Page 7 of The Laird’s Guardian Angel (Highland Lairds #3)

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T he chill racing up and down her spine, the hairs standing on end on her neck, warning her to remain in her bedchamber and bar the door as she'd been instructed to do, were lost on Calliope at the moment.

Well, perhaps not lost so much as ignored.

Aye, self-preservation warred with her instinct to protect what was hers. And though she barely remembered this keep or its people, she was the only daughter and heir of Ramsey. If the castle was under attack, was she not duty-bound to protect it?

Wouldn't that be what her father expected? However, it was also her father who bid her bar the door. But that was because he didn't know her very well. He thought her weak, perhaps. But there wasn't a weak bone in Calliope's body. Except when it came to berry tarts—then she was very weak indeed.

The hinges creaked on her door as she slowly eased it open. She winced at the sound, praying that it had not alerted any lurking enemies to her presence. Holding her breath, she waited a split second in case there was some ghastly enemy about to leap from behind somewhere to stab her into oblivion.

No one did. And so, Calliope stepped out into the corridor, certain she could feel the chill of the stone through the soles of her shoes, and knowing at the same time that was impossible.

What was she doing? This was stupid, one side of her brain warned, while the other side encouraged her to creep forward. To hold that dagger high and bring it down on their attacker's head.

But yet again, she paused. What was her dagger when armed warriors had swords longer than her arm in a fight?

She turned around, ready to return to her room, when a bellow of outrage from below practically shook the walls. Calliope whirled back toward the stairs. There was no going back.

Her boots made no sound as she gingerly pressed her feet into the corridor's stone, one foot in front of the other. Her dagger was clutched tightly in her hand, and her skirts were lifted in the other so she didn't catch a toe on the hem and take a tumble.

The sounds of the fight below the stairs grew louder the closer she drew to the circular stairs. Once at the top, sweat beaded on her brow, and her stomach had tightened so fiercely she thought there was a very good chance she was going to throw up.

Calliope gritted her teeth, swallowing the bile rising in her throat and demanding she get a hold of herself. She was a Ramsey, by God. And she needed to start acting like one.

She put one foot down on the step, then another, leaning her shoulder into the stone wall to hold herself up as she went. Go back, go back, one part of her brain said. No, you must protect what is yours, the other side replied.

Barely down eight steps, barely rounding a corner, the grunts, groans, and clashes of metal echoed in her ears as though she were in the thick of the battle that raged just out of sight. Calliope winced, then straightened. This was not a time for wincing. This was not a time for her to suddenly get a fit of the vapors, not that she was prone to them. This was the time to help her father.

Down five more stairs. A closed door on Calliope's right. She pressed her ear to it, wondering if this was the great hall, but also knowing instinctively it was not; the great hall had been wide open to the stairs. There was silence on the other end of this door. Not where the fight was currently taking place. Perhaps this was her father's bedchamber or his study.

She couldn't remember how many floors she'd climbed when she'd followed the maid to her bedchamber the night before. Exhaustion had been so deep, and only fear rushing through her body now kept her upright.

But it hadn't been many. Perhaps one more time down around, and then Calliope would be in full view of the great hall with its long, lonely table and great hearth that could fit an entire family of three generations inside it. The image conjured in her mind was her father sitting at the other end. And the fear that raged after was that she'd never see him sitting there again.

Not three steps down, her shoulder still pressed to the stone, her face close to the mortar, there was a smear of blood. So close to her face, she could smell the metallic scent of it. If there was blood here, then that meant the room she'd just passed must have had some sort of battle? Or perhaps the battle had started right here where she stood and raged downward. She tried hard not to think what she might have found behind that closed door.

This was ludicrous. Calliope was out of her mind. This smear of blood and the sounds raging all around her were signs enough that she should return to the safety of her room. She was brave. She was a Ramsey. She could protect herself—maybe—against an assailant. But an attacking army? What could she do to help herself and her clan? The answer was nothing.

Until this moment, when she'd not been faced with the actual realness, dangerousness, and seriousness of her situation, the fear of what might come seemed almost to be on the outside of her periphery. Happening to someone else, she was just going to bear witness to it. And now…

Now she was looking at a very real, very recent, stain of blood on the stones of her father's castle.

Calliope's knees trembled, one of them buckling, and she quickly sank to her bottom on the steps before she fell completely, which would both cause her physical harm and alert the enemy to her presence. Both of which had the same ending result—physical pain or death.

Then again, if she just sat here like a weakling, they would come charging up the stairs anyway to get her, and then where would she be? Slaughtered.

She shuddered, remembering her mother's warnings of the fighting between the clans and the terrible ways they lived. That was not a fate she wanted any part of. For all the bravery she'd tried to muster in the past few minutes, this was not the way she wanted her life to end.

She should be in England, dancing at court, flirting. Not holding someone else's dagger with blood a foot from her face.

This meant she should cease her descent into mayhem. What she really needed to do was escape the castle and find help for her father.

But who would help her, and how would she even know where to go? There would be neighboring clans, but what if those bordering Ramsey lands were the ones who were invading now? What if her father had no allies?

