Olwyn had never in her life felt more afraid or more exposed. Somewhere out there, her father lay in wait, and despite Aidan’s hounds losing the scent, Olwyn didn’t doubt for a moment that Rhys was nearby. Her intuition prickled like sensitive skin rubbed with the grittiest sand, and as she hurried across the property her heart pounded a wild tattoo.
Her heart. It had been ripped apart, and now was ragged and tattered. She wondered if Rhys cracked opened the cavity of her chest, would the pumping organ look different? Would it be battered and bruised, as it felt, or thickly engorged with shame and sorrow?
Olwyn heard the whinny of a horse, the answering stamp of another, and soon the carriage came into view. Its black veneer shone in the moonlight, and when the driver opened the door, she saw it was lit within by a hanging lantern. Olwyn climbed inside as Harry stowed her bag.
He ducked in his head, and spoke with the hurriedness of a man who knew a killer could be near. “There’s a lap robe if you need it, and the warming pan should be stocked with coals. If you require anything further, rap smartly on the roof.”
Before Olwyn could reply, he was gone. He closed the door, and the carriage dipped and bounced as the men took their positions. Olwyn grabbed hold of the armrest as the conveyance lurched into motion.
But she pushed down her feelings, as no good could come of wishing for things to be different.
The carriage jounced along at a teeth-rattling pace. She heard the driver spurring on the horses with sharp calls. The wheels squeaked and the floorboards groaned as they rolled on, faster and faster.
Fear built in Olwyn, real terror that was an internal scream. She rapped on the roof as Harry had said to do, but the sound was lost in the noise.
“Stop,” she cried out.
She heard the driver yell ‘yah!’ and the rattling grew louder still as they hurtled through the night. Olwyn fastened her hands on the bench seat, gripping the velvet as she tried to hold herself somewhat steady. The lantern swung wildly on its hook, the oil sloshing over the base until it suffocated the flame, and the interior went dark.
And then she heard a thud, and a man’s scream.
The carriage careened wildly, rocking side to side. Olwyn imagined the crash that would soon come, and wondered what would kill her—the impact, a shard of glass from the window, or perhaps a jagged-tipped spear of wood torn from the wreckage.
A high-pitched whistle pierced the air, and the horses slowed their pace. Olwyn leaned back into the cushion as the carriage slowed. She pulled her dagger and waited, and when the conveyance came to a stop, she crept to the door.
She turned the handle and pushed the narrow door open. Silence greeted her as she emerged; the night air was a chilly slap on her face. Olwyn coughed and gagged, all at once beset by the overwhelming stench of excrement.
Turning, she screamed. There on top of the carriage was her father. Rhys had a slim rope wrapped around his wrists and hands, and he quickly garroted Harry before letting him drop lifeless to the ground.
The other driver’s body was slumped to the side, and in the moonlight Olwyn could see his head was missing.
She gasped and began to sway on her feet, feeling as if she were trapped in a nightmare.
“I stretched a few lines across the road, from tree to tree,” Rhys said gruffly, seeing his daughter’s line of vision. “Took off this one’s head, but only sliced the other through the chest. Too tall for my trap. Had to finish him, else he would have just bled for hours.”
“Murderer,” she managed to choke out.
“Bah! I meant for the lines to knock them off horseback or carriage seat, only so I could take them hostage and ransom them for you, girl. The crazy bastards were going so fast is why this happened. Not my fault.”
Rhys pushed the headless body over the other side, and when the dead man hit the ground, the sound distinctly like a sack of potatoes being dropped, Olwyn bent at the waist and vomited.
“Gone soft, I see,” Rhys said with derision.
Olwyn spat the final, bitter dregs of her sickness onto the ground, and began to slowly back away.
“Get back here, girl. Get back inside the carriage. We’re going home, you and I. We’ve some matters to discuss.”
She didn’t respond, but kept moving back, one step at a time. Her every footfall was an effort, as if she waded through thick sand. Nightmare, her mind whispered.
Rhys hopped down from the bench atop the carriage and began advancing on her. “You know what you are? You’re a treacherous traitor to your own blood, and that makes you not worth a sheep’s fart, if you ask me.”
