Run Wild (Escape with a Scoundrel)

chapter 13




Flames. Burning. He had always known it would end like this. In hell. He was in hell. He opened his mouth and could not cry out, opened his eyes and saw only darkness. A cavern of darkness with dancing flames all around, a blur of fire and agony. He shut his eyes against the truth he did not want to see. He was burning alive, could feel the devil’s touch searing him through, body, bones, soul all ablaze. Pain without end.

Deeper and deeper he slid into the abyss, unable to fight his own inescapable, eternal damnation. He was falling falling falling into a corrosive pit that swallowed him whole. Pain heat fire. And he knew that the torment would never end never end never never never...

“Nicholas!”

And he was ten and he turned in the daylight, the bright, piercing daylight of Execution Dock, and saw his father on the scaffold, saw his tall, proud father standing there helpless with his hands behind his back and the rope around his neck.

“Father!” he shouted in horror, struggling against the hands that held him, against the men in their blue-and-white uniforms who had taken him from his father’s ship and brought him here. He fought with all his strength but they would not let him go.

Helplessly, he watched as they forced his father up onto a stool—the navy officers he had worked for, the friends he had fought beside in the war against Spain. Why had they betrayed him? Why why why?

One of them tightened the rope around his father’s throat. Nicholas called out to him, his hoarse, small voice lost in the growing roar of the crowd.

His father was calling back to him, something important, but Nicholas couldn’t hear and he began crying and looked away but one of the men who held him grabbed his chin and forced his head up, forced him to watch.

“Remember this, lad. Remember English justice. This is how the admiralty deals with pirates.”

And then all he could hear was screaming, his own voice screaming no no no his father wasn’t a pirate. James Brogan was a privateer, fighting for the king, a good man, an honorable man.

And he was all Nicholas had in the world. All they had was each other.

And then Captain Eldridge, who was his father’s best friend, very best friend, knocked the stool from beneath his feet.

And his father was kicking, struggling.

Dying.

And they forced Nicholas to watch until he stopped moving.

Until James Brogan’s struggles grew weaker and weaker and finally ended.

As the crowd cheered.

Nicholas went limp, sobbing brokenly, collapsing in the navy officers’ grasp, his body wracked by heaving, pitiful sobs that were larger than he was.

And they let go of him and he fell to the cobbles and lay there, weeping.

And he was alone.

Talons of fire clawed at him. Pain that burned and consumed him until he was ash until he was nothing and still he hurt. Oh God let the hurt end let it end he could not bear any more he was nothing but agony and fire and there was no one to hear him no one to help him...

Lieutenant Wakefield stood over him, smiling, brandishing the glowing iron rod in his hand.

“Be grateful, boy.” He spat a mouthful of tobacco onto the deck. “You’re to be spared.”

Nicholas did not reply, did not fight. Not because he was brave, but because he was too terrified to make even a sound. He did not understand what was happening, what ship this was or why they had brought him here. They had stripped him to the waist. One burly sailor held his arms pinned to the deck, another his legs.

And the one named Wakefield towered over him. “Welcome aboard the Molloch.”

He pressed the white-hot metal against Nicholas’s chest, pressed it down hard.

Nicholas screamed, a high-pitched scream like a bo’sun’s whistle. The sky went spinning, turned black as he felt and heard the sizzle, smelled the acrid scent of his own flesh burning, felt the branding iron bite deeply into him.

He begged them to stop, but his cries and his tears made the navy men laugh.

And when they were done they picked him up and threw him into the hold.

Into a place beyond imagining, a place of darkness and ovenlike heat and the stench of too many bodies packed too closely together. And he cried and he hurt and he prayed, prayed for God to help him. For weeks.

Then he stopped.

Because God had abandoned him. The loving God his mother had told him about would not have done this to him. He came to realize that in this world, there were only devils and hell. Devils in blue uniforms, hell without end.

And he would never cry again.

Because he hated them all hated them all hated them all...

He opened his eyes and saw only darkness, saw that the flames had died down but he could still feel them. Pain heat fire stop but God had abandoned him and he was alone and it would not end would never end never end never...

“Seventy-nine... eighty...”

The lash fell rhythmically, slicing into his skin. They had tied him to the Molloch’s mast, stretching his arms tight around it. Splinters pricked the skin of his bare chest, stabbing at the mark they had burned into him five years ago.

