Siege of the Heart (Southern Romance 2)

“He fought alongside us before that! He wasn’t a spy.”

“Then why’s he with a spy?”

“Because,” Ambrose Stuart said, managing somehow to look dignified, “I was taking him to stand trial, and he demanded my cooperation in rescuing these two first.”

Knox stared. Jasper stared. Solomon looked at the ground, hands clenched so tightly that his knuckles were a sickly shade.

“Knox, look at this mess.” Jasper twisted his head up to meet the man’s eyes. “I’m not innocent, you know that. Now you know why. If you can condemn Horace for failing to kill a Confederate soldier on the battlefield.”

Knox looked away, but he did not take his finger from the trigger.

“And you saw what the spy did.”

“Stuart just wants revenge on the ones that betrayed the Union. Like he should. Like we didn’t need the help.” Knox’s voice was rough.

“My brother died in an ambush because of men who betrayed their side,” Stuart said. His voice was light, controlled. Almost feminine, Jasper thought. “He deserved a better death. Any man does.”

“That’s why you came to spy on us?”

“I didn’t lead you into an ambush! I could have. I didn’t.”

“Knox, you know the men who fought for the Union believed just as much as we did, and you know there were widows there too and mothers without sons and daughters without fathers. You know this war was nothing from the start. You want to hang me for going? Do it. But you wanted to know why I went, and that’s why: to give a man I thought was Confederate the burial he deserved. I went so that his family wouldn’t wonder forever where he died.

“And him? He told me he turned because he wanted the belief we had. The fact that we fought so bravely? That brought a soldier to us, away from the Union, and you know you’d rather fight alongside Horace than against him.” He waited, h

eart in his throat, while the man considered.

Cecelia had dropped her face into her hands and was rocking back and forth, and Solomon was trying to comfort her.

“No,” Knox said finally.

“No?”

“No. You don’t know how it’s been. You should know, but you’ve forgotten! Because you don’t want the guilt. People are starving, Perry! They’re dying in the fields! Their farms are burned! Their sons are gone! There are families that will never rebuild, and when you could have come back to us, you turned tail and ran. Not just away from the war, away from everything. We’ve suffered too much for you to forget it. Now you’re going to suffer too.” He hauled Jasper up, oblivious to the gasp of pain from bruises, cuts, and cracked ribs. “Move. We’re only a couple of days out.”

Chapter 15

“How could you never have told me?” Cecelia asked Solomon. She was sitting back against a tree, her filthy skirts spread out neatly on the ground.

As if she was courting, Solomon thought. As if she was entertaining guests like a proper lady. The image of her perfectly tilted head and her careful posture was jarring when one added in her bound hands, the dirt on her face, the guards with their guns nearby.

“What do you wish I had told you?” Solomon asked her.

Nearby, Violet was tending to Jasper’s wounds, her fingers deft, probing for genuine injuries in amongst the bruises.

Jealousy heated Solomon’s blood to see her hands all over his friend, and he pushed it back down. He should not be jealous. Jasper did not even know who Violet truly was, and certainly the touch was bringing him more agony than pleasure.

“About how it really was, being away at war.”

“Are you...” Solomon looked at his little sister in horror. Her brown curls were escaping from her braid, and her face was the same innocent face he had always known. Even now, she looked kind. “Are you mad? I would never tell you that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I never, ever want you to know,” he said forcefully. “Never, Cee. I want you to wake up every morning in the same world you’ve always known. Because we kept it that way for you. That’s how I make sense of it, that you’re still alive and living as we used to.”

“But it’s not like we used to,” Cecelia said, frowning. “We have Jasper now, and we knew that something happened to you, that you...” She looked away. “Those things don’t just happen because of nothing. You think you’re protecting us, and maybe you are, from the truth. What you have to understand is, we watched you die every night in our dreams, and until you tell us what’s true and what’s not, we’re going to carry every one of those nightmares.”

Every one of those nightmares is true, Solomon wanted to say, but he did not. He looked over instead to where Violet was leaning close to peer at a wound in Jasper’s side, studying the blood and broken skin alongside the jagged scar when Solomon had nursed the man back to life.