Released (6 page)

“Ye didna find yer pleasure,” he accused in a husky voice, chiding her softly from behind heavy lids.  “Let me—”

“Nay.”  Katriona wrenched herself away from him.  His arms tightened as though to hold her prisoner, but she used her Banshee ability to levitate away from him, above the water.  “Nay, that shouldn’t have happened.”  She’d not meant to cause him such extreme pleasure; he’d found it on his own.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m here to
kill
you, not kiss you,” she snapped. 

A lazy smile slanted across his lips.  Katriona tried not to look at them, to remember how they felt on hers.  “Well, if ye canna do one, what’s wrong with the other?  I’ve wanted to do that for longer than ye can imagine.” 

“With the woman you are bound to marry a few doors away?”

Rory winced, a hand coming up to rub new lines that appeared in his forehead.  “All of that was set into motion before yesterday, before I knew ye were still—”

“
Alive
?” she bit out.  “Because I’m not, Rory.  I’m dead.  And there’s nothing in our past or future
but
death. 
Yours
if I have my way.”  Despite what they’d just experienced, the debt of vengeance still had to be paid.  The blood of her sisters called for it. 

And hers still did too, didn’t it?

“But… ye canna kill me.  Ye said so yerself.”

“When did you die?”  She repeated her earlier question.  How in the bloody hell had they strayed so far from her purpose?

“What does it matter?”  He sat forward in the bath, all the remnants of pleasure drained from his features and shadows took its place. 

A part of Katriona mourned the loss.  Her emotions felt much like the water in the tub, displaced by Rory’s unrelenting mass until they spilled over.

“
Tell me,
” she keened, her Banshee voice splitting the air between them like a blade.

Rory cringed and held up his hands.  “All right, I’ll tell ye what I think happened,” he promised. 

Katriona crossed her arms, valiantly keeping her eyes on his face and away from the enticing curve of each individual stomach muscle as they flexed and glistened with his movement.  She’d never forget what it had been like to have all that power beneath her.  At her mercy.  And that fact irritated her to no end.

“I was a lad, maybe all of sixteen or so,” Rory began.  “Angus and I were boar hunting on Cape Wrath.”

Lip curling at his brother’s name, Katriona bit back a snarl.

“I’d had so much to drink the night before and it’d been the first time I’d—”  Rory’s gaze snagged on hers.  “We’ll I’ll say my head wasna on the task.”  He shifted in the water, his eyes sharpening. 

“We’d cornered the boar between a rock crevice and a sea cliff.  We had to climb down to kill it.  I lost my grip on a mossy hand-hold and fell some distance onto the rocks below hitting my head and breaking my arm.” 

A bleak distance blanketed the observant clarity in his features.  “I remember floating above it all, looking down at my brother and wondering why he was so afraid.  He skidded down the rocks, screaming my name.  Then, he hoisted me over his shoulder and carried me up the cliff face to the safety of the grasses.”  Rory shook his head and let out a mystified breath.  “I weighed at least a stone more than he, even then.  It should have been impossible for him to lift me, but I’ll be buggered if he didna.”  A sad, wry laugh burst from his chest, and his gentle sorrow released something inside of Katriona that reminded her of when the frozen Highland lochs thawed and broke into jagged pieces of floating ice. 

“It was in that moment I truly I realized that I was watching him try to save my life, from
outside
my skin.  I felt the pull of my body, but also the presence of a nether world.  It terrified me, that dark unknown, and I knew I wasna done here, that I had to live.  So, when Angus jumped on his horse and went for help, I decided I needed to be
inside
my body when they returned.”  Rory shrugged.  “That’s the last thing I remember for a full month.  Maybe more.  That entire summer’s a wee hazy.”  He reached up and massaged the back of his scalp, perhaps finding a familiar scar beneath his thick, wet hair.  “I was told that I let everyone know what I saw.  Maybe I even heard that word before,
An
Dìoladh
, though I canna remember it.”

Katriona snorted.  “Perhaps your head wound was worse than you thought if you remember watching the likes of Angus save your life.”

Rory’s eyes narrowed on her face.  “Angus was always so angry.  So incredibly cruel.  But he shared a womb with me.  He laughed only with
me
.  He rode, hunted with, and fought beside me.  He
loved
me.  And regardless of what happened after… that day he saved my life.”  His gaze slid to the fire.  “It ended up being one of his biggest mistakes.”

“His
biggest mistakes
were viciously raping Kylah and burning my family alive.  Or raiding and pillaging across the Highlands, wreaking unspeakable terrors upon those who wouldn’t cower to his demands,” Katriona hissed.  “Or how about dividing our clan and making us weak, turning kin against kin until every death was a MacKay death.”  Katriona advanced.  “How
dare
you mourn him.”

Rory stood, proud and completely nude.  His jaw locked and a storm gathered in his eyes.  “I ordered his
death
, Katriona.”  His low voice a dark contrast to her Banshee wails.  “My own brother. 
I
put a stop to his evil.”  Stepping out of the bath, he reached for a plaid and wrapped it around his hips, hiding his glorious male flesh from view.  “That doesna mean I doona mourn the child Angus was, or the man he could have been.”

Katriona could see the pain and shame etched into the lines around his eyes.  The weight of his deeds straining the muscles of his heavy shoulders.  She felt a swell of pity for him, but tried to crush it beneath a wall of ice. 