“Eighty-one... eighty-two...”

He did not flinch, did not care. The first ten or twenty were always the worst. After that, a hazy numbness blunted the rest. He didn’t feel pain anymore. Or anything at all. He pressed his cheek against the rough wood and stared at Wakefield as the lieutenant counted rhythmically.

“Eighty-three... eighty-four...”

Blood ran down his back, dripped onto the deck. He had killed a fellow prisoner. In self-defense, but that mattered to no one. His keepers needed little excuse to use their cat-o’-nine-tails. They beat him, fed him barely enough to keep him alive, tried to drain every bit of spirit and fight and feeling out of him.

“Eighty-five... eighty-six...”

But his hatred was enough to keep him alive. His hatred and his thirst for vengeance. One had become his food, the other his drink.

They nourished him, helped him grow stronger.

“Eighty-seven... eighty-eight...”

He kept himself alert, always. Never let the other prisoners corner him. Defended and stole every scrap of sustenance he could get his hands on. Trusted no one. Cared about no one but himself.

“Eighty-nine... ninety...”

Many who were older and stronger than him had died aboard this reeking, disease-infested scow. But not him. His wits and his hatred sustained him.

“Ninety-one... ninety-two...”

And at night when the darkness closed in, he dreamed.

“Ninety-three... ninety-four...”

Dreamed of a sea of blood that would slake his thirst for vengeance.

“Ninety-five...”

Lieutenant Wakefield would be the first. Then all the “friends” who had betrayed and killed his father. Especially Captain Eldridge.

“Ninety-six... ninety-seven...”

He dreamed of vengeance and planned the best way to obtain it.

“Ninety-eight...”

And the plan became a vow. He would become the one thing they feared. What they had made him. What they had branded him.

“Ninety-nine...”

A pirate.

The most fearsome pirate that England had ever seen.

“One hundred.”

He swore, lashed out, trying to force the sound away, but it came again.

“You’re not alone.”

He could barely hear it, that whisper, so distant. Knew he must be dreaming. A voice like that did not belong here, with him, in hell. It angered him to hear a voice so sweet speaking words of reassurance, of hope.

Pain he could endure. Hope he could not.

“Shh, I’m right here,” it persisted. “You’re not alone.”

No. No, he was alone and always would be and did not care.

Something touched him, a hand. A cloth. Feather-light against his cheek, his brow. Dampness. Water. So cool, so impossibly good.

A soft touch to match that concerned voice. Gentle water to cool the devil’s fire.

A dream. It must be only a dream. Because he could not change what must be and he was where he belonged and here he would stay.

Thou shalt not kill thou shalt not kill. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

No, the goodness could not last. He did not want it did not want to hope for it. He surrendered to the fire. Let it have him let it take him he would not fight anymore there was no point.

This was the end. His inevitable end.

Here he would stay, alone for all eternity.

~ ~ ~

Darkness closed in with the last, feeble flickers of their last candle, bringing despair that cut through her as sharply as a blade.

Sam hung her head, pressed a hand over her eyes, tried to hold back the tears. But she could no longer deny the truth.

He was dying.

Her shoulders started to shake, then her whole body, as she sat crouched over him in the silent cave that had begun to feel like a tomb. There was nothing more she could do. Her best efforts weren’t good enough. She had failed him, failed them both.

And they would pay with their lives.

All her breath seemed to leave her body in one long sob. She had done everything she could think of, stayed awake hour after hour, tending him until the days and nights had become a sleepless blur. She didn’t even know how long they had been in here—three days, maybe four.

She had tried to cool the fever with water, giving him all that remained in the flask, saving only a few drops for herself. When that was gone, she had started using rags to capture the scant trickle of moisture that dripped down the cave wall, painstakingly soaking the cloth as full as she could and then wringing it out over his lips.

She had used the blade of the knife to cauterize his wounded shoulder, hoping it would stop the bleeding better than her stitching. Then she had stripped off the tattered remains of his shirt and bathed him, again and again, cooling his body as much as she could.

But nothing helped. For a time, he had seemed to improve, only to take a turn for the worse.

And now his breathing had become a labored rasp, so faint she could barely hear it. His body lay utterly still, ravaged by the fever that burned out of control. He no longer called out or groaned or made any sound at all—nothing but that low, fragile whisper of breath.

She pressed her fingers against his wrist... but felt only the slightest trace of a pulse.

