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CHAPTER ONE

IRENE

" I fed my captors the flesh of their own dead."

Irene whispered the words like a dark prayer, her lips curling into a broken smile. At times, she repeated them, savoring the weight of the syllables in her voice, so she would never forget.

"For four days, I watched them choke on their sins while I waited, knowing I’d be the only one walking out of that hell."

She shut her eyes. She could still see them, gasping and clawing at their necks, their faces twisted in agony as pieces of rotting flesh clogged their throats. Their chokes had kept her company in the grim darkness of the prison. Those sounds were still clinging to the walls of her mind like ghosts, scratching at the edges of her sanity. She’d never known if their deaths had freed her or damned her. Maybe both.

A wave struck the side of the ship suddenly, and Irene was thrown backward, her body colliding with the rough planks of the hold. She landed on the pile of hay where she spent all her days, her tangled curls spilling into her face.

"Of course, you’ve got nothing to fear from me," she said with a laugh, turning to her unmoving companion. "Not an ounce of flesh left on you."

The skeleton beside her stayed silent, naturally. Its jaw hung loose, as if caught mid-laugh at a joke it could no longer tell. Irene leaned back against the wall and ran a hand through her hair, tugging at it in frustration.

"... I’m so booored," she drawled in a rasp, letting her head fall back. She slid down into the straw, her head landing near the skeleton’s bony legs. One arm draped across her forehead, the other over her stomach. She closed her eyes for a moment.

"They better all apologize. One by one," she muttered, her voice cracking slightly. Memories pricked at her mind like shards of glass, sharp and impossible to ignore. "You know, there was a time when I was respected among the scum of the slums. A legend among pirates… the deadliest viper of them all."

Her voice faltered.

"Until he betrayed you."

The words slithered through the air, a hiss not her own. Mocking.

"Shut up!"

Irene shot upright, her eyes darting frantically, trying to pierce the shadows of the hold. But the hold was still, bathed in the pale light filtering through the deck above. Her vision blurred—scratches, flashes of green and orange light, shifting shadows.

"He betrayed you, and your crew died because of you."

Her hands flew to her temples, gripping her head as if she could crush the voice into silence.

"Get the hell out of my head, damn it!" she snarled through clenched teeth, her breathing ragged.

She sat beside the skeleton, her back pressed against the wooden wall of the ship's hold. Drawing her knees to her chest, she squeezed her eyes shut, fighting to steady the ragged rhythm of her breathing.

"I won," she whispered, the words a fragile chant to herself. "I’m here. I survived."

She raised her head, her wild, disheveled hair framing her face like a mane. Her eyes, a sharp green-brown, glinted in the dim light. They’ll pay. Every last one of them.

Starting with him .

A thought drifted through her mind like a feather on the wind. A voice. Hers, maybe. Or the skeleton’s.

"The price of blood... or flesh, if they prefer."

She sighed deeply and closed her eyes.

A sudden creak snapped her out of her trance. Instinct took over. Like a striking serpent, she grabbed the knife at her belt and flung it, the blade slicing through the air and embedding itself just inches from its target.

Movement. A small shadow. A spider.

She crawled forward on all fours, following the creature as it tried to escape along the planks. Her long fingers closed around it, and she lifted it to her eyes, the faint light filtering through her fingers to illuminate its black body and scrambling legs.

"You’re running away too, huh?" she whispered, a sly smile curving her lips.

The spider’s legs tickled her palm, but she didn’t move.

Irene talked. To skeletons. To spiders. To herself. Talking kept her human. Maybe she feared that if she stopped, something in her would shatter for good. Or worse, maybe she feared hearing something else. The truth.

Since escaping the Salt Prisons, Irene hadn’t stopped talking. Not for a single moment. Because silence… She knew it too well. It was the only thing she’d carried out of that rotting hell. It clawed at her throat, twisted in her gut. It made her doubt. What if, one day, no sound came out? What if she opened her mouth and found nothing but a void?

She talked to remind herself she was still alive.

