Storm Surge (28 page)

Paige risked a look to her right, where the second man stood less than six feet away now. “I don’t—”

A knife flashed out, sparking light from the single burning lamp in the bedroom. She raised an arm to ward off the blow and felt the blade slash across her forearm. Not deep. Please God, not deep.

“That’s just a taste of what’s coming,” Raleigh said with a smile.

Blood dripped onto the floor, a few crimson spatters on the hardwood. More ran warmly over her skin. She lifted her hand to her shoulder to elevate the wound, clamping her right over the cut, and turned toward the stairs. “Where are we going?”

“Just shut up. I’ll let you know when you get there.”

He marched her outside and down the stairs to the dark beach, the knife inches from her ribs and his tattooed companion on her other side. She had no doubt she’d break down when this was over, but for now she felt preternaturally calm. Like the atmosphere. Eerily still before the pending storm. Even the wind had died. Not a star could be seen over the ocean, and the mist had ceased its fine spray. Waiting. Everything waiting.

“The old broad? Bea something? I was in the house that day you came back to talk to her. I was there to make her shut up. Her grandson told me she’d been blabbing to you. Couldn’t have her saying too much. She might have let something slip without even knowing what the fuck she said. You passed the place I was hiding twice. I could have reached out and touched you.”

Paige’s stomach rolled. “Did you hurt her?”

He chuckled. “Nah. Scared her good, though. Couldn’t hurt her. She reminds me of my granny.”

Sick freaking bastard.
Paige stumbled on a dimple in the sand and was jerked upright with a rough wrench to her arm. Biting her tongue to keep from crying out, she scanned the beach from side to side for any sign Liam had preceded her. For all she knew, Raleigh was lying about that.

Before they’d gone far, he appeared—the seaman’s ghost. Lantern swinging. Looking back at her. Paige gasped. Did ghosts do that, look at people? The man to her right sucked a breath in through his teeth, his eyes bulging.

“Shit fuck, what is that?”

“You see him, too?” Paige asked, ever so calmly.

“I told you to shut up,” Raleigh hissed.

Oblivious. No chance to frighten him with it, then. But his buddy was faltering. Hell, Bea Hunt had been right. Sailors were a superstitious lot. This guy probably viewed what he was seeing as a premonition of death. One could only hope.

“Cap’n, you don’t see that?”

Raleigh stopped. “Who is it? Where?”

The man raised a hand, pointing. “Right the hell in front of us. It’s a haunt.”

Snorting impatience, Raleigh shoved her at the man, who grabbed her arm. Raleigh then marched forward, straight up and through the specter, pausing on the other side. Even at this distance, Paige witnessed his shoulders jerk in a quick shiver. He spun on his heel to stare back at her and then down to the beach at his feet. The apparition vanished. Where it had been, Paige spotted again the long, low rock, free of seaweed. This time, instead of the black stone, she saw
an actual body and the remembered stance of Regan Raleigh sixteen years ago standing over it, bloody knife still clutched in his hand. The man’s plea for his life and the whispered suck of his dying breath reverberated in her head with all the force of the present, rather than memory. The victim of Raleigh’s savagery had been a stranger to her then and remained a stranger now, but it didn’t matter. Raleigh had killed a man in front of her. She had witnessed his horrendous crime and spent a lifetime blocking it from her mind. Well, it was back now, the memory, and it both sickened and enraged her. Her jaw tightening, she raised her gaze to Raleigh’s bone-white countenance and knew he had seen the vision of the body on the sand, too.

He rushed back in her direction. “Lights out,” he said.

And they were.

Paige awoke to the vile stench of her own vomit. She struggled up onto her knees but couldn’t stay there as the surface beneath her rolled and dipped, tumbling her onto her side. Duct tape bound her hands behind her back as well as her ankles. Using her heels, she shoved herself backwards until she hit something solid and worked her way into a sitting position against what appeared to be a metal wall. The world plunged again. A voluminous spray of seawater crashed down over her and flooded across the deck. She was on a ship.

Without warning, another stream of vomit churned from her stomach.

“Seasick, little butterfly?”

“She’s probably got a concussion, Raleigh.”

