Page 3 of Lost with a Scot
“Anna?” a familiar voice croaked hoarsely in the dark.
“Alexei?” She ran to the cloaked figure and threw herself into his arms.
“Thank God you’re both unharmed.” Her brother coughed from breathing in the smoke. But he held her close, hugging her so tightly she almost couldn’t breathe.
She was almost laughing insanely with panic and relief, but her twin wasn’t. His face was hard and his eyes full of pain.
“Alexei...,” she began uncertainly.
“You have to go to the harbor. Board theRuritanian Star. It’s waiting for you.”
“Me? What about you? Where are Mother and Father—?”
“They’regone, Anna,” he rasped.
“Gone... What do you mean,gone?” She felt a wild hysteria building as she tried to process what he was saying.
“Uncle Yuri killed them. He almost killed me. If not for William, I would be dead.” Her brother’s face was dusted with smoke and streaked with tears. “He has turned half the army against us. We never even knew thedevilswere inside the walls until it was too late.” He ushered her and Pilar into the shadow of the garden wall at the edge of the palace. “Now go. Run to the docks. Take this.” He pressed a heavy coin purse into her hands.
“Aren’t you coming with us?”
Her twin smiled sadly. “I must stay and rescue any who are still loyal to us. Now that Father is gone, I am king, and I must stay with our people. Yuri will not spare them in this fight. TheStarwill take you to London. Speak to King George. Bring back soldiers to help us. I need you to do this for me...”
She was shaking her head, not wanting to leave him. “No. Alexei, I can’t—”
“You can, sister. You have always been braver than me—that is why you must go. You have the heart of a queen, and King George will want to help you once he hears you speak of these atrocities. When it’s safe, I will send for you. Until then, William and I will be fighting to take our home back.”
Anna threw her arms around her brother’s neck. “Keep your promise, Alexei. I cannot live in a world without you.” She kissed his cheek and let him go, even as her heart was breaking.
She and Pilar ran for the woods on the edge of the castle grounds. The sky was now red with hellish flames, a stark contrast to the dark woods between her and the distant harbor. She looked back only once, hoping to see her brother watching them, but the archway that led back to the gardens and the palace beyond was empty except for firelight.
The dream she’d had so often of late proved to be prophetic that night as she and Pilar fled through the dark forest. The howls of men hungry for royal blood echoed all around them, and Anna and Pilar did not stop.
We must reach the water,she thought over and over again. The water would save them. The water would carry them away. She prayed that her brother would survive. She had lost everything else. She could not lose him as well.
* * *
September 1821
Scotland
Aiden Kincade kicked off his blankets as he struggled to wake. Old, painful memories of his tyrannical father left him quivering with fear and rage. He sat up and covered his face with his hands, letting out a shaky sigh before he dropped his hands and stared unseeing at the room around him.
How could a man long dead still strike such fear into his heart? Aiden was twenty-seven, long past the time when nightmares should frighten him. But it always seemed so real whenever his father appeared in his dreams. The scars his father Montgomery Kincade had given him, both physical and emotional, were ever present for him in a way that his siblings seemed to have escaped. Brock, Brodie, and Rosalind all shared his abusive history with their father, but his siblings had all have moved on with their lives, whereas Aiden couldn’t manage to shake off the pain that lingered. It made him feel all the more alone for it.
His mother once said he was born with the wild spirit of her ancestors in his blood, the old warrior clans. That wild spirit had caught both his father’s eye and his scorn. Montgomery had secretly helped the English government crush a Scottish rebellion years ago. He, more than most, despised the old ways. The clans, the lairds, the kilts. All of it. And so Aiden became a target for his father’s venom.
Aiden climbed out of his bed and went to wash his face in the porcelain basin. The weak morning light was gray, and he could smell the rain upon the breeze that drifted in through the half-open window of his bedchamber. He washed his face, the cold water helping to banish the lingering murkiness of his dreams.
Something stirred in the corner of his room behind an old overstuffed armchair. Aiden clicked his teeth softly as a pine marten called out from beneath the legs of the chair and stretched, almost catlike. Its coat was a rich glossy brown that blended with the wood of the trees. Aiden had rescued the wee beastie when he had found its front paw caught in a hunter’s snare.
It had taken him half a day to woo the marten into trusting him before he could release it from the snare without it biting him. Once he had freed it, he carried it home to treat its wounds. Thankfully, the paw had escaped infection, and the marten had been free to return to the wild after a few weeks, but like many of the creatures Aiden encountered and assisted, the marten seemed perfectly content to stay at Castle Kincade.
Along with the marten, there was also a female badger, Fiona, who enjoyed sleeping in his brother Brock’s bed, which always amused Aiden because Brock’s name actually meant badger. They also had a pair of river otters in the lake who sometimes came up to play in the garden fountains. There was even a small tawny owl.
He’d named the owl Honey because her black, brown, and gold speckled feathers reminded Aiden of the honeycombs of bees. Honey roosted in the castle’s library, and Aiden had built a muslin flap entrance into one of the nearby windows where the owl could scuttle out onto a ledge on the outside of the castle and fly off to hunt when she needed to.
Aiden was lucky that neither of his brothers and their wives seemed to mind the comings and goings of the creatures. Even luckier for him, the two new occupants of Castle Kincade thought it was sweet how he nurtured the wee beasties. His sisters-in-law, Joanna and Lydia, seemed to enjoy the odd fox that sunned itself by his window, the doves that roosted in the hall, or the other various injured animals he brought home to heal. He wasn’t sure how he’d gotten so lucky. His brothers had married English lasses who were compassionate and kind, especially considering that for most of their lives, his brothers hadn’t been exactly predisposed to the English, by and large.
