Chapter 41 On Deals and Devils #3
Slowly, like he was letting go of a rope he’d held so long his hands were bleeding.
“No,” he said.
The word was simple.
Final.
Edmonds blinked, as if he hadn’t expected it. “No?”
Bash’s gaze didn’t waver. “I’m done chasing him,” he said. “Revenge is a chain. I’ve worn enough.”
The rain hit my face harder, or maybe it was just my eyes burning. It felt like I was finally breathing.
Edmonds’s mouth tightened. He studied Bash like he was trying to find the flaw in that answer.
Then he gave a small nod. “Very well,” he said, and there was something almost… respectful in it, though it vanished quickly beneath restlessness again. “Your choice.”
He lifted the conch.
He pressed it to his ear.
And his entire body stilled.
For one heartbeat, he looked like a child listening to a seashell for the first time, expecting to hear the ocean’s secret, expecting wonder.
Then his brow furrowed.
He shifted it. Pressed it tighter. Turned it slightly.
Nothing.
His eyes narrowed.
He pulled it away and stared at it, confusion sharpening into disbelief. He ran his thumb along the crack.
And then his face changed.
Anger rose up in him like a storm—sudden, violent, ugly.
“It’s cracked,” he said, voice low.
My stomach sank even though I’d known. This was the part that I didn’t know how it ended.
He looked at me, eyes bright with fury. “What did you do?”
I opened my mouth—
But Dilly stepped forward first.
It was a small movement, but brave. Her shoulders were squared, rain darkening her scarf. Her freckles looked like bruises.
“She didn’t do anything,” Dilly said. Her voice trembled, but she didn’t back down. “Not like you mean.”
Edmonds’s gaze snapped to her. “Who are you?”
“The person who paid attention,” Dilly shot back. “The person who listened to the pieces you ignored because you were too busy wanting the ending.”
Seas, I was so proud of her. She stood there strong and sure of herself in a way that would have made even Val tear up with pride.
Edmonds’s nostrils flared.
Dilly lifted her chin. “When the Atlanteans bound the Leviathan and created the conch, they weren’t just making a tool. They were making a choice.”
Edmonds’s grip tightened on the shell.
Dilly continued, words tumbling faster now as if fear had finally found a direction. “A conch like that isn’t just a weapon. It’s knowledge. Power. A call. A command. But if you could use it to destroy the Leviathan, then—then you’d have to lose the ability to use it for anything else.”
Edmonds stared at her like she’d spoken blasphemy.
Dilly spread her hands. “It makes sense. Atlantis didn’t chain the monster because they liked having it chained. They chained it because it couldn’t be killed. And if they built a conch to end it, they’d build it so whoever held it had to choose: destroy the Leviathan… or keep the power.”
My throat tightened.
Because I remembered the moment on the deck—the song in my bones, the Leviathan rising, the sea screaming, Inu’s body between me and death.
And I remembered what I had chosen without even thinking.
Not knowledge.
Not power.
An ending.
Dilly’s eyes flicked to me—soft, almost apologetic. “Rose chose to destroy it,” she said quietly. “So the conch served its purpose.”
Edmonds’s face went blank.
“Served its purpose,” he repeated, like the words were poison.
His fingers dug into the shell. The crack seemed to widen slightly beneath his grip.
“You’re telling me,” he said slowly, voice shaking now, “that my life’s work—my entire pursuit—ended because she made a choice I didn’t approve of?”
Dilly’s shoulders rose in a breath. “I’m telling you, Atlantis was smarter than you, and so was Rose. The bargain was that she would deliver you the shell. Nothing about its condition or functionality.”
Edmonds’s eyes flashed.
“Silence,” he hissed.
Then he turned on me fully, fury spilling out of him like oil.
“What do I have now?” he demanded. “What do I have—after all of this? After everything I sacrificed—after everything I endured—after all the years—”
His voice broke on the last word, and for a heartbeat I saw something beneath the obsession: a man who had built himself around a single purpose because he didn’t know what else to be.
Then the purpose snapped back into place like armor.
He lunged.
It was fast. Too fast for how composed he usually was. His hand shot out toward my wrist, fingers curling as if he meant to drag me closer, to shake me, to force the sea to give him what it hadn’t.
Bash moved instantly—
But Oscar moved faster.
A pistol cracked like thunder.
