An Unconditional Freedom Read online

  Praise for A Hope Divided

  “It’s gratifying to read a novel that deals so frankly with such issues and takes an unflinching view of the realities of life during the Civil War rather than reiterating the dangerous Lost Cause rhetoric that often colors romance narratives of this era.”—Entertainment Weekly

  “Successfully navigating the challenges of writing an interracial romance set during the Civil War is difficult enough to do once, but to pull it off twice is truly impressive. And yet Cole has managed to do just that with her second book in the series.”—Shondaland.com

  “Thoughtfully portrayed characters with deep minds and passionate hearts make this second novel in Cole’s Loyal League series . . . sparkle. Highly recommended for lovers of historical romance.”—Booklist STARRED REVIEW

  “Cole’s heroine is gorgeously portrayed and powerful enough that readers will worship at her feet just as Ewan does. But if this book shows that Cole is settling into a pattern, readers won’t want her to break the mold on book No. 3. Her prose is flawless. Her historical research is absorbing, and her characters are achingly human. This book is fantastic. As the war closes in around them, the line blurs between who is the rescuer and who is the rescued.”

  —Kirkus STARRED REVIEW

  “Brace yourself for another amazing installment of Cole’s The Loyal League series!”—RT Book Reviews FIVE STAR GOLD

  “Cole’s books are always timely, and yet timeless. She has a solid grounding of how to use history in her plots, and knows exactly what story she wants to tell. I could not put this down . . . I love it when the second book in a series totally exceeds the (very high) expectations of the first book.”—Smart Bitches Trashy Books

  Praise for An Extraordinary Union

  * The RT Book Reviews 2017 BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR and BEST HISTORICAL ROMANCE

  * The American Library Association’s RUSA BEST ROMANCE for 2018

  * An Entertainment Weekly TOP 10 ROMANCE BOOKS OF THE YEAR

  * A Kirkus BEST BOOKS OF 2017

  * A Vulture TOP 10 ROMANCE BOOKS OF 2017

  * A Publishers Weekly BEST BOOKS OF 2017

  * A Booklist TOP 10 ROMANCE FICTION 2017

  “Cole’s sparkling gem of a romance portrays love at its most practical and sublime; she writes with lyricism, intelligence, and historical accuracy.”—Publishers Weekly STARRED REVIEW

  “An exceptional story that both educates and entertains and beautifully launches a unique series.”

  —Library Journal STARRED REVIEW

  “A masterful tale that bodes well for future work from Cole.”

  —Kirkus STARRED REVIEW

  “Fans of Beverly Jenkins will be thrilled with Cole’s fearless, steamy, and moving multicultural take on forbidden love in a time of slavery and war.”—Booklist STARRED REVIEW

  “An extraordinary romance is found within the pages of Alyssa Cole’s An Extraordinary Union.”—Bookpage TOP PICK

  “Cole spins a tale that will pull you in from the very first page.”

  —RT Book Reviews FIVE STAR GOLD Top Pick

  Other Kensington Publishing Corp. books by Alyssa Cole

  An Extraordinary Union

  A Hope Divided

  An Unconditional Freedom

  ALYSSA COLE

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Praise for A Hope Divided

  Praise for An Extraordinary Union

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  AN UNCONDITIONAL FREEDOM

  AN EXTRAORDINARY UNION

  A HOPE DIVIDED

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2019 by Alyssa Cole

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-0748-2

  Kensington Electronic Edition: March 2019

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-0748-2

  ISBN-10: 1-4967-0748-6

  First Kensington Trade Paperback Edition: March 2019

  For anyone whose trauma was treated as weakness:

  You survived. You’re here. You’re brave.

  Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

  —Ursula K. Le Guin

  PROLOGUE

  January 1862

  Outside of Richmond, VA

  “I want to help my people get free.”

  That was how it all started.

  No, that wasn’t true. It had started with Ellen moving into the house next door. Daniel had been seven years old, the freeborn child of a seamstress and a blacksmith who did well for themselves.

  “You ain’t never been a slave?” Ellen had asked him one day as they played, wide-eyed, as if she hadn’t known Negroes could be born with their freedom instead of having it given to them by white folks. She’d still had her sweet Southern accent then. Years later—when he’d asked her to marry him and she’d said she wouldn’t, that she had to go fight for their people—he’d told her fighting wasn’t her place. She’d responded in the crisp tone of a woman educated by Massachusetts abolitionists.

