Page 4 of Highlander’s Escaped Prisoner (Highlands’ Partners in Crime #7)

T he man was lying, winded and in pain, when Nessa finally caught up with him. After making sure that he was no threat to her, she ordered him to his feet.

“Get up, please, and tell me your business,” she ordered.

She was startled to see that he was towering over her.

She raked him with a glance from head to foot and back again.

He looked utterly pathetic, but she could see that he was powerfully built, although he was dressed in rags and looked for all the world like a scarecrow.

He had shoulder-length, straggly dark hair and a thick dark beard that reached to his chest; he had obviously not shaved in years, and his face was encrusted in dirt.

Despite herself, she felt sorry for him.

She was sure that underneath all that grime, there was a handsome man.

Nessa was glad that she had kept her dagger honed and polished; he could have pushed her over with his little finger. “What is your name?” she demanded.

“My name is Bryce Blair,” he replied, then watched the effect that the name had on her. Her jaw dropped, and her face transformed itself into a mask of fury.

If Nessa had been angry before, she was now incandescent with rage.

She clasped her hands into fists by her sides, clutching the dagger so that its point was angled straight at him.

This was the monster who had killed her uncle Gerald, the man who had callously ridden a warhorse over him and broken his back.

It was at that moment that she realized the truth of what Logan had said.

She hated this man with every fiber of her being, but she could not stab him to death in cold blood; perhaps a man could, but she did not have a murderer living inside her.

“You dare say that name here!” she cried. “You dare set foot on our lands, you fiend!”

Blair could almost see her thoughts as he looked at her. Hatred, fury, and the urge to slay him were warring for supremacy inside her, but he knew that she did not have the heart to finish him off, despite the weapon she was clutching.

“You broke my father’s heart,” Nessa growled.

“How could anyone who calls himself a child of God ride over a man, friend or foe, and leave him to die? Gerald Guthrie suffered pain that an evil monster like you could not possibly imagine because you have no heart. It took him three days to die. Three days! At the end, my father was praying for God to take him so that the agony would cease. I cannot bear to look at you a moment longer!”

However, Bryce Blair had a heart, and it was being broken piece by piece as Nessa yelled her anger at him, hammering the false accusations into him as he stood, helpless, in front of her. He dropped his gaze from hers.

“Please let me speak,” he begged. “I am not the fiend that you think I am. I did not kill Gerald Guthrie, and I have been unjustly imprisoned these last seven years for a crime I did not commit. Please listen to me.”

“I will listen to you,” she answered with a sneer, “but only when it is safe for me to do so. Turn around.”

Blair obeyed her at once, sure that she was going to stab him in the back and leave him to die on the forest floor as she thought he had done to her uncle. “Let me make peace with God before you kill me,” he pleaded, his voice trembling.

Nessa gave a shrill, unpleasant laugh. “Do not fret, sir.” Her tone was cold and menacing.

“I will not kill you. That would deny you many years of loneliness, rats, cold, damp, and dirt, and I can think of no more fitting punishment for you. No, I will return you to the place you came from so that you can sit staring at the bars of your cell and pray for death. That is the best punishment I can devise for you here on Earth because I have no wish to kill you and meet you in hell.”

“You must listen to me!” Bryce persisted.

“Please do not give me up to your father. I am not an evil man, although I know many who are.” Suddenly, he felt the scrape of rough twine on his wrists, and pain shot through him as the rope was pulled tighter and tighter, then a hard knot was pressing into his wrist. He groaned and then heard Nessa chuckling in satisfaction behind him.

He was beginning to hate her for taking pleasure in another human being’s misery.

“Does that hurt?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied through gritted teeth. “Of course it does.”

Nessa thought for a moment. She had been about to express satisfaction that she was torturing him, but then she realized that by doing so, she would be lowering herself to his level. She loosened the twine slightly—not enough for him to escape, but just enough to ease his pain a little.

“Thank you,” he breathed, then he turned to face her again. “What is your name, mistress?” he asked, and for the first time, she noticed his voice. It was deep, husky, and vibrated like the darkest notes of a stringed instrument, sending a thrill through her whole body.

Nessa tilted her chin up. “My name is no concern of yours,” she answered. “Suffice to say that the man you killed was dear to me and my family.”

“Will you please listen to me?” Bryce begged. “I am not the man who murdered him!”

“But you escaped from the town jail in Alderbreck, did you not?” she demanded. “That itself is a crime. Please do not insult my intelligence by denying it because you have their mark branded on your neck. It was the first thing I noticed about you.”

Had it been broad daylight, Nessa would have seen Bryce flushing with embarrassment.

