Lahat ng Kabanata ng Claimed by my Sister's Fiancé : Kabanata 221 - Kabanata 230

CORMAC POV"You've barely slept. Neither have I, if it helps."Bridie sat across the small fire, her knees pulled tight against the damp chill of the forest floor, methodically drawing a wetstone along the edge of a hunting blade she probably wouldn't need. The rhythmic, metallic rasp of stone against steel was steady, rhythmic, and intentional—a practiced motion to give her calloused fingers something to do besides betray the fine, involuntary tremor running through her knuckles."I keep thinking about the mark," she said, her voice competing with the soft snap of damp pine needles burning down to embers. "The split circle. Rhys said it predates even the original boundary dispute seventy years ago. If that's true, Cormac, whoever is really pulling these strings has been waiting in the dark considerably longer than either of our bloodlines has carried a name in this valley.""Then we're not fighting an old family grudge," I said slowly, leaning back against the rough bark of a fallen

CORMAC POV"The mark on the burned cloth. The split circle. I want you to explain it before we go any further."I said the words before either of us had planted a boot on the first riser of the dais. My tone remained flat, an immovable line drawn across the silver-slick moss.The Warden went entirely motionless, the sweeping folds of the ash-grey cloak settling around his ankles like lead."You have encountered the primordial sigil, then," the Warden murmured, his voice hushed, carrying an ancient resonance that set the tiny hairs on my forearms upright."Twice," I answered, not yielding an inch of ground. "Once on an unburned scrap deliberately pinned beneath the scorched peace banner outside our gates. Once scribbled in iron-gall ink along the margin of an unsealed ledger, drawn by a Mackinnon ancestor long before either Bridie or I had drawn our first breath.""That fractured circle predates the founding of this court by a considerable measure," the Warden replied with agonizing sl

BRIDIE POV"Get behind me."Cormac's voice came out rough, already moving, his heavy shoulder catching mine as he tried to wheel us both toward the perimeter. But the instincts we’d honed through months of ambushes and alley fights were useless here. There was no archer in the gallery, no assassin sliding between the fluted pillars of the chamber. The threat wasn't closing in from the dark; it was already here.The red light didn't come from any direction we could put our backs against. It rose from beneath the dais itself, from the stone we were still standing on.It leaked upward through the hairline fractures in the slate, sluggish and thick as uncoagulated blood. The ancient, pale limestone of the High Seat hissed where the luminescence touched it, the ceremonial dust of a hundred neglected seasons scorching into black soot. The heat didn't hit our faces—it radiated through the soles of our boots, a subterranean thrum that vibrated up through the marrow of my shinbones until my tee

BRIDIE POV"No."The word left me before I'd decided to say it, ripped from my ribs by an instinct far older than the blood feud poisoning our houses. My boots scraped against the gritty limestone, the sound loud and fragile against the vault’s stifling hush. The cold, leaden weight in my stomach curdled into sickening certainty as I looked at the man who had taught me how to string my first shortbow, the man who had sat at my father's right hand through every endless council of war.My uncle's borrowed face twisting with the ancient thing's irritation rather than any expression I recognised as his own.The sneer dragging at his mouth was wrong. Uncle Alistair smiled with his eyes, a dry, crinkled squint that usually meant he was about to grumble about harvest tallies or tease me about my sloppy footwork. This grimace was flat, devoid of human warmth, stretching his cracked lips so taut over his teeth that a thin bead of dark blood welled at the corner of his mouth. The blackened vein

BRIDIE'S POV"The soldiers are already three miles out. If we don't reach them before dawn, this becomes a war neither of us can talk our way out of."I said it while half-running down the path that had led us here, Cormac and my uncle close behind, the Warden's ground already fading back into ordinary forest at our heels.The pre-dawn mist hung thick between the pines, clinging to the damp woolen folds of my cloak like greasy spiderwebs. Every breath tore through my throat, icy and needle-sharp, flavored with pine resin, rotting mulch, and the fading, coppery stench of the thing we had just forced out of Alistair’s marrow. Behind us, the ancient archway of limestone pillars—which had stood towering and ageless minutes ago—shrank into mere moss-covered boulders, silent and slumbering once more beneath the wild brush. The supernatural heat that had baked our faces on the dais was gone, replaced by the bitter, shivering reality of an autumn morning in the Scottish borders."They'll list