Chapter 27
Torin
Reva sits in the middle of Captain Finch’s office, looking mighty uncomfortable as the three of us try to pinpoint Kit’s location by staring at her bond with Kit.
“Southwest.” Jack nods sagely.
Finch steals the spectacles right off Jack’s face, glancing at Reva with an amused huff. “That’s south-southwest.” He pulls them off again and hands them over to me to confirm.
I nod and give Bones a nudge, and he hurries off to tell Dagger, who’s currently steering the ship.
“See, I told you,” Finch says to Jack. “You keep getting distracted by how shiny that bond with Kit is.”
“Aster’s too,” Jack says. “Tor’s is... not so great. I told him he needs to commence wooing immediately.”
My ears go hot, even as Reva breaks in, “It’s not Torin’s fault. He’s perfect. I just think there’s something... not right with it.”
I try to keep my breathing slow and steady, even though a flaming blade in my gut would sting less.
Of course, the bond between us would be wrong. I’m tainted.
Reva opens her mouth, shooting me an apologetic look that does nothing to soothe the sharp pain in my chest.
“That came out wrong,” she says. “It’s just..
. I told you what happened to my skin. I think because Noush is so far away, our bond didn’t form properly.
” She glances at Finch before turning back to me.
“Both Kit and Aster touched my sealskin. That was how our bonds formed, so maybe that’s what you need to do too.
I tried to do some reading at the library, but, funnily enough, I couldn’t find anything about selkie mate bonds. ”
My gut feels hollow. All that might be true, but I’m betting even if we’d followed direct instructions, there would still be something fucked up about any bond I try to form.
I’m fairly sure the monster inside of me doesn’t have a soul. And I doubtless lost my own decades ago.
“But even those bonds feel like they’ve changed since they formed,” she continues. “When they first formed with the other two, I could feel their heartbeats right in my chest as though they were my own. But I can’t feel that anymore, only when I’m really focusing on them.”
I’m still shaking my head, because there’s a reason I’m as messed up as I am, and she should know exactly what it is. I know she’s seen the abomination in action, but it’s impossible for her to know quite how unnatural I am.
How unlikely it is that I should have been granted a bond with someone like her.
“You should know some things about me,” I tell her.
“Tor—” There’s a definite warning in Finch’s tone, but I shrug it off.
“She deserves to know. Not just what she might be lumbered with if we can’t fix or remove the bond.”
“Remove? Who said anything about removing it?”
I pretend I don’t hear Reva’s whispered response, ploughing on ahead with the words I need to get off my chest. Because if not now, then when?
“Had you heard of Deadwood Cove before Northcliff mentioned them?” I ask.
Reva hugs her knees to her chest, cocking her head to one side. “Only vaguely.”
“You’re probably too young to have heard the stories,” I reply. My chest then goes tight as I try to bring myself to tell her one of those stories. Even after all these years, the scars on my back ache at the memory of that place.
“They’ve always been the same,” Cap says.
“They’re filled with a strange, wild kind of magic and are always shifting location at random, making them almost impossible to track.
” He smirks. “You’d think they’d be perfect for criminal dealings, wouldn’t you?
Instead, our dear king decided they were perfect for his purposes instead. ”
“What purposes?” Reva’s asks softly.
Finch clears his throat, avoiding her eye as he responds, “Word from his war room was that he was obsessed with his kingdom being besieged. He wanted to make his own perfect army of soldiers who would do his bidding, no matter who the enemy was or how overpowered his army was.”
“It was like a laboratory and training camp all in one,” I add, unable to keep the bitter edge from my tone. “Over decades, he rounded up hundreds of poor idiots who didn’t have any prospects and promised them a future.”
Reva swallows, and even Jack looks uncomfortable. He’s the only one of us who avoided a stint inside the Deadwood Cove labs but I don’t begrudge him that. Not when he’s the only reason I got out.
“King Wildrake’s people cursed the place so that everyone outside of it would forget about it, which meant he had free rein to do whatever he wanted with us,” I continue. “Decades spent experimenting and pushing us to the brink, only to bring us back.”
Reva’s trying to hide her confused frown, but she’s not doing a good job of it. And I don’t blame her. Whatever messed up shit she might be thinking they did to us all, it was ten times more fucked up than that.
“I wasn’t born with the bear inside me,” I tell her. “I was human. Mostly. Had a beast-borne grandfather, although he could turn into a fox and not a bear.”
Her eyes widen, and I see the realisation hit her in real time.
“I’m never going to go into detail about what they did to us,” I tell her.
“I don’t remember all of it since most of it was a mess of pain and being out of my head with rage.
They put the bear in, and then when I didn’t die from that, they added the spikes. ”
“What the hell,” she whispers.
“Kit was human too,” Finch adds. “He still is, more than the rest of us. With me, they bit off a little more than they could chew.” He grins, and his hat gives a little wiggle that no one can miss. “Tried to kill me at least a dozen times, but it never quite took.”
“Some of the cursed magic on the place must have rubbed off on him,” Jack adds thinly. “Kit broke himself out, and it was about a month later when I first met him. I’d been looking for Torin for years. Years,” he spits the word, shaking his head. “And between us, we let the rest of them loose.”
