Chapter 16
Torin
It’s well after midnight by the time the deck’s cleared.
Most of the crew are below, having burnt off enough steam to last them at least a week and I’m left doing the final bit of clean up.
I drag my knackered body across the deck, eyeing the couple of crew unlucky enough to be on the night shift and stretch out my aching back.
It’s going to be another long night. I need to slather myself in the potion to soothe my joints, lie flat on my stomach until my flesh knits itself back together, and hope I’ll be able to get up in the morning.
I’m just contemplating the stairs when a face appears, one that’s a lot more appealing than most of our crew.
“What are you doing up here?” I grumble.
Reva’s got a smear of dried blood on her cheek, something that has me gritting my teeth on an instinctive growl. Before I can stop myself, I’m reaching out to brush one rough finger over her smooth skin.
“What’s this? Are you injured?”
She grimaces, batting my hand away and rubbing at it with the base of her palm. “Not my blood.”
“Whose then?”
“Didn’t you hear? I’m the highly unqualified new ship surgeon,” she replies brightly before huffing a tired sigh.
“You’re the what?”
With a snort she tells me the bullshit Cookie spouted about his fat, broken fingers, her expression narrowing in suspicion as my lips twitch.
“You think the crew were messing with me?”
“Most of them will have needed cleaning up, but unless they were unconscious, they probably could have looked after themselves,” I tell her. “It’s all part of being on the ship. The crew like to fuck with each other. Shows they see you as one of us.”
“I started to get suspicious when two of them in a row started talking to me about their crotch rot. They wanted me to inspect it.” She gives a tired smirk, and I have no clue whether she’s joking.
“It’s late, we should be getting to bed,” I say right as the ship rolls against a monster wave and we’re knocked about. When I reach out to steady Reva, my entire back burns. I must not stifle my wince quickly enough as the next thing I know, I’m being prodded by inquisitive fingers.
“You’ve hurt yourself.”
“I’m fine,” I mutter. There’s no way I’m about to admit how much shifting into my other form royally fucks my flesh. My spine feels like it’s on fire right now, and even my bones ache. Sometimes it takes hours for the pain to fade, but it can be days.
She gives me a stern look that, for some reason, makes my dick twitch.
“Leave it,” I grunt.
Rolling her eyes, she scoffs. “How’d they manage to injure you, anyway? Did they lose an arm in the process or something? Those blades looked lethal.”
My head snaps around so violently, I hear it crunch. “What did you just say?”
“Come on.” She nudges me in the gut, leading the way down the stairs as I stare stupidly after her.
“Hold on. Repeat what you just said. What blades are you referring to?”
“The ones that were sticking out of your back.”
The words come out so casually there’s no way she can know how they make everything inside me freeze.
She saw the murderous bear inside me. My shameful secret, out in the open already. I thought I’d have at least a day before she learned I was a true monster.
But I suppose I’ve never been very lucky.
My lower arm burns at her proximity, and I fight the urge to scratch it as I hazard a glance at her.
She shouldn’t want to be alone with me, but instead of stopping outside her cabin, she continues stumbling through the passage, running her hands against the walls to steady herself against the movement of the ship.
“Where are you going?”
“Med bay. Unless there’s somewhere else you’d rather go to show me your back?”
In truth, I’d rather no one saw it. I’d rather I weren’t a freakish beast who shreds his skin to ribbons every time his animal emerges. But I learned a long time ago that what I’d rather happen isn’t likely to.
“I don’t actually know where you sleep,” she continues blithely. “So you’ll have to show me if that’s where you’d rather we go.”
I grunt. “Straight up ahead. Second door on the left.”
Might as well get this over with. Mate or not, there’s no chance she won’t scream when she sees the state of my back.
Jack and I share a cabin, but I’m thankful to see he’s nowhere to be seen as we head inside.
I drop onto the side of the lower bunk, sucking in a bracing breath as I bend at the waist to grab the handful of potions and balms we keep under the bed.
My torn skin stretches, and it’s like I’m being slashed repeatedly with a blunt blade.
Pulling my shirt off, I then twist around. “Have at it.”
She sucks in a breath through her teeth as she takes in my ravaged flesh. “This looks like it hurts a lot.”
“Mhm.”
“How come you’re not the ship’s surgeon when you do such lovely embroidery work?” she says from out of nowhere, nodding to the cross-stitch of a potato on the wall. “Did you maybe forget to wear your readers when you created that masterpiece?”
This woman.
She can see the state my body is in. The torn flesh, the criss-crossed white scars covering every inch of my back and torso, the blades that appear whenever I shift. And yet, she seems entirely unbothered.
“That’s the captain’s work,” I reply. “All the weird embroidery around the ship is his. He ran out of space on his own walls, so we get left with his less creative attempts.”
“Well, if he’s so good with a needle, why isn’t the captain here to sew you up?”
“He’s busy,” I reply tersely as she swipes at a particularly ruined patch of flesh.
“Your back is a real mess.”
I roll my eyes, gritting my teeth as she sets to cleaning the wound.
The air fills with the scent of clove, and it stings like a motherfucker, but I don’t let the pain show, gritting my teeth and keeping my fists clenched.
“I don’t need it sewn up, anyway. Just give it a quick wipe, and we can both get to bed. ”
“You keep telling yourself that, champ.” She pauses before adding softly, “Does this happen every time you shift?”
“Yes.”
To my surprise, she doesn’t press further. “So, Bones is pretty chatty when he’s got a drink in him,” she says conversationally.
I grunt, shifting slightly as she goes over another particularly ragged bit of skin.
“He was telling me something about a mutiny. Very piratey,” she says lightly.
I snort. And maybe it’s because talking is helping to distract from my screaming back, but I find myself sharing more than I usually would.
“Jack and I found our way onto a ship together. It couldn’t have been more different from this one.
” Shrugging my now tense shoulders as the memories flood back, I feel the telltale prickle of my spines as they threaten to break through the skin again.
Our old captain was a lot like Finch in some ways.
He selected his crew carefully. But instead of wanting to give a bunch of washed-up sailors a home on the water, the old captain wanted to sell us to his highest bidder.
It didn’t matter that he didn’t own us and didn’t care what they wanted to do with us.
“So you killed him?” She doesn’t seem surprised, let alone as terrified as she should be.
Truly terrible instincts.
“He had a few loyal crew who figured the loyalty went both ways.” I give an unamused snort. “Idiots. Mutinies are messy. Ships are all about the chain of command so once you get rid of the person at the top of the chain, people start taking out all of their old grudges. It was a bloodbath.”
“But you survived.”
“An abomination survived.”
I barely remember who or what I was before people forced their power on me and I got so fucked up.
She pauses, and I can feel the weight of her stare on my back. Without looking, I can imagine her expression. Horror and pity and disgust, all rolled into one.
“You should get to bed,” I grunt.
“You sound like someone’s nanna,” she replies without missing a beat. “You look like one too, with your old-lady glasses.”
As though she’s a snake charmer for the riling shame and self-disgust inside me, it all collapses in on itself. My chest expands, and I can’t stop the low chuckle that rumbles out of me. When I twist around, her eyes widen, and she grins.
Bloody fucking hell. She might not be the only one who’s in trouble.