If and when I hit that water, there would be no rescue boat this time. I would become part of the food chain.
All of this flashed through my mind as I plunged with agonizing slowness. I fixated on the cable, tracing the length where it connected from my wrists to the ominous end that led up, up, up… Where did it go? Was Ashley holding it? Was it tied to something on the balcony? Whatever secured my lifeline was letting it out inch by inch, easing my fall but not stopping it.
My hands clawed at the knot that bound them, my fingers clamping around the rope. I couldn’t see through the blackness to the balcony, didn’t know why Ashley had tethered me before throwing me over. But somewhere overhead, the cable snapped tautly.
I bounced to a halt, my wrists snapping in the restraint as my weight jerked and swung in the tailwind.
Dangling just above the crashing wake behind HMS Blitz, I swayed close enough to taste salt water. The warship groaned as her hull carved a deep black swath in the sea, spraying my legs in a warm mist and saturating Priest’s shirt.
Priest…
I wildly scanned the nebulous landscape, straining to see the horizon. Are you out there?
Now would be a good time for my feral huntsman to do something terrifying. But it was too soon. It would take him weeks to thieve a sloop, woo the new crew, and hunt down this ship. I was on my own.
The rope quavered. And the winds. The tides. The world narrowed to the drum and the whoosh and the dark, the dark, the dark… My heart cried.
“Ashley Cutlerrrrrrrr!” Waves spat at my legs in coughing fits, spinning me round and round. “You miserable little cock! Pull me in, damn you!”
I tried kicking, building momentum to launch myself upward to climb. But with my hands so tightly bound, there was no way to grip. I would’ve had better success if I were armless.
“Cutler! A pox on your blood! A pox on your king! A pox on your whole damn navy!” I screamed again and again until my voice bled and broke.
There was nothing to do but wait. And wait. I waited so long I knew he’d left me here to die.
Why would he do that? At any moment, a giant shark could leap out of the water and swallow me whole. Then he would have no lady pirate parts to deliver to England.
Why hadn’t he just left me in the hold? At least then, he would still have my head.
Needles prickled my hands until they grew cold. Numb. Wet hair stuck to my face and coiled around my throat. Wuthering gusts of briny air carried away my tears and turned my mouth into a desert. Eventually, exhaustion set in, shoving me past the point of weeping.
I kept my eyes on the water as it blurred away in sparkling moonlit billows. Staying awake seemed crucial for some reason, but it proved more difficult with each passing minute. The wind and the strain of hanging flogged the energy from my body, and my eyelids began to sag.
As I started to drift, I felt a vibration. Movement quivered down the line. Seconds pulsed by before I realized the distance between my feet and the water was stretching, lengthening. The rope was being pulled in.
My chest surged with the tumult of my breaths, waking my bones with violent tremors. Higher and higher I rose until the balcony came into view, and just beyond it, the cold sapphire eyes of my captor.
He knotted the rope around the rail, leaving me swinging just out of reach.
“Ashley…” I followed the length of the cable up and around an overhead beam, which supported a jutting roof. “Pull me in.”
With nothing but air and sea beneath my feet, I squirmed in limbo, uncertain and stricken with panic.
Why wasn’t he bringing me over the rail? I tried to extend a leg toward it, but I could only brush my toe against the balustrade.
Just out of reach, he reclined a shoulder against the open door to the cabin, wearing his white shirt and breeches and holding a knife at his side. He watched me impassively, as if hanging a half-naked woman outside his balcony was a nightly ritual.
Perhaps it was.
I wanted to kill him. The impulse to scream vivid details of how he would die clawed at my tongue. But I trapped the rant behind pinched lips.
The man had just plunged me toward the ocean like bait on a hook and suspended me there for nearly an hour. Now he casually held a knife too close to the cable that might very well drop me for the last time.
My heart told me I wouldn’t die tonight. Ashley Cutler had a role yet to play in my life. For good or for evil. Whichever way that went, enraging him wouldn’t keep me alive.
“Are you frightened now?” He tapped the blade against his thigh.
“I was frightened before.”
“Not nearly enough.” He grabbed an apple from the table behind him and set the knife to it, slicing off a bite-size piece. “I’d rather not return you to the hold. You might not be tender or fragile, but a month in a cage with forty beasts feeding upon you…” He popped the wedge of apple into his mouth and chewed. “I don’t wish that on any woman.”
Brutal, uncontrollable shaking wracked my body. The weight of my wet hair hung in my face, my neck too weak to hold up my head. I couldn’t even muster the strength to beg or complain about the agony in my hands.
His gaze swept over me, taking in my ragged, shivering appearance. “You’re sufficiently exhausted.”
Was that what he called this? I was living a nightmare. My muscles had long ago given out. My stomach knotted with hunger pangs, and my shoulders felt as though they’d pulled from the sockets.
He balanced the apple on the rail off to the side. Then he put the knife between his teeth, the serrated edge angled outward, and stepped toward me.
I tensed as he let out more rope, lowering me until I hung at chest level with the rail. With a hand on my bound wrists, he hauled me in, hooking an arm beneath the backs of my thighs.
Lacking the energy to move, I let him lift me up and drape my legs over the balcony. The position seated me on the rail with my arms stretched overhead and his hips between my knees.
The warmth of his proximity breathed against me, his face hovering just inches from mine as he straightened Priest’s shirt over my thighs.
The knife between his lips served as a lethal barrier. One forward thrust of his head and the sharp edge would do some gruesome damage to my face.
I waited for him to cut the rope, but he didn’t. He straightened, reached for the apple, and removed the steel from his teeth to carve another wedge.
The tension in the cable pulled my upper body backward, requiring me to focus all my strength on my knees, where they hooked over the balcony rail. I could only sit there, clinging at an awkward angle, vulnerable, drained, and entirely at his mercy.
“Now…” He stabbed a piece of apple with the blade and held the juicy fruit to my mouth. “What shall we talk about?”
My stomach caved in.
Ashley wanted to talk instead of untying me? The devil fetch him!
With his eyes locked on mine, he waited, his head tilting deliberately as if to distract me from whatever emotion he guarded. He seemed to believe he was untouchable, impenetrable, especially holding that knife. But if he meant to cut me, he would’ve done so by now.
I’d punched him earlier. Hell, I’d landed a few good hits across that pretty face. Yet there wasn’t a trace of blood on his person.
“Your shirt.” I parted my lips and bit the wedge of apple off his blade, chewing lazily.