Highland Slayer: A Scottish Medieval Romance

Book 3: Part of: Highland Legion (3 books)

by Kathryn Le Veque

Genres: Historical Romance; Medieval Romance; Scottish & Highlander; Ancient World Romance

Synopsis

Lucifer's Legion is back!!

A fighting order of nuns... a mysterious woman from the sea... and a sexy Highlander come together in this blow-out adventure romance set in Scotland!

Love enemies to lover tropes? Love strong women tropes? Then this is the tale for you!

Scotland is awash with legends, but there is no greater legend than the warrior nuns of St. Margaret's of Loch Doom. Founded by an order of persecuted nuns, they learned to face persecution with rage. They learned to fight those who condemned them and, two hundred years later, all of Scotland knows about the Na Ban-Teamplairean...

The Templar Nuns.

The Templar Nuns are also protectors of women and children, of those who cannot help themselves, giving the nuns a paradoxical existence. They are good to the poor and the needy, but they fight like men. But one thing is for certain – males who cross their paths don't often survive.

Estevan dun Tarh is well aware of these fighting nuns as he travels from one of his brother's home back to the highlands. He's aware of them because in order to get to the gambling house known as The Butchery in a nearby town, he must pass through lands belonging to St. Margaret's. He ends up going well out of his way, traveling along a lonely beach, until he comes across a woman in distress. Given that the order of St. Margaret's helps women and children, he has little choice but to deliver the injured woman to their doorstep.

And nearly gets his head cut off in the process.

Anaxandra dun Muir is part of the Templar Nuns. An orphan, she has lived with them since birth. It is Anaxandra, or Annie as she has known, who nearly kills Estevan, but soon enough, his mission becomes clear. But what isn't clear is the identity of the mysterious woman, who speaks in a different tongue. She continues to draw images of serpents in the dirt, trying to communicate, but by the time Estevan and Annaxandra realize what she is saying, danger has already arrived.

And it is deadly.

Join the most mismatched couple in Scotland as they discovery of the mysterious woman takes them through myths and legends, heartache, and finally a blazing romance that cannot be quenched.

It's all hands on deck in the wilds of Scotland this epic Historical Romance!

Read in KINDLE UNLIMITED!

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Release date: October 17, 2025

Publisher: Kathryn Le Veque Novels, Inc.

Print pages: 292

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

South of Dumfries, Scotland

Near the mouth of the River Nith where it meets the Solway Firth

“How far are we from the butchery?”
Though it seemed like a normal question, the answer wasn’t quite so simple. In fact, at
the head of a group of several knights and warriors plodding their way through Galloway,
the only answer the man received was to have someone hissing dramatically at him.
“Hush!” A man with a heavy Scots burr waved a sharp hand at his English-accented
friend. “Keep yer voice down.”
The English knight frowned. “Why?” he said, looking around the green and lush, sloping
landscape that surrounded them. “Christ, Estevan, who is to hear us? There is no one
around. Probably for miles. You insisted on taking this shortcut to the nearest town, so I
will once again ask you—where is the butchery?”
Estevan dun Tarh hissed again, only this time he was joined by his younger brother,
Kaladin, who went so far as to continue hissing and waving his hand in a silencing gesture.

“Quiet, Titan de Wolfe, if ye know what’s good for ye,” Estevan said with severity. “And
it’s not ‘the butchery.’ ’Tis called The Butcher’s, and if ye say it too loud, my mother will
hear ye and she’ll rain hell and fire upon us.”
Titan, heir to the Earldom of Warenton, grinned at Estevan’s statement. “Your mother is
back at Ashkirk Castle,” he said, jabbing a big finger behind them. “She has sent us on ahead
to your family seat of Hydra Castle and will join us there in a few weeks because she’s not
finished enjoying the summer at Ashkirk yet. And do not forget your father’s new
acquisition of Hollee Castle to the north. That alone should have your mother in good
spirits because it means more income. She’ll not care about a gambling house.”
“Have ye met my mother?” Estevan said incredulously. “If ye have, then ye wouldna
make such a statement.”
Titan shook his head, amused at the fear demonstrated by a grown man. “The point is
this—your mother is nowhere near us,” he said. “I promise, she will not hear us speaking of
The Butcher’s.”
Hydra Castle, or “the Hydra,” was the dun Tarh stronghold, far north in the Highlands of
Scotland. It would take them a few weeks simply to reach it, and Lares dun Tarh and his
wife, Mabel, were at their Lowlands property of Ashkirk Castle they’d spent most of the
summer. Even now, they were days away from it, but that wasn’t good enough for Estevan.
He was certain she could still hear them.
In fact, it was Kaladin who seemed to have the fear of God cast into him with that very
same thought. No matter what Titan said, the man was living a fool’s dream. He started to
groan and shake his head.

