Page 6

Chapter

Four

Adara

“ Y ou cannot think they won’t come for her.” Hagan chewed a roll as he paced the great room.

The space wasn’t as grand as the hall in her father’s stone keep but it still boasted timber walls and four windows, two on each side of the grand fireplace, made of skin so thinly stretched that on a sunny day light soared in.

When her husband, Elvin, was alive, the extravagance of them was something on which he prided himself, despite the need for tapestries to cover the thin skins in the winter months.

Now, the dusky light of the setting sun mixed with the lit iron sconces to cast the great room in a cozy glow.

Adara set her gaze on Hagan as she leaned back in her chair at the long dining table, satisfied in a manner she hadn’t experienced in God knew how long.

“Of course they will come for her. That is the point.” She drank deeply from her brass goblet. A fine mead, one Elvin had been saving for a special occasion. She relished its honey-oak flavour.

Hagan shook his head, his dark hair whipping around his eyes. He stalked to the table, choosing a fresh bun from the wooden bowl. The frown he’d donned since leaving the keep that morning hadn’t waned an inch.

“If you only told me why,” he said before he stuffed the remainder of the roll into his mouth and grabbed his own goblet of mead from above his place setting at her left. It was long enough to seat twelve men, though a good many years had passed since it had seen that many.

“I’ve told you why.”

“Indeed, I know you wish to wreak havoc on Ridley Ward and we have done so. I want to know why that bowman didn’t shoot. Why you wrote a note ordering another man from Hyrstow in exchange for our prisoner, who bit me when I threw her in the dungeon, by the way.”

Adara itched her nose to cover her grin.

She’d known Ridley Ward’s bride to be a warrior.

It had been written in the deft way she handled her knife when Adara had encountered her months ago, washing in the woods with another woman.

Her skills during Adara’s raid on Hyrstow had been valuable—she defended the village too well.

The men Adara sent hadn’t been able to capture her, as was intended.

It made her curious, however, that Yrsa appeared to be Viking.

She spoke strangely and had the airs of the northerners that had come to plunder parts of Northumbria’s coastline.

Hagan’s long, impatient sigh caused her to prop both elbows on the table and clasp them overtop her nearly finished plate. The quail had been cooked to perfection. Adara would have to thank Cook later.

“Who was he?” Hagan pressed, dark brow tenting in question.

Adara tried to work up some saliva to soothe her dry mouth.

Grahame.

The name sliced through her, straight at her heart. Before the warm blanket of memory could wrap around her, she thought of a fist clasping the name and crushing it between fingers. There was no room for the cut of heartbreak she felt when she thought of her fourteenth year.

“The man who couldn’t kill me and the one I ordered sent here are one and the same.”

Hagan’s dark eyes went round, his mouth dropping open. The scratch he’d received in the forest somehow enhanced his brutishly handsome face. Adara hated that men appeared better with age. It had certainly been true of Grahame.

His eyes had been round as he’d leveled the bow at her, their emerald depths startling in their brilliance.

What she hadn’t anticipated was his height or the breadth of his shoulders.

Grahame had been tall and spindly as a youth.

With no other reference than his peach-fuzz covered face and lanky frame, Adara had carried the image of him in her mind, aging it as she did.

It had been impossible to imagine how he would be as a man.

Adara found it obnoxious how sultry his lips looked, even pressed into a line of concentration.

Or the fact that his hair was still like burnished gold and carried a curl women would dream of having.

“ That was Grahame Shepherd? Why didn’t we just take him in the forest?”

Hagan placed both fists, knuckles-down, on either side of his half-finished meal.

The back of Adara’s neck prickled beneath his glower.

A reaction she was prone to when questioned by men.

She raised her chin to combat the feeling, reminding herself that she need not cower to any man but one. And her father was miles away.

“It was. And if Ridley’s bride hadn’t been poised to kill me and Grahame ready to deliver an arrow to my back, I would have stopped to take him as well. Thankfully, she had enough sense to listen to me, so I can still get both things I want.”

“Which are?” Hagan drew out the words as his glare nailed Adara to her seat. Her own eyes narrowed in response. As her most trusted, he was allowed to pepper her with his thoughts, though there was a limit.

“Oh, you’re back!”

The female voice that carried through the room caused Hagan to straighten. Adara smirked into her goblet.

“Yes, hello. Back we are,” Adara confirmed, downing the dregs of her drink before pouring herself another glass.

Adara’s closest friend, Muretta, strolled through the door from the house’s lifeline, the hall that ran between the great room on the house’s east side to the bedrooms on the west. To the south, the front entrance stood sentinel.

