Read Chapter 10: The Factor's Daughter

The mist hung low over the glen, grey as a widow's shawl, and Callum moved through it like a ghost. His knife was in his hand, not for game but for the quiet terror of the morning—the kind that crept into a man's bones when he knew the ground beneath him had shifted. Fergus's face had been in his dreams again, young and bloodied, and he'd woken with a start, Duncan's name half-formed on his lips.

He'd meant to go straight to the gaol. To face his brother with the truth of what he'd become. But the army needed meat, and Thorne had made it clear that a hunter who didn't hunt was a hunter who'd outlived his usefulness. So here he was, knee-deep in bracken, scanning the treeline for a stag that would never come.

It was a shout that stopped him. A woman's voice, high and cracked, carrying through the mist from the direction of the village. Callum sheathed his knife and moved.

The crowd had gathered at the edge of the crofting land, where the old MacInnes cottage had stood before the fire took it. Now it was a blackened skeleton, beams like charred ribs against the sky. And in the middle of it, on her knees in the ash, was Annabel Thorne's maidservant—no, not a maidservant. The factor's daughter herself, though you wouldn't know it from the state of her. Her dress was torn at the shoulder, her hair loose and wild, and she was clutching at the dirt as if the earth itself might give her comfort.

"Gone," she was saying, over and over. "Gone, gone, gone."

Callum pushed through the onlookers. "What's happened?"

A shepherd he knew—old Angus, whose son had died at Culloden—caught his arm. "The lass went out to gather herbs at dawn. Found this." He gestured at the cottage. "And her father's men gone. The factor's been taken ill, so she came alone. But look there."

Callum followed his gaze. In the soft earth before the cottage door, churned by boots and the scrape of something heavy, was a pattern he knew well. Three parallel lines, cut deep, with a fourth crossing them. The mark of the Broken Thistle—a splinter faction that had broken from Rab's command months ago, too wild and too bloodthirsty for even the rebels' taste.

"Rogue," Callum said, the word bitter on his tongue.

Annabel looked up at him, and her eyes were red-rimmed but fierce. "You're the hunter. The one who tracks for the English."

"Aye."

"Then find her." She staggered to her feet, and he saw that one of her hands was wrapped in a blood-stained rag. "They took my sister's locket. It was all I had left of her. They took it, and they'll sell it, and—" Her voice broke, then hardened. "Find her, and I'll make sure my father knows it."

Callum studied her. The factor, a hard man named Whitmore who'd come north with Thorne's detachment, had a daughter? He'd heard nothing of a sister. But the locket—that was a thing a man could track. "Where was she taken from?"

"Here. This cottage. We'd come to see if any of the MacInnes family had survived the fire. Charity work, my father's orders. And then—" She pointed to the treeline behind the cottage, where a narrow path wound up into the hills. "They dragged her that way. I tried to follow, but they had horses. I'm not a fool; I know I can't outrun them."

Callum crouched, studying the ground. The tracks were clear enough—three riders, one horse carrying double, heading northwest toward the high passes. But something caught his eye. A glint of metal half-buried in the ash. He reached down, fingers closing around a small silver locket on a snapped chain.

He pried it open. Inside, a lock of dark hair. And on the inside of the lid, etched small but unmistakable, the mark of the Broken Thistle.

"They wanted this found," he said slowly. "They left it where someone would look."

Annabel's face went pale. "Why would they—"

"To send a message." He pocketed the locket. "And to set a trap."

He should walk away. That was the smart thing. The rebels had their own war, and this rogue faction was a cancer on both sides—Rab would be glad to see them scattered. But if Callum could bring back the factor's daughter, he'd have leverage. Thorne would owe him. The leash on Duncan might slacken.

But it was her face that decided him. Annabel, fierce even in her terror, kneeling in the ashes of a dead family's home, clutching at a locket that would bring her nothing but grief.

"I'll find her," he said. "But I need you to go back to the garrison. Tell Thorne—"

"No." She set her jaw. "I'm coming with you."

"Out of the question."

"My sister is out there. The factor's daughter blood—" She winced, and he realized she'd almost said something else. "I will not sit idle while you traipse through the hills at your own pace. I know their likely hideouts. I've studied the maps."

"Studied maps," Callum repeated, incredulous. "You're a lass with a cut hand and no weapon. You'd be dead before sundown."

"Then teach me." She stepped closer, and there was something in her eyes that gave him pause—a steel that did not belong to a factor's daughter. "Teach me to move the way you move, and I will keep up. And when we find her, I'll be the one to talk my father out of burning every croft in this glen to the ground. You need me, hunter. Whether you know it or not."

Callum stared at her. The mist was thinning, and the first pale sun was breaking through, catching the tears on her cheeks and turning them to diamonds. She was young—younger than Duncan, maybe—and she was afraid. But she was not lying. He'd spent enough time reading men's faces to know when he was being told the truth.

And yet. There was something about her story that itched at him, the way a splinter itches beneath the skin. Her sister. The locket. The Broken Thistle's mark, placed so carefully where he would find it.

He thought of Fergus, dead in the mud. He thought of Duncan, sitting in his cell with his careful lies. He thought of Rab, who'd promised him a trap that would end in British blood.

"Your name," he said. "Your real name."

She hesitated. Then: "Annabel Whitmore is the name my father gave me. But my mother was a MacInnes. This was her cottage that burned."

The ground shifted beneath him again. The MacInnes family had been known throughout the glen—known for one thing above all. They'd been couriers for the rebellion. And their youngest son had been caught and hanged three years ago, after a message had gone astray.

"I'd heard the MacInnes line was dead," he said carefully.

"My brother hung. My mother died of grief. My father—" She swallowed. "My father remarried. A factor's daughter is a useful thing to be, if you want to live."

Callum looked at her, at the steel in her spine, at the locket in his hand with its rebel mark. She was no innocent, this girl with the factor's name and the rebel's blood. She was a weapon, waiting to be aimed.

And she knew where the rogues were hiding.

"You'll do exactly as I say," he said. "When I tell you to run, you run. When I tell you to hide, you hide. And if you disobey me once, I'll tie you to a tree and come back for you when it's done."

A smile flickered across her face, quick and sharp as a blade. "I've been hidden in plain sight my whole life, hunter. I think I can manage." She gestured toward the hills. "They'll have taken her to the old MacLeod hunting lodge, beyond the second waterfall. It's abandoned, but the roof still holds, and there's a spring nearby. It's where my brother used to meet his contacts."

Callum nodded, the plan already forming. He'd go in alone, draw them out, use the terrain. And when he brought the girl back, he'd have Thorne's gratitude. He'd have access. He'd be one step closer to pulling Duncan from that cell.

But as he turned toward the hills, Annabel's hand closed around his wrist.

"You should know," she said, her voice low, "that the men who took her were not the only ones at the lodge. I heard them speaking as they rode past me. They were waiting for someone. A messenger. Coming down from the north with word from the rebellion's heart."

Callum went still. "What messenger?"

"I don't know his name. But they called him the Red Squirrel. And they said he'd be carrying a death list—names of every man who'd betrayed the cause. They mean to have their own justice before the snows come."

Callum's blood ran cold. The Red Squirrel. He'd heard that name before, whispered in rebel camps, attached to a man who moved like quicksilver and never lingered. If the rogues were waiting for him with a death list, there was a chance Duncan's name was on it. There was a chance Callum's own name was on it.

He looked at Annabel, and saw that she knew exactly what she'd just told him.

"Take me to the lodge," he said. "And pray we're not too late."