neck, attached to a chain. Shackles were clapped onto my wrists and ankles. My boots came off. Then I was stripped to my skin.
They didn’t bother with the laces on my bodice and stays. Steel blades ripped through the fabric, removing the gown in strips. Thankfully, they left the jade stone on the choker at my throat. Perhaps because they didn’t see it beneath the iron collar.
My stomach plunged to my feet as I stood before them, naked, gagged, and shaking in the suffocating heat of the climate, trapped in the airless belly of the flagship.
The leg and arm irons connected together by a short chain, preventing me from lifting my hands or removing the gag. Why did they think I needed to be restrained so drastically? And without my clothing?
Perhaps I could’ve outrun them through the hold, scaled the ladder, climbed through the hatchway, and locked them down here. Then what? I couldn’t sneak through multiple decks undetected. Even if I did make it topside, where would I go? Jumping into the sea was only an option for those who preferred death over life.
Was that a possibility? Would I reach a point where I’d rather die than endure whatever awaited me here?
My trepidation heightened as they escorted me toward a door in the hold behind the mainmast. It opened without a lock, and they pushed me into the pitch-dark space.
I received such a greeting in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life. The loathsome stench surged bile to my throat, and the gag prevented panting through my mouth.
A ruthless boot knocked me down upon the deck, and the very planks themselves reeked of grisly things—excrement, despair, death. I became so unbearably sickened by the smell that I couldn’t focus beyond the violent urge to vomit.
Until they brought a lantern into the compartment.
The glow didn’t stretch all the way into the corner. But the edge of light that did reach… Oh, merciful God, I wished it hadn’t.
Skeletal legs extended from the darkness—bloodied, unmoving, human, female. My stomach twisted painfully as the officer with the lantern turned in that direction and held up the light, illuminating the cargo.
Three nude African women lay on their backs, glassy eyes staring at the deck above. Their emaciated bodies were restrained in the same manner I was, only they didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.
The abdomen of one protruded with a small, round bump. The undeniable swell of a babe that would never be born.
A low, unpreventable wail erupted against the rag in my mouth. Tears seared my eyes. Tremors overtook my limbs, and ice-cold fear sat like iron in my stomach.
I knew I was to be transported to England to hang, and if my demise had been no worse than death, I could’ve faced it with some semblance of courage and clarity. But my situation wasn’t that merciful.
As I took in the scars and open wounds that covered the women, the layers of gruesome bruises on their upper thighs, I was forced to acknowledge precisely what would assail me before I crawled out of this hole. If I crawled out.
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