Page 88 of Soulgazer

Painfully, furiously awake.

Dread coils low in my belly and shoots ice through my every vein as one by one, every pair of eyes flits from Faolan to me. And I shrink. Like a rabbit, my first instinct is to run—but we’re on a ship surrounded by water, and there is not a damned place I could hide.

“Faolan. Don’t.”

The whisper is all I can manage with my voice wrung raw from screams, but Iknowhe hears me.

I know it, like I know he’ll ignore me, because he is a showman and I am the stupid fecking woman whose hopes of being accepted here—of finding friends and purpose—are being shattered with one bloody phrase.

“It’s the tale of a girl who touched a soulstone. One blessed by a goddess with ocean eyes.”

I hate him.

The thought boils up my throat seconds before the laughter begins, shaky and then overwhelming from the others. But Brona’s reaction is worse. She regards me with the suspicion I’d thought we’d grown past.

“I’m serious, you lot. Listen!”

Faolan launches into an entire story that I know with a sickening lurch he must have been writing since the day we met—because that’s his favorite thing, isn’t it? The legend.

Never mind that he whispered words likeWolf Tamer,wife, andloveto do it. Never mind that he’s peeled back every damned layer I had to protect myself, touching me like he wanted me—listening like he actually fecking cared what I had to say.

Never mind that he’s breaking my heart.

Blood rushes past my ears, flooding my face, neck, arms, until heat radiates off my skin. And still I cannot look away as Faolan describes his first time meeting me. How he’d planned to kidnapme if I didn’t agree to his bargain—but then I locked him into marriage, something he sings the praises of now.

I die.

I die a little more when he talks about my grandmother and my lineage to a blessed one, and even more when he explains that our search for the Isle of Lost Souls depends solely on my ability to see a clear path. He swears once we find the ring, I can guide us straight there.

Because I’ve touched a soulstone and I have magic in my blood.

It wasn’t meant to be like this. He told me the crew wouldn’t have to know—not until I could control the magic. Not until it wasmychoice to tell, once I had some clearer answer to give than fractured visions and stifling pain. Faolan’s kisses, the cove, that stupid song about ocean eyes.

One kiss from her lips.

Feck, it’s all just another story to him.

“Imagine it. We’ll find this island usingher, and there’ll be no more answering to Kiara in the future. No more runs around the Crescent or bowing to the Ring of Stars.Freedom.We can do exactly as we fecking please! And Saoirse will lead the way.”

Freedom. What a sick, disgusting joke.

Thirty-Three

I run from the crew’s stares and questions, their scoffs and Faolan’s gaze. Run to his cabin, because nothing here is mine and I am not free and—gods above, my hearthurts. But the moment I fling myself through the doorway, I realize my mistake.

This room is full of memories now. Scented by sea salt and whiskey, our clothes from Aisling’s Cove still rumpled on the floor. The dagger Brona lent me hangs from a bedpost just beside my pathetic, poorly knit scarf.

A furious sob climbs up my throat.

“Feck.”

It’s not real. It never was.

The room tilts as frantic footsteps pound down the hall, and I don’t think. Don’t breathe.

I slam the door shut between us, dropping the key with shaking fingers seconds before my body hits the ground. Distantly, I know he’s knocking—know it will be so much worse once he finds a way inside—but it’s not enough to keep me from crawling to the smallest corner of the room. Tucking my body as tight as it will go.

I should have cast you into the sea the moment you opened those eyes.