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She grabbed her satchel, her resolve hardening. It was the only path left to her. She knew how to get there, and she wasn’t going to stop for anything.

With renewed purpose, she slipped out of her room. For once, all those years of her uncle’s conditioning worked in her favor. He was so certain of her obedience that he had never bothered to post guards outside her door or along the corridors to her room.

Creeping through the castle was easy enough for her. She was not some pampered, sheltered lady. She had moped and dusted almost every corner of it, and she had served most guards their food.

Silently, she slipped out into the courtyard, hidden by the moonless dark, and found her way to the stables by memory alone.

The stable boy was asleep in his chair as she slipped past him through the side door. Inside, the horses shifted and snorted in the dark, but none gave her away.

She knew exactly where she was going. She came to this same spot every day, with the same longing.

With practiced ease, she found her mare.

“Luath,” she murmured, stroking her nose.

Luath had been a foal when her father gifted it to her. The two of them had grown up together, and to Isla, the mare was the last part of her family. Rarely was she allowed to ride her, and never without an escort. Her uncle would never miss an opportunity to threaten Luath whenever he needed Isla to fall back into line.

“Tonight, we ride, lass,” she whispered.

Luath nuzzled her palm as if in agreement, and Isla’s heart settled.

With steady fingers but a trembling heart, Isla saddled her. Then she wrapped her hooves in cloth she had prepared beforehand, muffling their sound against the cobblestones as she led her out.

Silent as ghosts, the two of them slipped through the side door usually used for hauling out the stables’ muck, a chore Isla knew well from all the times her uncle needed to remind her exactly who was in charge.

The Highland air hit her, cold and bracing, carrying with it the smell of promise and the prospect of a new life.

“Let’s leave this place, lass,” she said, and swung herself up into the saddle with ease.

She secured her satchel and leaned down to kiss the mare’s head. She didn’t spare Sinclair Castle a glance as she kicked Luath into a gallop.

The morning air was crisp and cold against her cheeks, thick with the scent of heather and damp earth, and she rode through the waking Highland landscape at a desperate speed.

She had ridden the whole of yesterday, barely stopping to rest, in the hope of reaching MacLeod Castle. It was on the second day’s dawn that she finally saw it, the sun just beginning to rise over the distant mountains, painting the sky rose and gold.

Yet she had no time to admire the view.

In that light, MacLeod Castle rose in the distance, a formidable fortress of gray stone overlooking a loch, as though it had grown straight out of the sheer basalt rock beneath it. It looked unwelcoming, brutal and isolated.

It reminded her, uncomfortably, of its laird. Huge, shadowed—it looked utterly unyielding. The loch beside it was a stark reminder of the eyes that had stared at her in the garden at Douglas Castle.

For a moment, Isla felt the courage she had mustered over the long, treacherous ride here threaten to desert her. The place seemed almost hostile, and she wondered if she might do better taking her chances alone.

Then she reconsidered. What looked cold and forbidding also meant fiercely protected. If she were allowed in, she would be safe. Or so she hoped.

“If we reach the place fast,” she promised her mare, “ye’ll get an apple, lassie.”

As if spurred on by that promise, the mare pushed down the harsh path to the grand gates with as much speed as her weary body could allow.

Isla held her steady, riding tall, knowing that the watchmen would already have spotted a lone rider approaching. She meant to arrive at the seat of Clan MacLeod as a laird’s daughter, not some sniveling, frightened lass.

Her thighs ached, her back was sore, and her lungs burned, but she kept riding. She had to find refuge there. She had to make Alisdair listen.

At last, she reached the main gates, her heart in her throat. This was it—the moment of truth, her one chance to take her fate into her own hands.

“Easy, lass.” She drew Luath to a halt.

She looked up at the iron portcullis and waited, feeling many eyes on her