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Dahlia’s eyes flick past me, begging Kylian now because she knows I am no longer the safest thing on this deck.
I reach out and touch her cheek with two blood-stained fingers, the same cheek scarred by the burn I gave her when I was a little girl trying to save my sister.
She trembles beneath my touch.
“I could make it slow,”
A sob rips from her throat.
“I could count every breath the way you counted every lash,” I continue, watching her eyes fill with the memory she tried to bury beneath excuses. “I could make you understand what it is to wait for pain and have no power to stop it. I could make you wish for death.”
Her lips move but no sound comes out.
“But I am not you.” The magic around us tightens until the lantern flames along the deck bend toward me. “I do not need fifty.”
Dahlia screams, scrambling backward.
I press my palm to her chest.
The magic goes through her.
White fire blooms beneath my hand and floods outward under her skin, not spreading to the deck, not touching anything but her.
Dahlia arches backward with a scream that shreds into the storm.
Light pours from her mouth.
From her eyes.
From the spaces between her fingers as she claws at my wrist.
For one terrible moment, every vein in her body glows bright beneath her skin, a map of all the life she begged to keep and spent so carelessly when it belonged to others.
The fire consumes her from the inside out, burning through blood and bone until her scream breaks apart, until her hand falls from my wrist, until the body that once stood over me with a whip is nothing but ash collapsing onto wet boards.
With an exhale, the light fades from my hands.
For a long moment, no one moves.
The only sound is the creak of the ship, the hiss of rain beginning to fall, and the soft scatter of ash as the wind takes what remains of Madam Dahlia and carries it over the sea.
My eyes stay on the ash until there is nothing left to see.
“Now,” I say. “Let’s take Arlo home.”
CHAPTER 67
• Alessia •
ARLO LIES BENEATH a clean sheet in the captain’s quarters, and I sit beside him for most of the journey.
Not touching him at first, because touching him means knowing how cold he has become, and knowing means accepting, and accepting means admitting that the boy I grew up loving is gone. Yet as we draw closer to Purgatory, I take his calloused hand anyway, knowing it will be the last time I ever hold it.
His fingers are stiff beneath mine.
“You’re finally going home,” I whisper.
Kylian stands in the doorway for a while without entering, one shoulder braced against the frame, his eyes on me, not the body.
