The Highlander (42 page)

He had thought he knew what rage was. An inferno of uncontrollable lust for violence and blood. In the past, it had painted the world with a pall of crimson, and flashed fire through his body until his skin burned as though covered in molten steel.

What he felt for Gordon St. Vincent was the antithesis of that. It was a void of ice and darkness. A calculating, glittering shard of dense, hellish hatred lodged in his soul.

A welcome sin.

He snapped, and suddenly he had his knee against the viscount's chest, driving him into the couch as he planted a fist into the man's nose, shattering it beyond repair.

His demon reveled in the feel of the bone and cartilage giving way beneath his fist, and in the choked and pained sounds exuding from the man, as blood exploded down his robe in a great gush.

“She's not at Belle Glen, Liam,” Dorian murmured from where he stood behind the couch facing him. “I liberated that hellhole the day I helped her to escape. I worked very hard to have your governess emancipated as a ward of the crown, and she is safely with Farah and Millie at my home.”

Liam turned his wrath on his brother. “Why did ye let me believe she was in danger? What sort of bastard are ye?”

“The sort who built his fortune, his entire life, on secrets. The sort who built his name on a lie so
our father
wouldn't try to have me murdered again,” Dorian murmured, his good eye burning with its own dark fire. “We may be bound by Mackenzie blood, Liam, but not trust. Not yet. I needed to be certain you wouldn't take your famous temper out on Mena. She's suffered enough. And
you
needed to hear the truth of your woman's desperate circumstances from the man who caused them. You don't know me well enough to trust my word, and I knew trusting her would be difficult for you.”

Liam paused. The veracity of Dorian's reasoning washed over him with chilling precision.

“I knew this was where you'd find the truth.” Dorian pointed to Gordon, whose red, bleary eyes blinked up at them from an opium- and terror-induced stupor. “This human heap of rubbish told you everything you needed to know. And now, you can do what needs to be done in order to claim the woman you love.”

Liam blinked up at his brother, and found the same demon he saw in the mirror every day staring back at him. Suddenly there were things he wanted to say. Apologies he wanted to make for sins that were not even his own.

But first.

He drew his dagger from his boot.

“D-don't do anything you'll regret,” Gordon begged, putting a weak and ineffectual hand out. The man would have been mindless from the pain of his mangled face if not for the heavy amount of narcotics coursing through him.

“I'm a lord of the realm,” St. Vincent slurred from behind teeth stained crimson with his own blood. “There will be inquiries. When they find my body, they'll know it was you. There were too many witnesses on the train platform. They saw how you wanted her.”

Dorian Blackwell made a dark sound. “What makes you think there will be anything left of you to find?”

“Only the blood you're dripping onto this couch,” Argent added blithely.

Liam nodded to them both before pointing the dagger at the viscount's face. “My name is William Grant Ruaridh Mackenzie, I am the Demon Highlander, Laird of the Mackenzie clan of Wester Ross, and ninth Marquess of Ravencroft. When we meet in hell, ye'll know what to call me. I made a vow to
my
woman that if I ever got my hands on ye, I'd put my dirk through yer eye.”

And so he did.

 

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
FOUR

“I have to go to him.” Anxious agitation drove Mena to her feet and her companions, Millie LeCour and Farah Blackwell, both rose in tandem as she began to pace across the lush cobalt carpets of the Blackwells' Mayfair mansion. “What if he's … the poor children … I must—”

“Mena, darling.” Farah's robin-blue skirts rustled in the heavy, expectant quiet of the house as she put her arm around Mena's shoulders and tried to steer her back to the settee. “Dorian and Christopher left to look after your Lord Ravencroft before Murdoch and I brought your emancipation papers to the authorities. They promised to send a messenger if there was any news to report.”

Mena's anguish was a tight fist in her chest, squeezing her heart until every beat seemed as though it might be her last. She hadn't felt this kind of helpless desperation since Belle Glen. For once, her pain had nothing to do with her own hopeless situation.

