Ella swallowed past the tightness constricting her throat. She raised her hand to the bruising there, but it was her own guilt that made it difficult to draw air. The confusion on his face when she’d stopped her march toward him in the great hall, when she’d read the note, crushed against her heart. She had hurt him when he found out her secret from Gideon. By turning away at the wedding, she had hurt his pride before nearly his entire clan. And then he’d found the poison meant for him.

Would he ever trust her again?

…

“Ye are head of the Sutherland army then?” Cain asked the man standing across from him outside Dunrobin’s walls.

The castle was grander than Girnigoe, with turrets and flags, but its defenses were nothing compared to the many layers of impenetrable walls, baileys, and guard towers around the seat of the Sinclair Clan. The streets of the village that sat before Dunrobin were completely empty, the people likely hidden within Dunrobin’s walls or barred in their cottages.

“Aye,” the man said, his face drawn into veiled fury. Even though Ella’s kin outnumbered Cain and the twenty-five Sinclair warriors he had brought that morn, the man was bright enough to know that numbers wouldn’t defeat his lethal band.

“I am Ethan Sutherland. Where is Kenneth Macleod, and Ella and Jamie Sutherland? Have ye slaughtered them?”

Joshua snorted where he sat upon his charger. “We do not slaughter children and women.”

“All three are safely at Girnigoe after we saved them from the Mackays yesterday,” Gideon said on his black horse.

The muscles around Ethan’s eyes twitched, the only change in his face. “I had heard that Randolph Mackay was killed by ye,” he said, keeping his gaze on Cain.

“After he tortured a Sutherland woman named Florie and abducted Jamie Sutherland from Dunrobin and then Ella from Girnigoe,” Cain said.

Ethan’s brows rose. “Someone breached the mighty Girnigoe to take her?”

Cain didn’t have the time to let the fool provoke him. He had a mission to finish, one that would see his father revenged and his clan stronger. “Ye and whoever ye feel rules and protects Sutherland lands are to meet on the moor north of here, the one directly between Dunrobin and Girnigoe.”

“The moor where we shot down your father?” Ethan asked. Was the fool trying to get himself slaughtered this morn? Behind Cain, Joshua growled. Cain raised his fist to still him.

“Aye, and where Alec Sutherland drew his final breath around my arrow buried in his black heart,” Cain answered. For branding Ella, the bastard certainly deserved more: entrails stretched across the moor, eyes plucked from his skull, his whole face branded with a molten horseshoe.

“Why would we be meeting ye there?” Ethan asked, crossing his arms, his gaze fanning out to take in the two dozen Sinclair warriors seated and ready behind the brothers.