Madelyn was utterly confused. "What of my father?" Save that he had been a pirate? And she knew now how much Brand despised pirates.
Captain O'Neill hesitated.
"You must know that Brand was abducted as a child," he said at last. "Taken from his family, and forced to live far beneath his station. He was mistreated. Daily."
She nodded. Brand had told her as much. But something in the captain's tone made her listen still.
"The man who abducted him," he continued slowly, "was Balfour Finlay."
A strange, hollow silence opened within her.
"And the man who killed Balfour, was Brand."
She instantly lost the knowledge of how to breathe in its entirety.
The world fell away.
Her thoughts scattered, then fled altogether, leaving only a vast, echoing emptiness.
