glowered at him. “Dinna give my men cause to put that promised bullet in your heart.”
“Aye, Mistress,” he said with a mocking bow. The smile on his face was anything but confirmation he would behave.
* * *
Doctor Annie, as the men within the croft referred to her, had finally stopped working on Archie just before dawn. One of the men had seen her back to wherever she’d come from, all of them very careful not to give away any information in front of Toran. However, he’d snuck a peek out the small window and seen the direction they’d gone.
The men didn’t trust him, with good cause as he’d refused to answer most of their questions, though in truth they’d refused to answer his as well. Their distrust was fine because he didn’t trust them either. Jacobites were the reason his mother was dead. Every person in this room, save his cousin, was his enemy.
He was quite certain that Dirk wanted to rip his head off and feed it to the wild boars lurking in the forest. The feeling was almost mutual.
As the sun began to rise, men filtered upstairs to sleep, while others dispersed. Except for Dirk, who pulled up a chair in front of the door and sat in it, arms crossed, his gaze fixed on Toran.
Toran smirked at the man’s obvious intent to keep him inside. If Toran wanted to leave, he was damned well going to leave. But damnation, he needed to question Jenny, and he was furious that she’d not returned. Getting to the bottom of his mother’s murder was one priority. His other was getting back to his great-uncle’s castle and making certain his siblings weren’t ambushed by Boyd’s men. They were still too young to care for themselves, the guardianship having fallen to him on his mother’s death.
Trying to ignore the man set on intimidating him, Toran laid on the floor beside the table where Archie slept, arms behind his head. He stared at the ceiling, at the ancient beams that looked to have been put into place in the Dark Ages. He tried to get some rest himself, but every scrape of a bootheel on the floor, every creak of a board overhead had him waking and ready to fight.
Every question, whether prying or casually disguised, went unanswered. The men were more tightly sealed than Boyd’s treasure. Giving up his interrogation, Toran had concentrated on sleep, but that hadn’t worked either. By midafternoon, he gave up on rest and checked on Archie, pressing a damp cloth to his cousin’s forehead and giving him sips of a bowl of broth that had been pressed into his hands by a small woman who had come by to serve the men.
Archie did not push the broth away but didn’t finish it either.
Toran wanted to warn the woman away, to tell her that to remain at the rebel croft would only mean her death. The men jested with her, thanked her for the food, seemed to actually care about this woman. But Toran knew better.
There was no sign of Mistress J, and when the sun started to set again, Dirk, who had not slept at all, was replaced by two Highlanders standing in front of the door, arms crossed over their chests as they stared at him.
Was he a prisoner, as she had suggested? Because it damn well felt like it.
Toran wanted to ask where Jenny was. To demand she return and give him some answers. But he already knew his words would fall on deaf ears. He also understood there would be no escape. They’d not let him past the doors, and if he tried to climb out the window, they’d stop him from doing that too.
What was completely obvious to him and anyone else who might be looking in was that these men were loyal to her and to their cause. They would not betray her and would definitely not do him any favors.
It was all rather fascinating—and damned confounding. He was fairly certain he knew who she was, what she was doing, and the crimes she’d committed. Mistress J was a moniker well known on both sides of the war. Loyalists whispered of her misdeeds in dread or with a vow of vengeance; rebels would sing her praises, as though she were a modern-day female Robin Hood. The latter, he couldn’t understand. How was it that the rebels could all follow her when it would mean certain death?
As the evening turned into night, still