Even when she'd thought she was going back to the asylum, when she'd assumed Gordon had delivered her to another indefinite hellish incarceration, the only care she had was for Liam. She relived the horror of seeing his blood bloom against the gray of his vest. Of watching such a mountain of a man crumble to the earth.

“It's been
hours
.” Mena had never been the hand-wringing sort, but she was certainly doing plenty of that today. “I can't sit here and do
nothing
. I will truly go mad.” They'd have to deliver her to the very sort of place she'd been saved from if the man she loved was …

God, she couldn't even think it.

What if they hadn't sent word because the news was of the sort that one had to deliver in person.

Tragic news?

The only thing that had kept her away from the hospital this long was an alternate fear. What if Liam refused to see her? Could she face his antipathy? His rejection?

Could she bear the look of betrayal in his eyes?

The answer had been unclear until this moment. And the answer was a resounding
yes
. If he was alive, she could deal with whatever came after. So long as she could see his thick chest expand with breath, and his lithe, muscular body suffused with the almost inhuman strength she attributed to him, alone.

Nothing else mattered. Not until she
knew
he was all right. Until she saw, with her own eyes, that the Demon Highlander stood once again.

Gathering her pelisse, she hurried toward the door.

“Well, if you're going, we're certainly coming with you.” Millie LeCour, garbed in violet silk, also retrieved her fur wrapper, her sable eyes snapping. “I know that if Christopher were in a similar situation, the entire Roman Legion couldn't keep me away.”

Farah moved to stop them. “I've learned to trust Dorian,” she said evenly. “I know what kind of hell you're in, Mena, but if your marquess were in even a hint of danger, my husband would have called you to his side. He asked that we wait here, and I feel there's a reason for that.”

Mena paused, seized by indecision, looking to the secure door beyond Farah's slim shoulders, and then to the gentle gray eyes of the Countess Northwalk.

“Your marquess and my husband are brothers, Mena.” Farah's firm tone belied her subtle push back toward the parlor. “Brothers with a long and painful past of their own to sort out. Perhaps they are doing so now, and need the time to clear what is past between them.”

She hadn't considered that. Hers was not the only pain Liam had to deal with. There was Jani, their father, Hamish, Dorian, Thorne, and so much more. Mena probably rated rather low on the list of disasters he needed to contain.

Murdoch, the Blackwells' devoted steward, opened the front door, bringing in a blast of chilly November air along with the handsome Gavin St. James, Lord Thorne, looking uncharacteristically somber. Behind his brawny frame, chains rattled as Jani was led into the front entry flanked by two frightening sentinels that looked more criminal than copper.

Blackwell's men, no doubt.

A reckless temper rose within her, and Mena lunged at Jani, slapping him across his dusky cheek.

Hard.

“How could you?” Mena spat.

Jani squeezed his eyes shut, though she didn't know if it was against the pain her slap had caused, or his own guilt. “I did not think you would get hurt, Miss Mena. I did not know that was part of his plan.”

“To whose plan are you referring? Explain yourself.”

“When Hamish came back from the dead, he found me in the dark halls of the keep, and told me he'd witnessed Ravencroft murder my parents with his own hands. He said it was guilt, not altruism, that prompted the marquess to take me in.”

Mena shook her head.
Did the treachery have no end?
Was all this madness because of Hamish's greed? “Ravencroft loved you like a son. He's known as a demon on the
battlefield
. Not for entering civilian homes. You've spent so many years with him, how could you not know that?”

Jani's chin trembled and dimpled as he valiantly battled boyish tears. “Hamish reported that he threatened to expose Ravencroft, to tell me the truth, to tell everyone what horrors the laird had perpetrated in India. Against my own people. The things Hamish described…” Jani looked up, his throat working over a hard swallow as tears enhanced the disgrace in his liquid eyes. “He told me that Ravencroft set off those explosions on the ship on purpose and left him for dead so no one would find out what he'd done.”

“Did he offer you any proof of this?” Mena demanded.

Tears ran in fat rivulets down his cheeks. “Hamish described where my house was, where my parents had died and how. I remember … I remember their bodies.”