The day the old captain of the Mirage found her, sitting alone in the muddy shallows of the shore, she hadn’t stopped talking. She remembered it clearly: her torn clothes clung to her skin, soaked with salt, blood, and filth. Angry red marks streaked her arms and legs, fresh reminders of chains and blows. Her tangled hair clung to her gaunt cheeks. But it must have been her eyes that made him bring her aboard.

Naturally narrowed, almond-shaped, and mesmerizing, her eyes held the allure of a siren’s, made to captivate and ensnare. But that day, they were far from mesmerizing. Too wide. Too bright. Unhinged.

They didn’t blink. They didn’t move. They stared past the horizon with an unsettling intensity.

She wasn’t looking at the sea. Not really. Her gaze was fixed beyond it, on something no one else could see. As if she were waiting. For something. Or someone.

And when he came, his boots sinking into the wet sand, he didn’t say a word. He’d simply hauled her aboard.

Irene gently set the spider down, watching as it scurried away.

The ship rocked slightly under the choppy waves, but Irene felt a shift. A tension in the air. A vibration in the boards. Then, everything went still.

She looked up, her heart hammering.

Footsteps echoed on the deck above, followed by a creak as the hatch opened. Harsh light flooded the hold, blinding Irene momentarily. She squinted, raising an arm to shield her face, then lowered it to see.

The captain of the Mirage stood there, his face worn by salt and years at sea. He raised his brows, but he didn’t need to say a word. She understood.

They’d arrived.

Irene nodded, her eyes wide and gleaming. She watched him retreat without a word, her pulse quickening. A surge of adrenaline rushed through her, lighting every nerve in her body.

She jumped to her feet, retrieved her dagger from the floor, and cast one last look around the hold.

"Madam Spider," she said with a mocking smile toward the insect tucked in the corner. Then, turning to the skeleton, "Mister Skeleton, it’s been a pleasure, really. But I’m afraid this is where we say goodbye.”

She turned to leave, then hesitated. A sly glance back at the skeleton. She stepped closer, snatched the tricorne hat perched on its skull, and placed it on her head.

"I’ll need this more than you," she muttered before climbing up into the light.

Irene climbed the steps to the main deck, one at a time, her legs heavy, her boots slipping slightly on the worn wood. Each step groaned under her weight, as if the ship itself wanted to hold her back.

The harsh light of the sun awaited her at the top, impatient, merciless. She shut her eyes for a moment, but it was already too late: the burn had seeped beneath her eyelids. A dull ache bloomed at the back of her skull. When she finally emerged onto the deck, a shallow breath escaped her lips. Her eyes opened slowly.

Eldoria.

The city sprawled to the horizon, boiling and suffocating. The Port District spewed its life: the shouts of sailors mooring their ships, the clatter of chains, the stench of rotting fish and sweat… everything was exactly as she remembered it. Irene squinted beneath her tricorne hat, her lips twisting into a sneer.

Fishermen and merchants barked at passersby, hawking their wares. Farther down, wide-eyed tourists disembarked from gilded ships, all smiles, while chained slaves shuffled off beside them, heads bowed, engulfed in a silence that reeked of death. And then there were the soldiers. The Peacekeepers. Their presence was suffocating, their finely tailored uniforms and immaculate boots only amplifying the menace they exuded. They marched in perfect rhythm, their sharp gazes scanning the crowd as though searching for an excuse to spill blood.

Irene drew in a deep breath, but even the air tasted rancid.

She scanned the scene, a bitter smirk tugging at her lips. She wanted to laugh—or maybe scream. Instead, she exhaled slowly, as if the breath alone could smother the fire consuming her from within.

She hated them. The people of this city—all of them. She hated them for carrying on with their lives. They had woken up every morning as though nothing was wrong. They had laughed, drunk, worked, loved, and looked away. All while her world had shattered in a single night, in the midst of an ocean consumed by flames. They were alive, indifferent. They had not suffered. They had not screamed. They had not tasted the bitter tang of betrayal.

She closed her eyes. An image surged, sharp and relentless, like shattering glass: a sea turned red. Bodies ablaze. The stench of blood. And his face—his face pulling away from her as she sank beneath the waves.

Irene reopened her eyes and forced her lips into a smile that looked more like a grimace.

