The woman’s quiet translation was snatched away by the wind as the old man took the coins with an expression of grim confusion. Whispers broke out betweenthe villagers.
Suddenly, Dragan roared and stepped forward, slapping the coins from the old man’s hand and ranting in Gaelic. The villagers turned horrified faces to Thomas.
“Chan eil! Chan eil!”the woman protested, and looked around them frantically. Her unintelligible words continued, and then she looked at Thomas. “He said you want to buy me from my father. To take meas your wife.”
The old man looked suspiciously at Thomas.
“No.” Thomas held out his hand to the old man. “I didn’t—” He looked to Dragan. “That’s not what I said. You understand English—you know.”
“I heard what ye said, but I see more clearly what ye mean,” Dragan growled. “I’m nae stupid Englishman can be lied to, and I’ll nae have ye lyin’ to the folk.”
“Yer the one what’s lyin’,” the woman shouted. She broke out in another stream of Gaelic, ending with a pleading lookto her father.
The old man turned to Dragan with a low query.
Dragan’s expression darkened further, and his fists clenched. “Christian or nae, I’ll nae have it,” he growled. And then he spun on Thomas. “I’ll nae have it, I say.”
He lunged for Thomas and seized him by his wet hair. Thomas ducked, but it was of no use—the man’s reach and hands were mythological in proportion and there was no escape. Thomas struggled, but the cold and the wet, the shock of being abandoned on the tiny Scots isle had sapped his strength, and each blow he landed on the gargantuan man seemed to have as much effect as a child’s as Dragan dragged him further into the village. A sharp blow to the side of Thomas’s head caused colors to explode behind his eyes and his right ear to ring like the giant bells of a cathedral. He went momentarily limp as they passed the last of the houses on the opposite end of the settlement, headed toward a long point of land strewn with boulders that appeared to have been tossed about like toys.
The sea crashed onto the shore with ferocious intensity, as if the water had declared war on Caedmaray, and the beach was the pointof engagement.
“I’ll send ye back meself,” Dragan said, shaking Thomas by his head, stomping through the muck so that great showers of mud splashed from his boots. “The devil take ye!” He plunged into the surf, dragging Thomas with him into a wall of water, and Thomas was thrust beneath a wave, the hand on the back of his neck holding him down as surely as any broken-off granite froma cliff slide.
He struggled against Dragan’s grip, squirmed and writhed and managed to get his face above water between waves togasp a breath.
“She’s mine!” the Scot screamed into his face before he again plunged Thomas beneath the salty, icy water.
She’s dead. As the water pushed inside his skull, Thomas saw Vaughn Hargrave’s face on that dreadful night. The night Cordelia lay in the dungeon, her perfect, white skin slashed open. The night before they would have wed. The night all the secrets—all the shocking confidences of everyone at Darlyrede House—had been discovered.
He had not been strong enough to save Cordelia. He had possessed neither the courage nor the physical prowess to overpower such evil—evil he hadn’t known until that night could even exist.
He had run away and left herat Darlyrede.
He had run away and leftHarriet behind.
He had run from hismother’s clan.
And now he would meet his end on Caedmaray, at the hands of yet another evil man. Dragan wanted the honey-haired woman, and perhaps one day this would be her same fate—Thomas could foresee it now, as the cold waves stole the present from him, showing him with startling clarity the future and the past at once.
There would be no retribution. There would be no truth. Not for Thomas. Not for the woman or the villagers of Caedmaray. He had failed everyone who had ever dared be kind to him, and now there was no one and nothing left. He grew limp.
Hargrave would win, and not ever knowhis accomplice.
Fight, you coward, a quiet, fierce voice whispered inside his frozen brain.For once in your life, fight.
Thomas fought the powerful surge of water and the lack of air to raise his right hand and clutch a handful of Dragan’s inner thigh through the man’s thick woolen trews—the hand that had pulled miles and miles of wet, heavy rope over the summer. He curled his fingertips into a claw and squeezed with all the strength left in his body, imagining that he gripped Vaughn Hargrave’s throat, and he felt the ends of his fingers plunging into warmth.
And then he was free. Miraculously free, there at the end of the earth, and full of a deafening, red rage the likes of which young Thomas Annesley had never before felt.
He erupted from the crashing surf with a gasp, and then a great scream of fury, as he lunged at the goliath Dragan in the same moment the surprised and furious Scot came at him again. But this time Thomas did not try to duck and evade. He met the man’s blows to his head as if he had lost the capacity for feeling, and perhaps he had. For his blows gave no heed to the ones that landed on his own body. Thomas’s inexperienced fists flew faster and faster, striking Dragan’s face, his throat, the tender place behind the man’s ear. He climbed the dangerous weapon that was the islander, every protuberance on his body acting like a lance as he channeled his fury.
Dragan’s blows began to slow. And then a massive wave overcame them both and twirled them together in the storm surge, whipping the heavier man to the rocky bottom, shoving the entwined pair higher up on the shore.
Thomas wrapped his hands around Dragan’s throat, holding him beneath the foamy, detritus-strewn shallows while the man squirmed and kicked beneath him. Thomas squeezed his bloodied fingers, pressed with all his might, in his mind waiting for the bones of Dragan’s neck to finally give, give,giveunder the pressure.
He would stop running now. He would stop running, and stop being afraid.
“Stop! Stop!” The woman’s arms were around his neck, pulling vainly at Thomas. He was like an iron band, bent over Dragan—he could not be moved. He would not be moved.
