wracking her. For months he had wanted to bring her to Dun Aran. Now he couldn’t put the place far enough behind.

Maybe together they could find a way.

Slowly, he gathered her into his arms.

“I’m sorry for the things I said to you,” she sobbed and buried her face against his neck. “I didnae mean them. But you cannae keep me here, Evander. Your clan will learn what I am, and what I’ve done. Quintus will see to that.”

“Lass,” he murmured, tilting her face up so he could see her wet eyes. “We will go, and make a life where no one shall find us. ’Tis the only way we can be together now.”

She gazed up at him, wonder in her face. “Do you mean it?”

He smiled down at her. “You have my oath.”

But almost as quickly as her face brightened, a cloud passed over. “The druids and the people of my village,” she said. “Their lives are on my head.”

Neither of them could make a fresh start with the thought of those poor souls as blood thralls—to suffer what his Fiona had.

“We must set free the druids and the villagers,” he said quietly. How he was going to do that without his clansmen would be the trick. As a thought occurred to him, he held her at arm’s distance. “Is there ever a time when they’re no’ guarded?”

“Aye.” She gripped his hands tightly. “When the undead sleep.”