“If I could have found the brattling, I would have spitted him on my sword. My only regret is that you and your brothers were not there the day I attacked. It would have brought me great satisfaction to have destroyed every last McCabe.”

“I’ll see you in hell for what you’ve done,” Caelen vowed.

Cameron straightened and motioned toward his men. “Take him to the dungeon. I cannot bear to look upon his face a moment longer. Killing him now is too good a fate. I want him to suffer as my father suffered when he slowly bled to death on that battlefield.”

Three of Cameron’s men yanked Caelen to his feet and dragged him toward the small entryway with the steps leading into the darkness below. A fourth man bore a torch down into the cold, damp corridor.

At the end of it, a yawning hole opened in the floor, and without warning Caelen was shoved down. He pitched forward into the blackness and was suspended momentarily in the air before landing on the stone floor below. His injured shoulder took the brunt of the fall and he cried out as agony tore down his back and arm, numbing his hand.

He sucked in deep breaths as he battled unconsciousness. He tasted blood and realized he’d bitten his lip.

As he lay there shivering, pain his only companion in the darkness, he closed his eyes and conjured an image of Rionna’s smiling face. He imagined he was home, in the privacy of their chamber, as she thought up some new way to drive him mad with lust.

He imagined tracing the swell of her belly and talking with her long into the night of their hopes and dreams for their child.

“Protect her well, Ewan,” he whispered. “For I have failed her. And you.”

* * *

Rionna was near collapse when she ordered her clan to surround Duncan Cameron’s holding and remain in hiding until she gave the order to attack. If God was with them, Ewan McCabe would arrive with reinforcements before her clan was forced to take action. But if not, she and every one of the McDonald warriors would go down fighting.

She prayed for strength. She prayed for God’s guidance for what she was about to do. She had to be convincing or she and Caelen would both die.

Gathering the reins of her tired horse, she started forward, her heart pounding as she broke from the cover of the forest, and rode down toward the gate of Cameron’s fortress.

’Twas an imposing sight of stone, wood, and metal. The walls were tall and she only prayed that her men could scale them rapidly enough to avoid detection.

Her plan had to work. If God truly sided with the righteous, her clan would win the day and she would return home with her husband.

Still, she prayed, for perhaps God needed convincing on the matter.