The sea crashed onto the shore with ferocious intensity, as if the water had declared war on Caedmaray, and the beach was the point of 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 from a cliff slide.
He struggled against Dragan’s grip, squirmed and writhed and managed to get his face above water between waves to gasp 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 her at Darlyrede.
He had run away and left Harriet behind.
He had run from his mother’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 know his 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, give under 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.
“Please,” her voice shuddered in his ear. “Nae matter his cruelty, he’s one of them, and they’ll never let ye live if ye kill him! Stop!”
It was another wave that did her work for her, separating Thomas’s death grip on the man and sending him tumbling onto the shore. He was shaking once more, but no longer with cold. No longer with fear. He swiped the seawater from his eyes as he saw the handful of village men dragging Dragan’s limp bulk out of the foam. They awkwardly maneuvered him onto the path and away toward the village, leaving Thomas alone in the rain with the woman and, standing some distance away, her father.
She stared at him, her eyes red, her chest heaving through her soaked gown.
“Who are you?” she asked incredulously, her voice breaking.
Thomas returned her confused gaze for a long moment. Who was he? He couldn’t be Thomas Annesley—that man was dead, killed at Darlyrede along with Cordelia;
