The hold was also home to a handsome collection of spirits, skimmed from private stashes or lifted from the captain’s cabins of the ships they crossed, the ones left sinking in their wake.
“How do you know that the Sarows is coming…” she sang, pulling open the wine cage. Her fingers danced across the bottles on the rack, tracing the empty spaces like missing teeth.
Just being thorough, Stross had said.
“Bastards,” she muttered, just before an arm closed around her throat.
It wrenched her back with sudden force, lifting her off her feet. Her hand went to the dagger at her hip, but the attacker’s hand went there, too, pinning her fingers against the hilt before she could draw the blade. His grip was solid stone, but she still had another hand, and she used it, dragging free a second blade and driving it blindly back into his chest.
It should have found flesh. It didn’t.
Instead, the attacker let go, flinging her forward into the rack with clattering force. A bottle of summer wine went crashing to the floor, and shattered.
“Oh, you’ll pay for that,” she hissed, turning just in time to block the blade that came slicing toward her throat. Beyond the scraping steel, she saw him—the flash of a black mask, the ripple of a coat, a pair of lips twitching into a smile. But her attacker made no sound. Not when she spoke, and not when he struck, and not when he leapt back from the boot she tried to slam into his chest. By the time he landed, her dagger was already flying. It sliced through the air, embedded itself in a beam as the attacker twisted out of the way, vanishing behind a stack of crates.
Lila called the dagger back into her fingers. She held her breath, listened for the sound of steps in the hold. Bodies took up space. They made noise.
Overhead, the crew were singing a shanty, oblivious.
Down here, the only sounds were the slosh of sea against the hull, and the heartbeat thudding in her chest.
Lila didn’t call for help. Instead, she forced herself to close her eyes. Block out the cluttered hold, the tip and sway of the boat, and stretch her senses, feeling for the other body as if it were just another element for her to touch. Not wood or water but blood and bone.
There.
She blinked, her hand cutting sideways at one of the crates. It slammed back, wood scraping over the floor, and she readied her blade, expecting the attacker to dive out of the way. Instead, he vaulted over the top, weight slamming into her, both of them crashing down to the floor. They rolled, and when they stopped, he was on top, but her blade was at his throat.
His chest rose and fell.
Her steel kissed his skin, but didn’t draw blood.
“You’re lucky,” she said, “that I have such a steady hand.”
The hood of his coat had fallen back, and even in the dull light of the hold, his copper hair shone, a single silver streak glinting at his temple. Lila tugged on the mask that hid the top half of his face, and it came away, revealing a pair of mismatched eyes, one blue, the other black.
“Admit it,” said Kell Maresh. “I caught you off guard.”
Lila shrugged. “I still would have killed you, in the end.”
He raised a brow. “Are you sure?”
She turned the fight over in her mind. If he had used a blade instead of his arm. If he had gone for the kill right then and there, instead of the game, would she have been able to feel the intent? Would the knife have sung in his fingers, that tune she knew so well?
“Fine,” she said, still beneath him on the floor. “In my own hold, on my own ship, you caught me off guard. Now get off me,” she said, “unless you’d rather stay down here and have a tumble.”
It was worth it, just to see the color rising in Kell’s cheeks.
“You could put the mask back on,” she added, and his blush only deepened.
He tried to hide it with a frown as he rose off her, offering a hand to help her to her feet. Lila ignored it, stood, and pushed past him, returning to the open wine cage. She fetched up the bottom half of the broken bottle, studying the shallow pool of ruined summer wine.
“I was saving that,” she muttered, looking back over her shoulder.
Kell wasn’t listening. He was too busy fumbling with his coat, turning it inside out, trading the black he’d worn when he’d attacked her for red, then red for blue, and finally blue for grey. Each side of the peculiar coat was a different one entirely, from the color to the cut to the buttons and clasps, to the contents of the pockets, and each had a story. She recognized most of them by now—here was the one he’d been wearing the night they’d met; here was the royal crimson with gold buttons down the front, the one he wore as prince; here, the pale grey he’d donned in the Essen Tasch, when he first became Kamerov Loste—but every now and then she’d see one she’d never noticed, tucked like secrets in a life she knew so well.