Page 3 of The Merciless Laird
Not a sound. Not movement. The bird in the hedge had gone quiet. The gravel wasn't shifting.
Something or someone was watching her.
Matilda went still.
Her eyes moved first, sweeping left to right along the line of the hedgerow without turning her head.
She'd learned how to look without looking, how to read a space without advertising that she was doing it. Nothing visible.
The torches along the wall behaved normally. The maids were gone, their candle extinguished, their voices long swallowed by the keep.
But something was watching her.
A tightening at the back of her neck. A shift in her own breathing.
Her body had been quietly cataloguing threat for eight years whether she asked it to or not. It was rarely wrong.
She turned toward the inner corridor.
The bell split the air.
One long strike, then two short, then the pattern breaking apart into something continuous and urgent.
Shouting erupted from the courtyard.
Steel rang against stone. Torches blazed along the battlements, two becoming six, six becoming ten, and men moved through the shadows between the columns.
A figure lunged from behind the hedgerow to her left.
Matilda was already turning. Already moving.
His hand caught her arm and she pulledwiththe grab rather than against it, one sharp rotation that broke his grip and cost him his balance.
Then she was through the archway and into the corridor beyond, her breath even, her mind calculating.
Narrowest passage, more than one exit, keep moving.
Behind her, steel rang against steel.
She didn't stop.
The castle was under attack.
CHAPTER TWO
"Stay down or get out of me way."
The voice came from the courtyard, low, unhurried, almost bored, cutting clean through the noise of steel and shouting.
Matilda stopped at the corridor's edge and looked out.
The yard was torchlit and full of violence.
Six men she didn't recognize. No MacInnes colors, no markings she knew, moving through her father's guards with a deliberateness that turned her stomach. This wasn't a raid. Someone had counted the guard rotations and chosen the night on purpose.
The night before the Raven arrives.
But it was the warrior in the center of it all that stopped her feet.