I remember the bloody chaos right after.
It was glorious.
Not all the lab rats survived. But between us, we slaughtered everyone involved on the other side.
“And then Kit worked out he could stretch out the curse on the place. Make it so that no one remembers what happened there, other than us. As far as we know, the king himself doesn’t know a thing about it.”
“After we escaped, there was always the chance word would get back and we might trigger the king’s memories of what he had planned for us, since Kit was never too sure how long the curse would stick .”
“So we joined a pirate ship,” Jack says. “But the first one didn’t take, and after a while Cap found us again.”
Reva’s eyes dart around the room, her brow furrowed in thought. “Are all the crew—”
“Not all of them are failed experiments,” Finch replies. “Some, but not all. Some are a mess in different ways. All are equally mad.”
His hat gives another dangerous wobble at his words, and he grins widely while Reva just looks bemused.
“Deadwood Cove is a cursed wasteland,” I tell her. “But if someone lifted the curse on one of the rooms, I couldn’t think of a better hiding place. And if you’ve got the cursebreaker who created those curses with you, then all the better.”
“So it was targeted,” Reva says quietly. “She chose Kit for a reason.”
“Certainly seems that way.”
“How would she even know about it?”
Finch shrugs. “Like we said, plenty of failed experiments are still roaming around. All you need is one slip of the tongue to the wrong person.”
“And now we’re heading back to that hellhole you all escaped from,” Reva murmurs, reaching out to squeeze my hand.
She isn’t looking at me with horror. Why isn’t she looking at me the way she’s supposed to? I’m an abomination. A monster.
“Maybe your mate bond formed with the bear and not me,” I suggest to her. “That might explain why it didn’t form properly, because he’s not supposed to exist.”
Reva lets out a little sound that can only be described as a growl, glaring up at me. From this close up, I can see she’s looking paler than usual. Paler, and there are dark circles under her eyes that weren’t there a few days ago.
“Look, you can stop pouting now. I know you’re trying to make sure I have all the facts so that I can run away screaming from what a terrible monster you are.
But if that’s what you’re waiting for, you’re going to be disappointed.
” She huffs out a frustrated breath. “Aster can’t speak, so I worked out a way to speak to him—”
“So did I,” Jack pipes up. “Sort of, anyway.” He grins until he sees my expression, then holds his hands up. “Sorry, sorry. Keep going, Ree.”
“—and the next time you go all spiky, I’ll not come near you unless I’m wearing gloves or something.”
“Reva,” I growl. “You’re not taking this seriously.”
The way she’s looking at me is devastating.
She isn’t looking at me like I’d be another box to tick off on her kink list. Nor is she shying away from me, suddenly terrified of my presence or my touch.
It’s enough to drive my bear to madness.
He wants us to claim her. To make her ours so she can never leave us.
“Some very thick gloves,” she replies. “I’ve known about your bear for a while, remember? I’ve seen him, and I wasn’t scared off then either. Torin, I like you. And once we get Kit and Noush back, we can sort out whatever’s happening with our bond.”
I close my eyes as a high-pitched buzz starts up in my ears. But then she pokes me in the chest, tugging me by the collar until I’m ducking down and our faces are level. I snap my eyes open and, for a mad moment, she stares directly into my eyes.
The urge to kiss her again, to hold her to my chest and never let go, is overwhelming. Fuck the audience and fuck—
“Cap,” Jack’s voice sounds strangled, drawing everyone’s attention. Including Reva’s and mine.
To Captain Finch.
At some point over the past few minutes, the captain has lost his hat. And there’s something dark protruding from the base of the captain’s neck. Two long black things wriggling and writhing like a living scarf.
His tentacles.
I throw myself forward, like I’m trying to shield him or Reva, although I’m not sure which.
Whatever I’m trying to do, it doesn’t work. She’s already seen what he’s been trying so hard to hide.
His own display of freakishness.
“Your, uh, hat,” Reva says, clearing her throat. “You’re not wearing it.”
As though they’re aware of our attention on them, Finch’s tentacles freeze in mid-motion and then flow from side to side in a jaunty wave. One reaches out as if to touch Reva’s hair and Finch gently slaps it away, like it’s a naughty puppy that needs to learn a lesson.
“She’s not interested, boys.” He gives us all a rueful smirk. “Sorry, they have a mind of their own.”
All three snap back into action, moving even more quickly until they whip a knitting needle and a ball of wool from the captain’s pocket and start knitting at a furious pace.
I stand stiffly, feeling my shoulders ache with tension as I wait to see how she reacts. Surely, this’ll be the tipping point that pushes her over the edge?
But Reva just laughs, interlinking our fingers together. “So how long do you think it’ll take us to get to Deadwood Cove?”
“A couple of days at most,” Finch replies, grinning. “We could be there tomorrow, if we have the right conditions.”
“As long as the cove doesn’t move before then.”
She lets out a long sigh, and I wrap my arm around her, tucking her into my side. “I guess we’d better hope that our luck holds out until then.”
I glance up and meet Aster’s eye and I’m confident we’re both of the same mind. I’m feeling pretty damn lucky right about now.