Page 92 of The Iron Earl

Shifting behind her, Mr. Molson pulled out his dagger. “No?” He pointed the tip of it at one of the little girls. Three at the most, her huge brown eyes, terrified, peeked past her mother’s thick woolen skirts. “Are ye thinkin’ of the children, Evalyn? Consider well what you do next. Save yourself or save the children. It’s your choice.”

She stared at the girl for a long moment, the girl’s fear absorbing into her own.

Her hand shaking, Evalyn took the paper and pencil from the brute’s hand. “I’ll go.”

With a snort, Mr. Molson grabbed her arm, the blade flipping and slicing through the rope binding her hands together.

She set pencil to paper.

{ Chapter 21 }

He tied her wrists back up.

She’d said she would go with him, but it was clear he wasn’t going to trust her more than three steps away from him. That, or the lecherous monster just liked to see her wrists bound.

Maybe he wasn’t as stupid as she’d always thought him.

But he was definitely more evil than she’d ever given him credit for.

He’d sent one man with the note back to Vinehill and left two of his men in the area of the tenants. A constant threat, ready to burn out the families—kill them if she decided she wanted to run.

He knew she wouldn’t set destruction upon them. And no matter how she worked it in her mind, he was right. She wouldn’t choose herself. Wouldn’t try and escape as long as those families were in very real danger from Molson.

She would suffer anything if it meant those children were safe.

She knew it. Molson knew it.

She was trapped.

For as often as his hands paused at her breasts whenever possible as they traveled on the horse, he’d kept his paws off her the past two nights. He’d said if he couldn’t enjoy her exactly as he wanted to—then he wouldn’t at all. They’d stopped at a coaching inn both nights with his three men that accompanied them—with one of them always on guard at the door of the windowless rooms he stuck her in.

The landscape changed as they moved south—less stark hills and rocky terrain, but Evalyn had no idea as to their destination. Molson offered no information, and she refused to ask.

On the second day, she realized Lachlan would have already received her hastily scribbled note. The thought of the rage that would rip through him sent tears stinging her eyes and tore out her already shattered heart.

Or maybe he was already done with her. Maybe she’d pushed him too far in the stable and that was it. He was done with her. Maybe her note was a welcome reprieve for him.

Either way, the divorce would be finalized soon and Molson would force her to marry him.

She had to come to terms with that.

She also had to figure out a way to survive what was next. A way to remove herself so fully from her body, from physical pain, that what little was left of her wouldn’t break.

She’d been good at that once. She could be again.

It would have to start with forgetting all she’d seen and done and experienced with Lachlan. Forgetting that she’d once had hope. Hope that wasn’t misguided. Hope that was rewarded.

And she had to stop thinking about escaping. Escape would mean death to those children. Molson had sworn it.

It was on the third day when they were on the empty road alongside a river that the hairs on the back of her neck spiked. Her hands still bound together, they’d been walking in a grey, cold mist for hours, giving the horses a break from the muddied roads that sucked hooves deep into the muck.

Her look instantly swung up to Molson beside her. He continued to walk forward, his bushy eyebrows drawn together in a wicked line across his forehead. Aside from his wide nose, the man wasn’t ugly, slightly attractive, even, to some misguided souls. But she didn’t spare a thought on his outward appearance, for she knew the monster that salivated underneath his skin.

Her tongue curled up to the roof of her mouth and she immediately admonished herself. She was doing a dreadful job at accepting that his would be the face she would have to live with.

The face that would laugh when he cut her for sport.

The face above her in bed.

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