foursome who arrived at Andre’s home.
“I came to talk to her,” Louis said, panting as the house came into view. “That’s
when I found Gaston. He was already dead, stabbed in the belly.”
The first mate of the Vengeance des Raven lay sprawled at the base of the steps that
led up to the veranda. Around his hips, the ground was crimson with his spilled blood.
“Did you search the house?” Renaud asked.
“Of course I did, Renaud! She’s gone,” Louis said.
“Stop!” Alsandair yelled, and the men skidded on the oyster-shell pathway. They
looked at him. “Stay back and let me take a look.”
“Don’t tell me what to—” Louis began, but Renaud reached out to grab his arm for
Corsair had started forward again.
“He’s a soldier. He knows how to track men,” Kyle said. He bent over, his hands on
his knees as he attempted to drag breath into his depleted lungs. “We could destroy
signs he needs to read.”
Alsandair had hunkered down beside the dead man, putting a hand to the side of
Gaston’s throat.
“What the hell are you doing?” Louis demanded.
Alsandair got to his feet. “He’s been dead an hour or longer,” he said, and looked
closely at the pathway. “There were at least three of them, maybe four.”
“How can you tell?” Renaud asked.
He pointed to the overturned table on the veranda and the chess pieces lying about,
the blood smeared down the steps. “The man with Rylee must have fought them but
they gutted him. They pushed him down the steps and took off that way, stepping in
his blood as they went.” He began following the pathway around the side of the house.
“One of them most likely is carrying Rylee.”
It was then the other men looked down to see the boot prints tracking away from
the murder scene. There were at least three distinct sets of tracks on the pathway.
“How are you going to track them through the jungle?” Louis demanded.
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“I’m a damned good tracker and they’ve got my woman,” Alsandair said. He
stopped and gave the men a hard stare. “And I don’t need a crowd traipsing behind me
to alert the bastards I’m coming! All I need is a sword and a dagger, maybe a pistol.”
“Get him what he needs, Louis,” Renaud ordered.
“I’m coming with you,” Kyle said.
“No,” Alsandair stated, shaking his head as Louis ran up the veranda steps to do as
Renaud bid.
“You need someone at your back and we’re not going to argue about it,” Kyle said.
“Three against one isn’t good odds, my friend.”
“I know the jungle, Sandair,” Renaud said, “and so does Louis. We can be as quiet
as we need to be.”
“They have my wife and they’ve got an hour’s lead!” Alsandair hissed at them. He
was impatient to be gone, to find Rylee, and he flicked an irritated glance at the door to
the house, willing Corsair to hurry. “I need to move fast.”
“We’ll stay back but we’ll be behind you,” Renaud said. His tone said he would
accept no argument.
Louis came back with swords and daggers. “I don’t know where he keeps his
pistols,” he apologized.
Alsandair stuck a dagger into the waistband of his pants, flexed his hand around
the sword Louis had handed him and set off at a fast pace, studying the ground as he
went. “No talking,” he ordered, his teeth clenched.
The men following in Alsandair’s wake couldn’t see everything he was seeing as he
led them along the path. He pointed out a few broken stems on plants but when he
moved off the path and into the denser foliage they merely looked at one another,
unable to fathom what he was doing.
Carefully stepping amongst the detritus on the jungle floor, Alsandair was moving
as stealthily and as quickly as he could. His heart was pounding in his ears, his palms
sweaty from the fear for Rylee’s safety growing within him. Whoever had taken his
lady was either so clumsy or stupid they didn’t think to cover their tracks or were
shrewd enough to be setting a trap for anyone following them. Several hundred feet
into the lush canopy of the jungle, he decided there were four men and one of them was
definitely carrying Rylee for his footprints made deeper impressions in the rotting
vegetation. He also decided there wasn’t anything shrewd about them. They were being
careless, not bothering to cover their movement through the jungle.
He stopped, holding up a closed fist to halt Kyle who was following him about
twenty feet back. He cocked his head to one side, listening intently for he had caught
the hint of laughter up ahead. Twisting his neck, he gave Kyle a hard stare, looked past
him to see Renaud and Louis also stopped behind Kyle. He held up four fingers and
saw the other men nod. He forked two fingers toward Renaud and Louis then jabbed
his thumb to their right. Once more they nodded and began moving quietly the way
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he’d indicated. He looked back at Kyle and indicated the gambler was to go left. Kyle
immediately headed that way.
Alsandair turned back to the pathway ahead of him. The laughter had come again
and he knew that time the others must have heard it. With his jaw set, he began walking
toward the sound.
* * * * *
Andre tried once more to get up, fighting the lethargy the tenerse had forced upon
him. His head was swimming unmercifully and it was all he could do to get his leaden
legs off the bed and his feet to the floor. The room tilted to one side. Furniture in the
plush cabin of the Perdu receded and came at him in waves as he attempted to stand.
