“We can try again when you’ve had a proper sleep and some food.” She pushes my hair back from my face, peering into my eyes. “You did so well.”
My insides are a tumult of emotions and I can’t meet her eyes. I don’t think she has any idea what those words meant to someone like me.
I’m a shell of a person, really. I don’t have any interests or any money. I don’t have a home to go back to, or friends to introduce her to.
But I’m going to do what I can to deserve her. Even if it means moulding myself into someone worth her knowing, I’ll do it.
The captain leans forward, his gaze intense enough to flay me open, and Reva translates. “We’ll head southwest then.” He turns to me. “You don’t happen to know how to break curses, do you?”
I shake my head and he hums, releasing me from his focus. “Seems you know how to make them, but not break them, eh?”
He doesn’t know the half of it.
Chapter 13
Torin
“You must be cold,” Finch says to Reva like it’s only just occurred to him. He then turns to me. “She’s soaked through. Can we get her a towel and some fresh clothes?”
I fight the urge to roll my eyes at him. Cap’s a great captain and a loyal leader I’ll no doubt follow to my doom, but he’s not always the most observant when it comes to what’s right in front of him.
“We can.”
Reva squeezes my arm, and a surge of electricity flows from the point where we’re touching to the mark on my arm.
This woman is either very brave or slightly mad. Possibly both.
I catch the look Cap gives her after her attention has shifted onto me as I gesture for her to head out of the office ahead of me. It looks like she’s caught his focus in a way that few manage, and that’s always a dangerous thing.
The fact that she took her eyes off him at all while he was trying to bore a hole into the side of her head tells me something interesting about her. I also note the way she doesn’t show me her back, clearly picking up some sense of the threat I pose. While I’m not without claws in this form, I’m a puppy dog compared to Captain Finch.
I’m not so sure about our quiet friend here. He could be the most dangerous one of all of us, but until we can communicate with him, he’s remained a mystery. Although judging by the half-starved statehe’s in, he might turn out to be less of a threat and more of a liability, but we’ll have to see.
The woman is shivering but trying to hide it behind gritted teeth. When she goes ahead of me in the passageway, I spot the gash at the side of her head and enough blood in her wild tangle of hair to turn it into a matted mess.
“Med bay,” I grunt, pointing to the doorway at the far end of the second-level passageway. “You’re injured.”
She glances up at me in surprise before gingerly patting the wound on her head with a wince. “Would you believe I’d forgotten about that?”
I nod, knowing exactly how it feels to lose yourself to the adrenaline of the moment and then come to hours later with broken bones and blood caking my skin.
The difference is that most of the time it isn’t my own. But there’s been the odd occasion where someone got a shot in.
I scratch at my forearm, which has been itching from the moment she stepped on board. It feels a bit like she’s given me lice, rather than whatever magic brand she marked me with. They’d have to be some pretty powerful, electrified lice, but I don’t know what’s usual in the cities these days. It’s not often we spend time on land at all, except for the odd port stop to gather supplies and information.
“Come on. Food. Fresh clothes. Then a nap.”
My tone is heavy-handed, and I can see her bristling and trying to hide her instinctive reaction. It has me fighting a smirk, especially when I can feel the silent one glaring like I could ever be remotely influenced by one of his kind.
Reva swallows her argument and strides toward the med bay. It’s clear she doesn’t know what she’s agreed to coming onboard this ship. The fact that Finch’s name didn’t seem to have any impact on her tells me that much. It should have put the fear of the gods intoher, but her lack of reaction certainly wasn’t missed by me or by our captain.
She has no idea what kind of devil she just got into bed with.
Passing by the bustling kitchen, her eyebrows shoot up at the sound of Cookie’s bawdy singing and shouted orders for people to get out of his way. “That’s where we take meals,” I explain, waiting for her to translate to her silent mate. “You can get your food brought to your room, though.”
“We’ll be fine,” she replies.
We head inside the med bay. It’s a small, bare room with a single cot and a desk along with a wall of cupboards painted white. It always carries a faint scent of something astringent in the air, but it’s clean and quiet.