Thorne glanced at Mena, regret sitting softly on his hard features. “Once the Duke of Trenwyth got his hands on Hamish, my brother admitted to manipulating the boy. He turned every one of his own war crimes into something Liam had done and filled Jani's head with his poison. After some time alone with Trenwyth, Hamish admitted to killing Jani's parents.”

“It is
my
fault, Miss Mena, all of this is my fault.
I
read your telegram,” Jani admitted. “I sent word to your husband because Hamish had read your letters to Lady Northwalk and told me to do it. That is why your husband was waiting for you. And that is why I will die here today.”

A tear dropped from Jani's chin onto the silk of his kurta, and Mena felt her own eyes well with tears on his behalf.

“How can Rhianna ever forgive what I have done to her father? I will face the marquess and beg for his forgiveness before I am hanged, but I fear I will never see her face again before I am to die.”

“Surely you're not going to let him be hanged.” Mena turned to Gavin. “Why isn't he with the proper authorities?”

“Because even though this is England, and even though my brother and I have our differences, the first law I recognize is clan law,” he said resolutely. “And clan law states that the Mackenzie Laird gets to decide his fate.”

“Oh, Jani,” Mena whispered. “We've both wounded Ravencroft so terribly.”

“Unforgivably.” Jani's voice wavered.

She nodded, filled to the brink with a breathless pain. “I would give anything to make things right, but I fear it is too late…”

“A kind lass once told me that it is
never
too late to make things right.” A familiar voice rumbled from the shadows beyond the still-open door before the Demon Highlander, himself, ducked into the foyer. “I believe, Miss Lockhart, that lass was ye.”

Astonished exhilaration at seeing him alive and well made her light-headed with giddy relief. He stood as strong and wide as ever, and though his left arm was tucked into a sling, the rest of him nearly vibrated with strength and vitality.

Apprehension chased the relief away, followed by shame, sadness, and remorse.

Liam looked at her with an intensity she'd never seen before. A dark fire lit behind his eyes, and a grim, resolute set to his already stern features set off alarms of warning in her head.

Mena took a step back, and then another, refusing to believe her own eyes as she backed toward the hall off the foyer and away from those who'd fallen silent as they watched the moment unfold.

Dorian Blackwell stepped behind Liam, followed by the amber shadow of Christopher Argent.

Mena hardly noted any of them. Not Dorian, who went to his wife and reached for her hand, nor Argent, who melted into the shadows as easily as Millie melted into his arms. Not even Thorne, who gaped at Dorian as though looking into a dark-haired mirror, or poor Jani who rattled his chains with the force of his trembling.

Only Liam.

Mena's whole world narrowed to encompass the emotion she couldn't believe shone on his face.

“Doona run from me, lass. There is much to say.”

“You called me Miss Lockhart,” she realized with a breathless whisper. “Now you
know
I'm not she. That I am Philomena St. Vincent, a viscountess and a … married woman.”

His obsidian gaze became impossibly darker. “Not anymore.”

Her heart stopped. “What do you mean?”

“It is with very little regret that I inform ye that ye're now the widow St. Vincent,” he said with not a stitch of remorse.

“Because of you?”

“Don't give him all the credit.” Dorian sniffed.

“It was a collaborative effort,” Argent said.

Mena wished she could say that she was sorry her husband was dead. The only guilt that seized her was a regret that she didn't feel more distress over the loss of her husband of five years.

But why would she? Gordon had humiliated and shamed her. Terrorized and abused her. Then he'd locked her away and forgotten her.

What he'd done was unforgivable, and she hoped he'd burn in hell for it.

“Laird Mackenzie.” Jani dropped to his knees in a clatter of tears and chains. “I must beg of you—”

“Get up, Jani.” Ravencroft sounded more irritated than angry as he hauled the young man back to his feet. “It is as Thorne said. Hamish confessed to everything. To what he had ye do, to what he convinced ye of. There are many sins in my past, and I canna say I blame ye for believing yer tragedy is among them. We
will
have words, Jani, count on that. But I ken that ye are more victim than villain.”