  “You haven’t ever been a slave,” she’d said, her brown eyes so expressive that he’d known she wouldn’t change her mind about either fighting slavery or marrying him. War was brewing, changing everything Daniel had struggled and strived for, but he’d panicked at the thought of losing Elle. Elle who he’d seen by his side forever, even if she hadn’t been able to see herself there yet.

  “You were a child, it wasn’t such a hardship,” he’d countered, thoughtlessly. No, that wasn’t true. He’d had one driving thought: to dismiss her reasoning and make her see that she belonged with him.

  Elle remembered everything—everything; her mind was strange like that, and it was part of why she’d wanted to join the resistance against the Confederacy. She remembered what it was to be enslaved, down to the detail; she’d remember what he’d said to her, always. She would not look kindly on it, either.

  After rejecting him, she’d left for Liberia on a mission to see what life could be had for their people in Africa, whether their country went to war over the slavery question or not. To scout for what life might be built there without the strictures of American society. He’d written letter after letter, not knowing w
hen or if they’d reach her.

  I love you, Ellen. You say that you are not the right woman for me, but I will never believe otherwise. You have had my heart since we were children: I hope that one day you’ll see fit to take that which is and will always be yours.

  He’d waited.

  In the interim he’d studied his law books, scouring the codes and cases for things that might be helpful in securing freedom for his people. The United States prided itself on the rule of law, did it not? He would use that pride as the key to undo the shackles of slavery.

  He’d waited.

  When he’d heard there were men about his town, men asking for those free Negroes who would aid in the fight for the Union, he’d gone to them. That’s what Elle would have wanted, and perhaps if he wanted what she wanted she would come home to him.

  “I want to help my people get free.”

  It had been true. He’d been fighting for the same in his law clerkship, in a more temperate way. He’d always wanted to guide his country toward the path of righteousness, and he wanted to do it with Elle by his side if she ever came back. He’d show her that he understood.

  He sought out the strangers.

  The two white men had spoken to him about the despicable nature of the slave trade. They’d shared a meal as they figured out the ways in which Daniel could be helpful to the Union cause, with his physical strength and his knowledge of the law.

  Daniel had awoken trussed, confined in a wooden box that jolted about as if on the back of a wagon. When the lid was finally pried off the box, days later, Daniel’s hands were a gory mess, nails splintered to the quick. The blood from trying to headbutt his way free from the box had congealed on his forehead, and he was covered in his own filth.

  “Breaking these uppity darkies sure is something,” one of the supposed abolitionists had said cheerfully to his compatriot.

  Daniel had always been a hard worker. He’d helped his father with his smithing business, even though his father’s goal had been for Daniel to be educated, to be one of the Free Blacks who rose as high as society would allow them.

  He’d never known work as he’d found it on the Georgia plantation where he’d been sold. Work that sapped the strength from your body and your spirit and wasn’t even to your benefit or that of those you cared for.

  Daniel had always been stubborn. Elle had once told him that if a mule brayed at him he’d bray back just to have the last word, and for the mule to understand that it had lost the argument.

  The first time he’d been beaten bloody, spitting out a tooth that his hated overseer snatched up to sell, he’d stopped braying back.

  It had occurred to him one night, as he lay reeking of sweat and festering wounds, that he’d thought himself above this. He’d thought his freedom was something innate; he’d been born into it after all. God had seen fit to make him free. It was only as he swatted at insects that ran over him in the darkness of the cabin, as he heard the snores and exhalations and murmurs of those who had been born into slavery, many on that very plantation, that he’d understood the lesson he’d missed all those Sundays: blessings were always conditional. His had been rescinded. Had the people sleeping around him, who spoke of the Lord as their savior, too, ever had His grace to begin with?

  By the time Daniel arrived on the Virginia auction block, sold by a master who feared losing his slaves to roving Union soldiers, he was no longer thinking, I want to help my people get free. He was trying not to remember anything of his past. That he had been a man, supposedly born with certain inalienable rights. The Daniel Cumberland he’d been would have fought harder, would have stopped that overseer. He wouldn’t have let another man stick his hands in his mouth and test his flesh and inquire about his temperament. Daniel let the white man before him do just that. He didn’t respond when the potential buyer listed his defects, trying to knock money off of his price. As he was led away, the only thing he thought of was that he was glad Elle had gone to Liberia, though it had cracked his heart in two. He was glad she had left this foul chamber pot of a country, that would make a man love it, then remind him how it despised him at every turn.

