William grimaced at him. “Begging your pardon, Captain. I should have asked. May I kill the worthless trollop?”
“Sorry, Mr. Death. I want that particular amusement myself.”
Gagged by a piece of linen, Mona shrieked and struggled against the ropes William had double-knotted around her hands.
Especially when Devyl turned on her, sword held at the ready. Aye, this time, he was going to gut her.
Gate be damned.
And no one would stop him.
8
Just as Devyl would have killed the Deruvian, Mara appeared in the room and used her powers to dissolve his sword. His temper flaring, he glared at her. “Don’t need a sword to destroy your sister.”
As he started to choke Mona, a massive, invisible wave knocked him away, into a wall.
“Don’t push me, Du. I’m not the scared little child you found that day in the Fforest Fawr. I’ve come a long way, and so have my powers.”
Growling, he faced Mara with his full demonic visage. One that caused Belle, Janice, Sancha, Valynda, and even William to pull back in fear. Even the bitchling slithered toward the shadows to hide from his wrath.
“And who gave you those powers?” he growled.
“Do not push me!” she repeated.
He closed the distance between them so that barely an inch separated them. “Ditto.”
Her breathing ragged, she lifted her chin while her eyes blazed defiance and hatred. An unseen wind flared her pale hair around her slender form while she hovered above the boards of the ship that had been crafted from her body. “You’re still just an animal, aren’t you?”
Those words cut him to the quick, but he refused to let her or anyone else know it. Insults and abuse were mother’s milk to his blackened soul. They were all he’d ever known, and so what if she gave them to him? “Savage and rabid from my first breath to my last.”
“Then you need to leave and let me deal with this. Calmly. Without you.”
It took everything he had not to retaliate. She had no idea how lucky she was that he wasn’t the beast she accused him of being.
He curled his lip to sneer at her. “Deruvians forever, aren’t you? It’s why we hated the Vanir so. You were always so high and mighty in your arrogance. Thinking yourselves above the rest of us.”
If only she knew the real truth.
“You dare lecture me on morality? On humanity? Seriously?”
He let out a bitter, scoffing laugh. “Nay, lady.” He sneered the word, turning it into an insult. “I would never deign to tarnish your people. None of you ever committed a single atrocity against anyone. Did you, now?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Think about it.” With those words, he stormed from the cabin to leave them to it. Let Marcelina have it. He was done seeing condemnation in her eyes.
Damn her for it. Even after everything her sister had done to him … after the atrocities her Vanir people had committed against his, she still refused to acknowledge it. They were perfection, while the Aesir were feral barbarians. That’s all she’d ever seen any of them as.
Her blind loyalty to her people over all others galled him to the core of his being.
But it hadn’t begun that way. Her precious Vanir were the ones who’d started the war between them. And for what?
Futtocking selfishness of the worst kind.
Marcelina could deny it all she wanted. He knew the absolute truth of it all. This battle between their cultures and generations of hatred had started when his great-grandfather had made the mistake of asking the Vanir Deruvian princess Gullveig and her court to help their people after a plague Gullveig had deliberately sent to them had swept through their lands, laying waste to everyone.
Man and beast.
