Chapter Fifty-One
ELARA
Elara pretended to cower as she scrabbled towards the cards that Pieter had strewn around himself.
Scorpius approached, the little scorpions scurrying to and fro across the deck.
He was just as she remembered him at Lukas’s coronation ball.
Salt-licked hair, long and light kissed, eyes vivid green, mesmerizing and terrifying.
Like all Stars, he was beautiful. But his charm reeked—poisonous to its core.
He wore the clothes of a refined captain: velvet tailcoat, ruffed shirt and a tricorn hat.
With a heave, he latched his hands around the ropes binding her and hauled her to her feet.
‘Your quarrel is with me,’ she said as steadily as her voice would let her. ‘Don’t harm the others.’
‘And who are you to bargain?’
‘Why don’t you ask your king?’ Elara replied.
There was a flash of uncertainty across Scorpius’s handsome face.
‘Do you think Ariete just let me take Enzo’s tether, let me wake the Sun, without any consequences?’ She bunched her hands into fists. ‘You cannot kill me. Just like he cannot kill me.’
It was then that the uncertainty was replaced, his brow smoothing as a delighted expression formed upon his face. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But the sea can.’
He turned to the kneeling men, their heads bowed in reverence. ‘Get a barrel filled with something heavy and tie her to it.’
A few scurried up and disappeared below deck as Elara remained in Scorpius’s grasp, gritting her teeth.
‘Do you think that throwing me overboard will end this? I am not the only one awake, Scorpius.’
He smirked viciously. ‘You think I don’t know that?’
‘Enzo will kill you.’
‘I’ll lock him in the same watery grave I do you,’ he replied.
‘Then who will help you fight the Dark?’ she demanded. It was a risk, to give away how much she knew. But she had no other choice.
When he began to laugh, she knew she shouldn’t have revealed her hand.
‘Fight it? I will welcome it with open arms.’ A fanatical gleam began to shine in his sea-glass eyes.
‘On All Hallows’ Eve, balance will be restored with you and your precious Sun deep in an ocean trench where no one will find you. ’
The ice-cold fear shooting through Elara did not help her, nor did the sound of a barrel being dragged across the deck.
‘Leave Merissa and Leo,’ she tried to plead again.
Scorpius only sighed as the men manhandled her, loosening a few of her ropes before more were wrapped tightly around her to bind her to the barrel.
‘Do you know how drowning feels, Elara? Not many things make someone feel so helpless. The arrogance of man against the ocean. People trust it too much, forgetting the force of nature that it is. It will shove up your nose first, making you panic, the salt stinging. Then into your throat. You’ll try to breathe, that…
mortal reflex kicking in.’ He smiled. ‘Then, when you only swallow more seawater, you’ll finally feel the futility.
The realization, as you flail and your body fights and kicks, that there is nothing you can do.
Where you’re going, so deep that everyone will forget the Moon as quickly as you rose, the pressure will push and crack you, will compress your organs as you fight for your life.
’ He cocked his head. ‘Perhaps you should have heeded my fool of a king’s warning and not defied the Stars.
No matter, though. He’ll be gone, just like you, soon enough, when our lovely Dark returns. ’
‘I felt like I was dying just listening to that monologue,’ Elara deadpanned, that familiar bravado bolstering her. ‘Get on with it, then. The sea will be better company than you.’
Scorpius’s expression became livid as he wrapped his hands around the ropes and hauled her to the edge of the ship. ‘Arrogance won’t save you now, Moon.’
‘And the Dark won’t save you when my ghost hunts for you,’ she said. ‘You’re marked now, Scorpius. I swear it to all that is holy.’ Maybe it was the fire in her eyes—writhing, molten silver—that caused him to blanch a little.
‘Your ghost won’t ever breathe air again,’ he said, and pushed her from the ship.
Elara didn’t scream as the barrel hit the surface of the water before plunging her down into the depths.
The icy water, sharp as knives stabbing against her skin, caused her to want to suck in a breath, but she fought past her instinct, making sure her hands were still balled into fists, a hard card cutting into them.
It was inky black, too dark to see a thing around her.
She thrashed, struggling against her bindings, trying to get even one of them free.
But her hands were tied too tightly. The pressure began to build as she sank down, down, down, until it became excruciating.
Her lungs seemed to seize with the tension, her spine crumpling.
She couldn’t even let out a sob, and it was the powerlessness of it all that she couldn’t stand.
That, after all this—all the pain, all the strife, all the fucking sacrifice—she was going to drown at the hands of a lesser god.
No.
Her hands began to work against the sharp edge of the card crumpled in her fist, sawing back and forth against it. She winced as her lungs burned, as they begged her to take a breath.
She gritted her teeth until, finally, a small cut opened on her hand. And, squeezing the card, she screamed with her last breath into the water, ‘Eli, I call upon your favour!’
Scorpius was right that the last moments of drowning felt so hopeless, her body succumbing to it as she fell to the seabed. Her final thought was of Enzo, and she screamed his name in her mind through their soul tie, begging him by some impossibility to hear her as she let in the sea.