Vengeance of the Pirate Queen(60)

Something is cooking.

I finally step into a small kitchen. Some sort of vent in the ceiling allows smoke to be carried out of the room. An open fire sits in the middle, and Threydan is crouched in front of it, turning a few fish skewers. He’s wearing a different pair of pants, and he’s cleaned himself of any blood from the slaughter he wrought among the Drifta.

He looks over his shoulder as I approach. “You didn’t want to change?”

“I want nothing from you.”

He turns back to the fish. “So it’s going to be like that, then? It makes no difference to me what you wear, but I thought you might like to cease smelling of wet campfire.”

I’m sure I reek, but I’ve long since grown used to the smell. And I’m not about to do anything to make me seem more enticing to this man.

He pulls one of the fish from the flames and cuts into it with a knife to examine the meat. “And are you also too proud to accept my food?”

He holds the skewer out to me after deeming it fully cooked.

Saliva floods my mouth. I’m famished again, and now that my body has finally been allowed the sleep it needed, food is all I can think about. I snatch the skewer from him and tear into the fish, not needing to wait for it to cool.

I cannot be burned.

I barely taste it as I eagerly chew and swallow, needing to stop the pain that has returned to my belly.

When I’m done with the first skewer, Threydan hands me another.

And then the final one.

That’s when I remember he doesn’t need to eat. He is truly immortal. Meanwhile, I can still die by hunger.

And thirst.

As soon as I think it, Threydan hands me a cup filled to the brim with water.

I can’t even care if he’s poisoning me right now. I’m too desperate to be full.

“Easy, now,” he says as I chug the water. “You don’t want it to come up again.”

I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, surveying the kitchen around me. “What is this place?”

“When we found this island, we knew it would take a while before we discovered the sirens and the panaceum. This was the shelter we made.”

“You mean you and your crew? The ancestors of the Drifta?”

“Yes.”

“How long did it take you to find it?”

“Over six months.”

“That’s a long time to survive in the bitter cold.”

He smiles at that. “It wasn’t always like this. It was cold, yes, but it wasn’t so frozen. The sirens cursed the land just as they did me before they left. I suspect they thought it would deter future travelers from finding me and waking me. But nothing so silly as snow would ever deter you.”

The food in my stomach starts to turn. “You keep speaking as though you know me. You don’t. You don’t have a claim to me. You must stop this fanciful notion of us.”

He eyes me from head to toe in a way I do not like one bit. “But I do know you, Sora. You are Sorinda Veshtas, the pirate queen’s assassin. You were born the daughter of a rich nobleman, until you lost everything when you were five. But you had your vengeance. You know much in the way of vengeance, as you’ve been dealing it your whole life. I need you to help me with mine next.”

I choke on the next sip of water. I suspected that he was receiving my memories just as I’ve been getting his, but I can’t believe he knows so much so soon.

“It’s your doing, you know,” he says. “When you stabbed my heart, you connected us. I was so entranced by what I saw, that moment when you made your first kill, that I knew we were meant to be. And while we’re on the subject of your memories, we will need to talk about this Kearan lad. He can’t have you, because you’re mine.”

I don’t know which memory of mine made him delusional enough to think that anything is happening between Kearan and me, but he’s as misguided as I once was.

“Those memories were not for you to take.”

“I didn’t take them. I shared them with you.”

“You cannot share them! They’re mine. You shouldn’t have—”

“It’s all right, love. I’ve seen your darkest secrets, and you have nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed of. You are extraordinary. If anything, I’ve only seen how short I fall compared to you.”

“Stop talking to me like that.”

“Intimacy scares you. I understand, but—”

I leap away from him as he tries to step closer.

“No, no,” I repeat. “You don’t understand. If you did, you would know how wrong all this is. You cannot keep me here. You cannot force me to be with you or to help you with whatever your ridiculous plan is. You cannot take so much from me and then expect me to thank you for it.”

He’s too still as he stands there. Chest unmoving. Eyes unblinking. Not so much as an itch to scratch or a muscle to stretch.

It’s unsettling.

“I am sorry for how this all played out. I cannot help what I am or how our first meeting went. I—”

“That’s a load of shit.” I call him out on it. “You chose to be like this. To fuse with the panaceum so no one else could use it. You chose to kill and to hurt. You may not have chosen the consequences of those actions, but you are responsible for what you are.”