Edmonds froze mid-lunge, shock blooming across his face. His cloak darkened at his chest, red spreading through rainwater.
For a moment, no one moved.
Even the harbor seemed to hold its breath.
Edmonds’s eyes lifted slowly toward Oscar.
Oscar stood on the gangplank, rain plastering his hair to his forehead, his face hollow and expressionless. His hand didn’t shake. His eyes were empty in a way that made my skin crawl.
He looked like a man who had already died once and decided the world could join him.
“For Inu,” Oscar said softly, as if saying her name might anchor him.
Edmonds’s mouth opened, a stunned exhale escaping as he swayed.
He looked down at the conch in his hand as if it had betrayed him. Then he looked back at Oscar with something like disbelief.
“You,” he rasped, voice wet. “You would—”
Oscar stepped closer, pistol still raised. “You took her from me,” he whispered. “And then you tried to take my sister.”
Edmonds’s face twisted. “Everything I did was for—”
“For yourself,” I said hoarsely.
Edmonds’s gaze snapped to me one last time. And in it, I saw the final lesson the sea had carved into flesh: obsession didn’t make a man powerful.
It made him alone.
His knees hit the dock.
Rain hit his face like a baptism he didn’t deserve.
His hand loosened around the conch. It slipped from his grip and fell, clacking against the wood—unbroken only because it had already been broken.
Edmonds looked at it as if he expected it to speak now out of pity.
It didn’t.
His lips trembled. Not with fear.
With the realization that the sea didn’t care.
That the deep didn’t reward devotion.
That Atlantis had knelt, and he had spent his entire life worshipping the thing that they died for.
His gaze drifted toward the end of the dock—toward where Morwenna had vanished into the rain.
For the first time, his voice softened. “Mother…”
But Morwenna wasn’t there anymore. She was free.
Edmonds swallowed, blood bubbling at his lips.
Then he exhaled, and it sounded like surrender.
His eyes went glassy.
And Captain Edmonds—clinical, brilliant, obsessive—fell forward into the wet wood and did not move again.
For several seconds, no one spoke.
The rain was the only sound.
It hit the dock, hit the sea, hit our shoulders, sliding down our faces so no one could tell whose wetness was weather and whose was grief.
Bash’s arm slid around me, strong and steady. He didn’t say anything—he simply held me upright when I realized my legs had gone numb.
Oscar lowered the pistol.
His face didn’t change.
But his eyes did something—flickered, just once, with the crack of pain.
He looked at Edmonds’s body and whispered, “That’s for Inu.”
Then he turned and went back onto the Wraith.
My heart broke all over again because I’d never seen him so broken. He was a walking corpse with only his memories to both torture and comfort him.
I was learning, slowly, what the sea taught without mercy: there were monsters in the deep, and there were monsters in men, and sometimes grief made you both.
My gaze fell to the conch lying in the rain.
Cracked. Quiet. Spent.
A relic that had once sung of power, now nothing but a shell and emptiness.
And I thought of Edmonds—of his mother’s tears, of his father’s legacy, of a boy who had been taught that the deep was the only truth worth chasing.
He had died with nothing.
No song.
No legacy.
No one is holding his hand.
A lesson carved into wet wood and blood.
Obsession and vengeance were two sides of the same coin. The difference was love—love that said stop, love that said enough, love that anchored a person to life instead of letting them sink into purpose until it became a coffin.
I pressed my hand to my wrist through my sleeve.
The black ink serpent lay quiet beneath my skin.
Not gone.
Never gone.
A reminder.
We could fulfill bargains, but we could not outrun the kind of person we might become if we let the sea take everything without fighting to keep what mattered.
Bash turned us away from the body. “Come on,” he said softly.
Dilly wiped her face with the back of her hand, jaw clenched like she was forcing herself to stay upright.
Emille exhaled shakily and followed.
Kit stumbled, shoulders shaking.
We walked into Angra do Heroísmo beneath the rain and the heavy sky, carrying our grief like a second skin, carrying the weight of what we’d done and what we’d survived.
No one looked twice at the dead man holding a broken shell lying on the docks. Not the pirates or the locals. Some things were better left quiet. Some questions were better off never asked. Edmonds would fade from history–a missing person eventually given up on by the Navy.
The rest of us–well, it was up to us to bear the weight of what we’d done.
So it went for the living. To always carry the dead without letting them bury themselves.