“That is unfortunate.”
“I will endeavor to make it less so, lady.” He extended an arm toward the stairs behind her. “If you would but—”
“I meant unfortunate for you, Aodh Mac Con.”
He stopped, arm in the air.
Her face was extremely pale but fixed and determined. “You have defied the Queen of England, sir. You will be cut down like a sapling.”
He smiled faintly. “Ah, but we are beyond the Pale, are we not, my lady, where wild things hold sway more than queens?”
Something flashed in her eyes. “You do not know your history, sir.”
“I know some,” he said grimly. The bloody, betrayal-thick, grave-laden parts.
“Then you know Rardove holds for England.” Her brown eyes held his steadily as she mouthed such idiocies.
“Not always,” he replied, and even he could hear the steel in his voice.
Her face paled slightly more, but her chin also lifted to the same degree. Fear and defiance, then, in equal measure.
“I am Rardove, sir,” she said boldly, quietly, and foolishly. “And I hold for England.”
He tipped closer. “That has just become a matter for negotiation, my lady. From here on, let us say England shall have to earn Rardove’s loyalty.”
She stepped back, her lips parting. He’d shocked her. The realization caused a small, strange tinge of disappointment in him, that a woman who’d held an English castle beyond the Pale with only ten men would be shocked by such a thing. It seemed somehow…diminishing. But then, Aodh had a taste for rebellion today, and nothing but more of the same would serve.
Still.
A movement at the far end of the hall caught his attention. One of his captains, Cormac, poked his head through a door, caught his eye and nodded, then ducked back out. Good. They’d made it to the north side, which meant they’d secured the entire castle. Rardove was his.
And so where was the hot satisfaction of conquest? The rush of triumph? Where was…everything?
Lying at the bottom of the same cold pit that had marked his life for too many years to count, no doubt. Intrigues, battle, courtly maneuvers, it was all the same: naught.
Apparently even coups of castles did not rise to the level of interest anymore.
He turned his attention back to Katarina. “My lady, if you will—”
All he saw was a blur of green silk, then her small, bunched fist smashed into his face.
The impact, hard and square, landed directly on his jaw.
Caught utterly unaware—as he’d never been before, never, not even when his father had had his head cut off—Aodh reeled sideways. The retreat gave enough room for her to launch herself forward and slam her shoulder directly into his ribs so hard and fast, he grunted and stumbled backward and hit the ground, her on top, twisting like a hellcat.
She jammed a knee into his bollocks, and he doubled over protect
ively, at which point she grabbed one of his fingers and twisted it back almost to breaking, while her other hand—so sinuous and slender it was all but ungrippable—snaked between their writhing bodies and tugged his accursed dagger out of its sheath.
Disappointed, indeed.
With a roar, he lunged up off the ground, lifting her with him, and backed her to the wall. Predictably—dimly, he noted he was already predicting things about her—she wrestled like a firebrand. Whirling hair, arms, legs. Kicking, biting, punching, swiping with the knife.
First things first.
He caught hold of the feminine fist snaked around the hilt of his blade and slammed it to the wall above her head, gripping her wrist so hard she cried out, but she did not, of note, stop fighting. He finally had to pin her to the wall with his entire body, her toes dangling half a foot in the air, their faces pressed together, cheek to cheek, until he stilled everything that was writhing and flailing and kicking on her curving, rampant, berserker body.
Fire burned in his veins, urging him to smash and destroy. He reached over with his other hand and wrenched the blade out of her grip, then tossed it onto the ground behind him.