“We have to get back and convince that fool girl she needs us. If she finds a way to pay off Wickham, then we’ll have to start again and it takes too much time. I hate this situation and I hate England. I want to be gone from here as soon as possible.”
“You could just kill him and be done with it.”
He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about it. Several times. Wickham also had information about Montrose’s other ship, a ship that had not been seen in some time, and Darius needed its whereabouts. “Death is too quick. I want him to flee on a ship going nowhere and endure the shame and the humiliation that I did. It’s the only way to bring him to his knees. Deklin’s most recent letter changes things as well. The Persephone never made it back to Boston. She should have completed her journey to China and have been back at anchor by now. We have to discover where the ship is now and who took it.”
“Do you think it ever left London’s docks?” Marcus asked. “It’s like the blasted ship just disappeared.”
Deklin shook his head. “We both know that can’t happen. I’ll lay odds that Wickham knows where it is, whether that be on top of the ocean or below it. When he’s on his knees and begging for mercy, he may give us the information we need. I hope for his sake that the Persephone’s crew still lives.”
“And then after that? Let’s say it’s all that easy: we collect the debts, we find the other ship and repair the Persecutor. Then what?” Marcus asked.
“After that, I don’t particularly care what happens in England. Knowing my sire is on his arse is good enough for me. However, if the ship is lost and he had a part in it, I’ll run him straight through the heart.” He really didn’t want to kill his sire. Revenge on a man with no pulse was pointless. It might be petty but Darius didn’t care. He’d spent years being degraded before he’d finally earned his place in the world but he remembered each flogging, each whipping, as if it was yesterday, as if it had been his father holding the whip.
He would never forget what Wickham had set in motion that day. He’d vowed to ingrain the same memory on his worthless sire if he ever got the chance. He fervently prayed the Persephone was in one piece so he didn’t have to make good on his words.
Now that he finally did have the chance to bring down an earl, three scraps of girls, two scared boys and one dead duke might bring it all crashing down.
He could not let that happen.
Rapping on the ceiling, Darius then lifted the flap and called a new direction to the hack driver. When he sat once again, Marcus had a bushy brow raised in question.
“We’re going to pay a visit to an old friend. Perhaps Anthony Germaine can search in a few places we don’t have access to. He owes me a favour.”
Marcus laughed and made himself more comfortable. “I don’t think this is what he expected when he became indebted to you for finding his sister.”
“He should repay me a thousand favours for that mess with Daniella,” Darius replied with a chuckle. “As long as he doesn’t see us coming, he’ll do what I ask.”
“How can you be sure?”
“If there’s one thing that man holds above everything and anyone else, it’s his own neck. Put a knife to it and he’s ours.”
The pirate in him crowed.
The good and decent captain cringed.
Chapter Seven
“Are they still out there?” Eliza asked her two brothers as they stood at the windows peering through the glass at the still countryside. The snow had stopped falling the day before but the chill in the air was thick and the wind icy, forcing them all indoors even more so than usual.
Eliza liked to walk in the snow but with Darius’s sailors all around the house, hiding behind bushes and high in the trees, she hadn’t stepped foot out the front door in four days. She was supposed to feel safer with them watching and protecting but she didn’t. It felt more like a wolf rested on their doorstep and one step outside would result in the loss of a limb. Then there was the fact that she hadn’t even asked for Darius to set a watch on them. They were going to attract even more attention if anyone did come to call.
Lucky, she supposed, that scandal was so firmly attached to her name. It meant they hadn’t had a single tea caller in two years. It wasn’t as though her actual violation of society’s dictates was all that bad really, at least not in Eliza’s opinion. But the immediate countryside wasn’t exactly humming with the gossip of rakes or jezebels. In the absence of any larger scandalous happenings to anyone else, Eliza’s disgrace was surely still the topic of conversation at fetes and morning teas. There wasn’t a lady’s salon within a fifty-mile radius whose walls hadn’t heard the story of how the Duke of Penfold’s daughter was no longer chaste. Of how she threw herself at a man, attempting to trap him into marriage, a lowly earl’s grandson then, an heir now. The tales spread swift and fast and all who heard it had believed it.
That was really the worst part of the whole nightmare. Her father believed the lies. Her friends cut her from their lives and society shunned her