His legs went out from beneath him and he slid down the side of the bunk, scraping his
backbone on the wooden side rails as he went.
“Goddamit!” he barked, feeling the gouge along his spine. His legs splayed out and
he couldn’t seem to find the energy or strength to push himself up.
A part of him understood the urgency of going after Rylee, but though his spirit
and heart were more than willing, his body simply wouldn’t cooperate. Frustrated, he
repeatedly slammed the back of his head against the edge of the mattress, hissing his
anger at not being able to get up.
“Rylee,” he whispered, fear and regret and helplessness pressing down on him like
a ton of rock.
* * * * *
Alsandair caught glimpses of Renaud, Louis and Kyle as they carefully skirted the
clearing in front of the cave he was watching. He had to admit the men were being as
silent as possible, yet to his trained ear he could pick out their movements with ease. He
knew the men inside the cave could not. Those men were making enough noise of their
own to mask the approach of a rescue party.
Skirting a fallen palm tree, Alsandair made for the cave’s entrance. Once there, he
flattened himself against the face of the rock upon which thick vines were hanging and
quickly looked around the edge of the entrance. He’d caught just a glimpse of light
farther back down a passage leading off the entrance chamber.
Kyle quietly appeared on the other side of the cave’s entrance, carefully making his
way op
posite Alsandair.
Pointing a finger at Kyle then putting his hand out—palm down—to indicate Kyle
was to stay put, Alsandair struck a thumb to his chest and then pointed his index finger
twice toward the cave entrance.
Kyle shook his head firmly. The expression in his eyes said he wasn’t going to wait
while Alsandair went into the cave alone.
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Sensing Renaud and Louis moving up behind him, Alsandair turned his palm up
and folded all but one finger, giving Kyle another hand signal the gambler understood
all too well.
Kyle grinned and wagged his brows then mimicked Alsandair’s signal with his
right hand while he wrapped the fingers of his left around his extended middle finger
and moved the closed fingers up and down.
Despite the gravity of the situation, Alsandair was hard-pressed not to laugh as he
slipped quickly into the cave entrance, leaving the other men behind.
Across the entrance of the cave, Renaud arched a brow at Kyle.
Kyle shrugged and melded into the cave as silently and efficiently as Alsandair had.
Alsandair had every intention of moving cautiously and slowly toward the
flickering light that cast moving shadows on the cavern’s ceiling but one scream—loud
and piercing and filled with pain—broke his resolve and he dug his booted toes into the
loose sand beneath his feet and vaulted forward, sword clutched tightly in his hand.
Kyle cursed, barely noticing Renaud and Louis entering the cave, and sprang after
Alsandair. By the time he reached the place where Alsandair had disappeared, he heard
a brutal war cry and then the harsh clang of metal striking metal quickly followed by a
bloodcurdling shriek that made the hair on his arms stand up.
When the three men who had accompanied Alsandair on his rescue mission entered
the wide chamber lit brightly by light from a campfire and torches stuck into crevices
on the rock wall, they stepped into a living nightmare they would each remember for as
long as they lived.
One man lay crumpled beside the fire, his head a good ten feet from his still
twitching body. Another was struggling to stuff his innards back inside his lower body
as he slumped against a jagged boulder. The stench of spilled blood and guts was thick
in the air. Two other men were striking clumsily at Alsandair with swords they
obviously did not know how to wield, terror showing clearly on their sweaty faces.
Kyle would have entered the fray but Louis reached out to stop him. He shook his
head. “He would not appreciate your interference,” Corsair said.
“He needs my help!” Kyle protested.
“No, my friend,” Louis said. “He does not.”
Renaud spotted Rylee lying off to one side and rushed to her, stripping off his shirt
to cover her naked body as she lay like a broken toy on the cave floor. As he wrapped
her in his shirt, he winced when he saw the myriad bruises that marred her soft flesh.
Blood was running down her legs. He called out to Louis to give him his shirt and Louis
hurried over, ripping the shirt from his body. He handed it to Renaud who gently
pressed the material between Rylee’s legs. Kyle came to hunker down beside them,
groaning when he saw the scrapes and cuts on Rylee’s lovely face.
“She’s unconscious,” Renaud said.
“Thanks be to the gods for that,” Louis observed.
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The three men could not keep their eyes from the gory spectacle that was playing
itself out on the other side of the chamber. None of them were strangers to witnessing—
and dispensing—death but not a one of them had ever seen anything like what they
watched happen that day in the cave.
