Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
A scream ripped through the air, splitting the night with a force that I swore would tear me apart from the inside out.
Wind tore at my skirts and drove salt into my eyes. Below me, a roaring sea crashed against the cliff, the rock crumbling under my bare feet. Out on the horizon, a ship pulled away from shore, its wake a white scar cutting across the black water.
“Come back!” I screamed. “Don’t you dare leave me! Come back—”
Perhaps the ground gave way under my feet. Perhaps I stepped forward. The reason no longer mattered. All I knew was that I was falling. Air rushed past me, cold and endless, as the certainty that I’d just lost everything slammed into me harder than the ground—
I shot up from a restless sleep, my heart hammering.
My lungs burned as I dragged in air that tasted of brine and damp wood.
For a few heartbeats, I couldn’t tell where my body ended and the dream began.
The rush of falling still spun behind my eyes and the sensation of crumbling rock lingered under my feet.
I took a steadying breath and tried to focus on what was around me, what was real.
I was lying on a fluffy mattress, soft and unfamiliar.
Sheets tangled around one of my bare legs, and a low, deep ache pulsed between my thighs.
Cool air brushed my shoulders as the morning light danced across the cabin.
Silas lay on his stomach beside me, face half-buried in the pillow, one arm thrown above his head.
When I shifted, a deep ache flared across my hips where his hands had held me open.
The insides of my thighs burned with the same dull throb, tender enough that even the brush of the sheet made me suck in a breath.
My throat felt tight and bruised; every swallow pulled at the place where his mouth had been.
Between my legs the soreness was lower, heavier, a reminder of exactly how thoroughly he had taken me and gods did I love the feeling of it.
Heat followed the pain in a slow, traitorous pulse.
The night was still written on my body whether I could see it or not.
Gods, the things he had done to me…the things I had let him do to me. No man had ever touched me before. He’d known that, and yet he still hadn’t been gentle. He knew that I was not a gentle woman, and I didn’t want to be treated as such.
My body still hummed with the shape of his hands. Every shift of the shirt against my skin pulled at places that were tender, places he’d marked as his own while he looked at me as if he was done holding back.
Fuck, I had begged him. I ran my hands down my face in exasperation because I knew, if given the chance, I'd do it again.
Most of the scars lay in familiar patterns I could have drawn from memory, but the wide, empty stretch between his shoulder blades caught the light differently. Thinner skin, almost raw at the edges, and a pale, jagged absence that didn’t match the rest of the map.
I had always treated that space like a mistake.
A place the curse had simply failed to write.
Now, however, I wondered if there was more to it than that.
I stared at the empty stretch of skin between his shoulder blades, and a sense of unease turned my stomach.
The blank space had bothered me from the first time I saw it, but I’d been quick to dismiss it, thinking it just a piece of the map that had yet to unveil itself. But what if it was more than that?
My fingertips brushed the edge of the raw skin, gentle so as not to wake the sleeping beast. It was warmer than the skin around it. Silas made a low grumble in his sleep and shifted, but his eyes stayed closed.
I traced the jagged border slowly, reading it as I would any other map in my possession. The upper edge dipped in a shallow curve. The left side dropped in a long, uneven line that ended in a sharp notch. It all felt so familiar, as if I had seen that notch before.
I pulled back and stared at the empty section of his back like it might change if I looked hard enough.
The proportions were wrong for a natural scar.
The lines were too clean, as if they’d been cut in areas, but jagged like they’d been torn free afterward.
It was the kind of shape someone would make if they were cutting free a piece of themselves they couldn’t afford to lose.
I stilled.
Easing out of the bed, I found the floorboards cold against my bare feet.
His shirt lay half under the edge of the mattress.
I grabbed it and pulled it on, letting the worn linen settle against skin sensitive from his attention.
The scent of him, amber and sea salt, clung to the shirt and wrapped around my senses.
I stood and crossed to the cabin door, slipped past the threshold onto an empty deck and made my way to where we’d been the night before.
There, on the inside railing, my journal lay where I’d left it.
The leather was cool from the morning air and slightly damp with salt spray.
I turned it over in my hands, thumb finding the familiar ridge near the spine that had always felt a little wrong.
I carried it back inside on unsteady legs and shut the door behind me. Silas still hadn’t moved, though I could tell from the set of his shoulders that he was awake now and choosing to pretend otherwise. Bloody brute.
I sat on the edge of the mattress again, journal opened face-down in my lap, and looked from the book to the blank stretch of skin between his shoulder blades.
I traced the outer edge of the cover, then the matching edge of the scar.
The shallow curve at the top lined up along with the sharp notch I had always thought was a flaw in the binding sat in the exact place where the scar tissue thickened and turned jagged.
“What in the gods’ names?” I breathed as I set the journal on his lower back.
The proportions weren’t similar…
They were identical.
“You cut it off yourself,” I said quietly, realization a sickening bloom in my gut. “You cut this off your own back and made it into a book.”
Silas turned his head just enough to look at me over his shoulder. He answered simply, “Yes.”
“And you’ve known it since the night you took it from me.”
“I knew it was important the night I took it from you,” he said in a low voice. “It felt… familiar in a way nothing has in a very long time. I just didn’t understand why until later, and I didn’t know how to tell you that the thing you’d been writing your life’s work in used to be part of me.”
For a long moment, I just sat there staring. A short, disbelieving breath escaped me. I dragged both hands through my hair and held on for a second, as if the pressure might keep my thoughts from spinning apart.
All those years I had treated it like the one thing in the world that truly belonged to me.
The journal I had carried for years, the one that absorbed salt spray and ink and every frantic calculation, had never been mine at all.
My search for the Stella Mortis, the artifact that could secure my future, had been written in his past all along.
The answer to my lifelong search had been in my hands the entire time. I closed the journal and held it against my chest for a moment, feeling the faint warmth that had always been there and that I now understood.
The missing piece was home.
Now we had to learn what it had been trying to say all along.
“No more secrets about the map,” I said. My voice came out quieter than I expected. “No more half-answers. We put the whole thing together, your scars and this, and we find out exactly where it’s taking us. Today.”
Silas studied me for a long moment. Whatever he was searching for in my face, he seemed to find it, because he gave a single, slow nod.
“All right,” he said. “Today.”