Page 15 of Vengeance of the Pirate Queen (Daughter of the Pirate King #3)

ONLY, AS I SURVEY our surroundings, I don’t see anyone talking to us. No, the order was given some thirty feet off to our right. One of the guards has his spear pointed at a newcomer who is entering the camp.

A man who isn’t wearing a shirt or boots.

The hair on my arms stands on end.

It’s him.

“I said hold!” the guard repeats. An alarm goes up in the camp, and more people rush toward the altercation. More men and women with weapons and hastily-thrown-on clothes. “We will attack if you don’t comply.”

“I’m not here for fighting,” Threydan says in their language. “I’m searching for my beloved. She was spotted entering this camp.”

My stomach twists, and I feel the need to vomit my stolen meal. Because I know he’s talking about me. Those parts of me that are missing? He has them. That’s why I can feel him. We’re connected. I think I might have stolen part of him, too, when I stabbed his heart. His weirdly solid heart.

Before I can look away, peacock-blue eyes fix on me. Threydan winks.

He shouts loudly, “Who’s in charge here?” He keeps walking, as though nothing scares him.

A spear is thrown his way, burying itself in his back. It goes clean through until it pokes out of his chest on the other side.

He looks down at the weapon, as if it is only a minor inconvenience.

“I came to talk, not fight,” Threydan says. “Last chance.”

“Restrain him!” comes Dynkinar’s shout as she runs to join the throng. “Don’t let him—”

But it’s too late. Threydan has pulled the spear all the way through. Now he has a weapon. He hurls it at the man who had been shouting at him to halt. It strikes him clean through the heart. He’s dead before he even hits the ground.

Threydan’s hand curls into a fist, and the dead man rises once more, his eyes now the same peacock blue, the color so vibrant, I can see it even from this distance. He turns on his own men, swinging a fist at his closest companion. Then he pulls the spear from his heart and uses it to jab at his friends. As they fall, more bodies rise with blue eyes.

Shit.

He really can raise the dead. If Threydan finishes what he started on me, will I become like that? A mindless undead puppet for him to control?

Threydan looks purposefully in my direction and makes a shooing motion with his hands.

Only then does it dawn on me.

He’s helping me escape. He’s the distraction so we can make it free.

This is so wrong, but I do the only thing I can.

I shove Kearan’s arm off me and sprint for the trees. Kearan catches up with me in no time. He runs as though the very devil is on his heels, though he doesn’t overtake me. His longer strides match mine through the woods. Snow-covered branches whip my face, but our tracks are lost to the mostly needle-covered floor.

I’m not entirely sure which direction we’re running. I cannot orient myself, but Kearan seems to know where we’re headed, so I let him lead.

My muscles are still exhausted and sore from the last two days’ adventures, and I don’t last as long as I should on the run. My hands go to my knees, and I heave in breaths of air.

Kearan says, “You’re actually alive? How?”

And then the next thing I know, he’s gripping me in the fiercest bear hug.

I have not been touched like this since I was very small.

Not since my father would grasp me to him before throwing me atop his shoulders, walking me to the library, where he would read me a story before bed.

Kearan releases me abruptly, as though just realizing what he’s doing. Or perhaps it was my rigid posture that got through to him.

“I’m so sorry,” he says. “I’m so relieved you’re okay.” He clasps his hands behind his back, as though to keep them out of my sight lest I get any ideas about cutting them off. “But how are you okay? I was so sure you were dead.”

“It would have been preferable to what I experienced,” I say.

“I was awake the whole time. They didn’t knock me out as they did you. I’m too heavy to carry. They made me walk. They sailed you out on that ship, dumped you over the side bound to that iron weight. I thrashed and fought with all my strength, but it wasn’t enough. I watched the water as we sailed away. I hoped you’d regain consciousness and manage to free yourself. I waited for you to surface. Minutes and minutes passed, and still you didn’t.”

His voice cracks on the end, and I look up.

I take in his injuries once more. The dried blood on his clothing and caked to his hands. He got himself beaten while trying to save me . He cried over me.