“Everything’s fine,” she muttered.

She adjusted her hat, pulling the brim low to shadow her features. Her once sun-kissed olive complexion had faded into a sickly pallor, a souvenir of her time spent beneath the mountain and in the ship’s hold. But now, the sunlight touched her skin again. And it burned.

She was about to disembark when a rough hand clamped onto her arm. Irene turned her head, irritation flashing in her eyes.

The captain of the Mirage stared her down, his brows furrowed, his expression severe. She had spent enough time aboard this ship to understand what his silence meant.

She rolled her eyes, a mocking smile tugging at her lips.

“I promise I won’t die. Not today.”

Irene stepped ashore, her salt-worn boots striking the uneven cobblestones of the port. The city’s cacophony swallowed her whole.

Voices rose, sharp and furious. Merchants screamed insults at one another, horses dragged carts laden with barrels, and children darted through alleyways, laughing as they went. A soldier in gilded armor chased one of them, swearing with every step.

Irene passed a stall where an elderly vendor was being searched by two soldiers. With a fluid motion, she snatched an apple from the edge of the stand and slipped it into her pocket.

“Come, come! Get the news of the day! The week’s execution list is out! Check to see if your debts have been paid in blood!”

Irene froze. The words struck her like an invisible wall, brutal and unyielding, a hammer blow to her chest.

The word "execution" slid into her ears and reverberated like a gong struck in fury. It rebounded and splintered, leaving her staggering under the weight of a deep, familiar terror. A terror she hated to name.

A young boy perched on a wooden crate noticed her hesitation. His grimy hair hung over sunken cheeks, but a falsely cheerful grin stretched across his face.

“Madam! Do you want a paper? Just two coins!”

Her eyes fell on him, but her mind had already drifted elsewhere. Another voice rose within her, foreign yet intimate.

"Check."

The voice was sharp, rusted steel against her thoughts. It was never her voice. Never hers.

"He might be dead."

Her breath turned ragged, a storm breaking inside her chest. The air spilled out of her lips in uneven bursts. The words twisted and writhed, clawing at the walls of her mind.

Maybe this time, the voices were right…

If he was dead, she needed to know. A troublemaker, a scumbag like him. He’d be at the very top of the list.

“And what if you gave me the first name, huh?”

The boy hesitated, his dirty fingers nervously fiddling with the edge of the newspaper.

“For a coin?”

Irene reached into her pocket and, instead of a coin, pulled out an apple.

“And for an apple?”

The boy’s eyes lit up immediately. Hungry. Desperate. He reached out a trembling hand. But before he could touch it, she drew the apple back slightly, her tone falling cold and sharp:

“The name.”

The boy swallowed hard. His gaze flickered from the apple to her icy stare before he relented. With trembling hands, he opened the paper and scanned the list.

“Archie the Cutter!” he finally blurted out, triumphant.

Irene closed her eyes. A slow, deep breath broke the silence. Her chest tightened, her lips almost quivered.

She let out a long sigh.

It wasn’t him . He hadn’t been executed.

She opened her eyes again. Laughter erupted in her mind—a laughter that made her shiver.

He was still alive. Thankfully.

She alone would have the privilege of killing him.

She tossed the apple to the boy and turned away, slipping into the dark, grimy alleys.

Behind her, the boy’s voice rang out again:

“His Majesty the King is hosting a grand ball to celebrate the Crown Prince! Find out who’s on the guest list! Queen Alys has been excluded from the event!”

Irene kept walking, her tricorne pulled low over her eyes, but something made her glance up.

She narrowed her eyes as the harsh light pierced through the ramshackle rooftops of the decaying buildings. There, far off in the distance, at the pinnacle of Eldoria, the Hive rose.

Towering golden walls—immense, arrogant, and gleaming beneath the sun like sharpened teeth. It shone. Brilliant like a treasure. Blinding like an insult.

She tilted her head, a bitter smile curling at the edge of her lips. They thrived up there, swaddled in their smooth, golden comfort, while the foragers—that’s what she called them in her mind—wore themselves down at their feet.

Irene chuckled softly, her smirk dark and cruel.

