A Girl, Unbroken (A Kiss of Revenge, Blood, and Love #2)

Chapter 1

S ometimes, all it takes is one breath and the whole world spins.

As I waited for Pan to strike, a hundred memories exploded in my mind at once, a colorful firework of moments.

I saw myself at my birthday party in my yellow-meringue dress, the phone pressed to my ear; I saw myself on board the Agamemnon, sitting shackled and blindfolded in my cell.

A deep blue burst, and in that blue, my mother’s whitish apparition.

I am the little bird . I saw Nathan’s sea-gray eyes and the bracelet he had given me.

Do you want it back, Will? Our kiss in the storm.

Mom’s ring that was lost. Sparta and the fishing net. So many images in one breath.

I had never been brave. Nor courageous. And yet, I had risked my life for Dad’s.

That was why I was standing here now on this cutter between men who had given themselves Greek names: between Troy, the skater boy; Icarus, the magician; the bull-headed Taurus; Sparta, the traitor; Ilias, Pan’s twin; the hobbits; and so many others.

Their faces were merely a colorful flash in my mind.

More a feeling than reality. With Isaac in between.

Always Isaac. He was waiting for Pan to strike. They were all waiting.

I blinked and saw him standing in front of me with his dark eyes and black Medusa curls.

“Please don’t, Pan,” I whispered. Then my body was shaken by a tremendous force.

I screamed but felt no pain as I fell on the deck with Maury.

My head banged against the planks, and for a few seconds, it felt as if a black veil was waving in front of my eyes so that I perceived the world in front of me separated from my feelings.

I saw Pan, who loomed over me like a shadow before standing up again. I heard shots directly above me, but I felt nothing. Had Pan fired?

As if in a trance, I wriggled out of the arms of the prostrate Maury, stared at the long scar on his face, and straightened up.

I stood there as if I was ready to be shot.

I blinked at a world that simultaneously flew past me in slow motion and at lightning speed.

A man who had previously been standing on the bollards was lying on the ground and Nathan pulled the other down by the muzzle of the Glock. A shot was fired and Isaac backed away.

I felt nothing. Not even fear.

“Willa!” Nathan raced toward me, but I couldn’t move. Assertively, he grabbed me and pulled me along like a raging dark storm. Why was he free in the first place? How did he manage that?

“Don’t shoot!” I heard Isaac shout, and in the same breath, I saw Pan and Icarus jump over the railing.

I felt like I was in two worlds: my inner world and the one outside. Ilias was on the ground, wrestling a man in dark green overalls whose gun had slipped away. Reflexively, I jumped over him with Nathan, and the next moment, we were flying through the gangway’s narrow opening in the railing.

It happened too fast, I couldn’t even scream.

Black waves crashed over my head. I swallowed water and flailed about, but a strong hand grabbed my arm and pulled me up onto solid ground.

For a few seconds, I didn’t know what was happening, only when the engine roared did I realize that Nathan had pulled me up onto the edge of the speedboat.

Pan towered over me, firing a revolver into the sky while Nathan untied the knot in the mooring line and Icarus fiddled with the stern rudder.

“Full throttle!” Nathan shouted and threw the line into the water, then pulled me completely into the boat and held me tight as we shot across the dark sea away from the Agamemnon out of range of their guns.

“Wait!” he shouted when we had fled a good distance. “What about Stanton? We can’t leave him in the water.”

Icarus slowed and from a safe distance I saw the cutter’s lights glowing in the night.

“Stanton is Sparta,” I muttered to myself.

Polite, certainly a little strange at times, easy to control .

Words without meaning danced in the void that was my mind.

From here, the Agamemnon seemed so tiny to me.

I saw the silhouettes of the men and the taut anchor chain but felt nothing.

It was as if a black hole had swallowed my emotions.

“Go back a bit. He can swim the rest,” Icarus suggested. I shook my head mechanically, but no one noticed me.

“He won’t make it.” Nathan, who was sitting on the bottom next to me, leaned over the water and called out to Stanton. “Turn off the engine,” he said to Icarus at some point.

The silence was eerie. It was like the black hole inside me, from which a new horror could emerge at any time. A new memory, a monster from the depths. Part of me didn’t want Sparta to come on board, but the other knew he wouldn’t make it without us. We had to help him.

“What about the raft?” I heard myself ask, feeling like a stranger.

“It’s back on deck!” Nathan called out to Stanton again, and once more, it was eerily quiet, like after the Titanic sank.

