Read Chapter 22: The Alliance of Necessity

The wind had teeth in it. Iona pulled Tam’s old wool cloak tighter around her shoulders and watched the road south, where the heather darkened into bruised purple beneath a low sky. She had no plan beyond the next hour, and that hour was already failing her.

Tam shuffled beside her, his face creased with worry. “We can’t stay here. Donal’s men will be watching every hollow.”

“Then where do we go?” She hated the tremor in her own voice. “My father’s door is shut. Lachlan’s is barred. The MacRaes are gone.”

“There are other crofters,” Tam said, but without conviction. “Old friends of your mother’s line.”

Before she could answer, a rider crested the rise ahead. Iona’s heart seized—but the horse was a dapple gray, not the black beast Donal’s men rode, and the figure in the saddle was slender, almost boyish. He reined in twenty paces off and pushed back his hood.

Gregor.

Iona’s hand went to the dirk at her belt. “You’ve got a nerve showing your face.”

Gregor slid down from the horse, hands open. His face was younger than she remembered, sharper, with the look of a boy who had grown up hungry. “I know what you think of me. You’re right to think it.”

“You wrote that letter to Lachlan. You told him I betrayed him.”

“I wrote what I was told to write.” He took a step closer. Tam moved between them, but Gregor stopped. “I’m not here to fight you. I’m here to offer you the one thing you don’t have left—a way in.”

“A way into what?”

“Into Donal’s world.” Gregor’s jaw tightened. “He’s my half-brother.”

The words hung in the cold air. Iona stared at him. “Donal MacAllister is your brother?”

“Donal MacAllister is the bastard son of my father’s second wife. My father was a merchant in Inverness. A good man, by most measures. He made his fortune honestly, kept his ledgers clean, paid his workers a fair wage.” Gregor’s voice turned bitter. “When he died, everything went to Donal—my father never legitimized me. I was the shameful reminder of a first marriage he’d made when he was too young to know better. And Donal, he didn’t just inherit the coin. He inherited the name, the connections, the seat in the merchants’ guild. He took it all and then he took more.”

“More of what?”

“Our father’s reputation.” Gregor met her eyes. “Donal didn’t build his empire with trade. He built it with debts, foreclosures, and forged signatures. He ruined families the way he ruined mine. And I—” He swallowed. “I was useful to him. I was the son no one knew about, so I could go places he couldn’t. Into your father’s house. Into the Campbell lands. He planted me there to watch you both.”

Iona remembered him in her father’s hall, quiet, watchful. She remembered the way he’d looked at her during the wedding negotiations, as if memorizing her every movement. Her blood went cold.

“So you’re a spy,” she said. “And you want me to trust you because you claim to hate your brother?”

“I want you to trust me because I have nothing left to lose.” Gregor’s voice cracked. “Donal found out I’d been asking questions about our father’s will. He sent men to burn the cottage where I kept my mother’s letters. The only home I ever had—that I ever loved—was his mother’s, and my mother raised him for six years before the marriage fell apart. He knows I loved her. He burned it anyway.”

Tam shifted. “The boy speaks true, I think. I saw the smoke from that direction two weeks back.”

Iona studied Gregor. His hands trembled slightly at his sides, and there was a tightness around his eyes she recognized—it was the same look she’d seen in her own mirror since the night she found the brooch in the cave.

“You want revenge on Donal,” she said.

“I want him stopped. Revenge is a small word for what he’s done.” Gregor took another step closer. “You have knowledge. You know about the cave. You know about the land sales. But you have no paper, no proof, and no name that carries weight anymore. Alistair has cast you out. Lachlan has banished you. You’re nothing to them now.”

“And you’re something?” Iona’s voice was sharp.

“I’m a MacAllister.” Gregor’s eyes flickered. “By blood, if not by name. I can walk into Donal’s counting house in Edinburgh. I can open doors you can’t. And I know where he keeps his ledgers.”

The wind gusted, sending a spray of rain across them. Iona pulled the cloak tighter, her mind racing. Every instinct she had screamed caution. But caution had gotten her nowhere. Her father’s confession was in Callum’s hands. The brooch proved her mother’s secret, but no one would listen to a broken betrothal from twenty years past. The MacRaes were scattered. Lachlan thought her a traitor, and Lachlan was the only person besides Tam who knew the full shape of Donal’s scheme.

“What do you want in return?” she asked.

“When this is done, I want the land back.” Gregor’s voice was quiet. “The MacAllister estate. It was my father’s. By rights, half of it should have been mine. I’m not asking for the title. Just the ground. A place to stand at the end.”

“You’d turn on your own brother for a plot of land?”

Gregor’s face hardened. “I’d turn on him for the truth. He murdered our father—I’ve suspected it for years. Poison in his tea, a slow decline, the doctors paid to look away. And I told myself I was wrong until he burned my mother’s letters.” He looked at her, and for the first time, Iona saw something raw beneath the boyish surface. “Your mother died keeping a secret too. Tell me you don’t understand what that does to a person.”

The words hit like a blow. Iona thought of her mother, buried in an unmarked grave, silenced before she could speak the truth. She thought of Tam’s account of that night—the men who returned Donal’s coin with blood still wet on their sleeves.

She made her decision.

“All right,” she said. “A fragile alliance. But know this, Gregor—if you betray me, if this is another trick of Donal’s design, I will see you hanged. I don’t care who your brother is.”

Gregor nodded. “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

---

The rain worsened. They moved off the road into a shallow fold of land where an old shepherd’s bothy still stood, its roof half-caved in but the walls solid enough. Tam built a small fire while Gregor laid out what he knew.

“Donal keeps two sets of books,” Gregor said, warming his hands. “The official ones at the counting house, and the real ones at his private office above the warehouse. He’s careful. No one sees them except him and one clerk, a man named Ross who owes him everything and has nothing to gain from betrayal.”

“So how do we get in?”

“We don’t. I do.” Gregor looked at her. “I know the watch schedule. I know the back stair. I can be in and out in an hour with the ledgers in hand. But I need someone to watch the street and warn me if Donal’s men arrive early. And I need a place to go after, someplace he won’t think to look.”

Iona considered. “The cave. The one on the boundary lands. It’s hidden, and I know the way.”

Gregor’s eyes gleamed with something like respect. “You trust me that much?”

“I trust you to value your own skin.” She leaned closer to the fire. “When do we go?”

“Tomorrow night. The new moon. Donal will be at a dinner with the guild.”

---

They didn’t sleep much. Iona spent the dark hours turning over every word Gregor had spoken, searching for the crack in his story, the lie she was sure must be there. But she found none—or none she could see.

Tam woke her at first light with a face like stone.

“Take a look at this,” he said, and handed her a folded scrap of paper he’d found tucked into the doorframe of the bothy. Someone had written in a quick, bold hand:

*They took the bridge road. Campbell rode out at dawn. A man waits in Edinburgh who knows your mother’s name.*

Iona read it twice. The hand wasn’t familiar. Her eyes moved to the last line: *knows your mother’s name.*

“Campbell rode out,” she said slowly. “Lachlan. He’s left his own home. Why?”

Tam shook his head. “I don’t know. But someone out there is watching you. The question is which side they’re on.”

Iona folded the paper and tucked it into her boot. She had no time for another mystery. But as she rose to gather her few belongings, a cold certainty settled over her: Lachlan hadn’t ridden out for himself. He’d ridden out because he’d learned something, and whatever it was, it was tearing him away from the protection of his own walls.

The question was whether he was hunting her—or hunting the truth.