“Why would he do t-that?” Abella hiccupped, wiping her face with her hand.
“What does he stand to gain from killing us?” Mark added, glancing at her one more time.
Tristan frowned at both of them, and then sighed, rubbing his face.
“He’s a Black Knight,” I offered quietly, putting my hand on his knee. “And we’re the biggest obstacle the Black Knights have had to face so far. Getting rid of us is a business move for him.”
Tristan remained quiet, watching me with sad eyes.
“That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?” I pressed.
“Aye, Sam. It is. I don’t have enough proof to know for certain, but that is a possibility. I don’t want to believe we voted a traitor in to lead us, though. Not yet.”
“There are a lot of other options,” Mark interjected, folding his arms. “It doesn’t have to be Davies. I mean, sure, he’s lying to the other Templars about our living situation, but that could be for any number of reasons.”
“Like what?” Watching him with a frown, I tried not to show my annoyance when he couldn’t come up with an answer.
“It could have been Randall,” he finally said. “He hates all of us. He could have easily gotten some of his wacko followers to go torch our houses.”
“Ye have a point,” Tristan agreed. “But this doesn’t seem like something Randall would do. He’s always been very upfront and likes to take his enemies himself, so he can see them go.”
“Yeah, but every time he tries to do that to the two of you, he has to run away with his tail between his legs. Maybe he just got tired of losing and thought it would be better this way.” Mark shrugged, clearly not convinced Randall wasn’t the perpetrator of the crime. “He’s been unusually absent from the front lines of his cause lately. I think it’s a safe bet to say he’s licking his wounds and trying to take care of his mess with as little effort as possible.”
“Ye don’t know the man like I do.” Frustrated, Tristan stood, running a hand through his hair. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized how bothered he was by this turn of events. He seemed shaken, worried even, and it made me feel that much more upset by it.
“I think I do,” Mark shot back. “You knew him when he was still trying to save face. I’ve worked with the monster that he is now. It doesn’t seem like a far stretch to think he finally got tired of you chasing after him. This was an easy target. I mean, come on, Tristan. You stayed in the same house he broke into before. You might as well have put up a sign inviting him in. You could have tied Sammy to a chair and left her on the front porch for him and it wouldn’t have been any easier than this.”
Angry, Tristan rounded on him, his face flushing. “Aye, you’d like that, wouldn’t ye? Then ye could swoop in and save my wife again, be at her side when I should be. Maybe ye’ll get lucky and be able to attend the birth and death of another one of my children, so ye can lord that over my head later.”
“Stop it!” Rattled by his words and the fight unfolding in front of me, I got off the bed, grateful to find my legs felt fine now. “Both of you. Someone tried to kill all of us and you’re going to fight over this?”
Turning to Tristan, I smiled tightly. “What happened was awful, but we can’t change the past. I thought we were both doing better, here, on the ocean. If not, this is a conversation you need to have with me, not a fight you need to have with Mark.”
I then glared over at Mark, taking in his heated stance and the frown on his face. Folding my arms, I sighed, knowing I needed to stop this argument before it got even more out of hand. Tristan was still hurting and blaming himself for what had happened to the baby and me. I didn’t need Mark rubbing salt in the wounds by insisting Tristan wasn’t doing anything right. “I’m grateful for the help you gave me, Mark. But, if you’re going to use it to try and tear my family apart even more, I will leave you behind faster than you can blink.”
Raising my hand as he opened his mouth to interrupt, I continued. “I don’t think that’s what you were trying to do just now, but still. We need to focus. The fact our homes have been burned could have nothing to do with what happened before. It’s in the past. Let it stay there.”
He frowned, giving me a stare that said he didn’t much like being called out by me, and then turned, heading toward the door. “Let me know when you have the proof you want of who did it,” he said casually, leaving the room with a frustrated air.
Shaking my head, I turned toward the bed and Tristan, doing my best to keep my head together and not break into the worried woman I really was.
Tristan, relaxing in his chair some, looked at me with sad eyes. It was an expression I’d seen many times in Paris, whenever he’d been feeling especially upset about Rachel.
“Abella,” I said, without looking over to her. “Are you feeling well?”
“Better,” her soft voice replied.
“Do you think you could go ask the captain if he’s still in need of our assistance? I would like to talk to my husband alone for a moment.”
She sniffed, and I could hear her footsteps following after Mark, the door opening and shutting softly behind her.
Silence stretched between us for a moment, the two of us simply staring at each other. If there was a pin to drop, we probably would have heard it hit the floor clear as day.
“Talk to me,” I finally said, sitting beside him.
“He’s right.” There was a note of acceptance to his tone I hadn’t ever heard before when we had this conversation. With a start, I realized he was starting to believe he couldn’t protect me. He’d always asserted that he didn’t need to, but he wanted to. If he were now openly admitting he couldn’t do it, though, what did that mean?
“He’s not right—”
“He is.” He laughed lightly, a sound that was in no way funny or endearing. “I can’t protect ye, not from Randall. Not from whoever the bastard is that tried to roast us in our beds. Our home has been violated and destroyed twice now, and I was away in each instance.”
