Apparently Alex’s leaving hadn’t made the Guard change their method of contact in an emergency. An unusual oversight on their part, but one that had enabled him to summon his proof. He’d gone to the Standing Stones at Diddo a short distance from Berwick and placed three rocks in a pyramid at its base. The stones, circles, and cairns that littered the Scottish (and English) countryside were a favorite meeting place and place to leave messages of Bruce and the Guard—the three stones were the signal to come right away.

And who had answered the call but his betrothed’s “father.” That was whom Joan had been waiting for the night he surprised her in her room. That was what she’d started to say—Father, not Fiona. The maidservant had been a lie, as he’d discovered the morning after Gifford’s death when he’d asked to see “Fiona.” No one had heard of her.

Alex couldn’t believe it. Joan was the spy; she was the Ghost. She’d been deceiving him all along. The clues had been there, he’d just been too besotted to see them.

All the little oddities suddenly made sense. The deft move that had enabled her to escape Despenser in the barn and the instinct to block Alex’s flipping her when they’d been in bed were because she’d been trained—no doubt by the very man holding the knife at his back right now.

Alex cursed. Of course, the knife! It had Norse carvings on the hilt just like the bracelet that she claimed to have received from her “father”—MacRuairi, not Buchan. How the hell had Alex not made the connection? MacRuairi carried an almost identical blade. And how could Alex not have realized her biggest mistake of all: dragon, not wyvern? She’d practically called him by his bloody war name. It hadn’t been the sword; she’d known he’d been a member of the Highland Guard all along.

Suddenly the ramifications of that hit him with the force of a hammer in his gut. Had she been purposefully using him? Had she been spying on him? Had it all been a lie? The white-hot knife of betrayal sliced through his chest and burned with a new kind of pain. The pain of loving someone who’d been lying to him.

MacRuairi was the first to break the silence. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t stick this knife in your back just like you did when you betrayed us.”