Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Willy! I’m here!” Silas called, entering the cavernous space of the Harrow weald mill. Despite Giovanni’s reservations, Silas had insisted on going in alone and persuaded Giovanni to stay well-hidden but to storm the mill with their men if he heard gunshots.
“Well, well, well. I do love to be proven right!” Willy’s voice echoed down to him from a higher level, full of that same smug cruelty that Silas remembered. “I must remember to tell your wife she was wrong!”
“If you touch her, Willy...” Silas growled.
“I don’t think you’re in the position to make threats, Lucifer.”
Silas felt someone approach behind him and was ready for the expected blow to the head, knocking him to his knees.
He had already decided to accept the beatings that might be coming to him if it meant he could get closer to Anna, but it didn’t mean the blows hurt any less.
Finally, when stars were swimming in front of his eyes, he was dragged by his shoulders, his right one burning with pain, down the long factory floor to the foreman’s office where he was thrown to the floor.
“Welcome, Lucifer, to your reckoning!”
Silas coughed and struggled to rise, but felt heavy boots stamping his back and smelled the familiar tobacco and cheap whiskey scent of Willy Dugby. Those rough, smuggler’s hands pulled him up by his hair and forced him to look into the face of his old ally.
“Hello, Willy.” Silas spat out blood onto the floor. “Nice to see you looking so well.”
“Look well, do I?” Willy snarled, fumbling at Silas’ belt and withdrawing his trusty pistol, bringing the metal butt of a pistol smashing down on Silas’ skull again and again.
Red spots exploded behind his eyes. Somewhere nearby, he heard Anna screaming, cursing at Willy to stop.
He was glad to hear her voice, even through his ringing ears.
“You ruined me, Lucifer!” Willy’s spit splattered Silas’ face.
“You took everything away from me and came out on top! Well, I’m here to bring you back down, look,” Willy forced Silas to look in the corner of the room.
His stomach lurched when he saw Anna, tied to a chair in only her undergarments.
“- I have your wife, Silas. I have seen her and undressed her, and I have to say, she is quite something. Now I am ruining you, piece by piece, until you will beg for death.”
Silas stared into Anna’s face. On one side, it was bruised and bloody, the eye swollen closed. Her hair was loose and ragged but she stared at Silas with defiant eyes.
“You shouldn’t have come,” she said, tears sliding silently down her face, but she did not break down. “You shouldn’t have surrendered to this piece of excrement.”
She looked at Willy with such disdain and disgust that Silas felt a flush of pride in his wife’s bravery and strength. Willy didn’t know what Anna had survived. He didn’t know Anna’s core was made of steel.
“She bet against you, Lucifer,” Willy whispered in Silas’ ear. “She said you’d never come, that you didn’t love her enough, but I know different, don’t I? You’d never take a wife you didn’t want. She’s your weakness.”
“I’d never leave the woman I love in your hands, Willy, and she’s anything but weak.”
Silas watched Anna’s face, noticing the flicker in her eyes when he said he loved her. She smiled tightly, as if to do so caused her pain, but she wanted him to know she had heard him and trusted him.
“But she is in my hands, Lucifer.”
Willy dropped Silas’ head back down, so it slammed into the floor and took heavy strides over to Anna.
Silas struggled to look up despite the henchman who had twisted his bad arm agonizingly behind his back.
Willy stood behind Anna, one handheld his pistol to her temple.
Silas’ blood turned to liquid lava and he watched as Willy Dugby’s other hand brushed his wife’s hair, her naked shoulders and forced a hand down her stays to grasp her breast. Anna’s eyes were fixed on a space behind Silas.
He could see her jaw ticking with tension.
She was clearly biting back her screams. Silas remembered with dread what Anna had told him about the man who had killed her brother, how he had taken liberties and she had fought, and it had ended in Andrew’s death.
She was clearly using every ounce of her control not to fight.
Silas followed her suit, trying not to appear impacted by this cruel display.
It would only encourage Willy to hurt Anna more.
“She’s very compliant, isn’t she, Lucifer?” Willy looked between the two of them, clearly enraged by their shared silence. He undid the ropes around Anna’s waist, pulling her up and pushing her forward over the table. He glared at Silas triumphantly.
“Shall we see how compliant she is?”
Silas lost it. “Let her go, you bastard!” he roared, struggling against his captors, which only rewarded him with another uppercut to the stomach that had him doubled over in pain.
“Silas, don’t!” Anna cried, tears pouring down her face as Willy began to pull up her shift.
Silas couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear to let this happen, but then Silas saw Anna’s hands moving rapidly against her ropes, Willy, too busy trying to open his breeches, didn’t see her hands break free and reach for a large clay pot on the table.
As Anna wriggled around, slamming the clay pot against Willy’s head, Silas used every ounce of his strength to twist around and slam his forehead into the head of the criminal who guarded him.
He heard a shot from outside and saw Giovanni, his men, and Olsen Adley storm the building, Willy’s other men emerging out of the woodwork to engage them in combat.
Silas ducked as a hired assassin threw a punch at his head and Silas delivered a heavy blow to his jaw, knocking the man back.
He turned to see his wife fighting with Willy, straddling the man and fiercely struggling to snatch the gun from the smuggler’s hand.
In a moment, the gun slipped from both of their grasps, clattering away and both scrambled for it, but Willy got their first. Silas moved as fast as he could, but Willy’s finger was on the trigger.
“Anna!” he screamed, but he would never get there in time.
Then, out of nowhere, he saw a blur of a man jumping in front of Anna’s body, absorbing the ringing blast of the bullet.
“Father!” Anna cried, and dropped to her knees beside the collapsed body of Olsen Adley.
Silas saw Willy raise the double-barreled pistol to take aim at Anna again.
He didn’t think about it. Filled with the same instinctive rage that had taken over him on the night of his father’s death, he felt a metal bar from the millworks in his hand and swung it with all his might at the face of Willy Dugby.
The gun exploded as Willy fell back, and horrifyingly, Silas saw Anna fall behind him.
“Anna!” He rushed to her side, pulling her up and almost wept with relief when she gasped and clutched at him. “Where did it hit you?”
“It didn’t!” Anna sobbed, “I ducked! Is it over?”
Silas looked around him with a strangled breath. Giovanni and his men had subdued Willy’s criminal henchmen, and Willy himself lay splayed on the mill floor, a pool of blood spreading behind his head and his eyes staring unseeingly forward. He was dead.
“Yes,” Silas sighed, pulling Anna into his arms and letting her sob into his shirt. “Yes, it’s over.”