I kept my eyes on the water as it blurred away in sparkling moonlit billows. Staying awake seemed crucial for some reason, but it proved more difficult with each passing minute. The wind and the strain of hanging flogged the energy from my body, and my eyelids began to sag.

As I started to drift, I felt a vibration. Movement quivered down the line. Seconds pulsed by before I realized the distance between my feet and the water was stretching, lengthening. The rope was being pulled in.

My chest surged with the tumult of my breaths, waking my bones with violent tremors. Higher and higher I rose until the balcony came into view, and just beyond it, the cold sapphire eyes of my captor.

He knotted the rope around the rail, leaving me swinging just out of reach.

“Ashley…” I followed the length of the cable up and around an overhead beam, which supported a jutting roof. “Pull me in.”

With nothing but air and sea beneath my feet, I squirmed in limbo, uncertain and stricken with panic.

Why wasn’t he bringing me over the rail? I tried to extend a leg toward it, but I could only brush my toe against the balustrade.

Just out of reach, he reclined a shoulder against the open door to the cabin, wearing his white shirt and breeches and holding a knife at his side. He watched me impassively, as if hanging a half-naked woman outside his balcony was a nightly ritual.

Perhaps it was.

I wanted to kill him. The impulse to scream vivid details of how he would die clawed at my tongue. But I trapped the rant behind pinched lips.

The man had just plunged me toward the ocean like bait on a hook and suspended me there for nearly an hour. Now he casually held a knife too close to the cable that might very well drop me for the last time.

My heart told me I wouldn’t die tonight. Ashley Cutler had a role yet to play in my life. For good or for evil. Whichever way that went, enraging him wouldn’t keep me alive.

“Are you frightened now?” He tapped the blade against his thigh.

“I was frightened before.”

“Not nearly enough.” He grabbed an apple from the table behind him and set the knife to it, slicing off a bite-size piece. “I’d rather not return you to the hold. You might not be tender or fragile, but a month in a cage with forty beasts feeding upon you…” He popped the wedge of apple into his mouth and chewed. “I don’t wish that on any woman.”

Brutal, uncontrollable shaking wracked my body. The weight of my wet hair hung in my face, my neck too weak to hold up my head. I couldn’t even muster the strength to beg or complain about the agony in my hands.