“What’s done is done. You did not kill her and so she hung you like bait for Akareth.” I could feel his fingers against my side, lightly crawling down my hip and pulling the fabric of my shirt up until he found bare skin. “But I know too well, Dahlia. You did not spend those days in his prison learning nothing.”
“Every day that passes, it is harder to recall the details of my time with him.”
His fingers trailed over my thigh, settling between my legs where my body still longed for his touch, despite the memories of Akareth’s violations.
“But you do remember,” he whispered, slowly dropping his head so his lips could caress my neck. “Everything has a weakness. He had to have revealed one of his.”
The moment he was out of sight, shadows danced across my eyes like I was no longer there with him. I tensed, pushing himaway only so I could see his face.Hisface and not the one made of shadows and lies.
“I want to look at you,” I said. “I need to see your face.”
His eyes lit up with a sense of excitement as he brushed his fingers through my clefts.
“Then look at me.” He slid two fingers inside, his thumb pressing over my clit. My body shuddered against his touch. I hungered for it. I needed it.
But he was right. I did remember. I remembered enough to still feel Akareth squirming inside me even then. Logic said it wasn’t real, but as Vidar drove his fingers into me, a crazed part of my torn mind thought if he went deep enough, he’d find how ruined I was inside. How much of me had been reshaped by all that Akareth had done to me. One voice screamed how irrational it all was while the other whimpered that nothing was impossible. That I had physically and mentally changed, all because of a dream, and Vidar would soon find out.
I shoved him off me and rolled off the bed onto my feet, but I was immediately hit with the cold shame of having done so.
“I’m sorry,” I said, leaning on the desk and hanging my head. “I’m sorry.”
I could hear Vidar rising from the bed behind me. When he spun me around to face him, I wanted to scream my frustration, but I bit my tongue, afraid that if I opened those doors, I would not stop at just screaming.
“I said I would forgive you for anything,” he said, cupping my cheeks in his hands. “That does not mean there will always be something to forgive. Whatever it is that Akareth did and whatever he made you believe, it does not change anything. We are still going to hunt him down like any other monster. We are still going to destroy him. And Istilland willalwaysbe here for you. He can try to rob you of many things, but he cannot have that.”
My chest burned, my heart swelling far past the confines of my body until it ached like an overworked muscle. I swallowed thelump forming in my throat, ogling Vidar like he would soon burst into a cloud of smoke and disappear because nothing so perfect lasted. I took his hand from my cheek and lowered it down to the middle of my chest where my heart was beating maddeningly hard. He breathed deeply, staring down at my bosom as if to savor the rhythm. As he did, my thumb moved over the knuckles of his leather-covered fingers.
“I will not let this destroy me,” I promised.
His thumb traced the length of my scar from my mouth to my ear, not with regret, but with a strange sense of pride. The same way I sometimes looked at his missing fingers. Like we’d marked each other that day as children only to find each other in the chaos eighteen years later. We’d each taken a bit of the other. We’d branded each other and perhaps, if all things ended in death, we’d recognize each other in the afterlife because of it.
“I know,” he whispered.
I’d come to realize Vidar was just as capable of dealing pain as he was comfort. As I laid beside him, his arm draped across my chest, I found myself awake, listening to the sound of his breathing as the ship rocked and creaked across the water. My memories slipped back to the day we met again after eighteen years with vengeance on our minds. The hate I felt when he walked onto that ship threatened to suffocate me. And it nearly did when I had him under my blade.
I could have ended it that day.
But without him, I knew I would have been ripped away from the surface and plunged into the depths far sooner and I would have had nothing to cling to. Nothing to hold me together as Akareth tried to peel me apart. I would have been like my mother, with no purchase to save me from the descent. Or like Lyla, with no concept of light to steer me from the darkness. I was blessed tohave Vidar, a man who did not tolerate anything less than boldness and ferocity.
I turned my head, ogling the man who had defied all my expectations of the world. Who had shattered my resolve and built a new one with his brutal hands. Who had altered my thoughts in a way that made me feel freer than I ever had.
Wild creatures were harder to tame, and Vidar had been keeping me unbound and uncaged, allowing me to be the monster I was and the woman I wanted to be.
It was why I kept returning to him, no matter what strange and terrifying directions my mind strayed.
Unable to sleep with so many thoughts running rampant, I rose from the bed, carefully sliding out from beneath Vidar’s arm. The air had a chill to it as we ventured further east. I didn’t often feel the cold, but that morning, it was persistent. I took Vidar’s leather coat from the end of the bed and slid it on, quietly padding barefoot to the door to get some air.
Outside, the sky was still a deep blue. The sun had not even begun to crown, but its light was waking to announce it. I took a deep breath, savoring every bit of the morning aromas. Should anyone or anything try to fool me again with flawed copies of reality, I wanted to be able to find the real versions of things in the back of my mind.
Perhaps I could learn not to be tricked so easily.
Instead of heading to the bow of the ship to enjoy the early morning, I veered toward the grate covering the hold. Anyone on deck keeping a lookout paid no mind to my venture. I slipped below, almost choking on the smell of hemsbane. The overly sweet, almost rancid odor of it hit me like salt on a cut. I nearly covered my nose, but when I saw Lyla sitting quietly in her cell, not a hint of discomfort on her stone-like face, I refrained. If she could stand the overpowering smell of the herb, so could I.
Despite everything, I admired her resilience. It dwarfed even mine. I approached her cell, eyeing the crates full of freshhemsbane stocks and dried bundles stacked against the wall beside piles of cannon balls and harpoons. The question remained.
Why did I want her alive?
“I know you cannot speak to me. Perhaps it is better that way.”
