He’d been wrong.
Nothing would silence the pirate but her death...or his.
Hurtheven shook his head. “If you feel guilty, youshould.”
“I’mdead!”
“Stoneis dead.Youare very much alive. Go”—Hurtheven shoved again—“home.”
“Hit me again and Iwillhit back.”
“Good,” Hurtheven replied. “Violence is the only thing you understand.”
Hurtheven hadnoidea.
“Coward,” Hurtheven scoffed.
The buzz’s pitch heightened—feverish, unbearable. The red spots behind his eyes merged into blinding rage.
With a guttural roar, Cheverley charged. He collided with Hurtheven, and for an awful, timeless moment, both were suspended in air. Then, they hit a patch of muddy earth in a tumbling, pummeling mass of muscle and sweat.
Hurtheven pinned him. But he didn’t see Hurtheven. He sawher.The pirate witch.Calypso.
C’est bien que tu ne puisses pas bouger.It’s good you cannot move.Je n’ai besoin que d’une partie pour prendre mon plaisir.I need only one part to take my pleasure.
Chev’s neck muscles bulged, then came the hideous retching.
“Jesus.” Hurtheven leapt aside.
Gagging, Chev dragged his torso from the mud. His empty stomach heaved, and then heaved again. He wedged his head between his knees.
Even if Pen wished for his return—and that was still very much in doubt—how could he go home?
He’d thought survival would be enough...that if he regained his strength, what happened on that island could remain buried in the dark of the past. But shame ran like an underground river, bursting though the most thickly packed earth when least expected.
Without vengeance, violence would forever rise up, destroying everything—innocent or no—in its path.
In remaining dead, he would be protecting everyone he loved.
He knew only one way to make Hurtheven understand.
“You want to know what happened?” Shaking and weak and with the taste of bile on his lips, Chev had nothing left for the truth to steal. “I’ll tell you what happened, though God help us both if you tell anyone else—I was plucked from the wreckage by the wife of a man I’d just killed. She kept me alive...barely.” He shook as he inhaled. “The part of me she was interested in rousing did not involve my strapped down limbs.”
“Jesus,” Hurtheven repeated, this time in a whisper.
Chev fixed his gaze to the mud. “My one attempt at escape cost me my arm.” He swallowed. “It took three more years before I weakened enough for her to lose interest. She set me adrift to die.” He clenched his teeth. “Call me a coward again, whoreson. And then tell me how the hell I am to protect my wife whenIembody the danger.”
Chev lifted his head.
He had expected revulsion. Instead, Hurtheven held his gaze with neither pity nor censure, but with fierceness, the embodiment of a demand for justice.
“What can I do?” Hurtheven whispered.
Fuck.
Chev nearly wept.
He turned away, gazing into the perpetual mists that cloaked Ashbey’s land and shrugged. He had no answers, only mocking shadows of the man he had once hoped to become, the things he had once held dear, and the hollow mottos he’d once perpetuated as truth.
