“As someone who is bad at cowering myself, I can attest that changing one’s nature is difficult,” she said. “I tend to throw things instead of cowering.”

“That does not surprise me,” he said with a brief smile. His voice became darker. “Roux first granted me parole, then he revoked it and had me thrown into the vilest dungeon in Bitche. He did this again and again over the following months. It was a cat-and-mouse game with him, and the cat held all the power.”

She winced, sensing that his experiences had been far more painful than his terse words described. “Did he treat other prisoners that way?”

Foxton finished his brandy with one long swallow, then rose and began pacing the room, his unseeing gaze sliding over the weapon displays. “He was abusive in different ways to most prisoners, but he had a special hatred for me.”

“Do you know why?”

Foxton paused in front of an array of axes set in a circle, the handles radiating inward like the spokes of a wheel. “Roux was the son of a laborer and rose through the ranks of the army to become a colonel. Admirable, really, but he was an angry man who despised those who were born to wealth and privilege. He also despised the British and above all he loathed filthy British aristocrats. He was short, dark, and—not well favored. I epitomized everything he hated: tall, blond, heir to a title. He wanted to break me. He was quite creative in his attempts to do that.”

Kendra hadn’t thought of him in those terms, but Foxton was the very image of a blond, handsome young English lord, an ideal seldom found in real life. No wonder a short, dark, ugly son of poverty had hated the very sight of such a prisoner. “I have had some experience of being the victim of a powerful man who did his best to break me,” she said quietly. “Did Roux rely on torture?”

“Sometimes, but his specialty was mental cruelty. His favorite trick was to call in several prisoners at once and announce they would be exchanged very soon. Everyone but me. When I finally asked when I’d be exchanged, he said never; he’d see me dead before that would happen.”

Foxton’s flat voice gave Kendra chills. “Parole is linked to the possibility of a prisoner exchange, isn’t it? Is a parole valid when the captor is not fulfilling his part of the bargain?”

“That is where the moral complexity comes in. It’s also where I reached my breaking point.” He drifted across the room to study a display of Highland claymores heavy enough to cleave the skull of an ox. “I was not in very good shape by then. I decided to hell with honor. I might as well die attempting to escape.”

“But you didn’t die.”