Chapter 36
Ahand clamped over Amaya’s mouth. It muffled her attempted scream, her eyes flying open as flight instincts overtook her.
She kicked and tried to squirrel away from her would-be captor—until she saw his face. Her heart thundered in her chest, but she stopped moving until, seemingly convinced she wouldn’t scream, Markus Lockwood released her and held a finger to his lips.
That sort of gesture had never once worked on Amaya.
“Lockwood?” she said. “What are you doing here? What’s going on?”
“I’m sorry to startle you, my lady,” Lockwood said. His eyes darted about the room. “The captain sent me to bring you back to the Maelstrom.”
“What? What happened? Is the ship okay?”
“I’ll explain on the way. Get dressed.”
“I . . .” Amaya’s gaze fell on the empty space beside her. “Where’s Grace?”
The sheets were rumpled, the outline of Grace’s body visible in the wrinkles. She had spent the night helping Amaya concoct a plan while she composed a letter to Will. The finished missive was currently on her vanity, waiting for Grace to send it tomorrow.
Alarm flashed across Lockwood’s face. “Grace?”
A door squeaked on its hinges, drawing their attention to the back of the room. Grace sleepily padded out of Amaya’s washroom, yawning and rubbing her eyes. At first, she didn’t notice Amaya or Lockwood. Amaya knew she’d scream when she did, so she scrambled across the mattress to reach her first.
“Grace, don’t panic,” she said, putting her hands on Grace’s shoulders. “This is a friend from the Maelstrom, Markus Lockwood.”
“Huh?” Grace looked up and squinted.
Realizing she couldn’t see him properly, Amaya reached for Grace’s glasses on the bedside table and handed them to her. The teenager slid them on, blinking a few times before noticing Lockwood. Her muscles tensed, arms instinctively closing around her body to hide her nightgown.
“Goodness. What’s this about?” she asked.
“I’m trying to figure that out, just . . . wait a second.” Amaya turned back to Lockwood, a thought striking her. “My father has increased security tenfold since I got back. How did you get past the watchmen?”
“A stealth relic. I was an investigator, remember?”
An unfamiliar draft shook Amaya’s shoulders, drawing her attention to an open window. Gauzy curtains fluttered in the breeze.
She’d planned to find her own way back to the Maelstrom; she and Grace had a plan to get her there. With Lockwood’s sudden appearance, the entire thing was now moot.
But warning sirens blared in Amaya’s head. If Will didn’t trust her to return on her own, he would come himself, rather than send a member of his crew back into Sorrento.
And something about Lockwood seemed . . . off. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what.
He adjusted the leather band across his chest that kept Deadeye strapped to his back.
“There’s not much time. If both of you would please get dressed, we must hurry.”
Both?
Amaya frowned. She backed toward Grace, gently nudging the girl behind her.
“Grace isn’t coming.”
“I’m afraid I must insist. We can’t risk being followed.”
Amaya fearing for her own safety was one thing; potentially endangering Grace was another. Any harm coming to Grace was unthinkable. Amaya owed it to Camden, not to mention the entire Hargreeves family, to keep the girl out of harm’s way.
But this was Lockwood, the truest gentleman she’d met since her capture. Would he really harm them?
The borderline feral gleam in his eye suggested he would, and there wasn’t time to question why.
“I’ll go,” Amaya said abruptly, making a split-second decision she hoped she wouldn’t regret. “But Grace stays. She won’t say a word, right?”
Amaya cast a pointed glance at Grace, who was looking between Lockwood and Amaya with fierce intensity.
“You’re going to the Maelstrom?” she asked.
Lockwood’s eyebrows drew together, evidently surprised she knew the ship’s name. “Indeed, my lady.”
“All right.” Grace shoved her glasses up her nose and straightened her posture. “It’s fine; I’ll come.”
“Grace, no,” Amaya hissed, grabbing Grace’s arm and tugging her aside. “Listen to me. It’s too dangerous. I don’t know what’s going on.”
“It’s no trouble. I wanted to go anyway.”
“Grace, please. I can’t be responsible for you, too.”
“I’m coming,” Grace declared, already working her curls up into a topknot. “Should anything happen to me, you can rest easy knowing you did everything you could.”
She grabbed her yellow dress from the back of a chair, dashing into the washroom to change.
Amaya clenched her jaw, her skin breaking out in a cold sweat. There had to be more she could do.
Blatantly raising the household alarm was too dangerous, and Amaya had no evidence supporting her suspicion that Lockwood’s intentions were nefarious.
