Page 78 of Wanted By the Wicked Highlander

Kerr’s jaw worked once, twice, a muscle jumping hard beneath his beard. For half a heartbeat, something flickered behind his eyes. Not doubt exactly, but the ghost of it, the shape of a thought buried so long ago he no longer recognized it surfacing.

Then it was gone, chased off by something colder and more familiar. He stood, already shaking his head like a man refusing a gift he had no use for. “I will burn every MacGregor standin’ before I stop; every last one. Yer nephew included, when I get around to it. A boy of six makes a fine enough endin’ to this story.”

Something behind Sebastian’s ribs went very quiet and very still, and his hands, hidden behind the chair’s back, had already found the seam of his boot.

“Ye’ll nae touch that boy,” he said, and for the first time, something raw slipped through the flatness of his voice.

Kerr smiled at that, clearly pleased to have finally found the crack he had been searching for. “There he is. I wondered how long the ice would hold.”

Screams erupted outside the tent, sudden and violent, slicing through the rain and Kerr’s smug smile. Steel rang against steel nearby, and a horse shrieked high and frightened. A guard at the entrance shouted something that ended with a wet, choking sound.

Kerr’s head snapped toward the tent flap so fast his whole body turned with it. “What in the name of Christ…”

Sebastian drove the small dagger free from his boot and up through the last twist of rope, sawing hard, ignoring the bite of the blade catching skin along with the cord.

The rope gave in a single motion. He kept his wrists tucked behind his back, kept his shoulders slack, kept every muscle in his body perfectly still while Kerr’s attention stayed fixed on the tent flap, on the chaos rising outside, on anything but the man he’d tied to a chair and stopped watching the moment he’d decided he’d already won.

More shouting. A body hit the ground somewhere nearby with a final, wet thud. Kerr took two steps toward the entrance, hand dropping to his sword, his face twisting from triumph into something much less certain, something closer to the fear he’dspent twenty years handing out to other men instead of feeling himself.

By the time he turned back, Sebastian was already standing.

Kerr’s face shifted through three things at once: confusion, then understanding, then a fury so intense it seemed to age him ten years in a single breath.

“Ye threatenin’ bastard.” He wrenched his sword free of its scabbard, but Sebastian was already inside the arc of it, closing the distance before Kerr’s boots had fully planted in the mud.

The first blow caught Kerr across the jaw, Sebastian’s fist driving with the full weight of the days of forced patience behind it. Kerr’s head snapped sideways, his sword clattering from his grip, and the force of it sent him crashing backward across the map table; candles, torn parchment and a clay cup shattered against the dirt floor.

Kerr came up off the wreckage with blood already running from his split lip, snarling like someone not quite human anymore. He lunged sideways for his fallen sword, fingers closing around the hilt. Sebastian was already there, his boot coming down hard on Kerr’s wrist, pinning it to the ground with enough weight to hear the small bones grind beneath his heel.

Kerr screamed, his voice filled with rage rather than pain, and clawed at Sebastian’s leg with his free hand, nails tearing through wet fabric and the skin beneath it. Sebastian did not move, did not so much as look down.

“I will slaughter everyone ye love!” Kerr spat up at him, blood running pink down his chin, eyes wild with rage and madness. “Startin’ with the feisty little lass ye kissed goodbye out there. I will make certain ye watch every moment of it!”

Something in Sebastian’s chest went icy cold.

He crouched, dragging Kerr up by the collar of his tunic with one hand, the dagger from his boot already turned in the other. The tent’s chaos, the storm raging outside and every scream still ringing across the camp, all narrowed down to nothing but the man in front of him.

“Nay,” Sebastian said, low and level, the way he might have corrected a soldier’s poor aim on the training field. “Ye willnae.”

He drove the dagger clean into him and held on until Kerr stopped fighting entirely.

Sebastian burst from the tent with Kerr’s blood still slick and cooling on his hand, his own sword already drawn. The camp beyond the tent flap had descended into complete chaos in the few minutes he had spent inside.

Fire had ignited somewhere along the supply line, casting an orange glow that created long, broken shapes across the mud. Through the smoke and driving rain, MacGregor plaid clashed against Kerr’s remaining men in a dozen scattered knots of violence across the clearing.

Steel rang against steel everywhere at once, a sound with no rhythm, no mercy; just the flat grinding clatter of men trying to kill each other before the rain finished putting out the fires that lit their way to the deed.

A Kerr man charged at him out of the smoke without warning, his blade already swinging low for his gut. Sebastian turned the strike aside, and took the man down with a single cut.

He did not slow down to look at the body. There was no time to spend on the dead.

Fergus cut through the center of the fighting like a feral beast, his blade rising and falling in short, brutal arcs, dropping one man and pivoting into the next before the first hit the mud beneath their feet.

“Hold the left flank!” he bellowed, catching a blow on his own blade hard enough to stagger the man delivering it, then driving his elbow into the man’s throat before finishing him with a downward cut. “Daenae let them fall back toward the horses! If they remount, we’re chasin’ them clear to the coast!”

Beside him, Alasdair MacRae fought with the cold, economical precision of a man twice his years, parrying a strike from a Kerr soldier twice his size and stepping past it, letting the man’s own momentum carry him straight onto the point of his sword.

“MacRae, on yer right!” Fergus shouted, already turning to meet a second attacker of his own, sword already rising.