“I wasn’t there this time,” I said softly. “I was here, on this ship, with you.”
“Not by any of my doing,” he retorted. “If ye weren’t so stubborn and insistent, ye’d have been there. It would have been yer body they found in the ashes.”
He sighed, rubbing his face, and snorted, shaking his head. “I would have missed my child’s and my wife’s funerals. What kind of husband and father am I?”
“A damn good one.” Leaning forward, I wrapped my arms around his neck, pulling him toward me. “The best of the best. The love of my life and the most caring man I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. I would be lost without you. I was lost without you.”
He shook his head, the words not getting through to him. “Still. This is not what I imagined my life would be like. I didn’t think it would be so hard, or painful.” He smiled sadly and shook his head. “There’s been plenty of joy as well, but it seems like the hurt clouds over all of it. All I can think of is how much it stings, of how . . . alone it makes me feel. Even on this ship, surrounded by the crew and with a job to do, I feel as if I’ve been abandoned, sailing through an empty sea, living a life with hardly any purpose at all.”
“I love you,” I said softly. “We’ll get through this together. Always together, like you said. We can beat anything that comes our way, so long as we have each other. You will never be alone.”
“Aye, we have each other. But are ye not closed off as well? We’re a broken pair, Samantha. I know I’m not the one who suffered the pain of losing a child physically, that ye’ve known the horror of it and can recall it at any given second. But I feel like I would give anything to have those memories, just to know that she was real and I was there to see her, to hold her, and to say goodbye. I will always carry those regrets. You sit before me now and say we can move on, that we still have each other, but it feels like there is a hole in my heart now. Life is not what it was before.”
“And it never will be.”
My lip trembled as I watched him, tears filling my eyes. “We lost something we never had, something that can never be replaced. We lost our child. But, we lost her together. I intend to patch ourselves back up together, too.”
Nodding, he rose from the chair, moving to sit beside me on the bed. As he wrapped his arms around me, he released a great, shaky sigh, as if he’d been holding in what he’d just said for years and a weight had finally lifted off him.
“I’m sorry I got angry with Mark,” he mumbled, resting his head against mine. “I was only upset because he was right. I should have taken more precautions to protect ye once we returned home.”
“I’m sure he only fought back because he was shocked by the fact we all could have died. Stress does things to people, makes them act in ways that they normally wouldn’t.”
“Aye. I’ll speak with him when I get the chance and apologize, though.”
Silence stretched between us for a moment, his warmth wrapping around me like a blanket. The peace was short lived, though, as I found my thoughts drifting toward what Mark had said about our arsonist.
“Do you think it could have been Randall?” I asked quietly, staring at the chair in front of us.
He paused, as if he weren’t sure what to say, and then sighed again. “It could have been. Mark was right about that, too. I was never close with Randall and I’ve not spent months at sea with him as a blood thirsty captain. He very well could have decided to try a different approach to killing us.”
“But that doesn’t take into account the fact that Davies lied about us moving to another residence. Why would he do that? He has nothing to lose or gain from telling everyone he was having us moved.”
“I agree. There is much to think about and discuss before we return to Paris. It would seem we have many enemies and I’m not sure how to face them all.”
A knock at the door drew our attention, and we turned to see Captain MacDonald letting himself in.
“I apologize for my intrusion,” he said politely, walking to his desk. “Are ye feelin’ well, Madame O’Rourke?”
“Much better,” I replied, nodding. “Thank you for your help and the offering of your room for my recovery.”
“Think nothing of it.” Waving his hand, he opened one of the drawers, revealing the bottle of whiskey he’d mentioned before, and took a swig. The action seemed to be stressful, as if he were greatly agitated by something and seeking some release from the drink in his hand.
“Is everything alright, Captain?” Tristan asked, picking up on the feeling as well.
“No. But it’s not anything to bother yerself with at this moment.” Sitting in his chair, MacDonald took another drink, corked the bottle, and put it back in the drawer. “We are untethering ourselves from Jean Bart and moving on, though, if ye are able to head to yer station now.”
“What about the treasure?” I asked, surprised. We hadn’t been in here long enough for the crews to carry it over, had we?
Captain MacDonald grunted, making me think I may have lighted upon the source of his annoyance. "It would appear, there is none.” His reply was short and sounded angry, but he stared at me as if we were having a conversation about the weather.
“How can that be?” Tristan asked.
Captain MacDonald shrugged, rising once more and going to the window. “I dinna rightly ken. I received the distinct impression that the treasure was there, but they’d been ordered not to give it to me.”
“Why?” His words didn’t make sense to me. The Order worked like clockwork. The treasure transports were their most important task. Why would anyone try and mess that up?
“That is a question that remains to be answered, as well,” MacDonald replied thoughtfully. “But I intend to discover the truth of it.”
“Are you enjoying your time at sea, Samantha?”
