He Bought My Father's Name to Make Me Kneel, but I Was the One Who Cut His Chains novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: The Debt
Danika's POV
My father was in the road outside the shop with a boatman at each elbow when I came over the rise.
I had not been gone from him an hour.
I put the pony at a trot and left the trap across the road in front of them and got down with the whip in my hand.
"Let go of him," I said.
The two men looked at each other.
They were Torvald's, a pair of Lerwick lads in good oilskins who had never hauled a net in their lives.
"Mr Garriock asked us to see Mr Isbister to the boat, miss," the taller said.
"Which Mr Garriock?"
He did not answer.
"I thought so," I said. "My father stays in his own road."
"Danika," my father said. His cap was off, and his whole face shook. "They said I'd be safer at Lerwick. They said the sheriff would take me in his own custody, to keep me from the Ness men."
"The Ness men are in the shop doorway with their mouths open," I said, "and not one has laid a hand on you. Look."
He looked.
There were a dozen of them, at the shop door and along the dyke: the cooper with his sleeves rolled, a woman with a basket, the old man from the south end.
They looked at my father without any anger at all.
They looked at him as if they were waiting to hear what he would do.
I stepped between the boatmen and took his arm.
"Tell Mr Torvald Garriock," I said, "that the sheriff may have my father when the sheriff sends a paper to the door of this shop. Tell him I said it."
"Miss, we've our pay to earn," the taller said.
"Then you'll earn it somewhere else."
I do not know what my face looked like.
They let go.
I took my father in, and shut the door, and turned the big brass key on the inside for the first time in forty years.
It was a long night.
In the morning a thin man in a black coat came on the Lerwick boat and stood in the shop with a leather case.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Bought My Father's Name to Make Me Kneel, but I Was the One Who Cut His Chains are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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