“Look at those golden walls…” she murmured, her fingers brushing against the rough, cracked, and dull surface of the wall beside her. Nothing like the ones she saw in the distance, where the sunlight danced on the gilded stone. The contrast unsettled her.

She raised her head again, narrowing her eyes to study the Hive. Perched high above, its radiant walls looked almost unreal, like a mirage conjured by a cruel painter. Walls built to dazzle, to crush, to suffocate those below.

“Wouldn’t you just love to know what goes on in there…” she muttered, her voice trailing off, tinged with mockery.

The silence replied. Or maybe it didn’t.

Irene suddenly chuckled, a small burst of laughter that seemed to exist without reason. She turned her head slightly, as if listening to something, but there was nothing. No sound. No whisper.

She kept walking, following the maze of walls that twisted through the Port District. Her worn boots sometimes slipped on the damp cobblestones, but she didn’t slow her pace.

A jostling shoulder made her stumble slightly. She stopped, her muscles tensing instantly, her sharp gaze darting to find the offender. But it was just a hurried passerby. An idiot who didn’t know where to put his feet.

She was about to move on when her eyes caught something. A scrap of paper clinging to the wall, fluttering faintly in the wind. Irene frowned, turning fully to fix her gaze on it.

She stopped in her tracks.

Her eyes slid to the paper nailed to the wall, fluttering faintly in the wind, as if the city itself was breathing disdain. A poster. Yellowed parchment.

"WANTED."

Her face.

Irene felt something twist in her chest. A rush of adrenaline, rage, and maybe—she hated to admit it—a flicker of satisfaction. She had dreamed of glory all her life. Not like this, of course, but still. Fate had always had a cruel sense of humor when it came to Irene.

Her own gaze stared back at her from the poster, full of scorn, a frozen smirk balanced somewhere between mockery and defiance. It was like a ghost came back to taunt her with her failures.

Gritting her teeth, Irene reached out and tore the poster down, crumpling it in her fist. With a sharp motion, she tossed the balled paper into a murky puddle.

She couldn’t afford distractions. Not now.

Irene straightened, her chin lifting, and quickened her pace. Her boots struck the ground in a steady, mechanical rhythm, each step echoing through the narrow alleys like the beat of a war drum. She no longer looked at the faces, no longer glanced at the posters.

No. Her thoughts were fixed on one place.

The last place she had visited before taking to the sea. Before the night of fire. Before betrayal poisoned her soul and everything turned to ashes.

The place where she had hidden something precious. Something far rarer than gold.

An object her former captain, arrogant as he was, had ordered them to retrieve at all costs. But Irene had found it first. She had kept it for herself, like a viper jealously guarding its venom. After all, she had only followed the pirate code: pillage, steal, lie.

This object wasn’t a treasure. It was the key. A key that could tip the scales of fate and destroy the man who had betrayed her.

Because this object… people had killed for the mere rumor of possessing it.

She had never forgiven herself. And she would never forgive him. Yet, there was a strange comfort in one thought: she hadn’t been foolish enough to hand it over to him.

When she hid it, Irene had also buried her hope for revenge. She had concealed it in a place the people of Eldoria called the Wasp : the bell tower.

She inhaled deeply, the breath burning in her throat. Then, without a word, she picked up her pace.

Her boots struck the ground harder with every step, her tricorne still low, shielding her face. She knew exactly where she was going. A place she had avoided thinking about for months. But that was where it had all begun. And it was where she needed to return.

She turned sharply into an alley. Her heart was pounding faster now, adrenaline slithering through her veins like an old poison.

Irene pushed her way through the dense crowd. She passed by offerings piled at the foot of the tower—a grotesque heap of overripe fruit, withered flowers, and tarnished coins left like half-hearted apologies. A shrine of despair, or maybe just a habit.

She raised her eyebrows, pausing for a moment to take in the towering structure before her. It loomed, oppressive and foreboding.

The Wasp.

Its massive spires clawed at the sky, reaching for the clouds as if to challenge the gods themselves. The stones spiraled upward, gnarled and strange, giving the tower the appearance of something alive—something waiting to crush anyone who dared defy it.

