Page 94 of Owned by the Scarred Laird

“Ye’re mad.” Chloe struggled against the rope at her wrists, twisting hard enough to draw a thin line of blood at one wrist where the binding cut in. “Edward, daenae, daenae come closer, he’s nae bluffing, he’ll⁠—”

Alistair’s hand moved before she’d finished the sentence, an open-palmed strike across her face that cracked loud enough to still every other sound in the clearing. Chloe’s head snapped sideways, and she went down onto one knee in the grass, a thin line of blood already welling at the corner of her mouth.

Something in Edward’s chest came loose entirely.

He did not remember closing the distance. There was the strike, and then there was his sword already swinging, and Boyd was between him and Alistair with a blade half-raised.

Edward went through the parry as if the man weighed nothing at all, opening his forearm and forcing him back into the second guard so hard that they both fell into the grass together. Behind him, he heard Tyler’s voice, sharp and clear, along with the clang of Duncan’s blade striking something to his left; suddenly, the entire clearing erupted into chaos.

None of it mattered to Edward beyond the single fact of Alistair O’Donell standing in front of him with a knife still in his hand and Chloe on her knees in the grass with blood on her mouth.

“Ye shouldnae have done that,” Edward said, and his voice had gone somewhere he did not recognize, low and even and entirely without mercy.

“Struck me own daughter?” Alistair’s blade came up, unhurried even now, a man who’d survived on confidence for so long he’d forgotten it could run out. "She's mine to correct as I see fit. Always has been, whether either of ye care for the sound of it."

“Ye’ll nae survive doin’ it again.”

Alistair came at him first, which was his mistake. A man who talked as much as Alistair did had rarely needed to fight for anything, and it showed in the shape of his first strike, wide and telegraphed, easy enough to read that Edward had already turned it aside before it had finished forming.

Edward answered with three strikes of his own, fast, controlled, driving Alistair back a full stride with each one, and watched something like real fear enter the older man’s eyes for the first time since he’d stepped into this clearing.

“Ye think killin’ me solves anythin’?” Alistair said, breathing hard now, circling. “There are more men behind me than the ones dyin’ here today. More debts than the one ye think ye’ve settled.”

“Then I will deal with those after.” Edward’s blade caught Alistair’s next strike and turned it wide, and this time he did not step back to reset the distance. He stepped in, inside the reach of the knife entirely, close enough to feel the older man’s breath. “This one’s for what ye did the moment yer hand touched her face.”

Alistair tried to bring the knife up between them. Edward caught his wrist with his free hand. He held it there, the blade shaking between their two grips, close enough now that he could see every line the years and the greed had put into Alistair’s face.

He drove his sword home, and Alistair O’Donell went still against him, and Edward held him upright a moment longer than he needed to before letting the body fall into the trampled grass at his feet.

The clearing went quiet almost at once. Boyd was already down and bleeding out from the arm Edward had opened earlier, the second guard disarmed and pinned under Duncan’s knee, Tyler standing over the last of them with his sword still drawn, and no one left willing to test it.

Edward stood over Alistair’s body and found he could not, for several long seconds, make himself move at all.

Then Chloe made a small sound behind him, not quite his name, more the shape of it caught somewhere in her throat, and it broke whatever had held him still.

He crossed to her, dropped to his knees in the grass in front of her, and reached for William first, gathering the boy out from where he’d been pressed against her bound arms and holding him against his own chest with both hands, checking without meaning to for the rise and fall of his breathing, for the warmth of him, as though the boy might stop existing if Edward did not confirm it with his own hands.

William, entirely unbothered by any of it now, worked a fist into the collar of Edward’s shirt and made a small, contented sound.

Only then did Edward turn to Chloe.

His hands were shaking when he reached for the rope at her wrists, properly shaking, badly enough that the first attempt at the knot failed. He had to still them by main force before he could work it loose. The blood at the corner of her mouth had already begun to dry. He looked at it and felt something in his chest that had no name he was willing to give it.

“Chloe.”

“I am here.” Her voice came out rough, thick, but steady enough. “I am here, Edward.”

The rope broke. He caught both her freed wrists in his hands, being careful of the raw line where the binding had cut in, and for a long moment, neither of them said anything at all. William’s small weight still pressed against Edward’s chest, and the clearing was completely silent around the three of them.

28

Chloe woke slowly, gradually; more of herself coming together until she realized she was lying down, and the ground beneath her had turned soft and warm instead of hard and cold. She then noticed that the sound she’d been hearing for some time without noticing was a fire, steady and low, burning through peat somewhere nearby.

She did not open her eyes immediately. Instead, she lay there and took stock of herself. Her wrists, aching along neat lines where the rope had cut. Her jaw, sore on one side where she knew, without needing a mirror, that a bruise had already begun to form. The deep, bone-deep fatigue that had nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with whatever her body had exerted itself doing in that clearing to stay upright.

William.

She came half up off the pillow before she’d finished the thought, before she’d even opened her eyes properly.