Highlander Unraveled (Highland Bound Book 6) Read Free Page B

something.
    I made my way around the unoccupied turret. Panic, which had started the moment I found her side of the bed empty, curled deep in my gut, shredding me from the inside out.
    She was gone.
    People often disappeared in the Highlands, but there was only one reason for a person to vanish into thin air and I didn’t want to think about what that meant.
    Fate could not have recalled her.
    I refused to believe it. Refused to allow such a horrifying notion to even take root—but it already had. For, when I’d found out about Emma, wasn’t this the one thing I’d feared the most?
    I approached each guard on the battlements, every guard at the front gates, the postern gate, and the water gate… None had seen her. Murmurings of the castle walls being breached by the enemy sent up a panic. And it wasn’t like I could quell that panic or naysay their assumptions. They didn’t know about time travel, or about Emma’s past. To them, their mistress had been taken, secreted away from the castle by some nefarious criminal.
    “What’s going on?” Ewan approached from the castle, looking harried. The sun was starting to rise, but the shadows on his features were all concern.
    I gritted my teeth and then finally put my voice to work, hearing the way I sounded choked when I spoke. “I canna find Emma.”
    Ewan’s face paled, visible in the dim dawn light. The way his eyes shuttered, I knew he had the same fear as I. Emma was his sister. If she could disappear, it meant he could—or his wife. Hell. Ewan wasn’t even from this time. He’d traveled years ago and never returned—save for a twenty-four hour period.
    “When was the last time ye saw her?” Ewan asked.
    “When she was feeding Saor in our chamber, afore bed.” The two of them had been so beautiful. Her fiery red curls, their sons matching locks. She’d cradled him to her breast, smiling down at the bairn as though he were an angel beckoning her. They were both my angels.
    Ewan frowned. “Do ye think…?”
    He trailed off, but I knew what he was thinking. The same thing as I. Neither one of us wanted to say it out loud for fear it would be true. Giving voice to thoughts often made them more powerful.
    I shook my head. “Nay, it canna be.” I ground my teeth so hard I feared they’d turn to dust, pain pounded through my skull. “Fate canna do this to me.”
    I felt as though someone had shoved a jagged-edged dirk into my chest and was sawing back and forth very slowly at my heart.
    “Fate can do whatever she wishes,” Ewan muttered. He raked a hand through his hair and blew out a breath. He and Emma had been separated when they were both children, a plane crash that she’d thought had claimed her brother’s life, but in fact sent him here to me as a lad. They’d only just found out about each other.
    Fate can do whatever she wishes. Damn Fate to hell!
    That was not what I wanted to hear, that all power and control over the situation had been stripped from me. I liked being in control, needed it, and craved it.
    “I will scour the earth for her before I believe that she’s been taken,” I said.
    Ewan let out a long, downtrodden sigh. “Do ye remember doing the same thing when I went missing a few months ago?”
    I gave a brief, curt nod, pulling my lips back from my teeth and hissing. Nay, nay, nay. She needed to be here. I need her. I love her .
    Ewan regarded me with steady, serious eyes. “It didna help.”
    “Ye’re not helping,” I growled.
    Ewan nodded. “’Haps not. I will go and check with the guards.”
    “I’ve already done it.”
    “I’ll check with those who are asleep then.”
    I could tell he was only going through the motions. Ewan had already determined that Emma had time traveled.
    “Aye. Wake them all. We will check the surroundings of the castle in case one of my enemies has somehow managed to breach the walls.”
    Ewan pressed his lips together, obviously wanting to say more, but he didn’t. He jogged off to do my