Alsandair was like a man possessed. He didn’t know whether his lady was alive or
dead. All he knew was that these men had hurt her, raped her and would have killed
her had he not found her in time. He knew beyond a shadow of any doubt that he was
going to mutilate the two remaining men who were trying desperately to get around
him and get out of the cave. He slashed at them, driving them back farther into the
chamber until there was nowhere for them to go. His eyes were dark fire, his face as
hard and cold as the rocks surrounding him. Hacking at his enemies, placing cuts on
their arms, their thighs, their chests, he was doling out as much pain as he could
without finishing them off.
Louis watched Alsandair lunge and drive his blade into Rouyce’s gut, twisting it
one hundred and eighty degrees before dragging it up, cleaving the man’s chest all the
way up to his gullet. He saw Ethan Mock’s eyes flare as his friend sagged to the cave
floor, still impaled on the berserker’s sword. Mock dropped his own weapon and held
up his hands, hoping to stave off the death he saw flick to him. “Please, milord,” Mock
begged, and the front of his filthy trousers turned dark with urine. “Quarter, sir.
Quarter!”
Pity and compassion were no longer words in Alsandair Farrell’s vocabulary. With
a calm, steady hand, he withdrew his blade from the dead man who crumpled at his
feet and turned to the surviving man.
“Please,” Louis heard Mock cry, and the man sank to his knees, his hands clasped
under his chin as though in prayer. “I’m begging you, milord, please!”
This was the man who had been ramming himself into Alsandair’s woman when
the warrior had burst in. This was the man who would suffer the most at his hands.
Alsandair brought his left hand over to slowly wrap the fingers around his right
hand, gripping the sword tightly as he began to pull it up and over his right shoulder.
His hot glower never left the man’s deathly pale face and it wavered only a fraction of a
degree when his arms came down and he took off the top of his enemy’s head—just
above the nose—and blood and gore sprayed into his face. The backward swing of his
blade took the rapist’s head completely off at the collarbone.
Kyle looked away. His gorge was rising for the slashing did not stop when the
rapist’s head fell away from his body. The young warrior continued to hack at the dead
man over and over again—the wet, meaty sounds, the splintering of bone loud in the
still cavern.
When Alsandair was finished with the man he had seen raping his wife from
behind, there was precious little that was left to label the destruction human. He had
chopped and cleaved and pulverized the rapist into so much minced meat and blood
ran in streamlets toward the campfire.
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It was Louis who got to his feet and walked cautiously to the Anlusian and silently
took the grisly sword from the younger man’s hand. Alsandair just stood there staring
down at the vengeance he had wrought. Unaware he was trembling violently, his hands
shaking, his eyes glazed, he ran a blood-splattered hand under his chin.
“Your lady needs you,” Louis said softly.
Alsandair turned his head toward Corsair and Louis would later tell everyone who
would listen that he had gotten his first glimpse of what hell would be like in the
molten eyes of Farrell.
“She needs a healer, son,” Louis advised. He glanced back a
t Renaud who had
picked Rylee up and was holding her. “I’ll go fetch him.”
“You need to hurry, Louis,” Renaud added.
Louis took off like a shot, running from the cave as fast as his legs could pump.
Shrugging off the blood fever that had gripped him with iron claws, Alsandair
stumbled back from his kills and moved like a man lost to sleepwalking toward his
lady. He took her from Renaud’s arms.
“It’s all right, sweeting,” he whispered to her. “I’m here now. Everything will be all
right.”
* * * * *
Andre managed to pull himself up to lie halfway across the bunk. He waited until
the strange buzzing in his ears stopped then cautiously straightened up. Although he
felt numb, disoriented, he stumbled to the cabin door. Gripping the jamb, he wavered
there for a moment—taking deep breaths, striving to clear his head. When he finally
found the strength to head for the companionway and the steps up to the deck, his
body was managing to push the potent drug from his system.
“Horse,” he managed to tell one of Renaud’s men as he wove his way across the
deck.
“Go with him,” Devin Boucharde ordered to one of the younger men. “Don’t let
him fall off the damned thing and break his neck.”
By the time Andre staggered down the gangplank, a mount was waiting for him.
He tried to put his foot in the stirrup and missed twice before finally accomplishing the
task. It took him three more tries to hoist himself into the saddle before someone kindly
put their hands under his ass and vaulted him up into the saddle. As it was he nearly
tumbled off the other side and would have had another man not caught him and
propped him back up again. Tugging on the reins, unaware of the young sailor keeping
pace beside him, he dug his heels into the steed and held on for dear life as the beast
sprang forward with a jolt that snapped Andre’s teeth together.
* * * * *
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Crashing back through the jungle, Louis had just reached the clearing where
L’endroit Sûr stood when he saw several armed men coming toward him. “Healer!” he
called out, recognizing Andre’s sailors. “Hurry and get the healer. She’s been hurt!”
Suzette and her mother had just come back from market day, hurrying behind the
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