She stumbled on purpose, going down on one knee, and got her free hand flat on the floor. Her fingers closed fast around a piece of loose stone. Malcolm hauled her upright without breakingstride. She kept her fist closed. “How long have you been plotting against Alasdair? When did you decide to set your sights on…”
“Move,” Malcolm said, and his voice had nothing in it, no warmth, no patience, nothing she could catch hold of.
She moved and stopped talking, not because she had nothing left to say but because she was listening now, listening for footsteps above them, for voices, for any sound at all of the castle waking up and realizing she was gone.
She heard precious little.
The passage ended in a low wooden door, and he shoved it open with his shoulder and pulled her through.
The cold took her breath entirely. She had nothing on but the thin robe, and her feet hit frozen ground. The air was sharp and tasted of rain. Meanwhile, the sky above her was enormous and dark and full of more stars than she had ever seen. The castle behind them was black and silent with every window unlit.
He moved her forward, toward the glen’s opening ahead. The heather rolled away into darkness and no lights, save for the moon stars, and the single lantern Malcolm carried illuminated their path.
“That’s enough,” she said. “You’ve made your point. Let me go back inside, and we will say nothing of tonight. I will say nothing, and you can…”
“Walk.”
“I am not walking any further.” She planted her feet on the frozen path. “I am barefoot. I am in my nightclothes. The ground is frozen, and I cannot feel my feet. I want to know where you are taking me.”
He tightened his grip and moved her forward. Isobel’s feet slid on the frost, and she had to go with him.
“You want me gone,” she said. “That’s what this is. You want the arrangement between my family and Alasdair undone, and you thought if I disappeared—if there was no bride—the whole affair would fall apart.” She kept talking with a renewed sense of courage. She had to find out what he meant to do with her…what he planned to do to Alasdair. “But it won’t. It won’t fall apart. Alasdair will come after me, and he will find me. Whatever you have planned for tonight, it will not work.”
He said nothing, which meant he did not deny her accusations.
Alasdair would be in the room by now. He would see the door open and Jane on the floor, and he would know immediately. She was certain of that. He was not a man who needed things explained to him.
“Move,” Malcolm said, and tightened his grip.
She obliged. She kept her fist closed around the stone and watched the lantern in his left hand. She wriggled, testing theway he gripped her arm with his free hand and waited for the moment when he would lower his guard.
The heather rose to her knees as he pushed her off the path and into the inky blackness. The castle was behind her, entirely lost. The glens stretched wide and empty, and the stars were the only light.
“Stop,” Malcolm said.
He moved in front of her and held the lantern up to her face. His blue eyes were steady and unhurried, and she thought about every council meeting she had watched him speak at—always measured, always reasonable—and she wondered how long this dreadfulness had been sitting inside him beneath all of that polish and shine.
“Ye’re goin’ to be sensible,” he said.
“I am being sensible,” she said. “I have been nothing but sensible. I have not screamed. I have not fought you since the passage. I have walked through the dark in my bare feet .” She held his gaze. “I am the most sensible person in this glen, Malcolm.”
He looked at her for a moment, and something moved across his face.
“I need ye to understand that this ends better for ye if ye cooperate.”
“And if I don’t?”
She held his gaze. He reached to adjust the lantern, and she felt the shift in his grip a half-second before he finished the movement. Without waiting a second longer, Isobel drove the stone toward his face with everything she had. He released her completely as he dropped the lantern. Both of his hands flew to clutch at the side of his face where she’d struck him.
Isobel ran.
The heather tore at her legs, and the ground was black and uneven under her bare feet. But she ran anyway into the dark.
Behind her, Malcolm swore.
She did not look back.
Chapter Twenty