Page 96 of Promised to the Cursed Laird

"Seal the lower entrance!"

Neilina held him tighter. Marcas pressed his face briefly into her hair, and she felt him draw one long, uneven breath.

"Cailleach is dead," he whispered, as though he needed to say it aloud to believe it. "It's over, Neilina. Ye're safe."

She nodded against him. After a moment she pulled back just far enough to look up at him, and her hands came up to frame his bloodied face.

"Marcas."

"Aye?"

"I was never going tae let him dictate who I marry. I chose ye." She said it plainly, the way she had said it to Cailleach's face in her own mind a hundred times that night. "Nae the King. Nae the Accord. Nae my brother. Me."

He closed his eyes. Then his forehead came down against hers, heavy and warm, and he stayed there.

"God help me, Neilina."

She almost smiled despite the tears burning her eyes. "What?"

"I've never been so grateful for anything in my life."

Footsteps pounded in the corridor and slowed at the doorway. Neither of them turned right away.

Fearchar stood on the threshold with his sword still in his hand and a long gash running up his forearm. His eyes moved first to Cailleach's body, then, much more slowly, to his sister and the man whose arms were still around her. Something that might have been a dozen different things crossed his face before he schooled it.

"Ye two alive?"

Marcas did not take his eyes from Neilina. "Aye."

Fearchar nodded once. His voice, when it came, was not quite steady. "Good."

Neilina turned her head toward him. "Fearchar. Yer arm."

"It's a scratch, lass." He looked at her for a moment longer, as though counting her to be sure, and let out a breath she suspected he had been holding since the fight began. Then he straightened and turned to the warriors crowding the corridor behind him. The brother was gone and the warrior was back.

"Search the entire castle. Every chamber, every passage, every cellar. I want nae MacRath man left hiding in these walls."

He pointed toward the lower stairs. "And find that bloody passage. Seal it with stone if ye must. Nae one uses it again."

The warriors scattered, boots ringing on the steps.

The last sounds of battle began slowly to die. One door slammed somewhere below, and then another. A man shouted, and another answered him, the voices growing fainter. Boots thundered across distant stone. And finally, bit by bit, a silence began to settle over the castle like snow.

Marcas still held Neilina. Neither of them moved.

Outside, the wind carried the last cries of the men who had come to take what they believed belonged to them. But inside that little room, with Cailleach dead at their feet and the castle still standing around them, Neilina rested her cheek against Marcas's chest and listened to his heartbeat.

Still there and still hers to choose.

EPILOGUE

One Week Later

It took seven days to bury the dead. Neilina learned the number of them, in pieces, from exhausted men who fell silent whenever she approached until she asked them plainly.

Fifty-one MacKinnon and Chisholm men had been laid in the earth beneath the east wall. The MacRath dead were buried too, on the far side of the hill, in plain graves with plain stones, because Marcas had said that whatever else they had been, they were Highlanders, and no Highlander would rot unburied on his watch.

She had stood beside him through every burial.