  The devil who had purchased him was gentler than the last. He helped Daniel up into the wagon and looked at him like he was an equal. Daniel hated him for that. There wasn’t much he didn’t hate anymore. Only Elle, and he wished he could hate her, too. She could never know how low he had been brought, she who had warned him.

  “None of us are free when they might snatch us off the street and say we’re a runaway. None of us are free while one of us is enslaved.”

  He fell asleep in the wagon; he, who used to balk at old, lumpy mattresses. When he awoke, they were traveling down a country road that was more ruts than level ground. He could see the constellations above him, glorious bright kindred spirits, also trapped in the designs of men when all they wished was to be free.

  Elle would have told him he was being too poetic. She might have kissed him, too, as she had sometimes when the line between best friend and lover had blurred.

  He closed his eyes against the too-human feeling that rose inside him then, and against the pricking heat that pressed at his eyelids.

  Weak. You’re weak.

  The wagon pulled to a stop.

  Footsteps crunched on hard-packed ground, but there was silence in the winter night. Was he alone with this man?

  I’m weak, but my body isn’t. Maybe I’ll kill him. It wouldn’t be so hard. I know there’s no God to pass judgment, and if there is a God I deem Him too cruel to be obeyed.

  He shifted, and the sound of his chains hitting the wagon floor made him reconsider his plan. He couldn’t travel far with those. He’d seen a man try, seen how the shackles had made him easy prey for the slave patrols and their dogs.

  Daniel sighed and wished he could sink into the wood of the wagon. To curl up into a knothole and disappear. To become nothing in body as he was in soul. The world was too cruel, and he had been forced to receive that truth, to take it in like some awful communion. He didn’t care to see what life had in store for him next.

  Several additional steps were heard; he wouldn’t have been able to kill his new owner, anyway. Or he would have had to kill that man and a few more. The idea didn’t disturb Daniel as it once would have. The fact that they might kill him first didn’t either.

  The back of the wagon dropped down and Daniel crawled out into the darkness to find his new owner standing with men who filled him with shame. They looked like he had before he’d been dragged so low. Black men in respectable dress, their hair glossy with pomade and their beards neatly trimmed.

  “You’re free, Daniel,” the man who had bought him at auction said. “These men are going to help you get back North.”

  Tears pressed at Daniel’s eyes and he struggled to keep his mouth from trembling. Cruel, cruel jest. He wouldn’t believe him. Couldn’t. What was freedom? How could he be truly free if a white man could arbitrarily decide that for him?

  He tried to make an inquiry, but an ugly, pathetic sound came out instead. He slammed his mouth shut.

  “Brother Daniel,” one of the Negro men said carefully. “We can assist you in heading North, but first I must ask: do you want to help your people?”

  Daniel stared at the man, nostrils flared and hands shaking. The chains of his shackles shifted and that seemed to jolt the white man—not his owner?—into action. He rushed forward with a key and undid the shackles.

  Daniel clenched his fists around the urge to throttle the man when he smiled proudly and said, “You are free.”

  Daniel didn’t bother to correct him.

  “I can’t help my people,” Daniel said, his voice hoarse. “I couldn’t even help myself.”

  The other Negro man nodded thoughtfully. “If you do not count yourself as fit to help them, what about avenging them? Would that better suit you, my brother?”

  “Yes,” Daniel said before he could even fully process the question. The word came out thi
ck and choked by anger. “Yes.”

  “Good, good. First you must rest, but then I will tell you of the Four L’s: Loyalty, Legacy, Life, and Lincoln.”

  Daniel didn’t give a good goddamn about Lincoln or any other L word. He wanted revenge. He wanted someone to pay for his suffering, and if these men would help him achieve that, he would join them.

  “Liberty,” Daniel said darkly as he ran one hand over the bruise where the shackles had pressed into his wrist. “I think I should like to use my freedom much more constructively this time around.”

  CHAPTER 1

  Late October, 1863

  Cairo, Illinois

  Daniel sat in the corner of the main room of the secluded cabin nestled in the Illinois wilderness. His seat was farthest from the door, so he couldn’t make a quick escape, but the solid presence of the wall behind him was preferable to the vulnerability of leaving his back exposed, even among his compatriots.

  “I would like to bring up the topic of . . . loyalty,” the small, dark-skinned man at the front of the room said. Dixon or Dyson or something like that—Dyson, yes, that was it. Daniel forgot things often now, except, of course, the things he desperately wanted to burn from his memory.

  None of the men and women gathered looked back at Daniel, but he sensed their collective attention shift to him. He could feel the weight of their judgment coil around his neck, settling into the grooves of the scar tissue there and squeezing