He drew closer and she saw he was coated in dark smears of what reeked like horse dung. The blood on his hands was black in the moonlight, and a manic smile twisted his face. “Oh, Olwyn, my girl, you should have seen your man looking for me today. They ran all around, their dogs barking and their horses blowing hard.” Rhys laughed and ran a filthy, bloody hand through his wild hair. “A little horse shit was all it took to keep them off my scent.”
The night spread out around Olwyn, dark pockets of moonless shadows that were just out of reach. She couldn’t run to them, for her legs were gravid and thick with fear, rooting her so that just moving became an enormous effort.
“So like your mother. Piebald and strange, ready to run off the first chance you get. Well, didn’t I always tell you that you are a Gawain? Your mother didn’t share my blood, girl, but you do, and you can’t run from who you are.”
Run.
And in that moment she moved like the wind, set free of her nightmarish tether, spurred on by pure fear.
Olwyn ran as fast as she could, legs pumping, heart racing. Each breath became a searing heat in her lungs, and she heard the ragged sound of it in her ears.
Rhys was on her tail. He wasn’t as young or strong, but he was propelled by insanity. He yelled out, “Don’t run into my lines, Olwyn. You’ll only get hurt.”
She kept going, desperate to get out of her father’s reach. She ran and ran. Rhys called out, his voice faltering and broken; she couldn’t hear what he’d said. The gap between them widened, and she was too young and strong to be caught by him.
Olwyn hit something hard and warm, and felt arms go around her. She screamed again, and was once more overtaken by the stench of horse manure.
Drystan laughed. “I’ve wanted you like this for years,” he said. “Hot and breathless and in my arms.”
Olwyn still had her dagger in her hand, but he held her around her upper arms. She slashed at him and managed to slice his thigh. He yipped in pain and she snarled, “Back off.”
She could smell Drystan’s blood mingling with the excrement, and the stench of his sweat beneath both. She gagged as they struggled, and he gripped her harder, trying to subdue her and prevent her from nicking him again with her blade.
Rhys came upon them, his breath like great dragon bursts. “Turn her,” he commanded, and Drystan, like an obedient minion, spun Olwyn around.
Rhys limped along, and when he drew close enough to where Olwyn struggled with Drystan, he pulled his hand back and slapped her across the face.
Pain exploded behind her eyes in blinding starbursts. She cried out and squeezed her eyes shut. She didn’t see the next hit coming, but felt it blast through her cranium. Blood filled her mouth and when he hit her again, it sprayed onto the ground as her head fell to her chest.
He rained blows on her arms and shoulders and belly, screaming all the while, venting his rage, repeating the same four words again and again, “Traitorous whore, mutinous cunt.”
And then he stopped, and went completely still and silent. Cocking his head to the side, he whispered, “Do you hear?”
Her body and head throbbed with pain, and Olwyn raised her face to his. Well aware of how real the voices were to Rhys, she’d learned the long and hard way not to try to convince him that they spoke for him alone.
“Aye, I do,” Olwyn said softly. “I hear them.”
In
the moonlight, his obsidian eyes glittered. And then he sighed, as if he were suddenly sad and broken. His shoulders sagged. “I don’t want to hurt you, Olwyn. You’re my girl.”
She knew what to say when this version of Rhys manifested itself. “Pappy,” she murmured in a small voice, using the sobriquet she’d given him when she’d been a tiny girl. “I’m sorry you had to hit me.”
“I never liked disciplining you.”
“It’s not your fault. You just want me to be a good daughter, loyal and true.”
“Aye,” Rhys said, but there was a subtle shift in his demeanor that sent a warning through Olwyn’s battered body.
Her mouth was full of blood and bile, but she managed to say, “I’ll be much better now that you’ve taught me this lesson.”
Drystan had her by the upper arms and held her, facing her father. Olwyn tightened her hand on her dagger’s hilt. If Rhys had a weapon, she hadn’t seen evidence of it, unless he still had his length of rope. She shivered inside, imagining the garrote snapping her neck.
