Page 68 of Wicked Tides #1

And there I was, truly naked in front of him. Vulnerable. The perfect prey. If he wanted to kill me at that very moment, I did not have the will to stop him.

He raised his free hand and cupped the side of my face, his thumb brushing my marred cheek.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered back.

I sighed as if a burdensome weight had been expelled from me. Vidar leaned in and our lips met. But that kiss was different. It was slow and gentle. The warmth of it spread through me like sunlight on chilled skin. When we parted, I slowly licked him off my lips, savoring the taste of him .

“When I was injured, I know you stayed by my side,” I said. “I could feel you there.”

“I tried. Meridan had gotten a little possessive.”

The thought of Meridan made my heart ache a bit. I knew her feelings toward Vidar and I knew her reservations. And now it was blatantly obvious that I cared about him.

“She is afraid I will abandon her for you,” I said softly.

Vidar huffed a laugh as if the thought was too outrageous to fathom.

“She has her reasons,” I clarified.

There was another bout of silence as he mulled over my words.

“Do you believe that I am a monster?” I whispered.

“I believe you are as monstrous as you’ve needed to be to survive this shit world we’re in. And you are no more monstrous than I.”

“Two monsters in a shit world sound rather formidable.”

“And dangerous.” He paused, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “There are worse creatures than us, Dahlia. Much worse.”

“I know.”

“I don’t intend to let them live.”

I studied his face, trying to find what was behind his eyes when he said those words. It was unclear at first until my mind crawled reluctantly back to our shared nightmare.

“That dream we had. Was it my nightmare or yours?” Vidar asked, as if reading my mind.

“I don’t know anymore. Being overtaken by the sons is my worst fear, though.”

“Maybe not being able to stop it is mine.” He paused a moment and I could practically see him returning to that dream. “I felt something in the darkness. Something awful. Something not of this world.”

My brows knitted. “You felt him. Akareth.”

“That can’t have been my nightmare.”

“No. No, that’s mine. Then, who was that man who ate my tongue? ”

“Governor fucking Whitton,” he sighed.

“You want him dead.”

“I want plenty of people dead, but he holds a special place on the top of my list.”

“Why?”

He perched an elbow on his raised knee. “Because he’s the worst of us. He’s what people are becoming. Ignorant. Entitled. Cruel.”

“No worse than most, I’d wager.”

“Worse in different ways. The world was simple. Violent and horrid, but simple. Men like him will complicate it. Before I left, he ordered me to stop killing and start capturing. For your tongues and for your bodies. Under the control of men like him, the brothels will be full of your kind.”

“You cannot keep a siren in chains. Though I’m not surprised you are trying.”

“Not me. I want no part of it. My men have been on the fence about the whole thing since we set sail.”

“You wanted no part of it? Even before us? This?”

“Even before this. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t out of kindness that I disagreed. I wanted every siren dead. Outside of you and Meridan, I think I still do.”

“I don’t know what I want.”

“You want something different. That much I know. Otherwise, all those girls would be dead.”

I slid closer to him, my nails lightly caressing his bare back. The wound where Uther had shot him was healing nicely, despite my tearing the stitches in the woods.

“Perhaps we were meant to be good,” I said, pressing a kiss to his shoulder. “We just missed a turn somewhere on our paths.”

“You mean the turn that would have steered my father’s ship away from that island?”

I held his eyes for a while, soaking in the gold flecks that littered them in the firelight .

“I am glad for it,” I confessed. The words nearly broke me. “That day stripped a mask from my face that I didn’t know I was wearing. Painful as it was, I do not think I could bear having to wear it my whole life.”

Vidar reached up, taking my hand from his shoulder and pressing my knuckles to his lips.

“You forced my eyes open, Dahlia. I pray I never close them again.”

“And? You know now that even in sleep you cannot be rid of me. The only way to sever this bond is to kill me.”

“I’ll not be doing that anytime soon,” he said, placing his hand on a stool to stand.

The stool tipped his leather folder of papers onto the floor.

I glimpsed the many charcoal drawings and canted my head at one in particular as it drifted toward me and landed near my feet.

A new sketch. I reached out and picked up the parchment, staring at the face of a woman, her hair blowing in the wind.

On her cheek sat a long scar which was all the indication I needed to know it was a drawing of me.

But… I was beautiful. The drawing was delicate and the lack of malice in the eyes made it look like an entirely different creature to the one I’d always envisioned myself being.

Vidar crouched to scoop up the drawings as I ogled the piece.

“Why’d you draw this?” I muttered.

“Because you haunt my dreams. Quite literally. I draw what I want to understand and I’ve wanted to understand you for some time.”

I took another moment to soak in the picture and then slid it back into the folder for him with a sigh.

“You know a lot,” I said. “But you don’t know everything.

The one with the blue skin. The Gorgos. They’re from tropical waters.

If you saw one, she was displaced. There’s been a lot of infighting among my kind.

More than I’d like to admit. And if the sons are truly surfacing, they could be migrating. ”

“There’s been a lot of infighting among humans as well. There always has been. We move to avoid it and it follows. We have that in common.”

I pulled my knees to my chest and looked up at him as he set the leather folder back on the stool.

“You’re a product of that. Do you regret killing your sister? Your blood sister, I mean.”

I shook my head with a shrug. “No less than I regret killing the men on the Cornwallis.” I dragged my finger across the scar on my throat.

“She gave me this. There was a time that I wanted to please her like I wanted to please my mother, but in the end, our shared blood meant so little to me.” I paused for a moment, watching Vidar get dressed, and then glanced back at the folder of sketches. “That drawing. It’s beautiful.”

His eyes met mine and a handsome grin spread crookedly across his lips. Reaching out, he took my hand and lifted me to my feet, pulling me against him.