Randall smiled at me, his eyes bloodshot and skin pale. He looked unwell, like he hadn’t slept in days and was slowly becoming some undead thing, dark and scary. His white shirt was spotted with sweat stains and wrinkled like it had been shoved in a drawer for some time. Dark, stringy hair was pulled away from his face, tied with a leather band at the nape of his neck. Overall, I was getting the impression that he really was sick with something, but I couldn’t tell what.
Seated across the table from him, I kept my fists firmly in my lap, my wrists bound together, trying not to lash out and attack him. Our gazes were riveted on each other, my own conveying all the hatred and disgust I had for him.
“Tristan will come for me,” I said, enjoying the sickened expression that crossed his face. Our meetings were falling into a pattern now. It didn’t take long for me to realize I was dreaming. All I had to do was irritate him enough to get him to attack me in some way and I would wake up.
“Let him,” he replied smoothly, placing his arms on the table and leaning forward. “I want him to come.”
“Why, so you can try and fail to kill him again?” Refusing to back away, I sat straight as a board, not flinching as his face came closer to mine. “You should give up. Evil never wins over good.”
He paused at that, frowning. Leaning away, he watched me with his exhausted eyes, mouth pressed into a thin line. He seemed almost as if he were on drugs then, a crack addict who had been without his latest dose and was now suffering the consequences.
“There is no good and evil, Sammy. No right and wrong. Simply one man’s perspective. You think me bad, but all I want to do is save the world from itself. In my eyes, you’re the one stopping the salvation of every person. You’re the one mucking up plans and causing failures. You’re my evil.”
“I’m not the person who sacrifices his own men to get what he wants, who burns entire villages to the ground for sport, who murders joyously, or who thinks it’s okay to force himself on others. You may think I’m evil because I stand in your way, but good will always stand in your way. There is no salvation for a world ruled by you, only death and destruction.”
Laughing, he shook a finger at me, either highly amused by my words or very bothered by them. “I’ve seen where you come from, Sammy. Did you know that? The gods speak to me now and they show me things. They tell me that you’re dangerous but greatly powerful. You’ve managed to pass all of their tests, but you stand for everything they are against.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His ranting scared me some, the strength of his conviction evident in everything he’d said. I’d known the man was crazy before, but he sounded like a certifiable maniac now.
“You and I are chosen,” he said, licking his dry lips excitedly. “Me from a place of devotion and submission, you from one that was defiant and murderous. Every day, people from your time are killing one another in the name of love and freedom, destroying lives without a single thought except for how it will benefit themselves. You raise your leaders high, only to tear them down with magnificent force when they don’t do as you ask. You say you are good, but you are from an era of murder, rape, lies, and faithlessness. How could you even know what good is? The people in your time can’t even talk to one another without fighting. And it’s only going to get worse. You use your magic and your machines to destroy one another, claiming it’s for the better good, when, in all reality, you want to be the one in control. In the end, you’re unable to see that you were never in control, but a slave to the very destructive patterns you claimed to hate.”
“And you’re better than all of that?” I asked in disbelief. “You, who are a murderer and a liar?”
“I am faithful!” he shouted, eyes wide with anger. “I have never sought to make myself more than I am. I have always been devoted to the cause of the heavens, to cleansing the earth of the wicked that will birth your time and ideals. Why do you think the gods granted me my life, healing my hand when you so hatefully cut it off?”
“You have always wanted to be better than you already were,” I growled, leaning forward. “That’s why you’ve been stealing the blood of the gods in the fir
st place. That’s why you didn’t die in that cave. You managed to get lucky and fall in their essence. The gods weren’t saving you—you are a victim of circumstance.”
“You’re wrong,” he whispered. “They’ve chosen me. God Almighty Himself had chosen me before these new gods ever did. I am meant to save this world.”
“You’re meant to be locked in a mental institution.”
His hand flashed out, striking me across the face. The ring on his hand cut me slightly, a drop of red splashing on the table between us as he leaned in close and growled in my face. “I am meant to be the new god. Nothing you can do or say will change that.”
Starting, I sat in bed, my cheek still tingling from where Randall had slapped me. My breath was coming quickly, my heart racing, and I peered around the dark surgery in a panic, trying to regain my bearings.
“Sam?” Tristan’s hand rested on my arm, the shadow of his form rising next to me. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” I whispered, breathing deeply. “Just another nightmare.”
“Not as bad as the others?” he asked. “Ye weren’t screaming.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
Gradually, my pulse slowed and my breath evened, a sense of safety and peace washing through me. Gently, I laid down, cuddling into Tristan’s embrace. He pulled the blanket over my shoulders, kissing the top of my head, and gently caressed my face.
“Sam?” he said in surprise. “Ye’re bleeding.”
“What?” My face was still sore as I touched it gently, shocked to find it was sticky with warm blood. “How . . .?”
Sitting up, I fumbled with the blanket, untangling myself and moving toward the coals in the fireplace. “Did I scratch myself, you think?”
“Let me see.” Taking my chin, he turned my face toward the fire. “It doesn’t look like a scratch, I don’t think. Are ye wearing a ring? Maybe ye caught yerself with it when ye woke and didn’t realize because of the dream.”
Hidden Away (The Swept Away Saga, Book Three) Page 24