Alderbreck Jail was infamous for the brutal method it used to discourage its prisoners from escaping.

Each man was branded like a piece of livestock with the letter A on the side of his neck.

Bryce Blair’s was partially hidden behind his beard, but it was still visible, and he was extremely conscious of it.

The excruciating pain of the red-hot iron searing his skin still visited him in his nightmares.

“I did, but I never should have been there,” he confessed. “I know that you will not believe me, whatever I say, but it is true.”

“Whether I believe you or not does not matter.” Nessa’s tone was grim. “You are a wanted man, and you are going back to jail.”

Bryce began to panic. He would rather die than go back to the horror that was Alderbreck.

“May I explain a few things to you?” he asked, looking at the ground in case she should see the fear in his eyes.

Nessa sighed, frowning, then she gave in. She had nothing to lose by giving him his say. “If you must, but I cannot pretend that I will believe you.”

“Have you ever been inside a prison?” he asked. “Perhaps if you had, you would understand the fear I have of going back there.”

“No, I have not, and I have no wish to,” she replied tersely. “And whatever punishment you got there is something you brought on yourself. Now, is this going to take all night? Because I have better things to do than listen to fairy tales.”

“Good, because I am not telling any!” Bryce was furious. He sat down with his back to a tree trunk, and Nessa sat beside him, interested despite herself, although she would have died rather than show it.

“Go on,” she urged. “I will listen.”

“When I first went there,” Bryce began, “I was told that I would be lucky to last a year, and after the first week, I wished they would just hang me. The cells are dank, dirty, and infested with rats. The food was disgusting and often full of weevils, but even though it was worse than anything I had ever tasted in my life, I had to stay alive, so I made myself eat it.” He sighed deeply, paused for a moment, then went on.

“There was very little light, and the beds consisted of straw pallets with a thin blanket for warmth.

It was laughable, really, since I would probably have been warmer sleeping on the floor.

I was always freezing, but after a while, I became accustomed to it.

“One day, they came and told me I was going to work breaking stones for a new abbey that the church is building somewhere near Oban. They cannot get the stone they need anywhere nearby, so they came to quarry it in Alderbreck, where there is plenty of stone and plenty of free labor to gather it and break it.” His tone was bitter.

“There are a lot of men in Alderbreck, but no one quite as big as I am, so they picked me.

“It was exhausting and back-breaking work, but I was glad of it because I saw the sunlight, and the church made sure that I had more food so that I was strong enough to do my work. I eat well now, and I made friends too. There are six of us who work together, and we have been doing so for the last seven years. I thought I was as content as it was possible to be in such a horrible place, but when the chance came to escape, I grabbed it with both hands.”

Despite her resolution not to be curious, Nessa asked: “So how did you escape?”

“One of the guards’ wives gave birth,” he answered, laughing.

“All his fellow jailers gave him a little money, and he bought himself a bottle of whiskey. Jailers do not earn much, so it was cheap whiskey, and he almost emptied the bottle. He collapsed, and in their haste to make sure that he was not dead, the guards left my fellow prisoners and me unguarded. I ran away as fast as I could, but the stones cut my legs as I went. My fellow prisoners ran too, scattering in all directions, and there were not enough guards to chase all of us. I kept on running, and just as I thought I had got away—”

“I came out of the trees and caught you,” Nessa said flatly.

“Yes, but I hope you will give me a proper chance to explain myself,” he went on. “Please. It will not take long. What do you have to lose by listening to me?”

For a moment, they looked at each other with nothing to say, then Nessa felt a single drop of rain on the back of her hand.

She looked up at the sky and noticed that the moon was beginning to dip towards the horizon.

As well as that, heavy clouds were beginning to drift over it, obscuring what light there was.

It was going to rain, and she only had one horse.

It would take too long to get back to her home at Drumblane Castle if her prisoner had to go on foot, so they would have to find shelter since Nessa did not intend to let Bryce Blair out of her sight.

She looked back down again and realized that there was an empty space on her left where her prisoner should have been. She jumped to her feet and began to run after him.

As he ran, Bryce was twisting at the ropes on his wrists, but all he was managing to do was to make his flesh bleed. Running with a sore leg was bad enough, but running with tied hands as well was making things ten times worse.

“Stop!” Nessa cried, lining up her bow. “This time, I will shoot you in the back!”

Completely off-balance and unable to pump his arms to increase his speed, he felt himself slowing without the ability to go any faster.

It was utterly frustrating because, at any other time, he would have been able to put hundreds of yards between himself and his pursuer.

Suddenly, his foot caught on a tree root, and he tumbled head over heels to land in a crumpled heap on the grass.

“Kill me,” he sighed.