Shaking her head in denial, she took his hand in hers, wrapping her fingers around his broad, callused palm.

“Please,” she whispered. “Please.”

But there was no response. None. He had given up his grasp on this world, and she was powerless to hold him here.

Clenching her jaw, she echoed what he had shouted at her in the whirlpool. “Damn it, don’t you give up on me now!”

But it was too late. He had surrendered. She could feel the fever taking him. For days, she had resisted despair, enduring to the limits of her endurance and beyond... only to have it come to this.

Death. Slow, silent death in the darkness.

Her tears began to fall, one after another, sliding down her cheeks. He had given up his will to fight... and extinguished hers. She slumped over, still holding his hand, barely aware when her forehead came to rest against his rib cage. She closed her eyes and let the tears cascade down her skin and down his, let the hot, choking sobs take her.

The depth of her sorrow stunned her... because she was not only crying for herself, for fear of her own fate.

She was crying for him.

Him.

She didn’t even know his name. She shut her eyes tighter, tried to stop the flood of emotions. And failed, utterly. As she had failed at all the rest.

Her feelings for him made no sense. He was an outlaw, an unpredictable scoundrel. A man who had come into her life like a thunderbolt straight out of a storm cloud, startling and dangerous and unexpected. But she could no longer dismiss what she felt for him as simple gratitude or respect. She knew better now.

She knew him better now.

Far better than she had when they entered the cave three or four days ago.

He had been delirious for hours, calling out in pain, thrashing until she had to hold him down, afraid he would injure himself further. For much of that time, he had been talking, calling out names, cursing, uttering gibberish...

And sometimes speaking quite clearly.

Speaking of things so chilling, she could only hope he was hallucinating.

But she didn’t think he was.

Sam pushed herself up to her knees, wiping at her damp cheeks, gazing down at the brand on his chest through a blur of tears. She didn’t know what to think anymore, much less what to feel. Before, she had been curious about his past.

Now she almost wished she didn’t know.

Because between his fevered ramblings and the little she did know about him, she had managed to piece together a wrenching picture of his childhood.

In his delirium, he had cried out “Father” several times, and spoken of a rope. A scaffold. He had stared into the darkness as if watching it all unfold before his eyes—an execution.

His father’s execution. He had been forced to watch his father hanged for some offense.

And that was when he had been consigned to the prison hulk.

Sam looked down at him, still holding his hand, unable to make herself let go. His hand looked so large and dark against hers. Seeing him now, with his full beard and broad chest and chiseled muscles, it was hard to imagine him as a boy.

But she could imagine how he had felt. Fresh tears slipped from her lashes as she thought of a small boy with bright green eyes—orphaned, alone, terrified. Sentenced to a fate that must have been a living death. Jailed for a crime not his own, lost among strangers. Beaten and lashed and tormented for God knew how many years.

She didn’t understand how he had escaped the prison hulk or what had happened to him after that. She had only been able to puzzle out fragments of his fevered ramblings. It seemed bitterly ironic to know more about who he had been, decades ago, than about who he was now.

But was it any wonder he had become a hardened man, hostile and sarcastic and cold toward a world that had treated him so coldly?

She finally let go of his hand, bitterness and regret rising in her chest. She would never know anything more about him. He had come into her life a stranger, less than a week ago.

And he would die a stranger.

Kneeling at his side in the silent cave, listening to what could be his last breaths, she covered her face with her hands. Tried to find some shred of courage or wisdom or hope that could help him.

“Please,” she whispered. “Please, God, help me.” Clenching her fists, she lifted her head, staring desperately up into the dark. “Help us.”

The fire chose that moment to flicker out, leaving her in complete blackness.

There was no sound but the liquid drip of water down the cave wall.

And the labored, tenuous breathing of her companion.

All at once, her desperation and sorrow gave way, burned to ashes by a new emotion. Perhaps it came simply from the feeling of her own nails digging into her palms, but a tide of raw determination poured through her.

“No,” she snapped at the man she could no longer see, stubborn enough for both of them. “No, you can’t quit. Not now. Not after all we’ve come through. I won’t let you.”

She would not give in. Not as long as there was breath left in his body and a heart beating in his chest. She would not admit defeat. And she would waste no more time on tears.

