His face went blank for a moment, then his gaze sharpened again.

“Ye think it damaged me to kill the man who took ye?”

I reached for his hand and held it.

“I bloody know it did,” I said quietly. And added in a whisper, looking down at the scarred, powerful hand in mine, “What hurts you cleaves my heart, Jamie.”

His fingers curled tight over mine. He sat with his head bent for a long moment, then lifted my hand and kissed it gently.

“It’s all right, mo chridhe,” he said. “Dinna fash. There’s another side to it. And one that’s nothing to do with you.”

“What’s that?” I asked, surprised. He squeezed my hand briefly and let it go, sitting back to look at me.

“I couldna let him live,” he said simply. “Whether he’d forced ye or no. Ye were there when Ian asked me what to do. I said, ‘Kill them all.’ Ye heard me, aye?”

“I did.” My throat was suddenly tight, and there was a band of iron around my chest, the taste of blood clotting my mouth and the fear of suffocation a blackness in my mind. The sense of that night seeped through me like cold smoke.

“I might have done that in rage—I did do it in a black rage—but I would have done the same was my blood as cold as ice.” He touched my face, smoothing back an escaped curl. “Do ye not see? Those men were brigands, and worse. To leave one of them alive would be to leave the root of a poisonous plant in the ground, to grow again.”

It was a vivid image—but so was my memory of that large, shambling man, wandering vaguely among the pigpens at Beardsley’s trading post where I’d seen him, afterward. Seeming so unlike the man who’d come out of the darkness, to smother me with the weight of his body …

“But he seemed so … feckless,” I said, with a helpless gesture. “How could someone like that even begin to assemble a—a gang?”

He stood up suddenly, unable to sit any longer, and paced restlessly to and fro in front of me.

“D’ye not see, Sassenach? Even was he a feckless dolt—he went places. Ye saw him talk wi’ the folk at Beardsley’s, no?”

“Yes,” I said slowly, “but—”

He stopped, glaring down at me.

“And what if he began to talk, one day, about how he’d ridden wi’ Hodgepile and the Browns, the things they’d done? What if he lost himself in drink, and boasted of how he’d—” He choked that off and took a deep breath. “About what he’d done to you.”

I felt as though I’d swallowed something cold and slimy. And still faintly alive. Jamie’s mouth compressed, looking at my face.

“I’m sorry, Sassenach,” he said quietly. “But it’s true. And I wouldna let that happen. Because of you. Because of me. But more … because if it was known that such a thing had happened—”