“Ye dunna know my mother,” he said. “Mabel dun Tarh knows all and sees all. Most
especially, she hears all, and if she had the smallest hint that we’re going tae The Butcher’s,
she’d fly over from Ashkirk and beat us all like incorrigible children. Dunna think she’ll
leave yer de Wolfe arse untouched, for ye would be wrong if ye did. She’d blister ye just like
the rest of us.”
Titan, an enormous man whose name suited him, started laughing. He turned to the men
behind him, both English knights, to see that they were laughing also. He’d known them
both all his life, much as he’d known the dun Tarh lads most of his life. They were all
intertwined because their families had all married into one another over the years. Mateo
de Wolfe, off to his left, was a cousin because their grandfathers had been brothers, and
Rodion de Velt was a cousin to the dun Tarh brothers, as their mother, the infamous Mabel,
was a de Velt.
And that was why the three English knights were heading north.
It was a sort of exchange program that the northern English warlords had with the Earls
of Torridon in the Highlands of Scotland. Lares dun Tarh, father to Estevan and Kaladin and
several other sons, also happened to be the Earl of Torridon. They were deeply
intermingled with the Houses of de Wolfe and de Velt, and there were times when Lares
would send his sons south to spend time with the English houses, gaining experience, and
then the English warlords would do the same and send some of their sons and men into the
Highlands to gain experience and learn about the Scots.
It was something they’d been doing for several years, ever since Lares and Mabel’s first
son, Aurelius, went to foster with the House of de Wolfe. Because Mabel was English,

meaning their sons were half English, Lares had given his sons the choice of training as
English knights, but so far, Aurelius was the only one who had actually earned his spurs.
However, Kaladin, now coming of age, was a permanent fixture at Castle Questing, seat
of the House of de Wolfe, and he had decided to earn his spurs also. Baby Bull, as Kaladin
was called, was already an astonishingly good knight and had inherited the de Velt trait,
through his mother, of two-colored eyes. One eye was brown while the other, though
mostly brown, had a big spot of green in it. That gave him a most fearsome appearance.
A de Velt with a thick Scottish brogue.
But today, Kaladin as well as his brother and three cousins were heading home to Castle
Hydra before the winter set in. Castle Hydra was seat of the dun Tarh clan, and they were
mostly eager to go home, but it was Kaladin himself who had come up with the idea of
visiting one of the most notorious gambling dens in Scotland, a place called The Butcher’s,
on their way north. They would be passing so close to it that it was truly a crime—Kaladin’s
own words—not to spend a little time there. Games were good fun and Kaladin had a love
for them.
So, here they were.
Big, strong men hoping their mummy wouldn’t find out what they were doing.
The Butcher’s had quite a history. It had started off as a gathering of friends in an old
cottage on the outskirts of Dumfries, men who wanted to gamble and drink away from their
women, but the news of the place had spread and others had joined in. The little cottage
had other rooms built onto it, stone chambers for more games and more men, which would
seem surprising given the somewhat remote location, but it seemed that no man in
Scotland—or northern England, for that matter—gave a second thought to traveling a few

days to such a place for the opportunity to gamble and drink and perhaps even seek
companionship from a lass or two. It had become that kind of a place, too.
The name The Butcher’s had come from the man who had founded the establishment, a
member of the Douglas clan, because when his wife asked him where he was going as he
headed out for the day, he would tell her “the butcher’s.” Now, the group of five warriors
were heading for The Butcher’s in spite of the fear of Mabel lurking around the nearest
corner.
Some things were worth the risk.
“If I am jeopardizing my arse, this had better be worth it,” Titan said dryly. “But we
should be in Dumfries by now. Where are we, Estevan?”
Estevan looked around, to the mouth of the River Nith to his left and the endless green
sea beyond. “This was supposed tae be a shortcut,” he said. “If we take the main road, we
end up passing through Archibald Douglas’ lands, and he and my da are not friendly, so this
is a shorter route.”
“It’s not a shorter route,” Kaladin said. “But it’s a safer one.”
Estevan merely shrugged to his brother’s comment. “We should be in Dumfries by
nightfall if we keep up this pace,” he said. Then he looked off to the west, where dark clouds
were gathering over the waters. “Mayhap we should move a little faster. I dunna think any
of us wishes tae be caught in what will soon be upon us.”
He indicated the clouds in the distance. Rodion, who had been bringing up the rear of the
group, reined his big horse over toward the mouth of the river where it met with the
Solway Firth. Far to the south was England and further to the west was the Irish Sea and

