Helena tensed. From the suddenly hard set of Logan’s features and the way he was unconsciously clenching and unclenching his hands at his sides, she knew that whatever he was about to say wasn’t good.

He’d alluded to Mairin’s struggles in only the most oblique way, and he’d said next to naught about himself. But it seemed that she was about to learn more about the secretive Scot before her. She sat transfixed on the boulder, waiting.

“Ye ken that Mairin has lived through a great deal,” Logan began.

Helena nodded, not wanting to interrupt, for he clearly struggled to find his words.

“Mairin was…she was kidnapped from our clan when she was just ten years old.”

Helena sucked in a breath through her teeth.

“She was held hostage in England for nigh six years,” he went on, the muscles in his jaw twitching. “They kept her locked in the vegetable cellar of a cottage in central England. For six years.”

She could sense the rising tide of Logan’s anger, yet she did not fear that he would lash out at her. Tentatively, she extended her hand toward him. When her fingers brushed his arm, he flinched but didn’t pull back.

“Why?” she whispered, her breath puffing white between them before disappearing. “Why would someone do that to an innocent girl?”

“Because she is my sister,” Logan ground out. His eyes bored into her, hard and dark as iron.

“I…I don’t understand.”

Logan exhaled slowly. “I deserted the Mackenzie clan eleven years past—five years before Mairin was taken. There were…problems that I couldnae handle.” Absently, he lifted a hand to the scar running down the left side of his face and trailed his thumb along it. “So I left the Highlands and hired myself out as a mercenary.”

Surprise fluttered through her at that. How had a mercenary ended up in an elite training camp for Robert the Bruce? Instead of voicing her question, though, she let him go on.

“I fought in France, Ireland, even the Holy Land, as long as someone paid me for my skills. After five years of wandering wherever the next job took me, I found myself in England. I couldnae return to Scotland after the way I left my clan, so I began seeking out someplace to work in England. Eventually I found an organization that called itself the Order of the Shadow.”

Logan pivoted on his heels so that he stood in profile to Helena. His eyes fell on the dancing stream, but she could tell that his mind was far away.

“The Order was an organization of bounty hunters. The leader, Roland Gervais, gathered assignments from men willing to pay, then sent his fleet of mercenaries to collect the targets. I was one of those bounty hunters.”

Helena swallowed hard. She had already terribly misjudged Lord Geoffrey de Neville, thinking him honorable when in fact he was cruel and power-hungry. Had she made the same mistake again? Was Logan Mackenzie not some honor-bound protector, but rather a heartless killer who would do aught for the right amount of coin?

“Within a few months of joining the Order, I was sent on my first mission,” Logan went on, his voice a ragged rasp. “Roland was commissioned by an English Baron who wanted the wee son of his enemy kidnapped for ransom. I took the lad from his home and delivered him to Roland, who passed him on to the Baron who’d hired me. I never saw the boy again, but I heard several months later that the Baron had let the lad die of starvation. Apparently the Baron’s enemy—the boy’s father—hadnae paid the ransom quickly enough.”

Logan turned his head toward Helena, and she gasped at the light of pure rage burning in his slate-gray eyes.

“After that, I kenned that no amount of coin would ever be enough to make up for what the Order asked me to do. So I tried to get out, but Roland’s men caught me fleeing. They brought me before Roland, who said I was too valuable to the Order to let go. That’s when he told me he had my sister.”

Helena pressed her fingers into her lips to keep from gasping again, but it did little to quell the sickness churning in her stomach.

“Roland must have kenned even before I did that I wouldnae be willing to remain within the Order without some…incentive. His men found her in the Highlands and dragged her to a cottage in the middle of England—no’ to ransom her back to my clan, but to hold her there as leverage over me. They never let me see her, but they would tell me she was faring well, or poorly, depending on my obedience. For all I kenned at the time, they’d already killed her, but all they needed to do was mention her and I would do aught they demanded.”

Helena released a shaky breath. “But you found her. You saved her.”

“Aye, eventually,” he replied. “Kirk MacLeod and I took down Roland Gervais and the Order of the Shadow. But Mairin’s location went to the grave with Roland. It took me six bloody months of scouring the English countryside, but I found her. The men Roland had been paying to act as her jailors realized before I even reached them that the coin they’d been receiving had dried up. They locked Mairin in that root cellar and left her to starve to death.”

This time Logan spun all the way around so that his back faced Helena. She watched in stunned silence as the muscles of his shoulders bunched and his hands worked uselessly at his sides.

“I dinnae ken how long she was down there by herself, with no food and only the water that seeped up from the dirt floor of the cellar from time to time, but she was nearly dead when I found her at last.”

Tears of sadness and fury burned in Helena’s eyes until they spilled over in warm tracks down her cheeks. In the short time she’d known the girl, it had become obvious to Helena that Mairin was a kind soul beneath her invisible scars. How could anyone do such things to her?

“It took three months to nurse her back to health,” he went on. “But by the time those three months had passed, I kenned that she could not stay in England. Everything there reminded her of her captivity—even the sound of an English accent upset her.”

