Chapter 684: Traitor’s Only Reward (Part Two)
"I can kill this man for you, my lady," Sir Rain said, hopping off the tailgate of the wagon and drawing his sword. He’d already been shamed once tonight when Marcel snuck up behind him with a knife to his throat and another to his back.
Now that there was a bit of extremely dirty work to be done, the last thing he was going to do was let a woman like Lady Ashlynn dirty her hands with it when he was there to do a knight’s duty. Even if he hadn’t been a knight, he still had enough pride as a man to stop a woman from having to kill a man for his crimes. It was already bad enough that, as the most senior noble present, she had to be the one to pronounce the sentence, there really was no reason to make her do this part too.
"Step back and I’ll take care of this," he offered, trying to sound both gentle and gentlemanly as he made the offer, as if he was relieving her of a great burden by taking it on himself.
"No," Ashlynn said, placing her open hand in front of him before he could take a step toward Darragh’s kneeling figure. "All I need is your sword," she added, looking up at him with those frozen emerald eyes in a way that he was only finally beginning to recognize.
He had to remind himself that Lady Ashlynn had taken both Sir Kaefin and Sir Broll’s life and this wasn’t her first time killing a man. At first, he’d thought that she might have killed Sir Kaefin by accident in a struggle and fled the Summer Villa in a panic. By the accounts he’d heard tonight, she’d only defeated Sir Broll by some strange miracle that Eamon attributed to divine providence.
But when he looked at her now, he realized that her eyes were just as hard and cold as Lord Owain’s... The two men she’d already admitted to killing weren’t the only lives she’d taken and the man she was about to kill wouldn’t be the last.
He’d been mistaken, he realized. He’d treated the real Ashlynn Blackwell like she was the giggling imposter he’d met when he visited the Summer Villa with Owain. He’d thought that she was a simple woman, enamored of tales of heroism the way her younger sister Jocelynn often was, and naive about the ways of the world.
The reality, however, was that as much as she might resemble her younger sister or the imposter in the Summer Villa, the real Ashlynn Blackwell was cut from an entirely different cloth. This was a woman who, according to the tale she told, had crawled out of her own grave and then snuck into the Summer Villa in order to find proof of her husband’s infidelity and whatever else she’d been able to learn while she was there.
The more he’d heard tonight, and the simple fact that Lady Ashlynn was here and the woman in the Summer Villa was an impostor, was all the proof Sir Rain needed to understand that Owain still didn’t trust him with all of his secrets. Sir Kaefin would have known a great deal, however, and that might very well be the real reason that Lady Ashlynn had killed him, And then, when Owain unleashed his soldiers and one of his best knights on her, she killed her way out, even spending an entire day evading the pursuit of her husband’s personal huntsmen before killing that very knight in a trial by combat.
No, Lady Ashlynn might resemble her younger sister, but it would be the gravest mistake of his life to treat her like the two women were remotely the same.
All of that flashed through his mind in the instant that he met her frigid emerald gaze as she held out her hand, waiting for him to surrender her sword, and this time, Sir Rain couldn’t summon the slightest objection to what she asked. Inwardly, however, he couldn’t help but wonder... between her and her husband, which of the two was truly more deadly... and what would happen to the world if they ever reconciled their differences?
"Of course, my lady," Sir Rain said as he knelt formally before her, drawing his sword and offering her the hilt. "I should warn you, my lady, I use a heavy blade, and it’s made for someone taller than you," he said. "If need be, I can still..."