Paige jerked away from the visage of Regan Raleigh bending over her to Liam’s voice, locating him similarly trussed about ten feet away. He’d been tied about the chest, too, secured to what appeared to be a barrel affixed to the deck. The sun had not yet lipped the horizon and black clouds roiling overhead limited her vision. Raleigh straightened, unaffected by the tossing ship.

“You’re a fool if you think you can ride out the storm in this vessel,” Liam shouted.

“You’re a fool if you think it should matter. Not to you, Gray. Not to your lady, either. I’ve faced worse. You, however, have about another ten minutes for concern. After that…” He made a theatrical slashing motion across his throat.

“What’s another ten minutes going to do?”

Liam
, Paige thought.
Shut up. Don’t taunt him.

Raleigh crouched again. A flash of metal preceded the downward motion of his hand. Paige flinched and turned her face away, feeling a tug at her ankles. Two seconds passed before she realized he hadn’t stabbed her but only severed the binding on her legs.

“Turn around.”

She complied. He cut the tape on her wrists before yanking her to her feet. Good. Having her hands free evened the odds a bit.

“What are you doing?” This from Liam. Paige tried to reassure him with a look, but the deck’s plunge and roll across huge waves prevented her from focusing.

“I said ten minutes, didn’t I? Think about what’s happening to her while we’re gone. I don’t like them bound. I like them to fight.”

A wordless growl gurgled up from Liam’s throat as he struggled to free himself. Raleigh grinned. She wanted to knock his teeth out. As he dug his fingers into her arm, Paige envisioned the photo of her mother and Raleigh, both of them smiling. It had to have been taken before Deb Waters understood what a monster this man was. Another wave of nausea took her and she lurched over. Beside her, Raleigh jumped back, avoiding the spray.

“Fuck. This isn’t going to work.” Striding angrily across the reeling deck as if on dry land, he threw his hands up, the knife still in his left hand reflecting what little light existed. None of it came from the ship. They were running dark. Overhead, lightning seared the sky, followed by a blast of wind that threw her sideways. She caught herself on a coil of rope. A shrill keen filled the air. The storm was upon them.

“Too late, asshole,” she said, and charged Raleigh with her head down. She hit him square in the bony, concave structure of his lower back, sending him sprawling. The impact rolled her hard across the deck. The other men onboard stared, as if unsure what to do. An instant later, she realized they weren’t looking at them at all, their attention fixed starboard where an ominous black shadow, whether cloud or water, loomed toward them. If the latter, she understood the ship could flounder at any moment.

Raleigh was slow getting up. When he did, she spotted blood streaming from his head. She also saw the knife lying in a rippling puddle of seawater half a dozen feet away. She lunged for it. Chilled and wet, her fingers slipped off the handle and caught the blade. Blood clouded the standing water. Grabbing the carved grip with her left hand she rolled onto her back as Raleigh rushed her. The ship rose and dropped into a huge trough, throwing the man off balance. Paige lashed out, slicing into the tendon at the back of his ankle. A crippling blow, Raleigh went down.

On her knees, Paige scrambled over to Liam. Behind her, she heard Raleigh screaming for someone to stop her. She doubted anyone could hear it over the freight-train noise of the wind. Breathless, shaking, she cut through the duct tape on Liam’s limbs, struggling with the wet rope.

A hand reached to take the blade. Liam, who had been ripping the tape from his wrists, looked up. So did Paige. “Oh, God, you.”

Not a gardener after all, but Raleigh’s crewmember. No wonder he’d been watching her. She wrestled him for the knife. Rain lashed across her face with the sting of sleet.

“Let him have it,” Liam shouted in strangled tones. Paige turned and followed his wide gaze to the ocean rising toward them. She released her grip on the handle.

The stranger snatched the knife before it fell and sawed through the rope. “No man should be forced to die when he has even the smallest chance to live.”

Paige’s attention snapped back to the man beside her, to his red, burn-scarred face, familiar features and recognizable voice.
Oh, God, oh, God
. “Dad?”

The monster wave hit, flinging them all into the sea.

* * * *

She couldn’t move. Every bone in her body had been broken and badly glued back together. Water flowed through her head and pounded each nerve into screaming confusion. The black, black sea was going to claim her, suck her down into a place where she’d never be found. And that was okay. She wanted to go. If only someone would release the chain around her wrist.

“I’ve got you, Paige. I’ve got you. Stop fighting me.”