Olwyn held the dagger’s point down, hoping that Rhys wouldn’t be coherent enough to realize she had her knife. He might succeed in killing her, she thought, but it would not go easy for him. And at the very least, if he managed to take her back to Wales with him, she wouldn’t have to worry that Rhys would do any more harm to the Mullen family.
“You held a pistol in my face,” Rhys growled as his mood shifted once more to rage. “You locked me in a cell.”
He hit her again, square across the face, this time with a closed fist. The intensity of the blow forced Olwyn’s head back into Drystan’s and the back of her skull crashed into his nose.
Drystan cried out and let go of Olwyn’s arms, cupping his nose to stem the bleeding.
And she was free.
Olwyn took off, racing across the dark, barren fields in the direction of the manor house. She tripped over a log, righted herself, and kept going, ignoring the blood that filled her mouth and the pain throbbing behind her eyes. The cold air tore her throat and burned her lungs. A shout came from behind her but she didn’t dare look back. Her heartbeat became thunder in her ears.
Her foot caught in a trip line, another trap set by her father. She went flying through the darkness and when she hit the ground hard, her breath left her in a whoosh. Shaking off the stun of the impact, Olwyn tried to stem her heavy breathing long enough to listen for footsteps. They were coming, her father and Drystan, grunting as they slowly made their way to her, two older men out of shape and aware that traps lined the grounds.
Scrambling to regain her feet, she gasped. “My dagger,” she whispered. She’d lost her grip on the hilt when she’d fallen.
Feeling around on the frigid ground, she crawled on hands and knees, her fingers brushing desperately over the dormant grass.
Rhys and Drystan grew closer.
Fear stabbed icy spears into her bowels. Visions of Chase passed through her mind, and she pulled her pistol from her belt, where she’d jammed it at the small of her back. One shot. Two men. And murder forever on her conscience.
So be it.
Off to Olwyn’s left she saw a cluster of bushes and trees that led toward the untamed woods, dark clumps of blackness in the moonlight. She swiftly began to crawl toward them, keeping her belly low on the ground. As she moved she heard the distant rumble of horses, felt the vibration in the earth beneath her chest.
Aidan.
She envisioned the decapitated driver who’d had the misfortune of moving swiftly beneath one of her father’s lines, and she couldn’t help but see Aidan murdered in the same way. Her blood, cold with fear, began to heat with anger that her father could be so cruelly calculating, so heartlessly heinous. The fury fueled her, and so she fed it until it became rage.
And then she saw the distant glitter of her knife’s blade, winking coolly silver as it caught a shaft of moonlight. Olwyn scrambled across the ground like a scuttling crab, her breath coming in short bursts as blood leaked from her mouth and nose.
The hoofbeats grew closer, and Olwyn reached her dagger with relief, grabbing the familiar hilt into her fist before crawling further into the shadows. Crouching, she wiped her face with her sleeve and waited, watching.
Three men on horseback rode into Olwyn’s view, and though they were garbed in black and cloaked in night, she knew Aidan was one of them. They moved with caution, their heads down and close to their horse’s neck, keeping to the wide-open spaces where the traps were not so easily set. Olwyn felt a tiny bit of relief when she saw their posture. They must have seen her father’s traps and were taking heed.
Olwyn’s eyes, well accustomed to the darkness, saw the shape of rifle’s muzzles protruding forward, and she knew they’d come prepared for violence.
A shot rang out, and Olwyn strained to hear something, anything. Another rifle barked, and the reek of cordite reached her, a hot, angry scent that hung in the air.
The men on horseback drew closer, close enough that Olwyn could have called out, but she held silent, knowing that distractions could kill.
And then she saw him come from behind the mounted men. Rhys emerged from a shadow with two pistols in his hands. He paused and took aim, and Olwyn reacted.
She stood, and cried out, “No!” Her dagger left her hand, turning over and over again in a winking arc. Rhys turned at the sound of her voice, and the knife missed its aimed target, his chest, and instead took Rhys in his left arm, high and near the shoulder.
He screamed out an obscenity, dropped one of his pistols, and tried to pull out the knife.