That explained why Mairin struggled whenever Lillian was around, and why she’d been so cagey when Helena had tried to talk with her at first. “That was when you came to this camp,” she finished softly. “To give Mairin some peace.”

“Aye. Mairin deserves to live the rest of her life without fears for her safety.” Logan turned around to face Helena once more. “Kirk told me about this camp and the group of men who train here. They serve Robert the Bruce by protecting the innocent and vulnerable. They call themselves the Bodyguard Corps.”

He swept his hand toward the hut and what lay beyond it. “A camp hidden deep in the Highlands, filled with Scotland’s most elite warriors, each of whom has committed his life to justice—I couldnae think of a safer place to bring Mairin.”

“Forgive me,” she said carefully, “but why have you not returned with Mairin to your clan? Surely your family would want to know that she is well—and that you are, too.”

Logan’s face darkened and his eyes turned stormy. “I am no’ welcome among the clan,” he said flatly. “Besides, it was my fault that Mairin was taken. When I sold my skills—and my soul—to the Order of the Shadow, I made her a target. But even before that, I put her in danger, for I wasnae there to protect her these past eleven years. She suffered because of me. I cannae right the wrongs of my past, nor can I take away her suffering, but I can damn well ensure that she is never hurt again—no’ under my watch.”

Helena sank her teeth into her lower lip. There were so many unanswered questions swirling through her mind. Why couldn’t Logan return to his people? And why had he left his clan in the first place?

From the tightness around Logan’s eyes, speaking of the past and of Mairin’s suffering had already taken a great toll. She tucked her questions away in a corner of her mind for a more opportune moment.

“And you wish for me to be Mairin’s companion,” Helena said, “but are you sure that she would want me to remain close to her, given the fact that I am English?”

Logan stepped toward her until his shins bumped the boulder upon which she sat.

“Ye dinnae see it, but I do. She hasnae smiled in the entire time since I freed her—nigh on a year now. Tonight she came close—because of ye. She is coming to trust ye, and that is truly remarkable.”

Helena thought on that for a moment. Aye, even in only a sennight, she could see a dozen small but significant ways the girl had begun to open up. “What would you have me do as her companion?” she asked.

“I ken ye are a lady of some sort.” When Helena opened her mouth to protest, Logan held up a hand. “Ye can keep yer secrets, lass, but at least let us agree upon the obvious. As I told ye when ye first arrived, yer hands are too smooth for a commoner—and I am glad of it, for ye can help Mairin far better as a gentle-bred woman.”

“What do you mean?”

“Teach her the kinds of things ye learned when ye were a young lass,” he said. “I havenae the faintest idea what a lass is supposed to ken by the time she is sixteen, but ye do.”

“You…you mean things like mending tunics?”

His eyes softened. “Aye, exactly. She was little more than a bairn when she was taken captive, so she never learned what would be expected of her as a young woman. And also…”

He faltered. Helena waited, unease tickling her spine, as he found his words again.

“I want ye to talk to her.”

“That is all?” Helena prodded.

Logan shifted restlessly on his feet. “It would do her good to relearn how to socialize. She’s been alone so long that I think she prefers the solitude of her room—and her own mind—to the reality outside it. But…but it is more than that.”

One of his hands rose to cup his eyes for a long moment. When at last he scrubbed the hand over his copper stubble and dropped it to his side, she saw that his eyes were tight and haunted.

“The truth is, I dinnae ken exactly what happened to her when she was being held hostage, but I do ken that she went from a wee ten-year-old bairn to a sixteen-year-old young woman in that time.”

Realization of what Logan was struggling to say dawned, and Helena’s stomach seized harshly. Sickness clawed up the back of her throat and she had to swallow several times to prevent from losing her supper. Could it be true? Could those vile men have hurt Mairin in that foulest, most demeaning way?

“I dinnae ken,” Logan murmured, answering Helena’s unspoken question. “She hasnae told me what she suffered, nor will she talk to me of such matters, but mayhap one day she will trust ye enough to open up.”

For a fleeting moment, Helena felt as though she would crumble beneath the weight of such a responsibility. Mairin had endured so much. Even if Logan’s worst fears weren’t founded, the girl had already lived through a lifetime’s worth of sorrow in just sixteen years. How could Helena help her?

Aye, Helena had survived her own share of suffering—her cursed visions, her mother’s death, then Adam’s, then her father’s, and the knowledge of the fate Geoffrey intended for her. But even given all that, she had lived the life of a lady. She was the daughter of an English lord. She’d grown up in a fine castle and had maids and servants all her life—until now.

Yet as she held Logan’s searching stare, her fears and doubts skittered away. She wanted to help Mairin in any way she could. The kind-hearted girl beneath the scars deserved no less.

But more than that, she wanted to remain here, to build a simple life and no longer fear what she’d left behind at Craigmoor. Aye, she wanted to stay—with Logan.

“If I do this,” she said slowly, “if I become a companion to Mairin—talk with her, teach her, help her re-enter the world—you’ll let me stay here?”

Logan’s gaze turned to liquid metal, and suddenly Helena’s skin flushed hot despite the cold air nipping at her.

“Aye, lass,” he said, his voice low. “I want ye to stay.”