“Everything went well, I assume?” Muretta came to stand beside Adara, her ringed hand skimming lightly over the tabletop. Hagan’s gaze traveled from her pert nose to her rosy mouth to her hand’s movements as if anywhere it chose to settle was lewd. Adara rolled her eyes at him.

“Other than one of our men being killed by Ridley’s bride as she tried to escape, everything went to plan,” Adara said.

“His name was Leon,” Hagan muttered, shooting her a glare.

“Why should I bother to remember the name of a man who failed me?” Adara shot back.

Of course, she knew the man’s name. Leon had come to them before winter, one of a tenant’s many sons.

He wished to make a name for himself and was eager to help in the stables, the kitchen, anywhere that would have him.

She stood, anger coursing through her at Hagan’s impudence.

She hated to admit it, but too many of her men had died on her watch.

Guilt was a slimy thing in her belly but, as their leader, none of them needed to know that.

“Careful, my lady. You are sounding rather like your dead husband,” Muretta’s singsong voice scratched at her like nails on metal.

Her friend plucked an apple from the bowl at the table’s center.

Adara made her face impassive. Muretta shrugged as she bit into the fruit, ignoring Adara’s surliness.

Instead, she ran a hand down the front of her rich green gown, grinning at Hagan as she chewed.

The look they shared was conspiratorial.

As if to say they were unbothered by Adara’s moods.

“I am going to bed,” Adara declared, goblet in hand. That made her like her late husband as well, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. “You two enjoy each other.”

She left amid awkward denials of wanting anything more than others’ company.

Adara didn’t begrudge Hagan and Muretta their lies.

Elvin had been in the ground a mere two months.

Though lingering glances had been exchanged between Hagan and her husband’s mistress for years, Adara knew they would not jump into one another’s beds the moment Elvin passed.

Rather than retire to her room, Adara continued to the door at the end of the hall.

Large, metal hinges creaked as she unlocked it and swung it open.

A mouth of blackness greeted her, the stairs downward like rotten teeth.

Adara hesitated. She wasn’t one for dark, cramped places.

She’d spent enough time in the shadowy corners of her father’s keep trying to avoid his men. No sounds echoed from below.

After a moment, she shook out her shoulders, grabbing the lit torch in the sconce outside the door.

The flame flickered, making the narrow descent feel a little less like a coffin.

At the bottom, two cells carved from dirt and barred with iron greeted her.

The ceiling was low, hugging Adara too close, but she withstood it.

Adara could hear Yrsa breathing. Holding the torch closer to the metal bars, she found Ridley’s wife sitting on her haunches, her eyes cast to the floor.

A sneer decorated Adara’s top lip. Yrsa likely kept her gaze downcast because she was trying to convey meekness.

Or the sharp light of the torch hurt after being left for so many hours in complete darkness.

Whichever it was, Adara told herself she didn’t care.

She told herself that the begrudging respect that bloomed for Yrsa’s sacrifice did not exist. That the wife of her enemy was a fool for giving herself up willingly.

The two women remained breathing in silence for longer than was comfortable though neither broke.

After a while Yrsa sat on her bottom, her head falling back against the dirt wall, one leg stretched out in front of her.

Elbow on her upraised knee, she finally looked Adara in the eye.

No snarl nipped at her lips, nor pleading sprang from her throat.

It was as if she stared through to Adara’s soul, had deemed it rotten, and had passed her judgement.

Let her. Adara’s soul was no longer something she worried over. She served only herself, not some overseer or promise of greatness to come.

Without a word, Adara spun on her heel and made her way up the shallow steps, leaving Yrsa in darkness once again.

Frustration with herself nibbled its way through her chest. The whole point of her revenge was to alleviate the constant ache she felt at the loss of her cousin.

Yet, even with Ridley Ward’s wife in the dungeon, peace would not come.

Adara told herself it was because she hadn’t yet witnessed his suffering.

At the top of the stairs, she retrieved the goblet she’d left on the floor and slung back the contents.

It helped ease the scorn she felt for herself for leaving a woman in the cold dungeon.

Muretta was right. She was just like Elvin.

Perhaps she always had been. Like often called to like.

He’d been cruel and selfish and bold. Same as her father.

It didn’t matter that Adara’s plan for Ridley Ward was borne of anguish.

Her actions hurt people all the same. Adding Grahame to the mix had been a last minute, self-serving decision.

Indeed, it solved the problem of her father’s most recent missive; however Adara could have chosen anyone.

She did not need to drag Grahame into her life. It was a ruthless, desperate move.

Elvin had taught her well, it seemed.