When it was finally over, when Decker was nothing but cooling meat drifting toward the bottom, Riven looked at me with savage satisfaction burning in his golden eyes.
"The captain," he said.
I smiled and rose back toward the surface to continue my song. The captain was the last one left. He stood at the railing, swaying slightly, his cold eyes glazed with enchantment. An older man, weathered by decades at sea, with the kind of calculating expression that never quite went away even under magical influence.
He'd run his ship like a kingdom and himself like a king—distant, indifferent, unconcerned with the suffering of those beneath him. He hadn't personally tormented Lily, but he'd allowed it. He'd seen it and done nothing. He'd created the conditions that let men like Cort and Decker flourish, and he'd never once intervened.
Complicity was its own kind of cruelty.
He stepped off the railing with the same measured calm he'd probably maintained through storms and squalls and everything else the sea had thrown at him. He hit the water without flailing, without panic, sinking with an almost dignified resignation.
I stopped singing and dove to meet him.
The enchantment broke, but the captain didn't scream. He just looked at us—two sirens circling him in the dark water, silver and crimson, teeth and claws—with those cold, calculating eyes. Assessing. Evaluating. Even now, facing his own death, he was trying to figure out the angles.
"The girl," he said, and his voice was steady despite the water filling his lungs. "The quiet one who disappeared. You're here for her."
"We're here because of her," I corrected. "Because you let your crew treat her like garbage. Because you looked the other way while they made her life miserable."
"She was nobody," the captain said, and there was no apology in his voice, no regret. Just a statement of fact. "Just another pair of hands. They come and go."
Riven made a sound low in his throat—a growl that vibrated through the water and made the captain's composure finally crack, just a little.
"She waseverything," Riven snarled. "And you treated her like nothing. You let them hurt her because you didn't care enough to stop it."
"So now you die," I added, swimming closer until I could see my reflection in his fading eyes. "Not because you were the worst of them—that honor belonged to others. But because you could have stopped it and you chose not to. Because your indifference made everything else possible."
The captain opened his mouth, perhaps to argue, perhaps to plead, perhaps simply to breathe. It didn't matter. Riven's claws found his throat, tearing through the soft tissue with brutal efficiency, and the captain's last breath escaped in a cloud of bubbles and blood.
We watched him sink, his cold eyes finally empty, his calculating mind finally still. Down and down, into the crushing dark, where he would lie forever alongside the crew he'd failed to lead. When it was done, when the last body had disappeared into the depths, we floated in the quiet darkness and surveyed our work. TheWindchaserdrifted above us, empty now, a ghost ship with no one left to sail her. The water around us was tinged with the copper scent of blood, and somewhere below, the fish were already beginning to gather.
"Hungry?" Riven asked. I considered it. The bodies were fresh, the meat still warm. It had been a while since either of ushad fed properly—we'd been doing most of our hunting far from the cave system lately, making sure Lily didn't have to see or smell or think about what we ate.
She knew, of course. Six months of living with us, of being one of us—she'd figured it out long ago. She never said anything directly, but she'd started finding reasons to be elsewhere when we returned from long hunts. Started conveniently needing to visit Thane's garden or explore some distant cave whenever the hunger in our eyes grew too obvious to ignore.
She accepted what we were. She just didn't want to watch. Didn't want to participate. We loved her enough to make that easy for her.
"Not tonight," I decided. "Tonight I want to go home with clean hands. I want to hold her and tell her it's done and not have the taste of her tormentors on my tongue."
Riven nodded, understanding. "The ship?"
I looked up at the dark hull. Lily's nightmare made manifest. The place where she'd learned to be afraid, learned to be small, learned to hide everything she was just to survive another day.
"Sink it," I said. "All of it. I don't want a single plank left floating. I don't want anyone to ever find it, ever wonder what happened, ever speak its name again."
We worked together, claws tearing through the weathered hull, ripping open wounds that let the ocean pour in. Wood splintered and groaned. The ship listed, tilted, began its slow descent into oblivion. We swam through the interior, shredding everything we found—hammocks and nets and the captain's precious cargo, all of it destroyed, all of it consigned to the deep. By the time we were done, theWindchaserwas nothing but debris, scattering as it sank, disappearing into the darkness below. By morning, there would be no trace of it. No evidence that it had ever existed at all.
Good.
The swim home was peaceful. We moved through the water without speaking, letting the current carry us, lost in our own thoughts. Mine kept circling back to Lily—to her face when she'd frozen at the smell of fish guts, to the way her scent went sour with old fear in the middle of the night, to every small scar that ship had left on her soul.
TheWindchaserwas gone now. However, there were other scars. Other wounds that hadn't healed.
"We need to talk to the others," I said finally, breaking the silence. "About Marcus. About her parents."
Riven's golden eyes gleamed in the darkness. "You think we can find them?"
"We have connections." I thought of the networks we'd built over centuries—other sirens, sea witches, creatures of the deep who owed us favors or feared our wrath. "The merchant Marcus, the one who bought her like she was cargo—he has ships. Ships travel routes. Routes can be tracked."
