Chapter 41
Chapter
Forty-One
Augustus had known death was coming. He just hadn’t known how loud it would be. The surf, the gulls, the creaking of the ship—it all sang like a funeral dirge.
Thorne’s men dragged Augustus and Mettius to the upper decks, hands bound, eyes seared by the sudden sunlight… And waited. They’d been teasing this reveal for weeks.
Tristan Thorne’s moment had finally arrived.
As his vision cleared and focused on the details of the unfamiliar beach, Augustus’s body screamed from the lingering pain. He’d been kicked and punched and spit on and half-drowned more times than he could count.
Mettius had been forced to watch it all—every drowning, every lash, every time they broke him and dragged him back for more.
The drowning had been deliberate—Thorne’s idea. They’d dunked Augustus head-first into a barrel of water and let him thrash until the world went black, then he’d wake up later with seawater bursting from his burning lungs.
All payback for killing Captain Cuza and stealing Thorne’s ship almost a year ago. The Soris was at the bottom of Irrinet Gulf now—a home for shedine—and Cuza had long ago been eaten by sharks. Turned out, Thorne was still fucking pissed about it.
Augustus could have fought it, could have clawed his way to survival and vengeance—an escape, no matter what it looked like—but his father couldn’t. So, he surrendered. Not from fear or desperation, but love.
This latest torture, however, the scene before them, was for Mettius. Thorne’s purpose had never been about conquest. He was here to burn down the Triarius name, and Augustus was merely an ember. The last of hundreds.
This beach was where Quin and Ramón’s crews had gone. Two hundred men and women, hands nailed to splintered planks, a forest of human grave markers.
The crew of the Akias had died well by comparison. Even the sea seemed ashamed, hissing against the shore. The evening tide carried monsters to feast on the lowest limbs still within reach.
Mettius slouched heavily in the arms that held him up. His cracked voice reached Augustus as if through water. “You son of a bitch.”
Old Augustus would have lunged, broken or not, teeth bared for blood. The urge still burned in his bones. But he smothered it. Refused to give Thorne the satisfaction.
Selene was likely dead, so what did any of this matter?
In the face of his inevitable end, Augustus did what he’d been doing for days now: he thought about Selene.
He dove deep into his mind and lay down in those quiet moments between all the chaos their lives had produced.
The sweetest of memories sliced effortlessly through all the noise.
Like the day they swam in a cove under a clear sky, and the way her laughter peeled when he chased her through the water.
The nights when she lay on his chest, her hair tickling his nose, moonlight painting her skin with its milky glow.
The earnest, patient way she listened when he spoke—she had such a unique way of making him feel heard.
Thorne wanted this moment to hurt, but Augustus refused to bite. This time might be hard to experience, and it might be right under his nose, but Selene was more than his past…she was his forever. She was in unlimited lifetimes ahead, and they would be together again soon.
But Mettius… He needed Augustus now.
Thorne’s voice drifted through Augustus’s moment of peace. “Do you see, Triarius? Do you understand now?”
Tears slid from his father’s eyes.
“Gallagher,” Mettius rasped out.
The name struck like a hammer. Sailors still whispered it in taverns—the fleet too cruel to be human, too monstrous to survive. Yet here it was, resurrected in Thorne’s grin.
Tristan Thorne fisted the hair at the back of Mettius’s head and held him steady. Forced him to look at the carnage. “Now, ask yourself a question. Most of those poor bastards are still alive out there—barely. I told my men to leave them just enough strength to scream. Starvation, thirst, worse…”
Augustus’s calm broke, and he flinched. Flashes of pain flared through his still-healing back and his bruised ribs.
“So tell me,” Thorne continued, “do you play savior and cut them down?”
Mettius’s throat bobbed. “I wouldn’t have put them there to begin with. You did that, you sonofabitch.”
Tristan bared his teeth, and spittle flew from his mouth when he next spoke. “I know exactly what you’d do. You’d butcher them like cattle, wouldn’t you?”
The focus of Thorne’s rage surprised Augustus and must have shocked Mettius, too, because his eyes shot to Thorne. If Tristan had been Gallagher crew, why would he care how the people died?
“What exactly is this about?” Mettius asked.
Thorne released Mettius’s head with a shove. “Bring them ashore. Let’s get started.”
Augustus hit the beach hard, shoulders jarred, mouth full of sand. The hands were gone—but the cage remained. He clawed deep into the golden, damp sand.