Captain, stop flattering yourself.

The reminder of those words has me stopping that line of thought immediately.

“I made it,” I say. “I’m alive. You don’t need to worry. Apparently I’m harder to kill now.”

“Because he’s changed you?” he asks.

“I guess.”

“He helped us escape back there, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Because he wants you as his mate.”

My eyes close. “Don’t ever say that again. He doesn’t own me.”

“No one could ever own you.”

“I think he’s going to look for me when he’s done back there.”

“And you don’t want him to?” Kearan asks carefully.

My head whips in his direction. “Of course not!”

“Sounds to me like immortality and power are being offered to you.”

I step up to him and jab a finger into his chest. “Let’s get something straight. I don’t want to live forever. I have a family waiting for me in the stars. I intend to reunite with them someday. Not be trapped on this miserable world forever. And when has power ever made anyone happy?”

Kearan doesn’t flinch from my proximity. He shrugs. “Alosa seems pretty happy as a queen.”

“Alosa was happy before she was a queen. It isn’t the power that makes her happy.”

“Okay.”

I step back from him and drop my hand. “Don’t you ever suggest I’m some greedy—”

“I wasn’t.”

“Yes, you—”

“I just wanted to know where you stood with this King of the Undersea.”

“Stop interrupting me!”

“Yes, Captain.” He slams his lips closed.

“No man determines my fate. Threydan may come looking for me, but he can’t have me.”

And then Kearan’s face changes, as though he’d been forcing it to be calm. Now it morphs into a snarl. “He can look all he damn well likes; he’s not taking you. I—we—the crew won’t let it happen.”

A moment of silence passes, where we just stare at each other. I notice his breath fogging in the air before him, while mine does no such thing.

I hold one of my bare hands out in front of me. It looks normal, a deep umber against the white backdrop of this frozen tundra. I blow a breath of air against my skin. While I feel the gust of air, I don’t register any temperature with it at all. Not the cold of my surroundings or the heat that should be on my breath.

Kearan asks, “What’s wrong?”

I hold my hand up to him. He pauses before reaching out with his own ungloved hand to take it.

“Can you feel that?” I ask him. “Am I tangible at all?”

“I can feel you,” he says reassuringly. “You’re real.”

“I can feel the contact. I know you’re touching me, but I can’t feel warmth or cold. I just feel wrong. Does my skin even give off heat?”

He hesitates before saying, “Yes.”

“Are you lying to me?”

“I would never lie to you.”

“Then why did you pause?”

“I was processing how your skin felt against mine.”

That ball of heat where my heart is flares at his words, and I dare to ask. “And how does it feel?”

“Electric, like storm clouds.”

I stare at our joined hands, willing something—anything more—to happen. Not because I want a connection with this man, I reason. Forget that silly moment where my heart stuttered upon hearing him crying for me.

But I want to feel something . I want to feel normal.

“We need to fix it,” I say. “I need to be put back the way I was.”

“I know. We’ll fix it. We’ll make it right.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, but we’re going to figure it out. Can you move again?”

I nod and stand upright.

“I don’t think they meant to let me live, regardless of what that woman said,” Kearan says. “They didn’t blindfold me. I know right where we are.”

“Good.”

“Thank you,” he says earnestly. “For coming back for me.”

“I happened to stumble into the camp where you were being held.”

“You would have come for me even if that weren’t the case.”

“We need to move again.”

We run, flying through the forest as silently as possible. I try to slow my breathing, but I’m panting as loudly as an overworked horse. My head and limbs feel too heavy. I carry more than I ever should have to: the fate of the world if Threydan catches me, the end of my own mortality looming over me, the possibility of being kept from my family forever, and always— always —my past looming just around the corners of my mind, waiting to invade my thoughts should I let my walls down.

I brace myself against a tree when I need yet another break. I feel as though I could sleep for days.

“How are you?” he asks.

“I just need a moment.”

“No, I mean, a lot has happened. How are you?”

“Fine.”

“That can’t be true. You’re not a rock.”

“I’m the captain, Kearan. I’m not allowed to be anything but fine.”

