Page 24 of A Steeping of Blood (Blood and Tea #2)

JIN

Jin had lived in a constant state of breathless anticipation since he had died.

Even now, as he stood aboard the EJC ship, his insides were churning, roiling, and it wasn’t because the sea was doing the same beneath him.

He wanted to dig his hand into his pocket and toss a clove rock between his teeth.

He wanted to lick raspberry jam off his fingers.

He wanted to look at Flick’s sunshine curls and calm himself.

He felt incomplete, something he rarely ever experienced when it was him and Arthie against the world.

He still tasted blood on his lips. In reality, Jin didn’t mind his new sustenance.

He was surprised by how strangely sweet it had tasted.

It wasn’t as though he hadn’t tasted blood before.

He’d nicked enough fingers and sucked on enough wounds in the battlefields that were both inventing and running the streets, but it tasted different now.

Better. Sweeter, yes, but with distinct notes if he really sat down and allowed himself to savor each sip, and Jin had always been known to savor.

Two paces and a million miles away, Arthie gripped the rail and stared into the distance, the billowing sails casting her in shadow.

She held her hat tight against her head, the mauve swoops of her hair rippling with the wind.

There was something more she hadn’t told him.

He’d seen it in her eyes when she’d lifted her bottle to his in the hold of the ship.

Arthie had always been small for her age, but he’d never seen her actually look it. As if the world had grown larger since she’d been turned into a vampire and she wasn’t so sure of her place in it anymore.

He took a step closer, and her head whipped toward him. The look on her face, raw and open, was so deprived of her usual mask that it gave him pause.

“The last time I was at sea, I killed people.”

Jin froze at her words.

Her voice was eerie, distant in a way Arthie rarely ever was. She turned to face him fully.

“Remember when Matteo said I came to Ettenia on a boat filled with blood? It was the blood of the people I killed.”

One of the crew spotted them and started walking their way for small talk. Jin shooed him off with his umbrella.

Arthie didn’t even notice. “There were only four of us on that boat. Fleeing. They’d done nothing to hurt me, but if there had been more, I likely would have killed them too.

Penn took me in when I set foot on shore, and I killed some of his staff too.

I was a half vampire, like the Wolf of White Roaring. Like Matteo.”

Jin had not known any of this. That was the reason for her pause, the reason she’d drunk nothing but coconut water, eagerly gobbling it up when they’d met for the very first time.

Which meant—

“You drank that blood because of me,” he said.

She lifted a shoulder. “Eh, I was hungry.”

A corner of his lips hitched in a smile. Hers matched.

“Do you see why I couldn’t tell you? I couldn’t simply say, Jin, I’m a vampire , and let it be. I was going to give you the whole truth or none of it,” she said, and for a beat, there was no sound but the waves crashing against the ship.

“You could have though,” Jin finally said. “You could have told me and I would have understood, because I know you . I’ve known you from the moment you took my hand in front of my parents’ burning house. Nothing would have changed that.”

If anything, Jin thought this new information helped him understand her better.

Her anger, her deeply ingrained need for vengeance, her pain that she allowed no one else to see.

“I trusted you with everything,” he continued. “I only wished for the same in return. I had no one but you.”

She said nothing.

That was that, he supposed. He inhaled deep, remembering when Matteo had alerted him to the fact that he didn’t have to anymore.

Jin couldn’t see a world where he didn’t breathe—unless he was completely, utterly dead.

He joined Arthie at the rail, facing the sea.

After a beat, he placed his hand over hers.

She glanced down and then at him, a little hopeful and a little dubious.

“We’re all right, Arthie. If I’d massacred a boatful of people myself, I wouldn’t want you knowing either,” he drawled.

Arthie rolled her eyes. There she was, that tempest in a bottle he knew so well. Shouts rose from the crew as they turned course, and Jin watched as Arthie’s gaze drifted across the deck.

“He’s not here,” Jin said.

“I wasn’t looking,” she lied.

“Sure.” Jin nodded. In the distance, he saw a tail disappear into the ocean. “So, the Wolf of White Roaring, eh?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked with a sideways glance.

Knowing that Matteo was the Wolf and knowing what Arthie had done herself… their bond made far more sense. Even if Arthie wouldn’t give into it or admit what it meant.

The hatch creaked open and Matteo climbed on deck, looking between Jin and Arthie when they fell silent.

“Talking about me?”

“No,” Arthie said at the same moment Jin said, “Maybe.”

Matteo cracked a laugh. “For two of White Roaring’s most notorious criminals, you’re terrible liars.”

“Only for you,” Jin said, and it was true.

Arthie was struggling to hide it, but she was flustered, her composure nowhere near the calm, cool, and collected mask she usually plastered on herself. It was yet another reminder of how much they’d changed. Arthie, Matteo, Flick.

Jin didn’t want to think about what lay ahead. He had his umbrella and his just-reconciled sister, but that didn’t relieve as much stress as he would have liked. He had only what the ledger said to guide them.

“We’ll find them,” Arthie said quietly.

Because that was what Arthie did: followed through, and that fact was perhaps what Jin was most concerned about. He’d spent years wanting to find his parents, and now that he was finally headed in that direction, now that they were finally attainable, he found himself wavering.

Were his parents the same people that they were a decade ago?

He certainly wasn’t. He wasn’t even alive now, and that—that was the core of it, he realized.

He could understand Arthie and her reluctance to tell him the truth just then.

Because he was a criminal, a vampire, nowhere near the high society boy his parents had raised, and he didn’t know if they would want him anymore.

“Thank you,” he said at last. “For doing this. I know it’s not easy on you.”

Arthie pulled a face. “It’s nothing. Besides, I owe it to you.”

“No, you don’t.”

She smiled. “No, I don’t.”