Chapter 234: Madeline
He hauls me sideways, inch by inch, until my toes skid to the pulpit and the world drops away in a slate mouth. He angles me toward the smaller boat—the one with the boys shouting themselves raw—and laughs into the rain.
“Wouldn’t you love to stop this?” he yells across the water, his voice pitching high with the wind. His forearm bites under my collarbones; my heels scrape for purchase that doesn’t exist. “She’s mine. Mine. If she won’t be mine to love, she’s mine to hurt.”
They explode—“Don’t you touch her—hey!—HEY!”—fists thudding into gunwales, a metal ring tossed and snatched back because it’ll just bounce and be useless. One of them hammers the rail like he can knock the distance shorter; another keeps shouting my name like it’s a rope he can throw that will hold in the rain.
Nick drags me the other way, toward the red hull shouldering through the chop. The twins’ wheelhouse splits the weather, windows streaked, wipers raking. Reid is a cutout of fury at the helm; Jake braces beside him, one hand on the roof frame, the other cupping his mouth to shout. A third man—broad, dark jacket, face I can’t see—leans forward, assessing lanes and angles like the water is a chessboard. All three come out of the wheelhouse at the same time.
“You should never have taken her from me,” Nick screams at them, triumph buzzing like a live wire under the words. He wrenches me up on my toes, shoves me to the edge until my ribs catch the rail. I scream because I'm sure his kick earlier broke a rib or two already. “Whatever happens to her is on you.”
“Let her go!” Jake’s voice cracks the space between us. “You deal with us—now.”
“If you love her,” the third man booms—I feel like I've seen him before—“you don’t do this. Put her down.”
Nick bares his teeth. “She’s mine!”
“No,” Reid roars back, and it’s so big the rain seems to pull up for a heartbeat, like the weather itself startles. “She’s not.”
For half a second his eyes hit mine. They’re wild, yes—dark with something that looks like the same fever that’s eating Nick alive—but there’s pain in them too, a naked, wrecked kind that makes my breath stutter. He looks at me like he’s already holding me and like he can feel exactly where my body hurts.
The third man angles himself into Nick’s focus, palms up, voice a measured wall against the wind. “Listen to me. Leave her. Let us take her aboard. You can go. Take the boat and run. We won’t come after you.” He slices a look at the twins that says play along. “You walk away now, you don’t go to jail today.”
Nick’s breath saws against my ear. I feel his pulse jump where his forearm locks me. For the first time, uncertainty skates across his face—just a ripple, a hairline fracture in the manic mask.
Rain needles. The Vigil yaws, shows her beam, rights with a groan. The smaller boat keeps station, men on deck white-knuckled, mouths moving. The red hull holds off our starboard, engines low and angry, every part of her pointed at me.
Nick’s grip tightens, loosens, tightens. He’s doing math with a broken compass. For one long second, I can feel him teeter.
He seems to consider it.
He barks a laugh that sounds like metal grinding. “I’m not falling for that,” he shouts, pitching his voice to both boats. “You want her? Come get her. Doubt you’re fast enough.”
He’s spiraling—pissed, cornered, thinking with the part of his brain that only knows ruin. Two boats hemming him in, rain slicing sideways, the Vigil taking the sea wrong—he can taste the mistake he made and it makes him meaner.
He shoves me.
I go down hard, all the way to the bow, and this time the pain isn’t a point. It’s a detonation. Every inch of me lights up—wrist, ribs, jaw, scalp, the raw scrape on my arm—and then something new, a bright, electric stab that makes the world tilt white.
I scream. It tears out of me like the sound belongs to someone else.
Nick whips around. His eyes go wide. I follow his stare and see it: a long shard of glass jutting from my side, slick and terrible. Blood spreads fast—warmth blooming under my back, leaching through fabric, thin rivers finding the scuppers. The nonskid freckles red.
Noise erupts and goes thin all at once. From starboard, Reid’s voice rips the air: “RAM HER!” Someone tries to pull him back—“We’ll flip her if we hit beam-on—” “I don’t care—” Over port, the younger crew panics—“She’s bleeding—he’s killing her—Jesus—”
The sky presses low. The deck rocks. The rain is a curtain. Nick is a blur at the edge of my vision, pacing, shouting something I can’t keep hold of.
I try to sit up and the world tilts. I lie back down. The pain blazes, then… ebbs. Numbness moves in, soft as fog. The heat of the blood is strange, almost soothing where it pools under my spine. The shouting recedes like someone’s closing a door. The red hull. The smaller boat. Hands up. Mouths open. Reid. Jake.
I’m tired.
I’m not as scared anymore.
I let my eyes slide closed, just for a second, and think of their hands, their voices, the way home looks at dusk. Then I let the dark lean closer.