She racked her brain for anything her mother might have told her that could help her now. The only thing she could remember was something about the Sinclairs. The last festival they'd gone to, the Sinclair warriors had won every contest. Her mother had remarked on how every one of them had been handsome as well as incredibly fearsome. In fact, that night, she'd also overheard her mother say she'd never seen men such as the Sinclairs who exuded such strength while also being beautiful. But that was fifteen years ago. They could all be dead. And they were most certainly old.

Yet her mind was telling her to go to the Sinclairs. As if her mother had reached out from beyond the grave to pluck this memory from thin air and plant it in her head.

Calliope forced herself to stand, her fingertips brushing the blood on the stone as she did. She shuddered, wondering who had bled here as she wiped the remnants on her skirt. She needed to find a way out of the castle and to the Sinclairs. A feat that would prove much more difficult than she had time to contemplate, considering she didn't even know what direction to go.

Her father's booming voice below gave her pause just as she'd planned to return to the floor her chamber was on to locate a servants' stair. She glanced over her shoulder, hesitating even as she trembled.

"Why have ye come, Sassenach ?" Anger laced her father's voice so deep that she barely recognized him.

Sassenach ? Who was that? She'd have to remember the name so she could relay it to the Sinclairs—if she made it out of here alive.

There was a snort of a response as if her father's question was preposterous.

"Answer me. I'll know why ye've killed me."

Killed? Calliope's free hand went to her throat, and she squeezed to keep the whimper of fear from escaping. Her father couldn't die. Not now! She'd only just returned. Wanted desperately to know who he was. What a cruel world it was that Fate would kill both her parents in the same month.

She clutched the dagger tighter, wishing she could charge into the great hall to save him. And knowing at the same time that if she did so, there would be two dead bodies on the floor. The last of her father's direct line. She couldn't do that. Not when he had ordered her to remain above the stairs. She didn't want him to die, knowing she'd died too.

"The lot of you heathens will be wiped from the earth. Our English king will see to it." The venom in the other man's voice was palpable. And he wasn't Scottish. That part was extremely obvious and concerning. Did the man who was trying to kill her father know her mother? Know Edgar?

"Not my king," her father growled.

"Your denial is precisely the reason. We will take this border holding, and we will take the next one and the next, and all of you, every single one of you, who dares to try and keep us from it, will suffer the same sentence. And I will personally take your daughter to my bed."

Her father made a strangled noise of rebellion, and her heart seized in her chest.

"Execution, by order of King Edward of England," the Englishman named Sassenach shouted, the words sending razors of fear cutting through her nerves.

"Ye and your bloody king can rot in hell!" her father bellowed, but there was a wobble beneath the shout that sent a ripple of fear coursing through Calliope.

Her father was weakening. Whatever the man had done to him had well and truly been enough of a blow to see that his Fate was sealed. He had killed him. Maybe even before she'd come down. Some wounds took their time in draining life's essence from a man.

Chief Ramsey—her father—was going to die.

Which meant she was to be the new Chieftain to the Ramsey clan. In England, they would laugh at such a notion. A woman in charge? Not likely. But here in Scotland, lines were passed from man to woman to man and back again as long as they were the first in line. And though she wasn't the first in line—that had been her wee baby brother's position—she was the one who was alive.

Calliope bit her tongue as another whimper rose up her throat.

There was a laugh now coming from Sassenach , the sound gritty and vile as if he were enjoying this moment. Celebrating her father's death, his murder.

"Know that you and your people will die here with you, and this time tomorrow, the English will roam these halls, rule this land, and all that you have worked for, desired, will be dust to the wind like your old, failing body." There was a spitting sound that sent rage coursing through her.

"This body is no' a failure yet." There was a grunt, two, three, and then a bellow of pain. Her father had clearly mustered some last bit of resistance left in his body. And though her mind knew the bellow of pain had not been the Englishman's, her heart hoped it was.

"Die, old man." The silence was deafening.

Calliope let out a small whimper this time as her mind brought forth images of what could be happening. Her father got a second wind to fight the enemy. Getting in a hit, then another, before a final death blow was meted out by Sassenach .

"What was that? Who is there?" The man's voice sounded searching, and she realized too late it was her own sound that he was speaking of.

Not today. Calliope was not going to die today.

"Go and see." Sassenach gave the order, leaving no doubt as to what had just happened. Wiping away any last vestiges of hope that perhaps her father had rallied enough to kill the Englishman instead.

Why were the English here anyway? Edgar had been hurried in his desire to rush off. Was it because he knew this man was coming? She prayed that hadn't been the reason behind it. The reason he'd left her here was to die. Edgar had been her stepsire for most of her life. She'd thought he'd loved her as a daughter. But it had all been for show.

The man's words came rushing back. It was a proclamation of what King Edward hoped to accomplish in Scotland by eradicating the people who lived here and belonged here.

Had Edgar betrayed her and her mother?

But there was no time for her to speculate. Footsteps pounded across the great hall and then sounded on the stairs, and she forced herself to turn and flee back up the stairs from where she'd come.