Page 59 of Ruthless, But for Her

“If I return home, it would be akin to condemning you and your brothers.”

“We took you from your ship and will pay the consequences of our actions.”

“Consequences?” Cassia jumped from the bed. “You would accept being hunted and executed for killing my husband. Are you mad?”

The answer to her question was debatable.

“Silas de Grey has been attempting to execute us for many years. He is welcome to continue trying.”

She appeared genuinely angry. “Methinks Ryker is not the only one of you with a wish to die, courting danger in such a way.”

“Perhaps,” was all he said. “The choice is yours. Best you make it quickly, though. The road home grows less safe with each hour. There’s coin involved.”

She paced back and forth, not unlike Ryker did when deep in thought. It nearly made Ashton smile.

“Coin. A bounty on your head. And theirs, too.”

She no longer spoke to him but to herself. With naught more to say now that Cassia had the whole of it, he unbarred the door, took the tray, and bid her bar it behind him.

Theirs, he assumed, meant Ryker’s and Sorren’s.

Ashton smiled at the thought.

He tended to the horses.

Afterward, he spoke to Magge, since the inn had begun to fill, though she’d heard naught since earlier that morn. Staying away from the main hall, working in the shadows, Ashton contemplated his position after finding a messenger, one of the locals with his own mount Magge trusted for such a purpose, and paid him handsomely to take word to The Daisy to warn Ryker and Sorren.

Ashton contemplated Cassia’s choices and his next move. If he escorted her south, few would know him by sight. It was only in the Borderlands that Ashton was likely to be identified. If she chose to stay, they would be forced to remain hidden, a conversation he’d conducted already with Magge, who agreed for as much coin as The Einar had earned in a month’s raiding.

Though it could be useful to remain, the choice was not his.

He stood in front of the bedchamber, knowing precisely how long a woman needed to dress herself. As he thought on it, Ashton had little notion of how long a lady with a maid would take. He’d rarely come across them and even more rarely thought of a noblewoman in any state of undress.

Not so with Cassia, though dwelling on such a matter would not serve him now.

He knocked.

Listening for the bar to lift, he waited for her to pull open the door.

When she did, he’d never wanted to comment on Cassia’s unbound hair more than at this moment. The style was unusual for a married woman, and more so for a widow. The only time he’d seen her hair back was in preparing for sleep when she pulled it over her left shoulder, Cassia’s fingers working quickly, her movements mesmerizing.

Instead, he held his tongue and barred the door once again.

Then he waited.

It was something he did well.

Sitting on the wooden chair, he felt more like Ryker than usual. Walter Crey had taught all three of them, though Ashton took to his “lessons” more than the others. He understood that patience was its own weapon, one that worked best when it never looked like patience at all. Walter had once told him about a young prince, the Lord Edward, the king's son. He’d been held hostage after Lewes, kept near a year until his guards trusted him enough to loosen the leash. He hadn’t fought his way free. He’d waited for the day no one thought to watch him, then simply rode away.

Ashton understood the lesson before Walter finished telling it. He had spent most of his life waiting for Margot to tell him more about his mother than she meant to. She never had. But waiting, he’d learned, told a man more than asking ever would.

Cassia sat on the edge of the bed, fully dressed, as lovely as ever and as if it were the most natural thing in all of Christendom for her to be with him in a bedchamber at the Wild Boar.

“I would stay.”

Three words. All his life, Ashton had waited for three words—ones that might explain why Margot was so forthcoming with Sorren and Ryker’s histories, when she’d lied to him about his own.

Your mother is…