“How are you?” he asks.
“I just need a moment.”
“No, I mean, a lot has happened. How are you?”
“Fine.”
“That can’t be true. You’re not a rock.”
“I’m the captain, Kearan. I’m not allowed to be anything but fine.”
“You could be something else right now. It’s just you and me. I already know the full situation. You won’t lose face or authority by being honest with me. If you wanted, just until we get back to the camp, you could tell me things and I will never repeat them to another soul.”
I say nothing. All my pressing thoughts are begging to be examined, pounding at my skull. My heart feels as though it is about to burst.
“You could just be Sorinda for a moment. Not the captain. It might help,” he prompts.
I’m so spent, and perhaps that is the only reason why my defenses are down. I’m helpless to refuse the release he offers me. I’m carrying too much. It’s never felt like so much of a burden before.
It’s never been so unbearable before.
“We tried to do a good thing,” I say, rubbing at my closed eyelids. “We looked for those girls, intent on saving them. Instead, we wake up an undead being? I suppose I should just expect these kinds of things by now. Nothing in my life has been easy or gone the way I expected it to.
“Before this voyage, I had only felt truly helpless once in my life: when I was small, watching my sisters and mother be drowned one by one before my eyes.” I’m breathing even more heavily than before, when it was only physical exertion tiring me out. “But then Threydan changed me. My humanity is contained in one tiny ball where my heart should be. I can feel it there, sitting in my chest, a small ember heating the rest of me. What happens when it goes out?
“And then I woke up in the abyss of the sea. I’ve never known darkness like that. Such fear like that. Twice in the same day. I am Sorinda Veshtas, and I do not get afraid. I am what men fear. I’ve made sure of it, but I cannot be unmovable when the being I’m fighting isn’t even human and I have no means of fighting him.
“I’m not fine. I’m furious. He took something from me, and I want it back.”
I want to scream, to growl my frustration. I feel vulnerable from exposing so much, yet relieved to have less to carry on my own.
Kearan says, “Who was he? The man who murdered your family?”
The prompt is so gentle and inviting. I didn’t know Kearan could behave this way—specifically toward me. I saw him comforting Roslyn, but this is different. He’s offering to take the weight of some of my rage and hurt so my shoulders can feel a little lighter.
I just faced an empty ocean.
And some undead being wants me for his mate—whatever the hell that means.
There’s no more room on my shoulders unless I consciously make space.
I swallow before saying, “His name was Samvin Carroter. He wanted my father’s title and was next in line to inherit it after my sisters and me. He thought to enter the house, murder us, then burn it all down, claiming it was an accident.
“He started with my father. Killed him with the slice of a knife across his throat. I was hiding under the desk, playing hide-and-chase as I liked to do. I saw it all. When Samvin left, I ran to find my mother. I got there just in time to see him strangling her in her bathtub. I screamed. That brought the servants and my sisters.
“It was dark, nighttime, and I hid in the shadows and watched as he locked the door and killed them one by one. I was paralyzed by my fear. Too scared to save my older sisters. So I just watched and held very still.
“He thought he found us all. After all, he didn’t bother to count the bodies as he murdered them. He left the household and started the fire, and that’s when I finally fled. I killed him not long after. He’d settled into my father’s second home. Another estate in the city. I walked there, barefoot, carrying the knife he’d used to kill my father. I still savor the moment he realized who I was. Right before I slit his throat. I was five years old.
“Alosa found me several years later, feral on the streets in the pirate quarter of Charden. I had acquired more knives, learned to protect myself and kill anything I perceived as a threat. It took some coaxing, but she eventually convinced me to come with her. She gave me a family again and showed me that it wasn’t too late to protect those I cared about.”
Kearan is perfectly still, not interrupting. I can almost pretend I’m saying the words aloud to no one.
“I’ve never even told Alosa that full story,” I say.
“Thank you for trusting me with it,” Kearan says. “And let me make you this promise: I will die before that monster gets his hands on you and finishes whatever he started. You will not fear like that again. You will not become what he wants you to be so long as I have breath in my lungs and blood pumping through my veins. I will look out for you just as you do for me as my captain.”
I straighten slowly, needing to show some semblance of strength. “I do not need looking after.”
“No, you don’t,” he agrees, but he doesn’t take back his vow.
Makes it hard to argue when he agrees with me. Especially when I still feel contentious. Contentious and angry and spent. So very, very spent.
Now I can add exposed to the list. I never meant to reveal so much about myself to this man. I don’t like to think about these things. The best way to keep the fear and anger at bay is to not think on hard times at all.
“Is there anything else you want to say?” Kearan asks.
“No.” Fear hums under my skin, like I just need to be prodded at the right angle and it will come bursting forth. What could he mean by the question? Surely …
Kearan nods and bites the inside of his cheek.
“What?” I ask.
“I want you to know that you don’t need to lie to me. You don’t have to edit your story or withhold anything. I would never think less of you.”
“Are you calling me a liar?” I say, my voice reaching a deadly tone, the fear pounding harder against my skin.
“A man wants your father’s title, and you expect me to believe he didn’t count the heirs as he killed them? No, he didn’t just walk away. Something happened afterward. Before he burned down your house.”
My mouth floods with saliva, my stomach wanting to churn yet again. My limbs feel weak once more, and I hate that such a question can level me.
I swallow. “The details aren’t important.”
“Aren’t they?”
“He didn’t touch me, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“It wouldn’t change the way I see you if he had.”
“I don’t care how you see me.”
“I know.”
Another moment where I want to argue but cannot because he agrees.
“You do not have to tell me, Sorinda. But my ears are always open, if you want someone who won’t judge you to listen.”
He says that, but he doesn’t know. Not what I did. How I allowed the maid’s daughter to die in my place. No one can know my greatest shame. That is a pain that only I should have to carry.
“You were five,” he tacks on, as though reading my thoughts. “Children that young are blameless for anything they do. They are too young to know better.”