Augustus couldn’t help but wonder if Cassia would have made a difference. She’d had gods in her head. She’d had an uncanny way of knowing exactly what to do. She hadn’t been impenetrable, but there was a reason why Phya and Thorne didn’t hesitate after she was gone.
Finally, Mettius asked, “Where’s Selene? I heard she escaped Thorne’s ship near Okos.”
A chill crossed over Augustus’s skin.
He hadn’t said goodbye. Not really. Not to any of them.
Augustus cleared the blockage in his throat. “Thorne contracted the Bladesworn for her head. She was in the city the last time I saw her, with Oskar Dahlin and some of the Blades.”
“Good. Then I’m sure she’s all right.”
“I guess we won’t know anything until someone shows up to rescue us.”
Mettius frowned. “Augustus, son, I’m sorry to say we may never know. Thorne will kill us before he lets that happen. I hope you said your goodbyes.”
“We’re not leaving them!” Selene shouted.
TheEntia’s crew was staring—she didn’t care.
Lili, sporting a black eye and an arm in a sling, couldn’t look her in the eye. Instead, she let Omar relay the bad news.
“We’re sitting ducks,” the quartermaster said. The two women behind him nodded in agreement. “The mercenary ships vanished in the night?—”
“With our payment, I might add,” Blaze muttered. He looked as wrecked as she felt.
Good.
“Thorne’s fleet is moving back in,” Omar finished. “They’ll be here within hours.”
Selene turned and gripped the starboard railing until her knuckles burned and fingers went numb. The salt-laden wind burned her eyes, and it was becoming increasingly difficult not to scream her frustration into it.
Poor Little Gus had taken the brunt of it that morning. He’d appeared out of nowhere, plopped onto her bed, babbling in bursts about his delightful foray across the mainland.
Streams, stolen fruit, luron pups.
As if none of them had been bleeding.
As if Petrina wasn’t dead, and Augustus jailed, and Mettius…
Her stomach rolled. Augustus’s public whipping. Mettius’s amputation. The details had come last night, quiet, unbearable.
Selene sensed the group behind her strolling away, all but one. Oskarleaned onto the railing beside her. Usually, Oskar’s calm steadied her. Today, it scraped raw.
“Unless you have some idea how to get me into that jail,” she ground out, “I don’t want to hear it.”
Oskar stared into the pirate city and sighed. “We stay, we die.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I saw what Thorne did to that crew, Selene, and your imagination holds no candle to the reality.”
And none of them were there to see Petrina’s look of shock. Or remember the way she reached for help, while already beyond it.
Hot tears pricked the backs of her eyes, and she turned her burning gaze toward her mentor. “We left him. We left him, and Petrina died. If we’d juststayed together?—”
“You can’t honestly believe that would have gone any better.”
“We won’t know that, will we? The answer certainly doesn’t matter to Petrina anymore.”