Ireland. A cold wind blew off the water, smelling of salt and sea, rippling through the sea
grass that Rodion was treading upon.
“’Tis vast here,” he said, reining his horse onto a small rise overlooking the river. “One
gets a great sense of earth and sky, of air and existence. I’ve always thought that about
Scotland.”
Estevan, who had pulled his horse to a pause, turned to look at him. “Ah,” he said. “The
great poet speaks. Paint us a picture with yer words, Rody. Ye’re good at that.”
Rodion smiled faintly at his cousin. Much like Kaladin, he, too, bore the de Velt trait of
two-colored eyes, only his were oddly less pronounced than Kaladin’s were. He was a direct
descendant of the great Ajax de Velt through his eldest son, Cole, but he didn’t have nearly
the pronounced eye difference that Kaladin had. It was true that Mabel also descended
from Ajax de Velt through a daughter, but in their family, the women seemed to be far less
affected by the eye-color trait than the males.
Something else Rodion possessed was the soul of a poet, something quite foreign to any
male with the de Velt name. The de Velts, as a rule, were fearsome warlords. Ajax de Velt
had been the most feared warlord in all of England during his lifetime, so the name was
associated with death and warfare. But Rodion, for all of his skill as a knight, had a side to
him that some men could consider weak.
As Estevan said, he painted pictures with words.
“I simply mean that everything in the world comes together in this space,” he said,
indicating the river as it ran into the sea. “The water, the sky, the earth, and the air. A place
like this gave birth to men, to the world we live in. It’s where Time and God collide. I feel
reverence here, I suppose.”

“Ye should,” Kaladin said. “God is here, for certain.”
Rodion looked at him. “What do you mean?”
Kaladin cocked a dark eyebrow. “The most infamous abbey in Scotland is nearby,” he
said. “Ye should also feel fear as well as reverence.”
“Fear for what?”
“Na Ban-Teamplairean.”
It took Rodion a moment to realize what he was saying because he wasn’t as good with
Gaelic as others were. He was literate and educated, but he’d never taken to the Gaelic
language. In fact, it was Mateo who spoke first.
“The Templar nuns,” he muttered. “Bloody Christ, are those abominations around here?”
All eyes turned to the enormous knight with dark hair and pale eyes. His grandfather,
Patrick de Wolfe, had possessed legendary height. There were few men taller in England, if
not the entire world, than Patrick had been. Mateo was a twin, son of Patrick’s eldest son,
Markus, and he’d lived a rather solitary life. He’d been married, once, but he’d lost her in
childbirth about twenty years earlier and had never remarried. He was a bit of an enigma
because he kept to himself for the most part, a quiet man who was highly intelligent. That
meant that when the man spoke in that deep, raspy voice, men listened.
Like now.
He always sounded ominous.
“Aye, they’re around here,” Kaladin said, pointing off to the east. “St. Margaret’s of Loch
Doom is that way, over that rise.”
Mateo’s gaze moved in that direction. “I hope we do not run into any of them.”

“They keep tae themselves,” Kaladin said. “I dunna think they go beyond their walls,
seeking trouble.”
“I’ve heard stories about them,” Titan said. “They were founded by a woman whose
husband had been killed in battle. Legend says she prayed for forty days and forty nights
before St. Margaret appeared to her and told her to start a fighting order of widows in her
name.”
“And she had forty widows right away, one for each day she prayed,” Mateo finished. “I
know because I’ve heard the legend, too. We all have. True or not, that was over two
hundred years ago, and now all they have are a group of nuns who have been known to
fight battles when their sanctuary is threatened. They have a foundling home there, you
know. They protect those children rabidly.”
“I heard they never let the children leave,” Kaladin said. “At least, they never let the girl
children leave. They throw the lads tae the wolves when they come of age, but they keep
the girls.”
“Then they must have a lot of girls,” Titan said. “My father said he saw the Douglas
summon them for a border skirmish against Carlisle Castle, and he said the nuns fought like
men. They were more effective, too, because a knight is sworn to protect not only the
church, but women in general. Their appearance caused a great deal of confusion because
no one wanted to engage them.”
“It probably caused some deaths, I would imagine,” Mateo said.
Titan glanced at him. “You disapprove of a fighting woman?”
Mateo shook his head. “They have their place,” he said. “I was married to a woman who
took up arms, and she was fearsome. I have great admiration for a woman who can fight.”

