33. Chapter 33

CHAPTER 33

C onsciousness slammed into him and Thomas tried to open his eyes.

Despair crushing him as he realized why they wouldn’t open—blood and pus had crusted over his eyelids from the numerous beatings on the ship.

It all rushed him at once.

Blades in his arm, carving at bone. Heels of boots cracking into his face. Punches to the gut, taking his breath. Weak. So damn weak.

Izzie.

Izzie appearing out of nowhere, and all of the pain fell away, fear for her swallowing everything. That she was captive on a ship with these monsters. What they would do to her.

Fear so visceral he thought his heart would stop beating.

Then she’d smashed a pistol across his temple.

Family first.

She’d uttered those words, then knocked him unconscious.

What in the hell had she meant?

Flat on his back, he could barely move his left arm to wipe away the crust over his eyes, so he lifted his right hand, only to feel the heavy weight of an iron shackle clamped around his wrist.

No matter how it tore at his eyelids, he ripped them open, needing to see it to believe it.

The dank stone ceiling above him, droplets of putrescent sewer water hovering, flickering in the light of the lit torch outside the cell. Walls of the same blackened, stained stone. A coffin around him. Trapping him once again.

Vermin already crawling all over his skin, itching he couldn’t escape.

A splitting pain shot through his neck as he twisted, looking down his body. Shackle on his arm. Shackle on his ankle. Chained to the floor.

They’d tossed him into the same damn cell.

Family first.

Izzie’s words sifted through his brain again, like a feathery seed floating in the wind that he couldn’t catch, slipping out of his fingers again and again.

But this was important, he knew it. Had to think on it. Think on why she had said it.

Sister.

The word, pure cruelty for what it meant, flashed into his brain. Tino had said it. Tino had been the fifth in the men that had attacked him in that alleyway in Edinburgh. Tino had found him.

And Tino had been the cruelest, the leader of all the men that had tortured him through the years in this cell of horrors he was chained into.

Tino. Tino had been the one to say “sister.”

There was only one woman on that ship, and it had been Izzie.

She was Tino’s sister.

And she’d led her brother straight to him. Betrayal like no other.

His breath stopped for several blissful seconds where he thought he might finally escape this life.

But then his body recoiled, sucking in a gasping breath.

Breathing, but suffocating under the despair overwhelming him.

He was back in hell.

No escape.

And he’d lost the only thing that truly mattered to him. Izzie.

For she had never been his.

She had always belonged to that rat bastard, Tino.