Behind his closed lids, Selene stood beside him in the bird’s nest aboard the Soris, and the night stretched before them for an eternity. Her hand was so close that his fingers twitched. He reached—just a knuckle brushing the back of her hand—and it wasn’t enough. Even then, he’d needed her.
The moans and cries of the dying were a fist around his neck. See us, they said. Acknowledge us.
Throat tight, he shook his head.
Selene.
Focus on Selene.
“Augustus,” her memory said with that exasperated sound he loved so much, and her ghost tilted her head back with a really good laugh—
Two men yanked Augustus back to his feet and dragged him past piles of seaweed toward the sand dunes. The scent of dried blood thickened as they walked. Buzzing flies—bloated, lazy—rose in slow clouds, too fat to flee.
Nearby, Mettius was also held up by two men and hobbled on one leg, his face a pale gray.
Every step kicked up hot sand, and there was a day much like this one where Selene put them on a pair of white horses with silver manes.
They raced across a sandy beach, sand catching on the humid breeze like golden clouds—
“Mack.”
The grief in Mettius’s voice yanked Augustus from his memory like a hook to the spine. But he couldn’t look any further north of the hanging feet he passed with red and cracked skin. The sun had been cooking them.
Augustus’s stomach turned, and acid filled his mouth.
“I’m sorry,” Mettius said. “Audry— Gods, Jax. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Augustus tried—he tried so hard—to find a new memory. He couldn’t be here. It didn’t feel good here, where blood stained the sand, and the dying called him and Mettius by name. Mercy, mercy, mercy—
There was one place he hadn’t allowed himself to revisit—not until now. Not until he reached the edge.
Augustus sank deep into his memories until he was in that tiny little cabin aboard that strange ship. He had Selene wrapped around his hips, holding her up against the cabin’s door—
Augustus seized Selene in a deep kiss, drowning in her scent and the feel of her body. “We’ve established that you’ve been held and kissed—”
“I’ve definitely been kissed.” Breathy. Needy.
“Don’t interrupt.” He grinned. “I have one more important question to ask you. Has another man ever been inside you?”
She certainly didn’t kiss like a woman who didn’t know what to expect.
A flush filled her cheeks, and what little amusement had been in her eyes trickled away. “No man that ever cared about me. No man I wanted the way I want you.”
Augustus tripped over a hillock of sand, saved from falling by the men holding him upright. Hot tears were a flash burn across the backs of his eyes—
No. He wouldn’t give in. Thorne’s mistake was in believing this was the end for them. He’d see her again.
Outside his mind, the beach revealed the horrors and the answers he’d once wanted, but no longer. None of it mattered without her.
Augustus clawed back into his memory, and in it, he was kissing her face everywhere the sunlight glowed while memorizing the curves of her body. Her hip fit perfectly in the palm of his hand.
“I wish,” he whispered, “that I could remember all of our firsts. Is it possible they were as perfect as this?”
“If we remembered all those times, we wouldn’t recognize just how perfect this time is.”
He smiled. “Wise, as always.”
Augustus kissed her and put every word he wanted to say, every emotion he couldn’t explain, into the caress of his tongue against hers. Made sure she felt it in every caress of his fingers. How would he ever be able to express the complete madness behind such simple words? It was impossible.
I love you, I love you, I love—
Thorne’s voice interrupted with a vengeance. “I have a head in my possession, a head in my possession, a head in my possession—”
Augustus screamed. Not in fear. Not in pain. But with every ghost in his throat. And it broke the hands from his arms. He collapsed to his knees.
Everyone was watching him—
Fuck them. Fuck them all.
She was dead.
Selene was dead.
Tristan Thorne knelt in front of him, one arm propped by a knee. “Is my little garden getting to you?”
It was all noise at this point. The scent of rotting skin, the indifference of Thorne and his crew.
He hated it and he was devastated and everything was bad, bad, and worse…
but she was gone. The world had been a roar in his head until she stood in front of him on that road in Perean.
Then it was a whisper. She had softened all his sharp edges.
She’d hated him at times, and there were moments he thought she might walk away, but then she’d look at him like he was worth understanding.
Worth the battles, the duty, the ache of potentially living through a moment just like this.
He thought he had been prepared.
He wasn’t.
And the man responsible was a hair’s breadth away.