“You could be something else right now. It’s just you and me. I already know the full situation. You won’t lose face or authority by being honest with me. If you wanted, just until we get back to the camp, you could tell me things and I will never repeat them to another soul.”

I say nothing. All my pressing thoughts are begging to be examined, pounding at my skull. My heart feels as though it is about to burst.

“You could just be Sorinda for a moment. Not the captain. It might help,” he prompts.

I’m so spent, and perhaps that is the only reason why my defenses are down. I’m helpless to refuse the release he offers me. I’m carrying too much. It’s never felt like so much of a burden before.

It’s never been so unbearable before.

“We tried to do a good thing,” I say, rubbing at my closed eyelids. “We looked for those girls, intent on saving them. Instead, we wake up an undead being? I suppose I should just expect these kinds of things by now. Nothing in my life has been easy or gone the way I expected it to.

“Before this voyage, I had only felt truly helpless once in my life: when I was small, watching my sisters and mother be drowned one by one before my eyes.” I’m breathing even more heavily than before, when it was only physical exertion tiring me out. “But then Threydan changed me. My humanity is contained in one tiny ball where my heart should be. I can feel it there, sitting in my chest, a small ember heating the rest of me. What happens when it goes out?

“And then I woke up in the abyss of the sea. I’ve never known darkness like that. Such fear like that. Twice in the same day. I am Sorinda Veshtas, and I do not get afraid. I am what men fear. I’ve made sure of it, but I cannot be unmovable when the being I’m fighting isn’t even human and I have no means of fighting him.

“I’m not fine. I’m furious. He took something from me, and I want it back.”

I want to scream, to growl my frustration. I feel vulnerable from exposing so much, yet relieved to have less to carry on my own.

Kearan says, “Who was he? The man who murdered your family?”

The prompt is so gentle and inviting. I didn’t know Kearan could behave this way—specifically toward me. I saw him comforting Roslyn, but this is different. He’s offering to take the weight of some of my rage and hurt so my shoulders can feel a little lighter.

I just faced an empty ocean.

And some undead being wants me for his mate—whatever the hell that means.

There’s no more room on my shoulders unless I consciously make space.

I swallow before saying, “His name was Samvin Carroter. He wanted my father’s title and was next in line to inherit it after my sisters and me. He thought to enter the house, murder us, then burn it all down, claiming it was an accident.

“He started with my father. Killed him with the slice of a knife across his throat. I was hiding under the desk, playing hide-and-chase as I liked to do. I saw it all. When Samvin left, I ran to find my mother. I got there just in time to see him strangling her in her bathtub. I screamed. That brought the servants and my sisters.

“It was dark, nighttime, and I hid in the shadows and watched as he locked the door and killed them one by one. I was paralyzed by my fear. Too scared to save my older sisters. So I just watched and held very still.

“He thought he found us all. After all, he didn’t bother to count the bodies as he murdered them. He left the household and started the fire, and that’s when I finally fled. I killed him not long after. He’d settled into my father’s second home. Another estate in the city. I walked there, barefoot, carrying the knife he’d used to kill my father. I still savor the moment he realized who I was. Right before I slit his throat. I was five years old.

“Alosa found me several years later, feral on the streets in the pirate quarter of Charden. I had acquired more knives, learned to protect myself and kill anything I perceived as a threat. It took some coaxing, but she eventually convinced me to come with her. She gave me a family again and showed me that it wasn’t too late to protect those I cared about.”

Kearan is perfectly still, not interrupting. I can almost pretend I’m saying the words aloud to no one.

“I’ve never even told Alosa that full story,” I say.

“Thank you for trusting me with it,” Kearan says. “And let me make you this promise: I will die before that monster gets his hands on you and finishes whatever he started. You will not fear like that again. You will not become what he wants you to be so long as I have breath in my lungs and blood pumping through my veins. I will look out for you just as you do for me as my captain.”

I straighten slowly, needing to show some semblance of strength. “I do not need looking after.”

“No, you don’t,” he agrees, but he doesn’t take back his vow.

