Page 141 of Moonlit Nights & Northern Lights
Launch myself at him. Full weight. Knock backwards into heather. Pin shoulders. Lick face-neck-everywhere. Salt-sweat-fear taste.Mine-mine-mine.
“Rory, what the hell—” Muffled under my tongue.
Lick harder. Joy bubbles up. Found him. Safe now.
Laugh breaks from his throat. Deep sound. Good sound. “Get off me, you mad—”
More licking. Can’t stop. Need taste of him. Need proof he’s real.
“Change back,” he snaps, but voice holds fondness. “Now, Rory.”
Should hide to change. But don’t want to be away. Shift here. With him.
Burns through bones. Human skin replaces fur.
Naked. Cold air bites. Buthiswarmth underneath me, solid and real.
“You absolute lunatic,” Maxwell breathed, hands coming up to frame my face. “I thought— When they came out and I couldn’t see you—”
“I heard them talking,” I said quickly, rolling off him to grab my clothes. “Tomorrow night. They’re expecting new arrivals…”
I told him what I’d overheard as I yanked on my jeans, the words tumbling out in a rush. The overtime shifts, the casual way they’d discussed the numbers like livestock deliveries.
“I could smell it so clearly,” I said, pulling my shirt over my head. “The smell of death. Recent. All over the place. That’s what I was tracking, before they came out. I think they might have had bodies in that building. Before they dragged them to their burn site.”
Maxwell pulled the small surveillance cameras from his rucksack. “Let’s get these positioned.”
Nearlyan hour it took us to get the bloody things sorted. Maxwell insisted on testing angles three times, muttering about optimal coverage and battery life whilst I held branches out of the way.
All the while, I couldn’t stop thinking about the castle ruins we’d spotted from the burn site—grey stones jutting from the hillside like broken teeth. Something tugged at my chest, urgent and insistent.
“I want to go check out those castle ruins,” I said.
Maxwell squinted in that direction, then checked his watch. “That’s a bloody long walk, Rory.”
“We’ll go quickly.”
Maxwell was quiet for a moment, considering. “I suppose there isn’t much we can do back there anyway,” he said eventually. “If you think Isla and Dev will still be okay shacked up together in town.”
I snorted. “I wonder how they’re getting on. Dev’s probably trying to charm his way into getting Isla to uncuff him. Sweet-talking her about his journalistic integrity or some bollocks.” I grinned despite everything. “Good luck to him, though—Isla’s too smart for that. She’ll see right through his pretty-boy routine.”
By the time we reached the ruins, it was half past seven. The air carried that crisp bite that promised a cold night ahead, while late spring light mellowed to that particular Highland gold that photographers spent fortunes trying to capture, painting the lake’s surface in molten copper.
“Castle” was generous terminology for what we found. One wall remained mostly intact, maybe twelve feet high with a stubby tower structure jutting from its corner like a broken finger. The other three walls had crumbled, leaving gaps where wind and weather had claimed victory over ancient mortar.
We tossed our bags into the centre of the ruin. I tilted my head back, scanning the intact wall.
There—something metallic caught the evening light, nestled between weathered stones near the tower’s peak.
“See it? Right where the wall meets the tower.”
Maxwell shaded his eyes. “How do we get to it?”
Deep grooves scored the wall at regular intervals—too uniform to be natural weathering. “These look like handholds.”
His hands settled on my waist. “Right, up you go, then.”
Heat burned through my jeans where his palms pressed. That familiar spark zapped between us, making my breath catch.
