Augustus’s calm broke, and he flinched. Flashes of pain flared through his still-healing back and his bruised ribs.
“So tell me,” Thorne continued, “do you play savior and cut them down?”
Mettius’s throat bobbed. “I wouldn’t have put them there to begin with.Youdid that, you sonofabitch.”
Tristan bared his teeth, and spittle flew from his mouth when he next spoke. “I know exactly what you’d do. You’d butcher them like cattle, wouldn’t you?”
The focus of Thorne’s rage surprised Augustus and must have shocked Mettius, too, because his eyes shot to Thorne. If Tristan had been Gallagher crew, why would he care how the people died?
“What exactly is this about?” Mettius asked.
Thorne released Mettius’s head with a shove. “Bring them ashore. Let’s get started.”
Augustus hit the beach hard, shoulders jarred, mouth full of sand. The hands were gone—but the cage remained. He clawed deep into the golden, damp sand.
Behind his closed lids, Selene stood beside him in the bird’s nest aboard theSoris, and the night stretched before them for an eternity. Her hand was so close that his fingers twitched. He reached—just a knuckle brushing the back of her hand—and it wasn’t enough. Even then, he’d needed her.
The moans and cries of the dying were a fist around his neck.See us, they said.Acknowledge us.
Throat tight, he shook his head.
Selene.
Focus on Selene.
“Augustus,” her memory said with that exasperated sound he loved so much, and her ghost tilted her head back with a really good laugh?—
Two men yanked Augustus back to his feet and dragged him past piles of seaweed toward the sand dunes. The scent of dried blood thickened as they walked. Buzzing flies—bloated, lazy—rose in slow clouds, too fat to flee.
Nearby, Mettius was also held up by two men and hobbled on one leg, his face a pale gray. Every step kicked up hot sand, and there was a day much like this one where Selene put them on a pair of white horses with silver manes. They raced across a sandy beach, sand catching on the humid breeze like golden clouds?—
“Mack.”
The grief in Mettius’s voice yanked Augustus from his memory like a hook to the spine. But he couldn’t look any further north of the hanging feet he passed with red and cracked skin. The sun had been cooking them.
Augustus’s stomach turned, and acid filled his mouth.
“I’m sorry,” Mettius said. “Audry— Gods, Jax. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Augustus tried—he tried so hard—to find a new memory. He couldn’t be here. It didn’t feel good here, where blood stained the sand, and the dying called him and Mettius by name.Mercy, mercy, mercy?—
There was one place he hadn’t allowed himself to revisit—not until now. Not until he reached the edge.
Augustus sank deep into his memories until he was in that tiny little cabin aboard that strange ship. He had Selene wrapped around his hips, holding her up against the cabin’s door?—
Augustus seized Selene in a deep kiss, drowning in her scent and the feel of her body. “We’ve established that you’ve been held and kissed?—”
“I’ve definitely been kissed.” Breathy. Needy.
“Don’t interrupt.” He grinned. “I have one more important question to ask you. Has another man ever been inside you?”
She certainly didn’t kiss like a woman who didn’t know what to expect.
A flush filled her cheeks, and what little amusement had been in her eyes trickled away. “No man that ever cared about me. No man I wanted the way I want you.”
Augustus tripped over a hillock of sand, saved from falling by the men holding him upright. Hot tears were a flash burn across the backs of his eyes?—
No. Hewouldn’t give in. Thorne’s mistake was in believing this was the end for them. He’d see her again.
