Apparently, yes, given his rumbling and closed eyes.
“Come in,” I called.
His rumbling ceased altogether as he sat up and fixed me with a glare that had no business being on a cat.
The door opened, and he hopped off me, tail straight up in the air. Inu’s eyes searched the cabin for me, checking logical places like the bed, desk, hammock, before finally landing on me with a small shake of her head.
“Oni,” she said to Blackbeard as he exited the cabin.
He didn’t deign to respond.
“We make port in an hour,” she said, coming to lean against the bed. “Is there a reason you are on the floor?”
“Probably, I’m just not sure what it is right now,” I said.
Inu hummed.
“This is the last one, right?” she asked.
If someone had told me a few months ago that Inu would be standing above me, asking me for orders and clarity, I would have laughed in their faces. Time did funny things like that. Instead, I met her eyes and nodded.
“It’s the last one, but we have to make it count,” I said.
“What if they decide to make a point and execute them anyway?” she asked.
From the moment I met her, I found her quiet and placid persona to be draining and obnoxious. I should have listened to Oscar when he told me there was more to her, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t ready to see her as anything other than an inconvenience. If I’d looked a little closer, I would have seen the way her forefinger twitches against her thigh when she’s worrying. Anxiety and fear had a death grip on her at all times. The evidence was in how she searched every room she walked into for an invisible threat.
Somehow, it was more tragic that it all lived under the surface of her. It reminded me of someone drowning, screaming for help, but only calm waters stood between them and their rescue.
I sat up, my hair falling over my shoulder from where it’d grown out the past few months. I couldn’t bring myself to cut it again. It felt like a treason of sorts while Bash wasn’t here to appreciate it.
I made sure to meet her dark eyes that I used to think were made of fire. Now I understood they were merely coals that harboured a deep sadness.
“We make them regret it. If they hang them, then we will make them regret every morning they wake breathing.”
The words were cold and born of the icy depths of the sea. It was impossible to imagine the woman I’d been last year at this time saying them, but she was gone. Drowned somewhere between England and The Glass Sea. Every now and then, I would see a remnant of who she was, but the things I was forced to do to create the name Hellcat Smith quickly smothered her.
I knew she was dead because I couldn’t bring myself to regret any of it.
“We will be Onryo,” she whispered.
I nodded, though I didn’t know what she meant. Only that it sounded right.
We sat in silence with only the creek and hum of the ship to stave off thoughts that haunted and tortured all at once. The sound of the gallows never far from our minds. No one ever told me how loud silence could be. It was a lesson I was better off never having learned.
We were too close to Mallorca for any sense of comfort. Yes, it was over a hundred nautical miles, but if I never came within two hundred miles of her shores, I’d die a little happier. Not for the first time, I wondered if Ximena knew Bash’s fate. If she cared.
Either way, I wasn’t going to investigate.
The air was chilly beneath the sun’s rays as we docked. Madeira was a small island, but wealthy in its own right. A fact that emanated from her well-managed wooded dock that overlooked a bustling port. The slopes of her mountains on either side created a nest at the center that was more than alive.
“Let the crew rest. We can make repairs and all the rest later. Tonight they can do whatever it is that they want,” I said.
“How generous,” Val murmured next to me.
“Make sure you, Emille, Dilly, and Inu are ready to go at sunset,” I said.
“I thought I was getting the night off,” she pouted.
