“Like, this is my room, and you and Kavin are going to sleep elsewhere?” Thorn shook his head once. “You and I are sleeping here, and Kavin is sleeping…”
“No,” Kavin said, his lips curling slightly evilly as he stared at Thorn’s hood. “I paid for the bed. It’s the only one on board. Hammocks are uncomfortable.” I glanced at the narrow mattress. There was no way he would sleep comfortably in that thing; he was at least a foot too tall.
“Valerie called in a debt the captain owed,” Thorn said at last. “He didn’t have any space, but said you could sleep in here, in the hammock… or in his cabin.”
So, it was a choice between staying in this room with Kavin, or in the captain’s room? “Where will you be, Thorn?”
“With you, of course.” I knew better than to think he meant anything more than sleeping, but my heart still gave a quick pitter-patter at the thought of us spending our nights together. I glanced at Kavin.
“I’ll share my bed with you, Omega,” he offered eagerly, then froze as Thorn let out a hiss. “Not in that way, of course. I meant I would let you sleep next to me, but we could have clothes on or…”
I held up a hand, cutting him off. “Save it.” I felt slightly guilty that the thought of sharing a bed with him appealed to me. “Let’s go meet the captain. Maybe he’ll be a gentleman and offer his bed.”
THORN
The only person in the world that I loved stood on the deck of a schooner under the moonlight, her hair whipping in the night wind, her voice strident as she cursed powerfully enough to be heard over the rush of the sea and the rustle of the aft sail. I fought back a smile at her fluency, focusing my attention on her rant.
Goddess, she was stunning when she was incensed. I shifted my stance to one side and pulled my cloak away from my front to hide my physical reaction to her sharp mood. She would not like knowing how her anger affected me. How it had done for almost four years now, to my shame.
“Absolutely not,” Roya fumed, addressing me as I drew closer. “I will not sleep in a cabin with that man. If I get that close to him, I’ll come up with an eighth way to kill a man with wire, I swear it.”
I didn’t blame her for her anger. The man had taken one look at Roya and made more than one suggestion of how she could work her way into his bed, a few on how to earn some extra coins from his crew during the voyage to Mirren, and one or two about combining swabbing the decks with swabbing a dick or two.
He’d stopped talking when he felt my stiletto blade sliding through the skin underneath his sagging chin.
“Hemlock,” Roya muttered to herself, “with a half measure of wormroot, and two pinches of ambersol. I think I brought my ambersol…”
We both stood at the stern, the waves behind us reflecting the full moon. Her words were soft, but clear to me. Of course, I’d made a life out of paying attention even to the small things, and to me Roya was no small thing. She was not a child anymore either, though I’d known that for a while.
I had been fighting an unwinnable battle to resist her for years. Keeping her in a forbidden box in my mind long after she had grown.
She was a woman: a rare, beautiful, fierce, dangerous woman. For the past three years, I had wanted to touch her more than I wanted my next breath. Wanted to claim her in every way I could, and not because she was an Omega, and I an Alpha.
It wasn’t her scent I desired, but her fire. Her strength and passion. Her keen intelligence and sense of justice. The soft heart she kept hidden under her temper and ambition.
But I knew what I was. Anathema. Poison. If they caught me—and they would eventually—I would be killed. If I mated her, she would die alongside me. And I had made a promise to the Goddess years before to keep Roya safe.
I would not break that promise now.
I needed to find a home for her, where she would be protected. Mirren would not be such a place, and the possibility that we would make it to Rimholt—when we already knew there would be assassins in Mirren expecting us—was almost nonexistent.
Hell, the captain had probably already made plans to sell us all out. He was a criminal, and I didn’t trust him, but his ship was all Valerie could find at short notice. This captain was her connection to the island merchants where she sourced some of her best dyes and most effective poisons.
Rimholt was landlocked, squeezed between Verdan to the west and Mirren to the east, with Starlak sitting over them all, a vast tundra of sere grasslands in the summers and ice fields in the winters, capped by the Northern Sea. It was too close to winter now to venture to Rimholt via Starlak, where I had some allies, but Mirren would be a death sentence for me. The Guild was stronger there than anywhere, and once I was gone, Roya would be at risk. I needed a new strategy.
Valerie had ransacked Milian’s castle after his death, and stolen all the decades of research he had amassed about Omegas, particularly the maps he’d taken from sailors. Milian had only ever found one true Omega, a woman named Cerise, and she had come from an island southeast of Mirren: Havira, the same island where some of the Guild’s rarest poisons originated.
Valerie thought that was where we should go, and this captain knew where it was. In fact, Havira was his destination, but at my urging, Valerie had instructed him to drop us at Mirren first. I had no idea how much she had paid to make that happen. Mirren wasn’t exactly on the way, from my understanding.
For some reason, she insisted Havira was where we should go, and begged me to consider staying there. I had my doubts about the wisdom of sailing unknown waters—with a captain whose moral compass had no needle—then disembarking on some sort of fabled utopian patch of sand filled with lethal plants, hundreds of miles from the continent.
Wherever I chose, I had to keep Roya safe, and out of arm’s reach. It was getting harder to push her away, not to kiss those soft lips, touch that long, golden fall of hair…
“I’ll put it in the potato liquor,” she was muttering now. “He won’t taste it.”
“You can’t kill the captain, Roya.” Because I was going to do that myself, as soon as we didn’t need him anymore. “He’s the one who sails the ship.”
“I could sail the ship,” she retorted. “It can’t be too hard if that gob of donkey dung can do it.” She let out a huge yawn, and I knew we had to go below.
