Chapter 233: Madeline
I wait until the world steadies—a count of ten, then twenty—until my breath isn’t a saw and the locker stops tilting under me.
The lid slams open.
His face drops into the rectangle of light—rain-slick, pupils blown, mouth wrong—and whatever plan I thought I had just… evaporates.
I scream. “Stop—please, stop—go away—” It’s a shatter of sound, not language.
There’s no man behind his eyes anymore. Just manic shine and a hunger that has nothing to do with food.
My hand closes on anything it finds. A small aluminum tank—cold, gritty—I heave it at his head. It clips his temple and he reels, swears. I grab the first buoy my fingers hit and throw; it bounces off his shoulder and spins into the scuppers. A coiled hydrophone cable, heavy head still attached—I swing it like a mace. It catches his cheek with a meaty crack. He jerks back, shocked.
But he’s still there.
His arm snakes down, faster than my fear; fingers bite my throat. The world cinches to a narrow, burning line. He switches to my hair, a fist at the nape, and yanks. Fire rips across my scalp. I scrabble for purchase—rope, canvas, the anchor fluke—and miss. He drags me, and some hidden edge—metal, sharp—rakes up my forearm. My shirt tears with a wet sound; heat blooms along the cut and then the pain chases it, white and bright. I scream. There’s pain everywhere now—wrist a star going supernova, jaw thick and throbbing, the back of my head still ringing from the wheelhouse, my shoulders lit up like they’re wired to a car battery, and now the raw burn of my opened skin.
He hauls me out of the locker like a catch and yanks me forward, feet skidding on slick nonskid. The deck is a skating rink. I stub my knee against a cleat and something in it grinds. He doesn’t care. He drags me to the bow, to the wind and the rain and the iron grin of the pulpit.
Shouting tears across the water.
“Leave her alone!” a man bellows. “Step away from her! HEY!”
I crane my neck, blinking through salt and rain. A boat—not too far—rears and drops in the swell, four figures on the deck, hands up, one with binoculars, one with a radio glued to his mouth. The waves are too big; the Vigil is beam-on and hates it; there’s no way they can come close without slamming us broadside and turning this into wreckage.
I cry. I can’t not. The pain in my scalp is a live wire; his fist is still in my hair, yanking me back so my throat is a bare thing in the rain. I’m weirdly, stupidly relieved to see people—proof the world still exists beyond this small, cruel stage—but it doesn’t feel like anyone can stop what Nick is going to do.
His breath saws right by my ear. His fingers tighten.
And the sea keeps lifting us and dropping us, like it’s choosing sides.
The deck is a nightmare now—gear everywhere, coils of line turned to snares, a fender split and bleeding foam, the slick bell of a buoy rolling with each heave. Glittering teeth of glass are scattered along the nonskid from—God knows—did he smash a side window? The whole bow feels like a trap, every edge either sharp or heavy enough to end me. He knows it, too. It’s in the sliver of grin he can’t keep off his face: he could pick anything here and finish it.
Voices saw across the water, trying to throw ropes of sound around him. “Hold on, Madeline!” “Hey—hey—leave her alone!” Another voice—steadier, pleading. “Talk to me, man. Step back.”
Nick drops into a crouch over me, rain dripping from his lashes, pupils blown so wide his eyes look empty. “Oh,” he says, mock-sweet, tilting his head at my arm. “Looks like you’re bleeding.”
Then he kicks me in the ribs.
It punches the air out of me. Pain blooms in a color I don’t have a name for, and I’m sliding, backward, spine catching the pulpit rail. The men on the other boat explode—“NO!” and a scatter of curses—like their voices can stop force.
Nick laughs—high, bright, wrong. “I’m definitely going to jail for this,” he says, all teeth. “Might as well be for a good reason.”
“Are you going to kill me?” The words rasp out of me without permission. Maybe I want to know what shape to make of this fear.
He studies me like a puzzle. “No,” he decides at last, voice dipping into something soft that curdles my stomach. “You’re too pretty for that.” He leans in. “But I’ll make you regret all of it.”
Rain needles my face. My wrist is a sun going nova; my jaw throbs like a rotten tooth; the cut along my forearm weeps warm under the cold. I can taste copper and diesel and the metallic grit of fear on my tongue.
Movement to starboard catches my eye—a red hull shouldering through weather, cutting a smarter line than the smaller boat. For a second I think I’m hallucinating, but then the wheelhouse angles just right and I see them. Tall. Broad. One hand on the wheel, one braced. A third shape between them. I can’t make out faces through rain and distance, but I would know their bodies anywhere.
The twins’ second boat.
A small, wild smile claws its way up my face before I can stop it. It dies as fast as it comes.
Nick hauls me upright in one jerk until I’m on my toes, my scalp screaming under his fist. He pins me back to his chest, one forearm slotted under my collarbones so tight I can’t draw a full breath. “This will teach you,” he hisses against my ear, breath hot and sour. “You shouldn’t have broken up with me.”
“You’re sick,” I gasp. “In the head.”
He laughs, delighted. “Maybe.”
The world narrows to a ring of noise: to port, the young crew shouting themselves hoarse—“Leave her! Step away! Don’t touch her!”—to starboard, voices I know in my bones hit the weather like knives, both of them screaming my name.
But Nick’s the only thing touching me. His hands, his breath, his grip. He is still the one holding me.