"I am running out of places to search. Maybe she moved to America, where she was born. Probably California, as I first thought, not this God-forsaken place. Anna would never spend time in a crow's nest like this. No, she would never come here."
Burning tears filled his eyes and the tenuous control over his emotions was lost. He covered his face with his hands and cried silently, his body quivering uncontrollably like a mortally wounded buck about to be devoured by a hungry lion. In his case, the predator was his own cruel destiny.
"Oh my Anna, my poor Anna, my love! How much pain I have caused you." He set his face down into the palms of his hands. Nikolas felt an inexplicable power magnetically pulling the vessel toward the rocks. He could not distinguish whether it was real or imagined, but he no longer cared.
The remembrance of soothing voices and angelic chanting filled his mind as he recalled the women in black. His heart leapt back to life as he felt Anna's presence again, and smelled her body's fragrance. He could still remember caressing her flowing soft blonde hair, the tips of his fingers touching her inviting red lips, and then kissing them passionately. He covered his ears as the internal voices merged into one whispering, I ‟ love you Niko. I will always love you. I will be with you forever, my agape." Those were Anna's last words to him when they fled from war-torn Crete.
She had said those precious words just before the onslaught of Hitler's paratroops on the big island. Memories of debris falling like hungry locusts from the sky encapsulated Niko's thoughts. Nikolas had repeated her words over and over again in his mind and they had given him courage as the German Air Force attacked his ship. When he was in Egypt, suffering from amnesia, it was only her unflinching love that had kept him going through the long, dark years.
He stood up. "No, no!" he protested. "Destiny is not playing games with me. It's impossible."
He sat down again as he felt the lightheadedness of vertigo coming on. Adoni's wellworn bell-bottom pants slapped against his legs in the wind as the young sailor ran to assist his captain. He gripped Nikolas's arm strongly as the turbulent sea roared below them. Nikolas looked sorrowfully at Yanni and Adoni as he wondered how this desolate place could possibly hold the woman Captain Nikolas loved.
Yanni and Adoni remained silent as they looked at Nikolas, sharing his feelings of loss.
"Impossible," murmured Nikolas again, as he stood up and brushed away the thought with a swift flick of his hand. "Impossible," he repeated, but this time it was hard to hear what he was muttering. He stretched out his weary body and tried to get a hold of his volatile emotions. He nervously lifted the collar of his navy wool coat to shelter himself from the biting wind, but a cold shiver moved down his spine, nonetheless.