She relaxed her body, gave in to this new pressure, allowed herself to be pulled up and out and onto something cold and unyielding. Hands rolled her onto her side. She puked out salt water like bile.

“Paige, honey. We can’t stay here. With the storm surge, high tide will fill this cave to the ceiling in minutes.”

Thrashing, she managed to get into a sitting position. Her bones still hurt but at least now she understood why. Raising her head, she looked into her father’s eyes.

“Dad, Dad, you’re alive.”

He nodded, his scarred face creasing into a smile. “Later. We’ll talk later. We’re not out of danger yet.” He tugged her hand. Her muscles shivered in protest.

“Wait. Where’s Liam? Where’s Liam, Dad? Where is he?”

“Not here. That’s all I know. And we can’t be, either.”

Paige gaped at the crashing waves. No beach remained. Soon, the cave floor would disappear beneath the surging tide. She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Liam!”

“There’s no time. He wouldn’t want you to die here, waiting for him. We were lucky. I don’t think anyone else on that ship survived.”

“No, Dad. No. Liam!”

Wind rushed into the cave, carrying with it salt spray and a cacophony of sound. Water followed. Paige pulled herself away from the retreating surge. Next wave would drive even deeper. Their exit was blocked. “We can’t get out.”

“Not that way. Can you follow me?”

Paige gave one last cry for Liam, her voice drowned by the storm. Sobbing, she clung to her father’s hand as he led the way back into the cave into utter darkness. Soon, though, they left the echoing vastness behind, climbing up manmade handholds through a narrow stone corridor. Still crying, she paused when her father did. He placed her hand on the rung of a ladder. “Climb,” he said. “It will take you to a small trapdoor at the top. Open that, and you’ll be in the crawlspace underneath the cottage where you were staying. I snuck in that first night. Just that first night only. I wanted to know…to know you were there.”

“Dad.”

He let go of her. “I’m going back for one more look.”

“Wait, Dad, no. You’ll be—”

“I have to, Paige. He saved my life when Raleigh blew up my ship. We both lost a lot that day, but him most of all. I need to do this.”

Paige reached for his shoulder, but missed it in the darkness. She listened until she couldn’t hear his progression anymore and then she climbed up rung by rung. She pushed open the trapdoor at the top, shimmying onto the crawlspace floor where she sat with her knees pulled up and her arms wrapped around them. She wasn’t going anywhere until one or both men appeared at the top of that ladder.

What seemed like hours later, but was likely, in the time-warping dark, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes, she heard the old ladder creaking beneath the weight of an ascent. In sudden fear it might not be either man she wished to see, she didn’t call out, but waited in mute anticipation.

“Paige?”

“Dad! Is Liam with you?”

He hesitated. “No. I’m sorry.”

Paige bit back a cry of anguish. Crawling toward the opening, she assisted her father into the blackness beside her. “We’ll find him,” she said. “I swear we will. But for now, we have a more immediate problem.”

“What’s that?”

“I nailed the trapdoor in the cottage shut. With about fifty nails.”

Locating a piece of a cement block lying on the dirt floor, Paige banged it against the floorboards above. “I don’t get it, Dad,” she said, punctuating each word with a slam. “Where have you been? Why did you let me believe you were dead? What the hell were you doing on Raleigh’s ship?”

She heard her father scrabbling around in the darkness, soon joining her efforts, wedging an implement of some sort between the boards. “I’m not proud of the choices I’ve made in my life, Paige. I never meant for Liam to get involved in this investigation. When I saw the two of you being loaded into the dinghy with the last of Raleigh’s cargo, I slipped onboard. In the commotion, no one questioned me. Once the dinghy was winched up onto the ship, I hid inside. I couldn’t let either one of you pay the price for my past mistakes. Not again.”

“Why didn’t he tell me?” Paige wiped the sweat from her face on her forearm. “Why didn’t you?”

Her father pulled down on the piece of metal, splintering wood. “It was an impossible situation. We were trying to make things right.”Another board gave. Paige bit back any further questions as she worked beside her father to tear an opening to the cottage above. A half an hour later, they emerged from the cottage into gale force winds. Paige’s cell phone had disappeared in the ocean, but she knew Liam had a landline. She only hoped it would still be working in the storm.