She pulled back the top layers of goose-down pillows to the flat tick, careful not to scatter them. Ella smiled. “Thank you, you rotting devil,” she whispered and picked up the two weapons, a six-inch sgian dubh and an eight-inch mattucashlass, which was more lethal because of its two sharpened edges. Both were well balanced, and with a few practice throws later in her room, Ella should be able to hit her target. Kenneth had spent many years making sure she could use any short blade she encountered.

Fixing the pillows, she hurried back to the chest with the leather holsters. She chose one with thin straps and slid the blades into it, looping it over her shoulder.

She looked back to the hearth. Now for a way out. The bookcase or the hearth were the likely places for a secret closet with steps downward. Ella hurried to the bookcase closest to the hearth, her fingers sliding down the leather- and clothbound tomes: books on war, books with odd Greek lettering, several volumes of the Bible. Her palm slid across them, and her finger caught on three books that were pushed outward the smallest amount, as if something might lay behind them. Tipping them out, she found a ring caught into the chiseled stone behind the case.

“Yes,” she whispered and looped her finger through the ring and pulled. The sound of a latch lifting clicked in the wall, and a bit of breeze blew under the bookcase as it slid to the left on rollers built behind it. She smiled broadly at her old friend, darkness. There was no way Cain Sinclair could hold her for long.

…

“He died a warrior’s death, exactly how he wished,” Cain said, holding his tankard high.

Gideon grasped his shoulder and jumped onto one of the benches that ran the length of the long table where their father lay. “The greatest defeater of foes.”

“War was his game, and he played it well,” Joshua yelled, garnering “ayes” and the pounding of fists.

Bàs stood near their father’s head. “It was a damn good death,” he said, his deep voice softer than most. It was as if guilt and dread weighed his timbre down. Cain couldn’t remember a day when his youngest brother had been a carefree, smiling lad. At least Cain had had nine years of a relatively normal upbringing before his mother died and his father had latched completely onto the idea that he had sired the four horsemen. Cain would have to talk further with Bàs about his role in the clan. He would not have any of his brothers living a tortured life to fit into the legend their father had forged around them.