Page 42 of Dark Side of the Laird
Squeezing my eyes shut, I hoped I’d wake, because this was surely a nightmare. I was asleep and somehow I ended up here. But I didn’t wake, instead, my surroundings became all the more real as shouts of pain and the lashings of a whip assailed my ears. Just like when I’d seen the scout beaten by Ewan at Gealach months before. A traitor he’d been, and his punishment had been brutal, deadly.
God, was I having a nightmare about that again? I’d thought to be through with them. Through with visions of torn flesh and spraying blood. I stopped dead in my tracks, willing myself to wake, to be done with the nonsense. Nothing happened. I was still standing there. Still shivering, naked in a foreign, dark corridor. The whipping and bellows still echoed.
But somehow, I knew, this wasn’t a nightmare about the scout. This was different. I felt fear settle in the pit of my belly. My heart seized and beat in an erratic pace, and my breaths came quick and shallow as my panic took hold, took control.
Despite how real it felt, I knew this had to be a dream.Only a dream, I mouthed.
Vulnerable as I was, nude, alone in the dark and no idea where I was, taking control of my own situation gave me a confidence I hadn’t felt before. A renewed strength flowed through my veins.
Maybe the only way to wake from this nightmare was to walk through it. It was a possibility that my dreams had something to show me. Some way to cope with Logan being away, or maybe it was the effect of the medicinal teas Agatha had been feeding me. Whatever the cause, I wasn’t going to be able to get myself out of it.
And knowing that, taking control of that, helped me to take another shaky step forward. A single yellow dot of light glowed at the end of wherever I walked. A tunnel? A corridor in a castle?
Holding out my hands to feel for anything—and coming into contact with nothing—I took tentative steps forward, letting each slide of my foot, steady itself before taking another.
The light did not grow bigger, though I walked closer. It was tiny, like a hole in the wall. The screaming had stopped, and the only sound in the black hole where I was, was the pounding of my heart and air as it rushed in and out of my lungs.
When the light looked to be within a foot of me, I reached forward and put a shaking finger to it. A cold, metal rim. My finger pressed into it, blocking the light and I plucked it back out.
A keyhole?
I knelt down, my knees touching the slimy floor, and I pressed my hands to the wall—a wooden door—and my eye to the light.
What I saw had me recoiling in horror, jerking back and losing my balance, I fell flat on my ass, elbows jarring painfully into the stone floor.
No! It couldn’t have been. My eyes were playing tricks on me. I pushed back up and put my eye back to the hole.
My mouth open in a silent scream, I stared through the metal rim, the light blinding me now. I leaned forward again, and looked.
Logan was inside, lying on a tall wooden trestle table. His arms were stretched over his head, strapped down with leather as were his ankles at the opposite end. He was stripped naked, blood oozing from wounds over his chest, abdomen and thighs. Stripes of red marred his skin and deep purple bruising covered the parts that weren’t bloody.
He’d been beaten, severely so.
His face was turned to the other side, so I couldn’t see him. But I’d know him anywhere. He appeared to be alone. The single chamber was lit by torches hung on the walls. Various stands filled with instruments of torture weren’t too far from him, perhaps a reminder to him when he waked of where he was. Long curving daggers, axes, metal hooks, razors, whips of various kinds, saws, things that looked like pliers and clamps. The stuff of nightmares.
But wherewashe?
Where werewe?
Was this the king’s palace? His dungeon? MacDonald’s dungeon? Had he been captured after the Grant warrior had returned to the castle? Or was this just a manifestation of my fears? Logan, strapped to a table, vulnerable, gone from me.
“Logan,” I whispered, fear making me tremble all over. My hands digging into the wood of the door.
There had to be a handle. I had to get to him. Had to help him. I pulled away, frantically searching the surface of the door for a handle with my hands. Even the tiny shaft of light from the keyhole didn’t illuminate the door.
No handle.
It was flat, and the only marking on the door at all was the keyhole and three metal hinges on the side.
And I had no key. No tools to take apart the hinges.
Or did I?
“Oh my God,” I whispered harshly, slapping at my thigh, to the leather tie that held the knife Logan had given me.
I wrenched the handle, freeing the knife from the strap and feeling the leather sag down my thigh. I twisted the end of the handle, trying to remember how Logan had revealed the key to me.
As I worked it, I leaned forward, looking into the light again, praying that what I’d seen before was gone. This was a nightmare after all. A too real nightmare.
