Page 27 of A Princess, Stolen (A Kiss of Revenge, Blood, and Love #1)

Although I heard the last sentence, I latched on to one image.

I saw a windowless room, the type detectives always discover when they catch a serial killer: pictures of me and Dad hanging on the walls along with newspaper clippings and snapshots.

Isaac’s room. Maybe he was obsessed with me and Dad.

However, Nathan had said a few . Maybe there was another one like Isaac. Maybe that Killer-Miller.

“Willa?”

I swallowed and looked at Nathan.

His gray eyes were suddenly full of warmth, which once again confused me. “Don’t worry about the storm. We’ll be fine.”

We’ll be fine, Willa Mouse .

He smiled at me encouragingly and I thought he was going to touch my shoulder again in a comforting way, but he turned and told me to follow him.

Recently, I had thought I would despise the leader even more if he were Nathan because Nathan had always represented freedom for me.

For a while, I had even wished he were a stranger.

Now, I was infinitely glad that he was Nathan.

I didn’t know why, but I had the impression that a part of him was still the boy who had danced with me in the Palace of Shards.

Who had kissed me. Even if Nathan might not want to remember that boy anymore.

I spent the next hour in a trance, which felt like a horror trip.

I barely noticed anything. Nathan had handed me over to Troy who dragged me everywhere.

Vague images stuck in my mind. Pan, who seemed to be on the bow and stern at the same time.

Long waves with foamy crests. The gaunt man with the dreadlocks, who everyone called Sparta, checked the support boards on the bunks.

“When the sea is rough, you can support yourself with your legs there and lean your back against the wall,” Troy explained to me while Sparta pretended I wasn’t there. Later, Delphi installed checkerboard strips on the dining table, “So the dishes don’t slide back and forth,” he said.

“How long does a storm like this last?” I heard myself asking dejectedly as I descended the steps of the tower behind Troy.

Troy shrugged. “I don’t know. The outskirts sometimes last a few days. I don’t go to sea regularly. Few of us do. Actually, only Castor and Sparta. Sometimes Delphi. The rest of us have more or less received a crash course. But, if anyone can get a crew through a storm, it’s Nathan.”

“And why does he have so much experience with storms?”

Troy stroked his tousled hair and grinned crookedly. “I’m telling you too much, princess.”

I looked at him with a dull fear all over. We stood in front of the door that led out to the stern.

He sighed deeply. “Pan and Nathan are right, no one can say no to you, can they?” He glanced briefly toward the stairwell and continued.

“Nathan grew up on and by the water. He grew up in Coldville on Buffalo Lake. Almost the entire crew is from there. The people in Coldville make their living from fishing. Even in winter when it’s minus twenty-eight degrees, they put their nets under the ice.

At least, they used to.” I tried to remember everything.

Coldville on Buffalo Lake, cold, fishing, but Troy continued.

“Later, Nathan went down the Mississippi with his brother and sister, the whole river, mostly as stowaways, and later, when his brother was in prison, he hired on with trawlers to survive. But you didn’t hear all that from me, right? ”

I knew about the trawlers but had forgotten about it. With all the other information, I wondered why Troy gave it to me so freely. Weren’t these facts important? Couldn’t I later tell the police that most of them were from Coldville, wherever that was?

For a moment, through the haze of my fear, I stared at Troy leaning casually against the doorframe.

He was slim and, as expected, no more than four inches taller than me, maybe five foot seven.

I wondered how a sensible-looking young man with a future had ended up with this group of serious criminals. Was he also from Coldville?

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

“You don’t look like you belong in this group.”

“Phew!” he said as if he was insulted and gently nudged my arm. “You don’t look like a princess either.”

Despite my fear, I had to smile. “What do I look like?”

Troy leaned forward toward me. “Like an elf, a bit ethereal.”

“That was what my dad said.”

For a split second, Troy’s brown eyes glowed as if a wildfire was raging in them. The evocative word dad had been mentioned. “And what do I look like?” he asked anyway.

“You said it yourself; like Orlando Bloom. Only your hair lies differently. Bristly.”

“Bristly? I’ll give you bristly !” Troy grinned, and suddenly, I didn’t feel quite so alone anymore. Troy seemed okay, apart from the fact that he was one of my abductors.

“Why are you telling me so much?” I asked.