The riders wheeled their horses around, and one broke free and came thundering toward her. Olwyn waited, and when Aidan drew near, she didn’t need to look into his face to see his anger.
She took his proffered hand and let him swing her up into his lap, his hard, hot body like an unwelcoming wall that she slammed against as she settled into the saddle.
“So much for your vows,” Aidan snarled. “You didn’t last the night.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Aye. I don’t, and I never will.”
Rhys had given up trying to pull the dagger out as the riders approached him. He took off at a run, heading toward the woods, clutching his wounded arm to his side. Olwyn glanced all around, searching for Drystan but not seeing him. Coward, she named him, fleeing the moment he was outnumbered.
Momentarily sheltered in a tangle of trees and bushes, Rhys turned and raised his pistol. Olwyn could see that his hand shook, and knew he was badly injured. Not a moment’s pity moved her.
“It’s me you want,” Olwyn cried out, and she raised her own pistol and took aim. “You’ve killed enough innocents.”
She heard Rhys’s growl, coming deep and low and in their native tongue, “Cer I grafu.” Go to hell.
Olwyn answered him likewise in Cymraeg, their language that the English called Welsh. “Aye,” Olwyn said. “In due time, you and I both.”
Aidan spurred the horse on beneath them, faster, taking her away from her father. Olwyn swatted at his hands as they held the reins. “Slow down. I cannot aim.”
“Get back here, Olwyn!” Rhys screamed out.
“I must be the one who does it,” Olwyn told Aidan, her voice breaking with emotion she could no longer control. “He is my problem. I won’t have anyone else bear the burden.”
“Quiet,” Aidan commanded her. And his voice was different, cold, harsh, and humming with fury.
“Take me back.” Olwyn swung around, holding her pistol up in a hand that quaked as she tried once again to take aim at her father. The tremble became a wobbling shake that she couldn’t steady. “It must be me who does it.”
A bark of a rifle became her answer, and Olwyn watched as Rhys crumpled to the ground. Aidan spurred his stallion on toward the manor.
“I brought ten men with me in total,” Aidan said, his voice still hard and remote. “You’ll never know which one took his life, and that’s as it should be.�
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Another shot rang out in the night.
A sob welled up from within her chest, a great, heaving cry of anguish.
Aidan’s arm tightened around her waist. “I’m sorry, Olwyn.”
Between sobs she managed to say, “It had to happen this way. He was mad. Completely mad.”
“Aye, but no daughter should have to see such a thing.”
“He was once a good man. I remember.”
“Hold those memories and let them see you through.” Aidan’s tone didn’t change, and it hurt her heart to hear him speak to her in that horrible voice, impersonal, polite, saying all the right things but without the warmth she’d come to know.
Aidan continued, “We’ll have a memorial for him if it’ll please you.”
“No,” Olwyn whispered. She’d be gone by the time dawn lit the sky. No matter that the threat of her father no longer existed for the Mullen family, there was still the matter of Bret Kimball’s journals.
Sobs wracked her chest, pulled from a place she could not name and by a tide she could not stem. She was the last of the Gawains—her mother long gone, her brother dead of disease, and now her father, murdered for his madness. She put her hands over her face, wanting to weep bitter, useless tears, but they would not come.
They approached the manse. In the rear of the house, guards were assembled on the terrace. Golden light from lanterns lit the area in a yellow halo, and men’s deep voices filled the air. Olwyn tried to compose herself, gulping in air in big, trembling breaths. The night and its trials were not over. She needed to find strength from somewhere to do as she must.
The stallion beneath them slowed in response to Aidan’s strong hands tugging on the reins. He helped her to dismount, and as the light touched her skin, she heard his breath intake sharply. His voice came low and deep and full of dismay, “Oh, Olwyn.”
Aidan cupped her chin and gently raised it up, his eyes traveling over her every detail. Once again, Olwyn could only wonder what he saw when he looked at her. Had she been deformed? she wondered. The ugly girl revealed to be beautiful after all, only to have her newfound beauty stripped away?
“That,” he said softly, “is going to hurt precisely like hell in the morning.”
Stealing Midnight Page 34