Page 101 of Ruthless, But for Her

“Yours?”

Ryker looked down as if only just noticing it.

“Some.”

Ashton grabbed his arm and turned it.

“Not enough of it to matter.”

“I’ll decide that.”

Ryker pulled away. “You sound like Margot.”

“Then perhaps you should listen for once.”

Sorren appeared from farther down the Spit, sword still in hand.

“We lost three. Two more may not see morning.”

Five men lost. For nothing.

Ashton turned toward the men scattered over the narrow ground. Some tended the wounded. Others searched the dead, taking weapons and anything else worth carrying before the bodies were moved.

“How many of theirs?” he asked.

“Eleven here,” Sorren said. “More wounded. Hard to say how many made it back into the hills.”

Ashton looked toward the rise where the warden’s men had disappeared.

“They knew where the watch changed,” he said.

Ryker stopped wrapping a strip of cloth around his arm.

Sorren’s gaze sharpened. “Aye.”

Their watches had been staggered deliberately. Changed twice, since McGarron’s warning. Yet the attack had come in the small stretch between one group leaving and another arriving.

“Someone told them,” Ryker said.

“Or someone watched long enough to learn it.”

Ashton preferred the second answer…which meant he believed the first.

“Change everything,” he said. “No fixed watches. No same path twice. Double men on the Spit until dark.”

Sorren nodded. “And tonight?”

“We do not sleep here. Or even on the ship. Back to Mere’s End.”

Ryker stared at him.

Ashton looked again toward the hills. “If they know our watches, they may know where we bed down, too.”

That wiped the last trace of humor from his brother’s face.

Sorren started issuing orders.

Ashton crouched beside one of his wounded men. The blade had gone into his thigh. Deep, but not deep enough to kill him if the bleeding stopped.