Turning, she felt for the rag she had been using earlier and crawled on her hands and knees over to the cave wall, pressing the cloth to the trickle of water. As soon as it was wet, she moved back to his side and started bathing him again, sweeping the damp cloth over his chest, his arms, his face. Cooling him as best she could. Trying to return life to his battered body.

They had endured worse than this—both of them. Somehow they would survive this as well.

Together, they would survive.

“I am not going to give up on you,” she said fiercely. “Do you hear me? I am not going to give up!”

She shouted it so loud, her own words echoed back to her from the depths of the cavern.

I am not going to give up... not going to give up... not going to give up.

~ ~ ~

A flutter of wings passed overhead, close enough to brush her cheek.

Startled awake, Sam sat up, heart pounding. What was happening? What was that sound? Had it been a dream? Disoriented, blinking, she rubbed her eyes.

The cave was silent, empty.

She must have been dreaming, must’ve fallen into an exhausted sleep... though it couldn’t have been for long. The glow of a fire still shimmered in the biscuit tin. Earlier, she had gathered some moss from the cave walls, scraping it off with the knife, in the hopes that it might burn. It had not only burned, but it burned slowly. It gave off an unpleasant, sour odor, but at least it provided some light, however meager.

Fully awake now, her eyes adjusting to the darkness, she turned to look down at the man beside her, reached out to touch his forehead.

And found his skin no longer ablaze beneath her fingers.

She started to smile in relief, but as she bent over to study him more closely, she realized he was still deathly pale, his breathing shallow and unsteady. And his pulse...

Pressing her fingers to his neck, she could feel it, but just barely.

The fever had finally broken.

He made a low sound, a weak groan. She almost shouted with joy. A sound was a sound, a sign of life, no matter how faint.

Then a shudder went through him, followed by another. He began shivering, as if he were cold, freezing.

And her spirits fell almost as quickly as they had lifted. For days she had battled against the fever that had threatened to burn him alive, and now it seemed he might freeze to death instead. Her meager fire would not heat him any more than the candle had. Nor did she have any blankets. And the thin cotton sheet would be useless. The only way she could keep him warm would be to...

She moved away from him, instinctively. The idea of his almost-naked body pressed against hers—

The chain brought her up short. She couldn’t get away. From him, from what he needed.

Or from her fear. The fear that had been indelibly marked on her heart when she was sixteen.

She had seen the hunger in his eyes. Knew that he wanted her, the way a man wanted a woman. Whenever he had looked at her that way, she had ignored it. Changed the subject. Brushed him aside with an icy glare or some haughty comment. That hunger in his eyes made it impossible for her to trust him.

He groaned again, the sound so pitiful, so filled with pain.

Sam stared down at him, torn between the need to help him... and the caution that had been her shield, her protection for so many years.

But he would not survive without her help. She could not turn away from him now.

And for heaven’s sake, he was unconscious! Wounded. Ravaged by days of fever.

She breathed deeply, tried to slow her racing heart and her spinning thoughts. By all the graces, she knew what she had to do. If only she—

The flutter of wings swept past her again.

Sam whirled, turning one way and another. It hadn’t been a dream. That sound was real. Bats?

She saw a small shape, just beyond the edge of the firelight. And it wasn’t a bat.

It was a bird.

She stared, unable to breathe for a moment. A bird. A small, brown, ordinary sparrow. It hopped closer, pecked at the pile of moss beside the biscuit tin.

Sam blinked at it. How had it gotten inside? Through the crevasse behind the falls? She doubted a bird could navigate the twisting tunnels and low openings they had squeezed through—not in the darkness.

It must have come in through another entrance.

Another exit.

One not far from here.

Almost as soon as she had the thought, the bird hopped away and took flight, into the darkness—heading away from the direction they had come, away from the falls.

Sam’s heart pounded, and she realized she was shaking. Not with fear this time, but with hope. Despite everything, there was hope. A way out, a way to freedom!

She turned back toward the rogue.

If she gave in to her fear now, it would mean certain death for both of them. Swallowing hard, she summoned her courage.

Her trust.

She edged closer... and lay down beside him.

And felt instantly, uncomfortably aware of every muscled inch of him. Of every shiver that went through his angular frame. Of the way her body fit perfectly to his, even when she merely pressed against his side. As if she’d been made to fit there.

Her stomach in knots, she slid one arm across his midsection... slowly... and rested her head on his chest. And felt the matted hair, bristly against her cheek.

And the brand.

And she did not dare close her eyes.