Prologue

PROLOGUE

T he rope was itchy, little sharp fibers of it poking into his skin.

This felt different than he’d imagined it, a noose around his neck.

Different, but still reality.

A calmness like he’d never known invaded his muscles that he’d thought for sure would be twitching, fighting this to the very end.

Not that he was resigned to what was to come—his body, maybe, but his mind couldn’t quite comprehend how he found himself on the wrong side of a long rope.

He still searched the deepest hollows of his brain for some way out of this, some nugget that would turn his fortune. His frantic thoughts a windstorm of dreams and hopes that would never be.

The pinpricks of the rope dug into his skin as the brute behind him that smelled of rotted fish tightened the rope.

They hadn’t bothered to place a sack over his head. No, they wanted him to see what was coming, what he had a wrought.

A sizeable crowd, probably most of this fishermen’s town, had gathered to witness the spectacle. His eyes bulging out, his body jerking as it fought for breath. He didn’t imagine they thought to snap his neck with the fall—it was far too short.

They wanted the slow death. The painful, panicked death as a warning to all others.

Don’t make the mistake he did.

He ignored the crying next to him on the adjacent stump, the frantic pleading and begging—he couldn’t do anything about that now.

He’d already made that error—played the part of a brash young buck that didn’t know his own limitations. So fucking na?ve.

He hoped someone in the crowd recognized him, a sailor passing through, if he was lucky. One that knew where he came from, so they could report to his father what had happened. Idiocy and shame in it, but at least his father would know.

The stench of the man behind him reached his nostrils as the man sneered up into his ear. “Ye can ask the devil for yer forgiveness for no man of God will come for ye now.”

The man’s boot clunked onto the stump he was balanced upon, kicking it.

And there it was, his last true breath.

The block trembled under his weight, then disappeared.

Air underneath him. Weightless.

For one silent, glorious moment, the world around him went still.

He dropped.