Page 53 of A Princess, Stolen
He grabbed the bars. “If you think I’m going to tell you…”
“What did my dad do to you?” I asked impatiently.
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
“From whom, Isaac?” I called out louder than I wanted.
He was silent.
My heart started pounding again. “What do you know about him?”
Nathan sighed. “Too much.”
“What does that mean?”
“I just know him.” He turned his back to me again.
“Talk to me,” I whispered. “Please. Please don’t go away again and leave me alone.” I didn’t know why I was asking him. Clearly, the past didn’t matter to him and he had decided to continue despising me for what my dad had supposedly done. Ithought he was going to leave, but he stopped without turning to face me.
“Back then,” he said after a while, “in Baton Rouge…you seemed lost to me, bouncing around your yard. No mom or friends, only adults watching you from afar. Adults and cameras. It was so sterile…so sick. You seemed like a tiny animal in a giant cage. You thought you were free, but you were trapped inside. It seemed that you weren’t allowed out. Your every move was monitored; only in that memorial did they leave you alone. You were…full of tears, somehow. You felt like I did and maybe that was what attracted me. Or maybe it was your braids or your dress. I’d never seen a girl like you, so chic and classy. So beautiful.” Now he turned to me, towering over me and looking down at me through the bars. “Two years prior, I buried my sister. For two years, I hadn’t seen anything beautiful. Until that day, nothing could make me happy. The bracelet I gave you…Lea had made it for me. For after her death. It was supposed to comfort me. She said it had magical powers, so I wanted to comfort you with it.”
He noticed that I clutched the ribbon like a treasure. I received that brief smile that grazed his face more than it spread. At that moment, he seemed much younger than he looked.
We were silent for a while. We stood facing each other, staring at each other almost like we had eight years ago. “Why were you in Baton Rouge anyway? Did you want to kidnap me back then?” I finally asked what had been on my mind for a while.
He laughed darkly, sounding contemptuous. “I was barely thirteen. I didn’t even know how to spell kidnapping or who you were.”
“Your companion was older.”
“Nineteen.”
“And he knew who I was?”
“Yes.”
Suddenly, I understood. It was so obvious that I could only shake my head at myself. He had said on the phone that he was twenty-seven, which meant he must have been nineteen at the time, eight years younger. And I was nineteen today and I was eleven back then in Baton Rouge. And I remembered something else. Troy had said that Nathan had stowed away down the Mississippi with his brother and sister. There were two leaders, one on land and one at sea.
I took a step back. “Isaac. He’s your brother, isn’t he?” I whispered. “The man, the mastermind on land. He’s your older brother.”
Chapter 12
Nathan took a deep breath. “He used to be very different from how he is now,” he said, looking absentmindedly for a few moments as if he was peering into the past. “Even though he was always different, we shared a certain moral code. There were things we would never have done, like physically hurting someone when we stole or something. That was always taboo. We didn’t have to discuss it, it was an unspoken rule. A moral anchor so to speak.”
“What’s happening?” I was still whispering even though the hatches to the companionways were closed and no one could hear us.
“I want to stop him from coming on board.” The pale light of the bulb glowed in his eyes, which now looked pitch black. He raised his arm and paused, and for a moment, I thought he wanted to touch me through the bars, but he obviously changed his mind and brushed a strand of hair off his face. “Isaac was only supposed to join us at the end. When everything was wrapped up. That was the plan, my condition. I only became involved in this whole thing because I knew he would be on land most of the time. I thought that once everything was sorted out, maybe it would…appease him.”
“Appease?” I felt like I was being snubbed. “Why does he even need to be appeased?”
“I can’t tell you.”
Same old story again! I am going to go crazy soon! “And why is he different now than he was before?” I asked just to find out something.
“Prison changed him, turned him around.” I remembered Troy saying that Nathan had signed on with trawlers when his brother was in prison. At the time, I didn’t know who Isaac truly was. Nathan looked at me piercingly. “He was in Rikers Island. Allegedly for drug possession.”
“Rikers Island? The second Alcatraz,” I said anxiously. “One of the worst prisons in the USA. It’s going to be closed because there have been so many attacks by guards on inmates and so much violence between inmates.”
Nathan seemed surprised. “You’re not as naive as you seem, are you?”
