Page 17 of Vicious Hearts

She falls into the water with a resounding splash, her scream caught on the wind as it echoes through the night. I’ve tugged my shoes off and I’m diving into the water after her without giving it any thought. I don’t even know if she can swim. But I’ll be damned if I let her die on my watch.

The men have already sprang into action, turning the beams onto the water where she fell and lowering a life raft. I hear their shouts and yells as my head emerges from the water, looking around for her. The seas are choppy this time of night, especially in this climate, and my teeth are already chattering as my eyes search the water for her.

“Ariadne!”

I swim around the location where she went in, then dive under water, holding my breath as I try to find her. When I come up for air, I call her name into the night, but there’s no answer. The night is like a dark abyss; even with the floodlights, it’s hard to see a thing. I stop moving in the water and listen, until I hear soft splashing and grunting a few feet away. I adjust my eyes to the dark until I see her flailing in the treacherous water, trying to stay afloat. An abnormally high wave lifts her, then smacks her down, her head narrowly missing the boat as she free falls back into the water. I swim to her as she sinks further under the water, the only sign that she was once here her outstretched arm and her middle finger waving at me to go fuck myself as she disappears under the water.

* * *

“Areyou out of your fucking mind!” I scream, and I don’t know why I’m so angry, but it could be because of the value I place on my own life.

She scoffs, turning her face away from me as the doctor steps out of the room. She’s soaking wet and looks like a bedraggled doll, but she hasn’t sustained any damage beyond the stupidity residing in her brain. She wraps the blanket around her shoulders, her teeth chattering against each other as she tries to stay warm. When she doesn’t answer, I let out an exasperated sigh and turn toward a door in the corner of the room.

“You need to shower,” I tell her, flinging the door open. It goes banging into the wall with force. “I’ll get one of the girls to leave some clothes on your bed.”

“Girls?”

Sothat’swhat it takes to grab her attention and direct her gaze back to mine?

“One of the maids. Shower, change, sleep. In that order. We’ll talk in the morning.”

“Not if you kill me first,” she spits.

“Is that what you think I was going to do to you, little girl?” I laugh, unable to keep the vicious snarl out of my voice. Even the echo of my laugh feels empty. I’m flattered that she’s afraid of me enough to think me capable of killing her without first getting what I want. “If I wanted you dead, you’d be gone already.”

* * *

Ariadne doesn’t comeout for breakfast, even when I send one of the maids to fetch her. She doesn’t want breakfast and she doesn’t want to see my face. Her words exactly. The girl is proving to be more trouble than she’s worth, and I have a mind to put her in the chopper and drop her off at the mainland and be done with her already. I don’t have time for this shit.

I stalk to her room and fling the door open without knocking. She’s lying face down in the bed, buried underneath a thin white sheet. A soft and silly snore wafts through the room. Oh, for the love of God; I’ve never met a more unladylike woman in my life.

I approach the bed and reach out to pull the sheet back but stop with my hand in midair. Her shoulders are bare. She’s naked underneath the sheet, the tone of her delicate skin glaring against the pristine white of the sheet.

“Go away,” she mumbles, as though sensing my presence.

I backtrack a few steps to stand by the door. Anything not to have to stare at her skin.

“You need to eat,” I tell her, stating the obvious. She didn’t even finish her dinner before she plunged to her “death”, and she’s been in my care for almost twenty hours.

“Not hungry,” she mumbles. “Just drop me off at the nearest port and I’ll get off and make my own way back.”

Her voice is garbled as she talks into the pillow, but I just make out the words as they escape her lips. I need at least a couple of days before I can set her back on the mainland. Two days in which I’ll have everything she needs to make her story front page news, bumping my name off the cover of every news outlet.

“And how will you explain to your boss coming back without the story you promised him?”

The slight twitch of her head tells me she hasn’t thought that far ahead. She lifts her head, looks to the left, then the right, then drops her head back down with a heavy sigh.

“Get out so I can get dressed,” she snaps.

There’s a satisfied smirk on my face as I step out of the room and close the door behind me. I wait until she’s ready and escort her to the dining room on the upper deck. I don’t want to risk her pulling another stupid stunt like the one she did last night.

I watch her as she eats, wolfing down her pancakes with a generous amount of syrup and berries. Her small stature would indicate she’s not much of an eater, but she just keeps going, onto her second serving without batting an eyelid. It’s not many women that would sit in the company of a man and enjoy their food, lapping at every drip of syrup as though their life depended on it.

She’s an anomaly; a curiosity I wish to unpack. Her hazel eyes are luminescent as she sets her fork down and dabs deliberately at the corners of her mouth. She reaches for her coffee, and I continue to watch her. She’s not beautiful in the conventional sense, but she’s striking in a way that many women aren’t. If she wiped that scowl off her face, I might even consider her stunning.

“That was by far, hands down,thebest pancakes I’ve ever had,” she tells me, sitting back in her chair.

“You can thank the French chef for that.”

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