Page 85 of Promised to the Forbidden Laird

“Now!” The command cracked through the music.

The guard ran.

Hamish reached Roy’s side. “What has happened?”

“She is missing.”

Roy hated the word the moment it left his mouth. Missing suggested accident, confusion or some harmless absence which might be corrected by searching the next row of stalls.

Donaldina did not disappear harmlessly, not while Cormac Gunn remained alive.

“Search the square,” Roy ordered. “Every building, stable and wagon. Nae one leaves without being questioned.”

Hamish caught his arm before he turned away. “Me laird.”

“Dinnae.”

“Ye dinnae yet⁠—”

“I ken she wouldnae leave without telling someone.”

She might leave Roy without telling him. She had every right to do so. But she would not abandon her clansmen, her companion and half the responsibilities of the festival merely because the crowd had become tiresome.

He reached the fountain where she had last been seen. A ribbon she examined earlier lay trampled beside the stones. Roy picked it up before realizing it was red rather than blue.

His hand closed around it anyway.

“Me laird!”

A guard appeared at the edge of the square, breathing hard. Mud marked his boots.

Roy crossed the distance before the man finished calling. “What?”

“We found something near the eastern lane.”

The guard led him between two darkened stalls and along the narrow passage beyond the final row of houses. The sounds of the festival fell behind them. Lantern light reached only partway down the lane, leaving the distant woodland in darkness.

Another guard waited near the last fence. Something pale lay upon the ground beside him. Roy stopped.

Donaldina’s shawl rested in the mud.

He recognized it at once. Gray wool, bordered with blue stitching. She had worn it around her shoulders after the air turned cold. Roy remembered adjusting one corner of it where it caught beneath his hand during the dance.

Now the fastening pin was gone. Mud darkened the cloth. One edge bore the unmistakable mark of a boot.

Roy bent and lifted it. The wool remained faintly warm.

Every thought vanished except one.

Cormac.

Roy had seen the man use confusion before. He had watched him turn funeral rites into an abduction and grief into rebellion. Cormac understood crowds, divided loyalties and the moment in which celebration made guards careless. This was his work, whether performed by his own hands or those of men desperate enough to serve him.

“Tracks?” Roy demanded.

The guard pointed toward the trees. “Four men, perhaps five. One horse was waiting here. There may be others farther inside the wood.”

“How long?”