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“Look for survivors!” Kylian orders.

I should feel bad knowing there were humans aboard, servants, people being carted around between kingdoms in cages, yet I feel nothing. Nothing beside the void that is trying to consume me.

Time passes slowly as our ship approaches the wreckage, or what hasn’t been taken by the sea. Eagan’s voice carries from the rail.

“No sign of Draven,” he calls, grim and breathless. “He escaped by wings with the others.”

Draven.

The name settles inside me beside Arlo’s last breath.

Kylian helps me turn. The sea is littered with death.

Bodies float between burning debris, the water dark with oil, ash, and blood, while pieces of the dragon ship drift in widening circles around the place where it sank.

Our own ship groans beneath us, damaged but still afloat, men moving slowly now, stunned, afraid to look at me too long. “We have survivors!” Someone calls, and boots hit the ground running, retrieving souls almost swallowed by the sea.

Kylian does not look away as people are hauled aboard, begging and pleading not to be killed while our guard tries to assure them they’re safe. I do not look at their faces for fear of seeing them cower before me.

“What do you want to do?” Kylian asks, his voice quiet enough that only I can hear beneath the crackle of fire and the distant cries of people still being pulled from the water.

I look back toward Arlo.

Eagan has covered him with a torn sailcloth, but one of his hands has slipped free beneath the edge, his fingers still stained with blood, still curled slightly around nothing.

My chest hollows out.

“I want to go home,” I say.

Kylian’s grip tightens slightly.

“Home?”

I nod, though tears finally come again, hot and silent against my cold face.

“Yes,” I whisper, staring at Arlo beneath the sailcloth. “Back to Purgatory.”

Kylian says nothing.

“I want to take Arlo home,” I continue, my voice breaking only once before something colder settles over it. “And after we bury him, I am going to kill King Draven.”

Kylian watches me for a long moment, and through the bond I feel his fear, but beneath it, there’s a quiet understanding that whatever I was before Arlo died has gone with him.

At last, he lowers his head slightly. “Then we go to Purgatory,” he says.

I keep my eyes on the burning water when someone calls out. “That’s the last one!” My gaze lifts as a woman stumbles aboard, shaken and drenched.

My eyes move from her feet to her terrified face as she falls to her knees, weak from treading water, heaving in lungfuls of air.

It’s as if my body is being pulled closer by invisible threads.

“Alessia?” Kylian’s watching me as I tilt my head. Surely my eyes must be deceiving me, yet when she clutches her arm to her chest, I know I’m not mistaken.

The world narrows to the missing hand clutched against her chest.

For one impossible moment, I think grief has broken my mind so badly that it has started dragging ghosts from the wreckage, but then she lifts her head, and the wet hair plastered to her face parts enough for me to see the mouth I once watched curl with disgust while she counted each lash across my back.

Madam Dahlia stares at me from her knees.