Augustus felt sick. “I should have left with you and the fleet months ago.” Deep in his chest, his heart stuttered. “You know, Dimitrios’s mother was secretly hoping he would marry Selene. Can you imagine the good she’d do as queen? She’s perfect for a position like that, and Dimitrios…he’s not so bad. They’d look good together.”
Mettius sighed. “You can’t torment yourself with thoughts like that. That girl loves you.”
Augustus met his father’s eyes through the shadows and iron bars, through the dust motes dancing in the lowering sunlight. “Loving me was the worst decision she ever made, and if I had any balls, I’d walk awaybefore it’s too late. But who knows? Maybe Thorne will take that choice from me, and none of this will matter.”
Mettius’s gaze lowered. “The only thing we can hope for at this point is time.”
Time only mattered if their friends were still out there plotting some kind of miracle to get them out of this. Selfishly, he hoped that was true. Then again, he didn’t want any more blood to spill on his behalf.
A sound broke the quiet that turned Augustus ice cold. Theclick, click, clickclickclickof a scythe-shaped talon on stone. Then the flutter of those ash wings.
The Vorash landed between their cells, wings spread like wind-torn sails. It focused on Mettius, and all the while, its talon clawsclick, click, clicked.
Boot steps echoed toward the Vorash, steady and sure. Neither the beast nor the approaching man appeared bothered by the other.
Augustus pushed through the pain and rose. Regardless of the blazing fire burning across his back, he would meet Thorne in the eye.
The pirate captain stepped into view wearing a clean, pale tunic and black pants, pulling a long drag from a pipe.
Thorne exhaled a sweet curl of smoke into Mettius’s cell. “Hello again, friend.”
Augustus fisted his steel bars and growled across the space. “You’ll deal with me now,friend.”
Thorne turned casually toward Augustus, a smile taunting the edges of his mouth. “Will I?”
The Vorash crossed the narrow walkway. A fresh weight settled inside Augustus’s cage, and beneath it came the dry crackle of something ancient stretching awake.
Thorne and his pet scanned Augustus from the bottom up. “I see where Selene gets it now.”
Augustus flashed his teeth with a biting smile. “You don’t get to say her name.”
“Selene and Petrina really had me for a while. They’re good—” He stopped abruptly. “Forgive me. It sounded as if I meant that in the present tense, didn’t it?”
A cold chill flowed down the length of his neck to his spine, raising goosebumps along the way. “Say what you mean.”
“I have a head in my possession,” Thorne said. “And a body. Neither attached to the other.”
Augustus’s mind emptied of everything.
There was no world without her.
Not one breath in this cursed life unless she breathed first.
Mettius slapped the stone bench beneath him, drawing their attention. “If you mean to toy with someone, Thorne, let it be me. Is the girl dead?”
“One of them is,” Thorne confirmed. “The other… According to witnesses, she killed the Bladesworn in the street. Sounded like quite the spectacle.” He smiled and placed the pipe between his teeth. “I’ll let you guess who’s who. It’ll be more fun that way.”
Augustus staggered back, hands heavy, world tilting sideways and wrong.
Selene was a lot of things—fearless, competent, resourceful—but skilled enough to survive a trained mercenary?
His own words came back to him like a slap. “Are you under some illusion that after a few months of training to be a weapon, you’re suddenly ready for war?”
How she’d survived this long?—
No. He couldn’t think that way. She’d killed actual monsters. She could doanything.
Thorne’s smile widened. “Your ship has left.” To Mettius: “Your fleet has vanished. They left you to die.”
