Page 59 of Lost with a Scot
Aiden closed his eyes as the Romani woman’s words echoed through his mind.“You will die for her...”Most likely he would. But he would gladly die to save Anna, because to live in a world without her was no life at all.
* * *
Anna woketo a bitter taste in her mouth and the sound of water lapping against wood. She blinked, her eyes adjusting to the small dark room she was in. She lay on a tiny bunk with high sides, which warned her she was on a ship. The last thing she remembered was being shoved into a coach, and only then did she try to fight them, once she thought it wouldn’t endanger Rosalind’s life. But something had hit her hard on the head, and she’d blacked out.
Her wrists and ankles were bound with rope, and her red-and-cream evening gown was wrinkled and bunched beneath her, telling her she had been dropped unceremoniously on the bed. Her head ached from the blow in the coach. Anna struggled to sit up, but when she did manage to right herself, the dingy little room spun around her. She closed her eyes, listening to the water slosh against the hull, feeling the rocking motion. That didn’t help with her nausea. They were already at sea. How long had she been unconscious?
The doors of the cabin opened, and a man lifted a lantern to stare at her. She wondered if he’d been doing that frequently to see when she woke up.
“Awake at last, princess,” the man said with a dark chuckle.
Anna stared at him. She was certain she’d seen him before. He might have been one of her father’s former palace guards.
“We are bound for Ruritania?” Her voice was raspy and her mouth dry.
“Yes. Your uncle is most anxious to see you safely returned.”
Anna knew he was baiting her, so she ignored the comment.
“Would it be possible to have my bonds removed? I need to use the chamber pot.” She nodded at the pot in the corner of the cabin opposite the bed.
The man seemed to weigh her request carefully. “If you so much as raise a hand to me, I will tie you to the bed and you can go where you lie,” he warned. “There is no escape. We are hours away from England, and you would only drown in the sea if you tried to jump overboard.”
Anna knew he was right, and she wasn’t a fool. She would let them take her back to Ruritania, and she would wait for the right moment to run or attack, whichever would prove more likely to set her free. The man set the lantern down by the door and advanced toward her, a small dagger in one hand. He knelt by the bed and sliced the ropes at her ankles and wrists.
“Thank you,” she said. If he was surprised at her words, he gave no indication.
“I remember you, princess,” he said softly, his tone dangerous. “Too pretty and too untouchable for the likes of me.” He reached for a lock of her hair and curled it around one finger as his smile turned predatory in the darkness. “But you aren’t protected now. Remember that.” Then he left her alone in the room.
She shook with so much rage that her first few steps toward the chamber pot were unsteady. She knelt before the pot and then vomited hard inside it. There was nothing to stop these men from hurting her in a thousand ways, and fighting them would do her no good, not until she was in sight of land.
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and sat on the floor a long while, listening to the waves. Each caress of the water upon the hull sounded like Aiden’s gentle shushing tone when he spoke to his animals. It calmed her more than she expected, and it made her miss him with a desperation that felt like a physical pain in her chest.
Think about your escape, not about your husband...
If the wind was with the ship, they could arrive on Ruritania’s shores in less than two weeks. If the wind was against the ship, it would take a month like it had when she’d first sailed toward England and her ship had been caught in that storm. All she had to do was stay alive until then. The men aboard the ship knew better than to intentionally kill her, but if they took to abusing her, death could still result. She would have to find a way to keep them at bay.
CHAPTER15
The wind proved to be favorable for Yuri’s men. The ship carried them to Ruritania in just two weeks. But the days Anna spent on the ship were fraught with the constant fear of being tortured or raped.
Gustav, the man she’d learned was the leader of the men in charge of her abduction barely kept control of the other men on the ship. It was a shocking thing to witness. She recognized many of these men, some who had served as guards since she was a child. She’d once trusted her life to them, and now she feared for it.
The unfortunate truth was that Captain Fain was the reason the men held themselves in check. Soon after she’d arrived on the ship, she’d heard soldiers’ whispered tales of his brutality as they spoke to each other over dinner or card games, and it left her cold and shaking at night. Even as far away as they were from Fain at sea, the men feared any consequences of harming her simply because of the wrath Fain would bring down upon them. She’d assumed a public execution was being arranged for her, but it seemed her uncle had other plans. It was the reason no harm had come to her on board the ship. Gustav had warned the other soldiers that Captain of Fain would not want his new bride to be sullied.
She had gleaned more information than she’d expected the few times she’d been allowed to leave her cabin to walk the decks or empty her chamber pot. She’d overheard the men talking about how her uncle had promised her as a bride to Fain, who had been her father’s former captain of the guard, and was one of the reasons he had joined her uncle’s cause and agreed to betray and murder her parents. Fain had been the one to kill them, but while he had wielded the sword, her uncle had wielded Fain.
The entire voyage to Ruritania,the soldiers looked at her as if she was getting exactly what she deserved, and for the life of her, she did not know why they felt wronged by her family. What words had Yuri poisoned them with? Had he convinced them that all their problems, regardless of what they were, were the fault of the monarchy? That Yuri alone could fix everything?
She remembered hearing Yuri rant to her father, his half brother, about pushing Ruritania to some glory that existed only in the fables of power-hungry men, and he had called King Alfred weak when he refused to listen to Yuri’s dreams of conquest. It was not hard in hindsight to see the danger that this man had posed. But at the time she had thought him silly and delusional, even amusing in a deranged way. So had her father.
If only they had known...
It made her wonder how much her homeland might have changed, even though less than two months had passed since Yuri had murdered her family.
As the ship finally docked and sailors rushed about throwing lines out to men on the walkways, Anna stood on deck, quietly observing the scene. She wore a simple dark-blue cotton dress that had been provided for her the previous week.
One of her abductors had had the foresight to pack a few dresses for the rest of her journey. The lovely court gown that Rosalind’s modiste had designed was beyond saving, and Anna wanted no more memories of that night. She’d folded the gown and tucked it under the bed, out of sight.
