But the truth curled like a serpent into her chest.
He had no idea who she truly was.
And gods forgive her, she was falling in love with him anyway.
Chapter
Thirty-Eight
“Did I ever tell you how I met your mother?”
Augustus opened his eyes, careful not to move more than a breath. Pain knifed his back, immeasurable, merciless.
In the jail’s waning light, Mettius stared toward the ceiling with one hand draped to the floor, the other on his stomach. “She tried to slit my throat.” His voice was little more than a rasp. “She was an angry little vixen back then.”
“Why?”
Mettius’s head fell to the side, his blood-crusted beard scraping across his bare chest. “Why was she angry, or why’d she try to kill me?”
“Either. Both.”
“Her life wasn’t what she’d expected, and I was a foul, murderous pirate.” Mettius laughed. “She attempted to kill me a few more times after that—when she set her mind to something, she tried until she succeeded.”
“Sounds like her.”
“Aye,” Mettius whispered, his gaze turned back up. “My only defense was to make her fall in love with me.”
A laugh burbled up from Augustus’s chest, halted by the flare of white-hot pain. “Not unlike how I drag Selene around by the elbow, making promises to go straight while secretly hoping to slip right back into piracy.”
It was meant to be funny, but the truth hit him square in the chest.
This life was going to kill Selene the same way it had Cassia.
He was a fucking fool.
Mettius pushed upright, wincing. “Listen to me, son. Selene doesn’t stick around because you’ve got some kind of hold on her. Your smile is smug, not magic. In fact, I recall quite a bit of irritation every time you opened your mouth back when the two of you were just getting around.”
That was true. Augustus had been a constant source of her irritation, and he’d pushed and pushed and pushed…until she fell in love with him.
“How did you and Mom do it?” Augustus asked. “Decades together, Mom possessed by the gods, building a fleet, a reputation… All that, and no one died.”
“Is that what you think?” Mettius laughed. “Of course, people died under our watch. We were never that powerful. Lucky sometimes.” All humor vanished from his face. “Until we weren’t.”
Until Cassia died.
“I don’t want this life for Selene,” Augustus said. “But, who am I without it? All I ever wanted was my own ship. To stand at the head of my own fleet one day.”
“When you imagine that future, is Selene standing with you?”
“Begrudgingly. She’s too good for what I want my life to look like.”
Mettius nodded, slow and thoughtful. “What does Selene want?”
Good question. He’d never asked, and she never said. The future they talked about was his idea, derived from some notion that he could give her alife. One that was new and exciting and always changing.
In just a few short months, however, his idea of what was best got her kidnapped, scarred, and on a dangerous man’s kill list.
Possibly dead.
