Page 50 of Laird of Wrath

The acrid smoke burned his lungs as he rushed into the village, barking orders. The villagers were eager, fearless, but also disorganized, all of them running around with buckets of water but no real plan.

“Put out that one first!” he shouted, pointing to a house that was ready to collapse and spread the fire to the one next to it. “Daenae let it spread!”

The villagers heard him, gathering around the house to put out the fire as fast as they could.

Callum stayed with them as he barked more orders, tossing bucket after bucket of water onto the house in a desperate attempt to rescue what little was left of it.

In the back of his mind, he couldn’t help but think of all the damage they would have to fix—all the buildings that had to be rebuilt, all the food stores that had been ruined.

How would he manage to feed them all? Their reserves were being bled dry after the last attack, and he feared that whatever they managed to gather that summer would not be enough to sustain them through winter.

His only option was to turn to their allies for help, especially Rhea’s family. Her father owed him now, more than he could ever pay back, not within his lifetime. Grain would be a small price to pay for all the men Callum had lost in the war.

“Start a line!” he called as the fire consuming that house started to die down. “Women and bairns! Start a line and carry the water down here! And there!”

The women rushed to get the children into straight lines, and he made sure every line led to an active fire. But even as he moved around, giving orders, he carried bucket after bucket of water to help put out the fire.

Sweat dripped down his forehead, falling into his eyes, and trickled down his back, sticking his shirt to his skin. His eyes and throat and lungs burned from the smoke and heat, forcing him to cough again and again, his ribs rattling with the force of it. Still, he pushed through, ignoring every pain, every discomfort for the sake of putting out the fire until the village was safe.

Hours passed before the last of the fire was extinguished, and by then, everyone in the village was exhausted.

Callum watched the villagers, especially the elderly, drag themselves on weary feet to the village square, now burned to coal, nothing but the stones on the ground remaining to remind them that it had once been a place of gathering. The buildings around it had all but crumbled. The villagers were pale, their eyes red and watery, their skin covered in ash and soot, as if they had just come out of war.

And in a way, they had.

Callum cursed under his breath. This was all his fault, but what was there to do? He couldn’t let Sienna marry that vile man, especially now that he had shown his true colors. If Laird Barclay was willing to burn down a village, there was no telling what else he would do. There was no telling how he would treat his sister.

Violent men were rarely violent toward specific people, after all. And Laird Barclay was nothing if not violent.

Callum’s gaze fell on Rhea in the crowd. Her pale blue dress was stained black, her hair a tangle around her face. In her arms, she was holding a little boy no more than a few years old, cradling his sooty face and hushing him gently.

There was blood on her, thick and dark. Her dress had been ripped in places. Strips of it had been torn off, as if to make makeshift tourniquets.

She didn’t seem to be injured, and yet the sight of her like this nauseated him. Bile rose in the back of his throat, his heart threatening to leap right out of his chest and cease to beat at his feet.

There was something so jarring about seeing her like this, something so overwhelmingly wrong about someone so innocent covered in other people’s blood.

Memories of war flashed through his mind as he stood there motionless. There had been so many people like her, so many soldiers who had been little more than boys. They had trained and trained for years, and yet they had never seen battle, not until he dragged them into it.

The duty of a good laird was to be willing and ready to make sacrifices. Those young men had been the reason why Clan McMahon and Clan McAllister survived. He had to make horrible decisions for the greater good. He had to become a monster himself to defeat the monsters.

And yet the sacrifice still weighed heavily on him. The war was his fault. The men’s deaths were his fault. And now, this… this was his fault, too.

I should never have brought her here.

Someone was talking. Callum was only half-listening, lost in his thoughts. There was mention of an accident and an attack. No one seemed to know precisely what had happened, but he didn’tneed to speculate. He knew for certain that Laird Barclay was behind all this.

I should kill him. I should go after him and have his head.

The longer he stared at Rhea, the more this idea solidified in his mind. Laird Barclay was to blame for all the blood, for all the pain she now carried after trying to help their people. He was the one to blame for the loss of her innocence. He was the one to blame for all the pressure she had endured when he had tried to marry Sienna and take over the clan.

Had it not been for Laird Barclay, Rhea and Sienna would have been safe. His people would have been safe. The villages would still be standing, and the grain stores would be full.

But I promised her. How can I leave when I promised her?

Rhea’s eyes seemed to bore into him even across the distance. He had the sense that she knew what he was thinking, that she was judging him for it.

How could he leave for another war when she was looking at him like that? How could he leave her again when he had promised to be there?