Liam advanced, prowling forward until he was toe to toe and nose to nose with his brother, whose usual smile had been replaced by a sardonic twist. But Liam was able to look past that. To see what his brother hid behind all his bravado and pride.
There was fear. And perhaps regret, if he looked deeply enough. But love?
“It would be the last mistake ye ever made, little brother, to go to war with me.”
The arrogant smirk returned. “The war would have ended before it even began, Liam. Though she’s a kind and good woman, Philomena Lockhart has secrets. A lass like her could never put her heart in hands like yers. And a man like ye couldna love a woman he didna trust. Ye would dominate her, smother her, and finally ye would break her, fail her, and ultimately ruin her.” Thorne drew himself up to his full height, the eyes he used to charm and disarm so many glittering with unmistakable meaning. “Just like ye ruined Colleen. Like ye failed Hamish. Just like our father broke both our mothers. Have another drink, my laird, ye grow more like him every day.”
Liam’s beast reared like a wild stallion. “Get out,” he seethed.
“With pleasure.” Thorne’s look of disgust preceded his lengthy stride to the door. He wrenched it open, pausing with his hand on the knob. Though he didn’t turn around, he touched his chin to his shoulder, obviously not comprehending how close to death he stood.
“There is treachery in this keep, Liam. Something nefarious is going on right beneath yer nose and ye’re too blind or too proud to see it. Someone’s trying to sabotage ye, to turn those closest to ye against ye. I’d look to my own. I’d be questioning whom I could trust.”
“Believe me, I already am.” Liam’s muscles tensed to the point of breaking. It was as though he turned to stone beneath his skin. His rage was a volcano, the lava dousing him and hardening, building upon itself until it had become a living thing.
“Ye sit on top of a lonely mountain, Laird,” Thorne continued. “Ye’ve fortified it well so ye keep out all yer enemies, and barricade yourself against the screams and blood in your past. But no one else is in there with ye, Liam, and ye’ll die alone. Just like our father did.”
“I said get. The fuck. Out,” he roared. The door closed behind his brother just in time for Liam’s whisky glass to shatter against it rather than the back of Thorne’s skull.
And then he was alone. Alone and seething. Like coals shoveled onto a boiler fire, a myriad of memories, needs, and failings heaped into the flames of his rage, fanning it into something familiar and lethal.
But there was no one here to kill.
Head swimming with the heady rush of intoxicated fury, Liam stared at the flames in his fireplace, the only sound the whoosh of the fire as it devoured the air surrounding it. Would that he could control his own inferno … contain it within a casing of mortar and stone. Feeding it just enough to keep those he protected, those he loved, warm and safe.
Would that it didn’t consume him, this unquenchable rage. That his very flesh wouldn’t burn with it, becoming mottled and red from the force of its heat.
His blood, it boiled. His wounds, they burned. The lashes on his back itched and stung as though flayed open once again.
His head pounded in time to the beating of his heart.
Unable to stare at the flames any longer, or allow his own demons to scream at him through the silence, Liam stalked to the sideboard and reached for more Scotch.
Finding the decanter empty, he surmised that the closest bottle would be in the library.
As he prowled his own keep, it seemed that the castle bent and swayed with malevolent shadows. The shades of his demons waiting impatiently to drag him down to his final judgment. They were behind every tapestry. Slithering beneath the carpets and the cold stones. They were in the rain, hurled at the castle turrets by an unforgiving wind. Lightning sliced through the storm, slashing into the hall and casting a nightmare in terrible white.
The specter of a black-cloaked figure with demon-red eyes lurked not two spans in front of him. The lightning passed, plunging the hall again into darkness.
Liam had a knife in his hand before the thunder shook the stones of the keep. “Are ye the devil come to take me?” he demanded. Or was it the Brollachan seeking shelter from the storm? The hair on Liam’s body lifted with awareness, with warning. The fetid stench of death cloyed about his senses as though the reaper breathed in his direction.
Those eyes. That form. They’d been familiar and yet so utterly foreign.
“I wondered if it would be ye who came to drag me to hell,” Liam slurred, feeling both relieved and unsteady, as the Scotch seemed to release into his blood all at once and cause his world to tilt on its axis.
A high, soft feminine voice permeated the darkness from the direction of the library, along with a gentle but unintelligible masculine reply.
The lightning flashed again, and Liam found himself alone in the hall, his blood pounding through his veins with the force and fury of a blacksmith’s hammer.
Had his sullied conscience begun to conjure apparitions?
“Father?” Rhianna called from the library. “Is that ye out there?”
Liam made the few steps to the library door and reached for the frame to steady himself.
Rhianna and Jani sat across a chessboard from each other. A cup of fragrant tea filled with Indian spices steamed at his daughter’s elbow, and a fire crackled in the hearth.
Jani leaped to his feet and away from the table with all the alacrity of a guilty scoundrel. Rhianna, completely relaxed, turned in her chair and smiled brilliantly.