The soldiers stepped toward the bodies and kicked at the torpid legs. The youngest-looking woman lay in a state of rigor, suggesting she’d died recently. The one beside her had shriveled to a stage of death that was beyond human recognition. The third one…

“Still alive.” The man kicked again, prompting a jerking twitch from the pregnant body that now showed signs of breathing.

Matted black hair hung over her face in clumps, but her eyes were in there, bright and desperate and staring directly at me as she tried to lift an arm to defend herself. I scrambled toward her—awkwardly and ineffectively with my ankles and wrists shackled as they were—and threw myself onto the soldier’s ramming boot. A foolish decision, for the next kick sent me careening into the wall.

I hit so hard that black spots stole my vision. Pain stitched through my skull, and a loud ringing swallowed my hearing. I climbed through the fog, clinging to consciousness. After several attempts to sit up, the agony dissipated, and my eyesight returned. But I was too late.

Across the hold, one of the officers held the pregnant woman’s head in a bucket of water. I screamed against my gag, scrabbling toward her as her arms flailed weakly, uselessly. Then she fell limp.

Dead.

Gone.

She’d suffered only feet away, and I’d been helpless to stop it.

The horror that swamped my senses was unlike any that had come before it. My lungs burned with the frantic gasps of my shallow breathing. My jaw clenched so tightly I couldn’t unlock it, and the pain in my chest and throat tried to black out my awareness.

I knew this level of evil existed. I’d glimpsed it beneath the rutting body of the Marquess of Grisdale. I’d felt it in Jobah’s stories of his months aboard a slave ship. Hell, I’d battled it on the high seas in all forms of demons and monsters.

But to drown a dying, defenseless woman without reason or care? My mind couldn’t process it. My soul couldn’t bear it.

I lay in a state of traumatic shock, staring at their lifeless bodies.

And I was next.

Before I reached England’s shore, I would be defiled in so savage a manner I would likely die in consequence of it. Just like those women before me.

Being unaccustomed to wearing irons, I naturally feared that particular infliction as the officers turned their attentions on me. Could I have twisted my arms free, I would’ve gone for the knives on their hips. But I could not, and besides, I still had the ring around my neck to contend with, which they now secured to a hook on the wall and locked with a screw key.

Then, to my surprise and relief, they left.