“Our father he was… cruel to us both, but Angus got the worst of it.  I suppose because he was the eldest and next in line to be Laird.”  Rory squeezed at his forehead again, a now familiar sign he experienced unpleasant memories.  “The degradation that we—the humiliation…  It’s no wonder he became a creature of pain and perversion.”

“You excuse him in
my
presence?”  Aghast, Katriona recoiled farther away from him.

“Not an excuse.”  He held up his hand as though to ward off her anger.  “I just—”

“Just
nothing.
”  Katriona could feel the Banshee rage gurgle from deep inside what little soul she had left, squelching what tendrils of warmth remained from his touch.  “You were subject to the same upbringing as your brother.  Based on your logic, don’t you have the potential for the
same
evil?”

“Aye, it’s possible.  But I
choose
to be different.  I want my clan to be strong and prosperous.”  Rory hit a fist to his chest, amber flames flaring in his eyes in response to the frost forming in hers.  “I want the word of a MacKay to mean something in the Highlands again.  And, most of all, I want to pay for my
own
sins and not the deeds of the Lairds before me!” 

“You
enjoyed
the pain my magic wrought, didn’t you?” Katriona sneered.  “It brought you pleasure?  Is that not a perversion?  Do you enjoy inflicting pain with the same excitement that you receive from it?”

Muscles heaving with fuming breaths, he advanced on her.  “You
know
I would never.”

Katriona let out a dry sound that may have been called a laugh if it wasn’t so full of contempt.  “I know no such thing.  What other sins do you hide from the fools in our clan who love and trust you?  What price will they ultimately pay for their innocent willingness to forgive?”  What price would she pay?  Or her sisters?  And was it already too late for them all?  For even as she hurled accusations at him and watched the darkness gather on his features, she yearned to be back in the warmth of the water with him, forgetting anything about the past and the future.  Living, as it were, only for the next moment and the new sensation it would bring them.  A part of her knew she was being unfair, but she’d rather it be so than be deceived by a MacKay Laird.  

“Ye really have the audacity to lecture me about the well being of my clan?”  His voice gained volume, as did the heat of his glare.  “When ye let yer anger at me and mine punish the
innocent
ye seem so worried about?”

Was he really turning an accusation on
her
?  “
We
were not finished living either, but the choice was ripped from us.  We died innocent, and we
remain
innocent!”

“Tell that to Kevin when he’s starving without his herd.  Or the village over the hills from
yer
washhouse where the milk is spoiling.  I mourn for what befell ye and yer family, but yer Fae curse is spilling into the lives of Strathnaver and I’ll not have it!” Rory stalked forward and only then had Katriona realized that she’d been drifting back in the wake of his anger.  “I’ll do whatever it takes to stop ye.”

Stunned, confused, and enraged, Katriona warded him off by releasing a wailing keen of such incredible pitch that the tub shattered.  Rory dropped to his knees, holding the sides of his head and baring his teeth at her.  She watched in despair as the water that had brought her the first touch of warmth she’d felt in as long as she could remember flooded the chamber, soiled and chilled by the stones.

Rory hated the sound of her cry more than just about any other on the earth.  It reverberated through his body with its otherworldly force, shriveling him up until he curled in upon himself.  No one had wielded the power to drive him to his knees since he was a small boy, and perhaps that galled him the most.

A loud crash and a tortured bellow told him that someone had burst through the door and was now reaping the full brunt of Katriona’s wails. 

A bright light flashed across Rory’s vision, momentarily blinding him, and then the wail abruptly stopped.  He caught his collapsing weight on his hands, blinking rapidly to rid himself of blind spots. 

He expected Katriona to be gone when he finally gathered himself enough to look up, but her absence screamed as loud as she had.  Too much had been said and left unsaid between them.  How would they ever bridge the chasm between their worlds?  How would wrongs be righted, ties severed, and wounds healed? 

The impossibility of it all hung like a lead weight in his chest.

Rory let his head drop in defeat, staring at the inch of bathwater surrounding him and soaking the stones of his floor, spreading out toward the open doorway.

“Holy Christ, ye’ve a Banshee!”  Lorne yelled into the silence while using the doorway to pull himself to his feet. 

“I fucking told ye that this afternoon,” Rory snarled.

A small but steady trickle of blood leaked from Lorne’s ears and one nostril, which he unceremoniously wiped with the back of his hand.  “Wha’?,” he cried.  “I’ve ringing in my ears like ye wouldna believe.” 

Rory hoped like hell the damage wasn’t permanent. 

Lorne staggered to his side, helping Rory to stand.   “Did she get close enough to touch ye?” he boomed.  “How did ye survive?”

Rory shook his head to clear it.  She’d touched him deeper and more thoroughly than any other.  Aftershocks of her power singed across his nerves even still, reminding him of the excruciating bliss her touch and her body had manipulated from him.  And though he’d been lost in a place of pleasure tinged with pain, through the surprise in her emerald eyes, he’d glimpsed a hint of something deeper.  More familiar. 

Possession.  

“
An
Dìoladh.
”   A husky, feminine murmur sounded from the doorway. 

“Huh?” Lorne shouted.  “Speak up, lass!”

“Kathryn.” Rory nearly choked on the word, waving at his steward to be quiet.  Albert rushed around the doorjamb brandishing a sword that seemed a mite too large for him.  He pulled up right behind Kathryn, his un-tucked tunic and disheveled dark hair matched the sleep-hazed alarm in his dark eyes.