“He drown already?” Pan asked hesitantly.

“Not so fast. Not Stanton. He’s a fighter.” Nathan wrestled his cell phone out of a zipped pocket, switched on the flashlight function, and aimed the beam over the water. It had to be a new model if it had survived the fall into the Atlantic unscathed.

Did he steal that one too? How could he afford it? Is that really important now?

Squinting, I stared out at the sea.

“What if Isaac sets off?” I heard Icarus ask from the stern.

Nathan stoically continued to shine the light over the water. “It’ll take a while. The cutter is sluggish, besides, he doesn’t have anyone who can really steer the Agamemnon.”

I sat there and heard their words, but nothing sank in. Not the cold of my soaking wet clothes. Not even the pulsing in my jaw or the burning of my cheeks and lips, which I only started to notice. Rivulets of Atlantic water streamed tirelessly over my face almost as if I was crying.

“Over there!” Nathan suddenly called out.

In the light, I saw two heads sticking out of the water and voices rang out almost simultaneously.

“Wait!” “Wait for us!” “Stanton won’t make it much longer!”

“Noah!” Nathan let out a sigh of relief. “It’s Noah and Stanton!”

Troy swam toward us closely followed by Sparta, who I now vaguely recognized by his dreadlocks.

I knew I should be happy that Troy had escaped Isaac and that Sparta was still alive, but inside I was petrified.

Impassively, I watched Nathan and Pan pull Troy and Sparta out of the water.

Troy grinned at me mischievously, rubbing his hair even though he was shivering from the cold and shock was still written all over his pale face.

He didn’t belong here any more than I did.

Abruptly, he flopped onto one of the anchored seats and Sparta sank next to him and crouched down.

I stared at him for a moment. I now no longer believed that he was behind the attack. Maybe it was Ilias alias Rayk. Or Taurus alias Thomas Tremblay.

Remember it for your police report, little lady!

Isaac’s words skipped through my mind as his aristocratic face danced in front of me, but I pushed it away.

As if in a trance, I watched Icarus start the engine and we began to slide through the pitch-black water toward the coast. Above us, the entire sky was full of stars, the moon lying between them like a thick, yellow lantern.

Nobody said a word. I kept taking deep breaths and asking myself what was wrong with me, why I didn’t feel anything.

I concentrated on Nathan, who had wrapped an arm around me to warm me, but the cold didn’t reach me, nor did the touch.

I stared at the pitch-black water. There was something inside me deep beneath the shock. A buried memory that I didn’t want to see, didn’t want to feel, but which rose relentlessly into my consciousness.

There was a boat, an open speedboat like this one.

A sea rescue boat or a private boat. I looked to the side and it was as if I could see this boat gliding over the water next to ours, like the trawler a few weeks ago.

I blinked and time slid into one another so that yesterday, today, and tomorrow became one.

I’m sitting on Dad’s lap, wrapped in a wool blanket, wordless and without feelings, just like today.

Someone starts the engine and we leave the soot-black column of smoke rising into the sky from the burned yacht behind us; the fireboats have long since stopped.

Dad hugs me, and when I turn my head to him, I see his sorrow-filled face, this deep, heavy despair on his pale features, and I know that part of it is my fault. I just don’t understand it.

My fault.

I don’t dare put my arms around his neck and look out at the gray sea.

My fault. This burial place on the sea. Suddenly, the paralysis falls away from me and understanding returns.

I try to wriggle out of Dad’s arms, wanting to jump into the water to get Mom back.

I have to get her back because it’s my fault.

“Mom! Mom! Mom!” I scream her name over and over.

“Mom, I’m sorry!” The men have to hold me down, but something inside me snaps shut.

I scream until I lose consciousness, and when I wake up in Mount Sinai Hospital, I’ve forgotten the last three days. Retrograde amnesia.

“My fault,” I whispered, but it was drowned out by the roar of the engine.

Suddenly, all my emotions were back. The fear I endured, the throbbing pain in my jaw, my lips, and cheeks, and the biting cold.

It was as if there was no place on my body or in my soul that didn’t hurt, but nevertheless, I still couldn’t cry.

We stopped in knee-deep water in front of a deserted stretch of coastline and waded the last few yards to the beach. According to Nathan’s cell phone, we were on Hilton Head Island, one of the many offshore islands off the coast of South Carolina that were connected to the mainland by bridges.