It was just a gut instinct, triggered by the strangeness of the situation and subtle physical clues she wouldn’t notice if she’d didn’t know him—clues like the way he tugged on his sleeves or how his eyes darted around the room and lingered on the deepest shadows.
She had a couple ideas, but she needed him to look away.
Amaya grabbed Lockwood’s arm and brought him to face the open window, where it would be harder to decode any shadows dancing on the walls.
“Just give me a moment to change. Don’t look.”
Lockwood nodded, reiterating their need to hurry, and Amaya got to work.
She selected a dress from her closet in a seafoam green, quickly changing into it behind the divider. When she emerged, she tip-toed to her bedside table and opened the drawer, taking Eagle Eye and Wayfinder.
For the briefest of moments, Amaya questioned herself. Whistleton wasn’t exactly close, and she worried—no, she knew—summoning him back to the city to help her would be asking too much.
But just as she was about to put Wayfinder back, she remembered his words at the inn.
"I gave you Wayfinder to use, Amaya. Of course I came for you."
Will would want her to use it, and that was enough.
So Amaya opened the compass and pressed on its face, covering the golden flash it emitted with her other hand.
She muffled the sound of it snapping closed with her shuffling footsteps and tucked it into her pocket, risking a glance at Lockwood.
Before she went to retrieve her shoes, she reached for the cord next to her bed and pulled three times—hard.
She paused, then repeated the pattern twice more.
Three pulls in short succession was the internal signal for an emergency.
A bell would ring in the servants’ quarters downstairs, alerting them that something was wrong.
Amaya didn’t have a plan, exactly, but she hoped recent events would lead the responding staff to discreetly raise an alarm and send for help.
It was a gamble. But now she’d done all she could.
Amaya stopped in front of a mirror to tie her hair back and secure Eagle Eye on her ear. Grace exited the powder room moments later, bright-eyed and fully dressed.
“Mr. Lockwood?” she said. “We’re ready.”
“Very good,” Lockwood said, turning. “Let’s get moving.”
He brought the girls back to the open window, where he’d affixed a crude pulley system to lower them to the ground.
Amaya attuned her ear to the hallway, listening for activity. Her heart sank when she heard Mrs. Stone’s short, heavy footsteps pounding the stairs leading to Amaya’s room—far from quiet. Far from discreet.
Shit. She’d gambled, and she’d lost.
Lockwood’s head snapped to Amaya, his eyes narrowing.
“You stupid girl,” he seethed, his usually calm demeanor morphing into something brutish. He grabbed Amaya roughly and slid a loop of rope over her body, tightening it at her thighs. “I recommend holding on.”
In one swift movement, Lockwood picked Amaya up and all but flung her out the window, forcing her to grip the rope for dear life as her stomach lurched and the ground rushed up to meet her.
Her scream pierced the dark night. The rope’s rough fibers dug into her palms, the whoosh of air fanning out her skirt and hair.
The brief moment of free fall was terrifying, but paled in comparison to the whiplash of the rope pulling taut. Amaya let out another cry, sure she’d develop a ring of bruises around her thighs. Her legs tingled, the tight rope cutting off her circulation.
“Amaya!” Grace called from the window. Then she screamed, too, and Amaya flew into a full-fledged panic, kicking and employing every muscle in her body to climb back up. But she lacked sufficient upper-body strength, and the effort did nothing but make her arms burn.
Red stained her peripheral vision as the ground neared—a side-effect of physical exertion. At least, that was what she thought.
She was wrong.
The additional watchmen her father had hired lay below, unmoving, soaking in crimson pools of their own blood. There had to be over a dozen of them just on this side of the estate.
All rational thought left Amaya then, replaced by nausea and a deep, all-consuming terror that seized control of her body.
Not again. Not again, not again, not again! her mind screamed.
She flailed around like a suffocating fish, holding onto the rope with one hand while the other scraped against the house to halt her descent.
It did nothing but shred her fingertips.
She tried to wriggle out of her seat, for all the good that would do, but the motion only made the rope more unwieldy.
There were voices upstairs. Daisy barking. Then a gunshot, clear and true.
“Grace!” Amaya shrieked, craning her neck to see what was happening above. She saw nothing. “Grace!”
In her flurry of panic, the rope lowering her spun out of control and she smacked against the exterior wall of the house. Pain exploded in her head. Color drained from the world as her surroundings swirled out of focus.
Amaya had just enough self-awareness to realize the futility of her mission and the extremity of her failure as red faded to pink, to dusty rose, to gray.
Then, there was nothing.