Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
HOOK
T he first time I died was in a damp, mouldy room on a godforsaken island. I succumbed to injuries that had been killing me for weeks. I’d been thirteen. I lost count of how many times I’d died since. I should have been dragged down to Hell’s fires years ago, but the curse wouldn’t allow that. It wouldn’t give me a moment’s damn peace.
I’d felt dead for thirty years. Even if my heart still beat, my lungs expanded with breath, and my brain clamoured with thoughts, I was practically a corpse. Bored, empty, unfeeling. I was used to being unfeeling, which was why this sudden explosion of rage and surprise and thrill was a little disconcerting. More disconcerting was the way my heart pumped faster, adrenaline coursed through me, and even as I was sucked into the ocean, bleeding from a mortal wound, a smile tugged at my lips.
I was too weak to swim, too pained to pull my bleeding body into any semblance of motion, so I let the current carry me. I’d find my way back to the Banshee. To that vicious, smirking, maddening woman who stabbed me and hauled me overboard.
Wendy. Not Wendell. Wendy. Sister of the sacrifice for Feeding Day. The woman I shot on the dock.
She must have been in pain this whole time, must have been agonised from the wound in her shoulder, but she’d given no sign of it until she almost fell into the ocean during the storm. She’d endured that pain, pushed it down, and schemed the downfall of my crew and ship, and silently, wickedly, planned my murder.
Fuck, that was hot. I might have been leaking blood into the water from half a dozen places but blood still managed to pool in my cock as the current carried me. Unconsciousness began to wrap around me, my eyelids heavy, the pain surging up to smother me.
I didn’t know where the water would carry me, but I would find my way back to the Death’s Right Hand. And to that infernal woman. Wendy might not know it, but she marked herself by killing me. I’d wanted to break her when she was Wendell and a mere nuisance. Now? Now I would take my time breaking her down until she begged for mercy. And she would learn, over long, long days, that the word mercy did not exist in my vocabulary.
Her death belonged to me.