“Then why disapprove of the nuns?”
Mateo frowned. “Because they are nuns,” he said. “They are women of God. It seems to
me that if they can be summoned by a clan to fight for their cause, then they are not fighting
for God. They are fighting for men. There is something inherently self-serving about that.”
Titan didn’t have an argument for him. He couldn’t disagree that nuns, by virtue of their
holy vows, probably shouldn’t take up arms, and most especially not fight other men’s
battles. He was about to say so when they heard a shout from Rodion, who was still riding
on the crest overlooking the river. When everyone turned to look at him, he pointed toward
the water.
“There!” he shouted. “There is something there!”
He spurred his horse toward the river and they lost sight of him. That brought Titan and
Mateo charging after him with Estevan and Kaladin bringing up the rear, all of them
thundering over the rise only to see a dirty, rocky belt that ran alongside the river as it
dumped into the firth.
But there was indeed something on that sand.
A body.
Rodion was the first one on the scene. He dismounted his horse swiftly and went to the
body, bending over it but not touching it. He was a man with a knowledge of healing, so he
knew what to look for. As he was visually inspecting it, as it was lying face down, Titan and
Mateo arrived. They hit the ground running, so to speak, moving swiftly to the body and
kicking up sand as they went. Titan reached down and yanked on an arm, pulling the figure
onto its back.
It was a woman.

Her face and hair were covered with dirt and filth. Rodion knelt beside her, feeling on
her wrist for a pulse to see if she was even alive. She certainly didn’t look like it, pasty and
gray like the dirt surrounding her.
“She’s alive,” he muttered. Then he lifted his head and looked around, up and down the
riverbank. “Is she alone? Does anyone see wreckage of any kind?”
That had the knights looking around, heads bobbing. “Nay,” Estevan said. “No wreckage
that I can see. Kal, ride down the bank, toward the sea. There may be something down
there, sunken so we canna see it.”
Kaladin was already heading in the direction his brother had indicated. He and his
cream-colored stallion raced down the riverbank. As he headed south, Estevan brushed
some of the dirt away from the woman’s face and nose, making sure it wasn’t impeding her
breathing. She was wet, but he didn’t have anything to cover her with. In silence, they
waited until Kaladin returned, which was nearly a half-hour. The could see him thundering
back in their direction.
“There’s some wreckage down that way,” Kaladin shouted as he came near, reining the
horse to a rough stop as the animal kicked up clods of dirt in its haste. “The tide has gone
out, but I could see a small boat that has been badly damaged. It must be hers.”
Estevan nodded, returning his attention to the woman at his feet. Titan and Mateo were
gazing down at her, also, watching Rodion assess her condition. It didn’t take long for him
to figure it out.
“The woman is near death,” he said grimly. “She will not survive if we do not find
someone to tend her.”

“A physic?” Estevan said, turning his attention northward. “Dumfries would have the
nearest physic, but we are an hour or more away.”
“What about the nuns?” Mateo asked.
Everyone looked at him. “They are a fighting order,” Estevan pointed out. “They dunna
heal.”
But Mateo shook his head. “If they are a fighting order, then they must also have
knowledge of healing,” he said. “I am certain they would not let a male physic touch them
should they be wounded, so it stands to reason that if they fight, they heal.”
His logic was sound. As Estevan sighed heavily, trying to determine what to do, Rodion
spoke.
“How far is the abbey?” he asked.
Estevan gestured toward the east. “Not far,” he said. “A mile or two at most.”
“Then we should put this woman on their doorstep and continue on our way,” Rodion
said. “We cannot simply leave her to die. Let us take her and be done with it.”
It seemed the reasonable course of action, but unfortunately, no one seemed particularly
eager to make the first step. No one wanted to go near the Templar nuns, their fierce legend
perhaps larger than the actual truth. Sometimes things like that happened, when stories
told from man to man took on a life of their own with each successive telling. They’d just
finished speaking about the mysterious nuns of the order of St. Margaret of Loch Doom and
now they were facing the very real possibility of actually having contact with them.
A far different destination than the gambling den.
“Matty, collect the woman,” Rodion said when no one else seemed willing to move. “We
must get moving. We’ll take her to the nuns and then continue on to The Butcher’s.”

“Mayhap taking pity on the lady will erase the sin of gambling,” Kaladin muttered.
“Mayhap it is penitence for what we’re about tae do.”
Mateo heaved the sandy, wet, limp woman over his shoulder. “Then let us get about it,”
he said. “I do not need another stain against my immortal soul. If this will eliminate one,
then I am keen to do it.”
That seemed to make the decision for everyone. They found a ready cause for absolution
for their future gambling sins right in front of them, so no one questioned it. They began to
run for their horses as Estevan helped Mateo get the woman onto his horse. When she was
finally secure and Mateo mounted, the five men made haste for the lair of the Templar nuns.
And for one of them, a distinct date with destiny. ...