He should have spread the word far and wide to discredit his father but it was always the bastard who came off second best in London.
“You never said,” Daniella accused but the accusation was light. More disbelief than anything else.
“No, I didn’t.” And for good reason. Daniella’s father probably would have dropped him at the first port after rescuing him. He would have been as good as dead anyway. Exactly as Wickham intended all those years ago.
“Why did you come back? You told James and I that we would never see you again.”
He raised a brow. “I said no such thing. You punched me in the nose and then threatened to, what was it now, kill me and then dance on my grave beneath the moon?”
“I was upset.”
“I won’t apologise for what I did,” he told her.
“Nor will I,” she countered.
This was why he’d always liked Daniella Germaine. She had been like a sister to him before he’d staged the failed mutiny.
Any further nostalgia was broken by the butler’s very serious manner as he re-entered the room. “The men have arrived, sir.”
Germaine nodded and gestured for him to let them in. Pretty soon, their party numbered forty men and one woman.
Who would have thought convincing a room full of men to believe the Duke of Penfold had killed himself was the easiest of Darius’s arguments that day? Convincing the same room full of men to let him go alone to find the Persephone had been completely impossible. The one woman in the room was the most vehement of all.
Darius sent a half smile in her direction. “Is it because you worry for me, Daniella, or are you scared to miss out on the fun of a fight?”
She huffed and shook her head. “You have no idea what you are stepping into. There could be a hundred armed men on that ship. What do you plan to do once you are aboard?”
This time a full smile tilted his lips but once again there was no humour behind it. “I’m going to kill them all, starting with my father, and then anyone else who has laid even one finger on my wife.”
*
“I am so very thirsty,” Ethan complained in the tired way a child does before dozing off into a nap.
Only he wasn’t going to sleep; he was still trying to shake off the cloying effects of the laudanum they had been drugged with. Eliza squeezed her brother a fraction tighter and kissed his forehead. “Only a little longer, dearest.”
She locked eyes with Nathanial over Grace’s hair and he nodded. So they were to offer hope to the little ones even though it felt so wrong. Eliza didn’t want to upset her youngest siblings any more than they already were but should they be more prepared for their fate? Whatever that may be? She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything anymore.
The room was still so dark, very little light spilling in from the fires lit along the docks now that rain misted over the timbers along the water’s edge. But it was enough to see they were doomed. If a once strong ox of a captain, now reduced to skin and bone, had been held captive for so long, then the five Penfolds shouldn’t present too much of a challenge. Only, Eliza would fight. She would use her nails and her teeth again if she had to, but she would not give in willingly while she remained conscious.
But it was the vile things Wickham and Sir Percy did when she was not conscious that worried her. “What happened to me?”
Nathanial’s voice drifted quietly to her over the children’s heads in answer. “You do not want to know.”
She met his gaze. “I need to know. How far did it go?” She wanted to ask if she was ruined for any other man but then what did that matter? She only needed to know if she had been violated while unconscious. The days of her passion with Darius were soured now but she was glad in a way that she had given herself to him when she had and not just to seal their vows. She had enjoyed him as much as he had enjoyed her. She might have even carried his child. A sob tried to work its way up her throat. If she did fall pregnant, how was she to know who had fathered the babe? Oh God, just when she thought it couldn’t possibly get worse.
Nathanial looked away but he answered eventually. “I tried to stop it. I really tried to stop it but my hands were bound…”
“Stop what?” she asked as he trailed off. “The truth, all of it, Nathanial. I need it.”
The captain in the corner scoffed and drew all their attention. Like they could ever forget his presence. “You don’t,” he muttered. “You’d be better off never knowing.”
“You’re wrong,” Eliza said, her own voice rising along with the turmoil in her heart and the contents of her stomach.
Nathanial gasped at what the stranger implied as though he hadn’t yet caught up to the conversation. “You weren’t raped,” he said, indignation making his tone harsher than it should have been. The children between them cowered.
“Now you’re lying,” she accused.
Nathanial stood and then crouched before her. “Those sick bastards had a doctor perform the test on you, but no one touched you other than that. I swear, Eliza. They discovered you had already…” His face turned crimson against the darkness. “They then moved to Gabriella. If she was not…” He flicked his glance to her. “If she was not confirmed chaste, then we would all be dead. Wickham said since you were no longer a… You were both unmolested, so to speak, and you must take my