Irene watched the people kneeling before it, their hands clasped, their eyes lowered, their whispers weak and pleading.

She stared at them. "What were they praying for, exactly?" she wondered, her thoughts cutting through the noise of the crowd. Probably for their chains to feel just a little lighter tomorrow. Or maybe simply for the king to find someone else to crush before them.

They prayed, of course. Because that was what they had been taught to do. In Eldoria, habit had long since replaced hope.

After all, once their murmured prayers were done, they would stagger into the taverns to drown their illusions, muttering complaints between sips of bad rum. And maybe, if the alcohol was strong enough, they’d even dare to whisper his name.

The Lord of Dread.

King Ronan.

Irene narrowed her eyes, her thoughts sinking into a tide of restrained fury. The people of Eldoria liked to parade their pride, pretending to be the heirs of a grand legacy. They called themselves the children of the Six Kingdoms. They liked to say they had “vanquished their enemies, fortified their glory.”

Irene almost wanted to laugh.

She had grown up in the slums, in the grimy cracks of Eldoria. There, no one was stupid enough to believe in those speeches glorifying the nation. There, they knew better. They knew that the nobles’ words were nothing more than hollow ornaments, weapons crafted to dazzle the weak and crush the other kingdoms.

But here, the people of the port were foolish enough to think they were part of that greatness. They believed—naively, stupidly—that when the Hive sang of its glory, it was also singing about them.

“Fools,” she muttered, shaking her head.

Their pride was nothing but a false echo, a way to boast to those even poorer than them. The Hive didn’t care about them. They weren’t heirs. They weren’t even pawns. Just background noise in a city too loud to hear its own lies.

Her gaze rose again to the Wasp. It loomed over everything, perched halfway between the bustling market and the city’s grand gates. A sinister sentinel, its shadow stretched across the alleys like a silent reminder that King Ronan was always watching. Always. Even locked inside his Hive, behind those golden walls, he saw everything.

Irene moved forward. Her steps grew slower as she approached the tower.

It was, admittedly, a beautiful structure. Its flower-covered balconies and arched windows seemed almost too elegant for this brutal city. And yet, everything about it radiated power and dominance.

The last time she had been here…

Time was pressing. She knew it. She didn’t have the luxury of hesitation. If she wanted to succeed in what she’d come back to do, she had to act fast. Very fast.

But something in Eldoria’s air—in the dampness of the docks and the chaotic cries of sailors—slowed her steps. Like an invisible hand pressing on her chest, forcing her to listen. Her heartbeat echoed louder than the noise around her, heavy and uneven.

She closed her eyes. Just for a moment. And the promise came back, sharp and cutting: to never forget that night.

Memories sliced through her mind like rusted blades. Months spent locked beneath a suffocating mountain, surrounded by filth and dampness. The sticky air clinging to her skin, sickness creeping through the weeping walls. Her hands, still numb, remembered the salt rocks she’d chipped away at until they bled, until her nails cracked, until the taste of salt clung to her lips, her lungs, her nightmares.

Endless nights spent reliving the fragments of her life over and over again, trapped in that stifling air that consumed everything. If she had never taken that mission. If she had never boarded that ship. If her father hadn’t owed money to the wrong people, eleven years ago. If she had never been torn away from him.

But those “ifs” were nothing but illusions. Every path, every imagined possibility led Irene back to the same place: standing before this city, before this suffocating tower that clawed at the clouds.

Because no matter where this tale begins—whether at its dawn, its dusk, or somewhere in its chaos—one truth echoes through time.

She lifted her head slowly, the brim of her hat casting a shadow over her face. But the sun pierced through, blinding her eyes, green-brown shards, sharp as blades. A low, bitter laugh escaped her lips.

“History always repeats itself,” she murmured.

A grim smile crept across her face. She wasn’t the girl who had been torn from her father anymore. Nor was she the disgraced pirate locked away in chains.

Irene was something else now. A storm of vengeance.

It was the steady roar vibrating deep within her soul, a force that refused to be silenced. And to make it echo all the way to her enemies, she knew she would have to scream first.

Irene Delmare was back.