“I don’t know. You have that effect.”

“What effect?”

“People trust you. I bet you won’t tell on us once you know the whole truth.”

“Of course not, I told you,” I said, perhaps too quickly. The Agamemnon rocked for a moment and I had to support myself on a mast, which were luckily everywhere. Then, I glanced at Troy. “What truth?”

He looked at me. “You’ll find out the truth when you get home.”

With that, he turned and led me further to the main deck at the bow where Pan and Taurus were stretching arm-thick ropes and lashing nets.

“The ropes are for holding on to during the storm. Sometimes you have to repair or readjust something outside, but if a breaker like that hits you, it can wash you over the railing and off the ship.”

“A breaker?” That word made me forget all the questions about the truth that I would learn at home. With a queasy feeling, I looked out to sea again, and then Nathan appeared.

“We’re ready. The hatches are closed, nets and cranes secured, and ropes attached.” He said a lot more, but I didn’t understand the technical language. I only heard one thing before Nathan left again; the wind was already at force six and rising.

A quarter of an hour later, the deck was deserted in the wind and rain.

Half of the men were holed up in their cabins, the rest were on the bridge.

No one was allowed outside anymore. Troy checked the cabinets again, the handles of which he had tied together with cable ties before he took me to the command center.

When we entered the bridge, I was stared at with hostility from both sides.

“What is she doing here?” Sparta asked, the thin man with the dreadlocks, and coughed as if he were a chain smoker. “Why isn’t she in a room?”

“Or her cell?” Taurus added, and the bull on his forehead seemed to jump at me.

Nathan glanced at both of them. “She can’t do anything on the bridge,” he replied before saying to me gruffly, “Sit back there and stay quiet!” I now understood that the more men there were around us, the colder his tone became toward me.

I did as he said and squeezed myself into the furthest corner where there were no consoles, machines, or other devices flashing. I stared out with my eyes wide open.

The world behind the large portholes was a mixture of gray and black. The storm wind chased the clouds across the sky, dark gray, thick, and heavy.

On the narrow emergency seat, I pulled my legs up to my body, wrapped one arm around myself, and with the other, I held on to a bar on the wall. Repeatedly, I peered outside and then inside and back again.

In front of the helm, Nathan was talking to Troy and Sparta.

Their voices sounded worried, which made me even more nervous.

I froze and closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, Sparta was holding the helm.

Pan, Troy, and Taurus were standing at the control console or the rudders.

I had no idea which device was responsible for what here.

Everyone was suddenly wearing life jackets including Nathan, who held out a bucket to me with a nod.

I said nothing as I pushed his arm away.

Nathan put it next to my seating area. “Believe me, you’ll need it.”

“But I’m not feeling sick.”

“Not yet.” He went to a box and came back with an orange vest. “Put it on!”

I did as ordered and he explained to me what I had to do in an emergency. Nonetheless, I was afraid that even the life jacket wouldn’t help us in a heavy storm. A cutter like this could just drag you down into the depths.

However, I have to get home safely, if only for Dad’s sake . Apprehensive, I breathed on the pane and painted a picture on the fogged-up window, which made Pan look over at me suspiciously.

“What you drawing? A witch spell?” There was a bit of fun in his words but also distrust.

I merely shook my head. My fingers were shaking.

I was painting waves. Dad had often said that my drawings left him with a question mark, but pictures should evoke feelings.

I had often painted the ocean alongside the swamp, and the ocean was just one question.

What happened back then and why did I forget?

I tried desperately not to think about Mom or the nightmares that continued to haunt me, in which I was dragged down to the bottom of the sea where I drowned. I couldn’t go completely crazy now, but fate was not kind to me.

The wind picked up. It howled over the bow, tugged at the bridge, and whipped the rain against the windows. The rickety windshield wiper looked as if it was about to break off and fly away.

A short time later, a burst of activity broke out. The men shouted values or courses to each other, orders for the rudders, but I didn’t understand any of it. They might as well have been speaking Urdu.

I was growing colder and colder. My ears were closing and everything sounded far off. I glanced out again at the raging sea. Whitecaps blew over the crests of the waves. If I squinted a little, they looked like the fluttering fabric of a white dress forgotten in the wind.

“Darling?”

Who said that?

“Darling!”