Makes it hard to argue when he agrees with me. Especially when I still feel contentious. Contentious and angry and spent. So very, very spent.

Now I can add exposed to the list. I never meant to reveal so much about myself to this man. I don’t like to think about these things. The best way to keep the fear and anger at bay is to not think on hard times at all.

“Is there anything else you want to say?” Kearan asks.

“No.” Fear hums under my skin, like I just need to be prodded at the right angle and it will come bursting forth. What could he mean by the question? Surely …

Kearan nods and bites the inside of his cheek.

“What?” I ask.

“I want you to know that you don’t need to lie to me. You don’t have to edit your story or withhold anything. I would never think less of you.”

“Are you calling me a liar?” I say, my voice reaching a deadly tone, the fear pounding harder against my skin.

“A man wants your father’s title, and you expect me to believe he didn’t count the heirs as he killed them? No, he didn’t just walk away. Something happened afterward. Before he burned down your house.”

My mouth floods with saliva, my stomach wanting to churn yet again. My limbs feel weak once more, and I hate that such a question can level me.

I swallow. “The details aren’t important.”

“Aren’t they?”

“He didn’t touch me, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“It wouldn’t change the way I see you if he had.”

“I don’t care how you see me.”

“I know.”

Another moment where I want to argue but cannot because he agrees.

“You do not have to tell me, Sorinda. But my ears are always open, if you want someone who won’t judge you to listen.”

He says that, but he doesn’t know. Not what I did. How I allowed the maid’s daughter to die in my place. No one can know my greatest shame. That is a pain that only I should have to carry.

“You were five,” he tacks on, as though reading my thoughts. “Children that young are blameless for anything they do. They are too young to know better.”

I knew better , I think darkly. I knew better, and I let her die anyway.

“You didn’t kill your family. That horrible man did. You couldn’t have helped your sisters if you’d tried. You were the youngest. You needed protecting. There was no one to protect you except yourself. You did what you had to to survive. I know that.”

“Just stop talking,” I say, regretting that I shared anything at all.

“You wish you didn’t survive, don’t you? You wish you’d died with the rest of them, so you wouldn’t harbor such guilt. Guilt that you now find magnified because you woke up this undead guy who’s killing the natives as we speak.”

How? How does he do that? Just pull secret thoughts straight from my mind? I slip my fingers under my clothing in an attempt to reach for a dagger, but Kearan says, “Don’t bother. You need every soul you’ve got to get away from this horrible place.”

My hand drops down to my side.

We continue walking, and I consider the matter done. Kearan, it would seem, does not.

“When I was five, I ran away from home, seeking adventure. Probably scared my mother to death. I came back after two days because I ran out of food.”

I roll my eyes. Does he think his sins could ever compare to mine?

He’s hopeless.

“When I was seven, I stole my neighbor’s cat, because I wanted to keep him, and he liked me best. So I reasoned that I hadn’t done anything wrong.”

I resist another eye roll.

“Never gave him back, either,” Kearan continues. “He got run over by a cart only a few days later.”

“What a monster you were,” I say sarcastically.

“When I was ten, I beat up a boy who made fun of a friend of mine. Knocked him unconscious. That was the day I realized how strong I was and that I had to be careful.

“And when I was seventeen, the girl I thought I loved died, and I was happy for it.”

At this, I pause and look at him.

“Just for a moment,” he says. “Just because of how much she hurt me. And then the guilt ate at me, and I wondered if it wasn’t my fault all along that something bad happened to her.”

“You thought you were a bad person because you wished someone ill for the span of a few seconds?”

What would he think of me if he knew the truth? I actually did cause someone’s death. A lot of someones. Bad men, mostly. But not the first one. Not little Sleina, who had swapped clothes with me earlier that day for a game of dress-up. We never switched back. That’s why Samvin thought she was me, and I didn’t correct him. I could have spared her, and I didn’t. Instead I watched as she thrashed her limbs in my pretty dress. Clear up until the point where her lungs filled with water.

Kearan must realize that his words are making things worse, not better, so he finally, finally quiets until we reach camp.