Карен Кингсбери - A Distant Shore [calibre]

And Jack would spend the rest of his life paying for it.

THE WATER WOULDN’T take her.

All she had wanted was to stay still, to slip down, down to the bottom of the ocean. So that God would take her to the edge of the ocean, where her mother and brother lived. But her arms hadn’t listened to her heart. They kept drawing and pulling and grabbing at the water. And her lungs kept breathing.

Then she had seen something else.

Two boys swimming out to get her. And there on the shore, Aunt Betsy, waving at her, all wild-like. And the two Palace guards standing nearby with their guns. Like they might shoot her if she didn’t get back to shore.

When the first boy reached her, Eliza tried to get away. No, she tried to shout. I want my Mama. I want my brother. Daniel, I’m here! But the boy had put her on his back and started swimming toward the beach.

Closer and closer and closer.

And with every passing second, as Aunt Betsy came into view, the truth became clearer. Her aunt was desperate to see Eliza saved. Not because she loved her. But because of the plans her father had for her. Big plans for some far-off day. Plans that involved drugs and men and money. At least that’s what Eliza thought.

“No!” she screamed and the sound made her eyes fly open. What was this?

She sat straight up, her breaths coming hard and fast. Where was she? She wasn’t in the ocean, she was in bed. Her bed. The sheets were silky satin and the bed coverings were fluffy white. Eliza put her hand to her chest and felt her heartbeat. Boom, boom, boom. Like a scary drum.

She ran her hands over her arms and her hair and it hit her. This wasn’t the ocean and she wasn’t on the boy’s back. She wasn’t drowning and her mother and brother were not here to help her.

Eliza was back in the Palace.

And the armed guards were just outside her door. She could see their shadows.

If she had fallen beneath the surface of the ocean, she would finally be with Mama and Daniel. Eating dinner with them on the other side of the sea. Instead she was here, in the room where her daddy kept her. The room that smelled like fine linen and perfume, across the house from the place where the other girls were sold to different men every night. She slid back down under the covers and snuggled her cheek into the pillow. No matter what she dreamed tonight, when she woke up she wouldn’t be in heaven like she had hoped.

She’d be in hell.

CHAPTER THREE

Fire consumed their young men, and their young women had no wedding songs.

—Psalm 78:63

Every once in a while, when the warm salty breeze drifted up off the Caribbean Sea over shimmering sand, when it brushed against Eliza’s tired face as she sat alone on the beach at the base of the familiar cliff, reading yet another book from the Palace library, she would close the cover and look up. And on her very best days in that moment she could still see the God of her childhood.

There at the far edge of the ocean. The way she had a decade ago.

Eliza shaded her eyes, and stared out at the horizon, searching for God. But He wasn’t there. Not today. He hadn’t been for a long time. A sigh drifted up from her frigid heart. Never mind. Nine days from now things would get worse. Much worse. Her fear about what was coming grew with every passing hour.

Because in nine days she would be forced to marry Henry Thomas Ellington IV, a marriage Eliza had known about nearly all her life. Henry Thomas was a dangerous young man, one her father had only recently identified as Eliza’s future husband. The son of a friend of her father’s. A man none of them had ever met.

But all that was about to change.

Henry Thomas was flying in from the States to meet her. “He wants to spend an evening with his bride,” her father had told her this morning. “Before he signs off on the marriage.”

The whole arrangement was sickening. Her forced marriage would join two drug and sex-trafficking dynasties—her father’s and that of Henry Thomas’s father. According to her dad, the senior Ellington was a lawyer who secretly ran a longtime trafficking ring that worked both Florida and southern Belize. By combining their illegal activities, the men believed they would make far more money and be nearly impossible to bring down.

Eliza understood the situation. She was merely a pawn in her father’s dirty game of greed and power. She let her gaze drift twenty yards down the beach to a pair of men walking her way. Their laughter and cigar smoke carried in the wind, and Eliza stiffened. She’d seen them before. Eliza wasn’t a little girl anymore. She knew the business her father was about at the Palace.

One of the men was a redhead, and the other, balding. Pasty white skin and champagne bellies. Trust fund parasites, casting shame on their fathers’ old money. Or following in their footsteps. The men were members of a private yacht club with longtime privileges at the Palace. One of them looked her way and stopped. He motioned to the others and all three gawked at her. Like lions sizing up a wounded gazelle. Eliza pulled her gauzy cover-up tight around her body and turned the other way.

She wasn’t for sale. Not until next week, when Henry Thomas Ellington IV, came to visit.

“Hey, Princess, come for a swim!” It was the bald head. “The water’s nice.”

I’m not for sale, she wanted to shout at him. But then, the men already knew that. Everyone knew Eliza wasn’t for sale. Not like the other sixteen girls at the Palace. Eliza refused to look up. If her father heard the men he’d turn his guards on them and they’d never be seen again. No one messed with Eliza. No one.

Not until the wedding on her twentieth birthday. The day she would leave the Palace in the arms of another evil man, a stranger she already hated.

The other girls would leave the Palace on their twentieth birthdays, too, the days when her father would set them free. The promise was part of the deal. Her father and his team would keep the girls till they turned twenty. Then they were free to go. Her father would give each of them a year’s wages, a passport, and a suitcase of clothes. And that would be that.

“Come on, Eliza. You know you want to swim with us.” The bald man was yelling at her now. Scratchy voice, thick guttural laugh. The same laugh that had echoed through the Palace the last three nights, just outside the door of one of the teenage girls.

No. She squeezed her eyes shut. Make it stop. Please. Eliza glanced up the hillside. The two armed bodyguards took a step forward. Customers or not, no one had the right to bother Eliza when she was on the beach.

Not while she still belonged to Anders McMillan.

Eventually the men gave up. They lit another round of cigars, and headed back down the beach. What was the point of harassing her, they probably figured. Eliza really wasn’t for sale. Tonight, no doubt, they would be at the Palace in one of the other girls’ rooms.

And Eliza would be forced to fall asleep knowing what was happening down the hall. But not for long. The wedding would be a grand affair and then Eliza would leave this place forever. Her next home was bound to be just as dark and dangerous. But at least she’d be away from her evil father.

A fresh breeze cleared the cigar smoke. Eliza breathed deep and wondered. Where would she live? In Florida with the rest of the Ellington family? Or would all of them move here? Like everything else about her life, she had no say in her future. Not like the other Palace girls.

She remembered one of them—Alexa. The girl had been a true and dear friend to Eliza. When they were twelve and ten, Alexa had thought Anders McMillan a good man. The one who kept the strange men from hurting them too badly.