“Would it surprise you that much to know that you are that beautiful to me?”

“Perhaps.” I ran my finger lightly down the healing cut on Vidar’s chest. “I do not know how to navigate these waters. You think I’m beautiful. I believe you to be charming. With our past—”

“I don’t care about the past anymore,” he grumbled. “There are many names there that will be lost with time. But I’m still making my mark on this world and I won’t have it be a tragic one like those before me.”

“You truly think there is any other mark we can make, you and I? A siren and a pirate.”

“A privateer. We’re different”

“Right. Privateers kill lawfully. Then what do you call what happened to the Widow’s Smile?”

“An accident.”

I almost laughed. Almost.

“We accidentally murdered them all, then. ”

“That’s a way to put it, love.”

I glanced up at that word, even if he had used it casually, and that slanted grin returned to his lips.

“What? Like the sound of that, do you?”

“I—I don’t know.” My mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water as I attempted to form words.

“It’s just a word,” he groaned as he continued to dress himself. “Like lass or sweetheart.”

I pulled on a pair of leather leggings and a tunic and coat, shielding myself against the cold now that Vidar wasn’t pressed against me.

“I know what it is,” I said, stepping past him to leave the cabin.

Vidar attempted to grab my arm and I slipped out of his grip, moving into the chill of the morning air.

I folded my arms over myself, breathing in the fresh breeze and soaking in the sun.

When Vidar emerged, he was in his captain’s coat instead of one of the thick, fur-lined ones everyone else was wearing.

I looked him up and down and furrowed my brows.

“Didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” he said. “I won’t say it again if it—”

“Do I look like someone so easily hurt?” I said flatly.

“Not at all.”

“Why are you wearing that?”

“I am going to talk to my crew. About leaving.”

“Leaving?”

He shrugged. “We were never going to stay here forever.”

Of course, he wasn’t. I felt foolish for being so surprised by the notion and shook my head.

“I’ll tell Meridan.”

Without giving him another chance to cut off my retreat, I left. I walked with the scent of him still in my lungs and the warmth of his touch fluttering across my skin.

Vidar fucking Bone Heart. The captain of the Burning Rose.

Hunter of sirens and scourge of the sea.

My mother’s murderer. The wolf cub from the Mother’s Fang.

The golden-haired bastard had done it. He’d found a chink in my armor.

I had heard so many human stories about it feeling good to care for someone.

It was supposed to be exciting. Warm. Instead, I was afraid and it left an absolutely wretched knot deep inside.

The crew of the Rose gathered in the longhouse where Vidar divvied out jobs for everyone to prepare for departure. He tasked many of the men with getting supplies and negotiating good prices with the villagers. Not that the village was asking for much after we’d returned their girls to them.

Meridan and I stood at the back of the building, watching while I strung a thin twine string through Vidar’s silentium pendant. Now that it wasn’t under his skin, he would need to wear it another way.

Seeing him in his captain’s garb, speaking to his men, had never captured my attention quite like that.

Every single one of his remaining crewmen was watching him as if he were the only person in the room.

They were loyal, even if there had been a hundred reasons for them to leave for a less dangerous life.

Even if they had to watch him kill the traitors.

Glancing at Meridan, I imagined Voel and Kea being with us, but like so many others, they’d been claimed by the horrors of our ugly world too soon.

When the meeting was through, Vidar got caught up in talking with Gus and Mullins in the back corner as the rest of the crew dispersed to do their jobs. I narrowed my eyes at them, wondering what they had to talk about without the rest of the men present.

Once they finished, Vidar headed my way, but rather than stop, he passed me by and walked outside. I walked after him, confused.

“You didn’t say where we’re going,” I pointed out. “Should that not be the first thing you decide before setting sail.”

“My crew knows where we’re going. We knew before we anchored here. ”

“Can I ask where that is?”

We wove between two cabins and he still wasn’t looking at me. Irritated, I hastened my step to walk beside him.

“Vidar, you—”

Quickly, he took a step toward me, herding me toward the wall of a cabin until my back was against it.

“You can ask,” he said calmly. “But it won’t matter.”

“And here I thought perhaps I was a part of your crew after saving your life,” I said. “After not killing all of your men, despite the many chances.”

“I cannot begin to thank you for everything.”

“Is there another way you test your crewmen’s loyalty?”

His eyes wandered.

“There is no test.”

“Then it’s because of what I am that you are not being honest with me.”

I saw the tension in his jaw before it happened and yet I still flinched a bit when his hand came up to slam onto the wall beside my head. Anger seeped like salt on a wound into my thoughts, rotten and unwanted.

“You are angry with me? What right do you have to be—"

Both hands suddenly cupped my face and his once tense features became tortured and twisted.

“You’re staying here,” he said.

I blinked. “What?”

“You’re not coming with me, so you don’t need to know where we’re going.”

I reached up and ripped his hands off my face. “You dare to leave me behind after everything?”

“I am a hunter. My place is on the sea. And now new monsters have surfaced. People won’t know what to do about them, hunters and fishermen alike. I’d say my job just got more lucrative.”

“You think my place isn’t on the sea? ”

“The sons don’t know you’re here. These people love you. You’ll be safe.”

“That’s not safety. That’s a prison.”

He took a deep breath, seeming defeated, and stepped away from me. “I’m sailing tomorrow. And you should stay. I want you to stay, Dahlia.”

I stared at him, waiting for him to change his mind, but he would not relent.

His mind was made up and I had no say in his decision.

Part of me couldn’t help but think it was his plan all along to leave me behind, whether in the sea or in an icy village.

The sense of betrayal was like a jagged little stone in my gut, churning and sharp.

It hurt. It hurt in a way I was not trained to withstand.

“I will do as I please,” I hissed, pushing him away so I could rid myself of his presence.