Her brow pinches. “My mother?”
I nod once. “Yes. I know enough about your father, but you don’t talk about her.”
She sighs softly. “What do you want to know?”
A small grin dances on my lips. “Everything.”
“Nobody’s ever asked me that before,” her voice trails off, laced with emotion.
Internally, I wince. I asked her with humour and she answered with pain. The echo of it pushes against her tonguelooking for an escape, and perhaps she just needs somewhere for that pain to go. Someone to hold the weight of it for a while. Someone to gently prod the barrier of grief she uses to protect herself. “I’m asking.”
Her jaw tightens, and for a moment I think she’s going to refuse, then a soft sigh escapes her lips. “She died fifteen years ago.”
The pain in her voice mirrors my own. Grief calling to grief. So I reach for her and gently squeeze her hand. “I’m so sorry.”
Odi is silent for a moment. Thinking. Her mind taking her back to a place she probably told herself she’d never visit again. I brush my thumb over her velvet cheek, letting her know I’m still here. “What was she like?”
“Too pure for this world. A wood nymph that fell in love with a pirate.” Her eyes glisten over. “Torn between land and sea.”
The words are raw, and I think I’m starting to understand. “Was she a deer like you?”
She nods, and I catch my breath at the way her hair spills over her shoulder to brush against my ribs.
“When I was seven. She gave me a necklace. Told me that it was so special only the ocean could offer it as a gift,” she murmurs, instinctively reaching for her neck. “I wish I still had it. It’s the only thing of her I had left.”
Dread coils in my gut like a snake. All this time, I thought she’d stolen it—like any pirate would. That’s what made sense to me. But it wasn’t stolen. It was her mother’s. A gift. And then hers. And the ocean let her keep it. How do I tell her I carried it in my pocket for weeks, not understanding, only to lose it to the deep when the Sotor came?
I can’t tell her—I can’t. Telling her would only cut her twice—believing she’d lost it, and then hearing the truth from me. That I’d kept it. That it confounded me. I’d believed it could never belong to someone like her. That shame sits deep in my chest.
But it’s mine to carry. I can’t hurt her to unburden myself. Not now.
I gently graze my knuckles across her forearm. “How did she pass?”
Brown eyes map my face. “She was sick, but it wasn’t the visible kind. The moment she married Ivor, the moment she left the mainland, she grew ill. Ivor says it was because she had me but I think . . . I think it was grief. I think becoming so detached from her shift made her waste away. They knew she needed a doctor, but who treats the wife of a pirate?”
Something in my chest tightens, gripping my heart with a grasp so tight it threatens to crush it. My tongue presses against the back of my teeth, words clawing to get out, but I swallow them down. Better to keep quiet. Better to let her speak first.
“She insisted on going to the mainland alone, said she’d have a better chance, but it didn’t matter. They locked her up, and she died behind bars while I was stuck on theSea Bane. I never got to say goodbye,” Odi continues.
Tears well in the corner of her eyes, and I can’t stop myself. I reach for her, wrapping my arms around her waist and pulling her tight. “By the stars, Odi,” I whisper into her hair.
She rests her cheek on my chest. “After that, father swore land would never touch us again. He tried to make me hate it too. Taught me to take what I wanted, to cut first and never ask. Said it was the only way to survive.”
I drag my fingers up her spine, offering some sort of comfort, if that’s even possible. “And you believed him?”
“When you’re a child, all you can do is believe,” her voice is barely a whisper.
The words punch a hollow out in me. There’s the child I used to be too—believing. Straining for a voice that meant home, the woman who vanished back into the tide and left me clinging to the wreckage of her absence. Even now, I can taste salt in that memory, the brine she always carried on her skin. I still believe that she’s out there somewhere. My chest tightens, for the small, desperate boy who once cast his wishes into the waves, hoping the sea would answer.
Odi traces the shimmering patterns on my chest with her fingers. “I love my father for who he was when I was a little girl. But he hasn’t been that man for a very long time. And I’m never going back.”
I know what it’s like to run from a parent. Yet Ivor is much worse than my own father. Mine might scold me or strip awayThe Gilded Hartwhen I return, but he’d never hold a knife to my throat. The thought leaves a cold taste in my mouth. It morphs to others.
Protect her. Don’t let him touch her. Don’t let her think she’s alone in that fear. The fear that if her father finds her, all her hope of freedom will be lost. That she would spend the rest of her days on his ship believing that she’d never be anything more than his bloody shadow. I won’t let that happen.
Odi moves her head to look up at me. The fire in her eyes is shadowed by unrelenting, feelingless pain.
I reach out to brush her cheek. “As long as you’re here with me, I won’t let him take you. And when we meet again, well, he’ll find I bite harderthan he expects.”
