Chapter 44
Arlo
Witnessing Elowyn dive into the ocean was painful, but seeing my brother cradle her, gaze at her in a way he had never looked at anyone, was excruciating.
She looked far paler than her usual blushing tone.
Even her freckles had faded. She was limp and unresponsive.
Sunlight streamed through the rocky, narrow slits of windows, casting shifting patterns of light and shadow on the rough stone walls as I hastened to Cedric.
For one moment, his eyes met mine, then he darted around a corner and disappeared behind it, taking Elowyn with him.
I followed him into the sunlit chamber. I would have been relieved that he’d found her, praising his name to all four Guardians, if it wasn’t for the worried look my brother was trying to conceal.
“What’s wrong with her?” I demanded. But he was silent. The ocean waves lapped at the shoreline in the distance, the smell of seawater on the breeze that blew in through the open window, making the sun-leached shutters knock.
He tried to marry her.
He put her on my ship.
Then the sirens took us.
And I fell for her. Elowyn Blackthorn. The king’s only daughter.
Fate is a cruel cunt.
Cedric was always power-hungry, thinking if he obtained enough, he could outrank Jessal and change the trajectory of her path.
Help people. He was good-hearted like that, in a deranged way.
He wanted to help poor souls out of poverty and starvation.
Even if it meant doing terrible things. But it was a fool’s errand.
People would always starve. Always freeze.
Always die. And from atop a damned ivory tower, you couldn’t do shit for them.
But on the sea, I helped my men. Gave them work and purpose. Yet once again, the games of rulers took the lives of the ordinary.
This time though, it was done by the woman I loved. No, the woman I once loved. Long ago. When she was all woman and no beast. Catarina. But now the sirens called her Calypstra.
I shook her from my mind. Dark circles hung under Cedric’s eyes. His black hair was disheveled. When did he last sleep? What kept him up each night? I wondered only for a second, my question answered by who he trained his gaze upon. Elowyn.
He cared for her. No, he loved her. I knew it.
How ironic it was that despite his hard exterior, my brother was ridiculously tenderhearted.
He kept that hidden, like many things, deep in his chest behind a black iron ribcage.
I always worried that burying that blossom of compassion so deep inside himself meant suffocating it.
I feared that one day it would finally cease to exist at all.
What part of his soul had already died in this mad quest for power? He was smothering his own humanity by slithering through court, all while being trampled on by aristocracy. Destroying himself in search of brighter days that did not exist.
He looked up at me, absolutely ruined.
She would be his undoing.
“How long has she been asleep?” I asked.
“They found her floating in the middle of a bay,” Cedric said in his terse, direct way. Tempered so as not to allow a single hint of emotion seep into a syllable unless he put it there. But I knew him all too well. He was hiding more from me.
“How long?” I ground out through clenched teeth.
“She’s been like this for three days,” he said, eyes never leaving her.
I took her from his arms. The sight of him holding her so carefully was making my stomach churn. She was not a delicate, fragile thing; she was strong. Resilient. Tall. Proud. Her expansive hips and long legs poured out of my arms.
The legs that had been my salvation when they wrapped around me under the sea, bringing me back to life when I had lost everything. My crew, my men, my sanity. All taken by those damned sirens.
I would make them pay, those beasts. For a moment, all those thoughts vanished when she was safe in my arms. And I hated myself for that relief.
Fuck. She might be my undoing, too.
Her skin, warm against mine, sent waves of pleasure through me, her familiar scent of rosewater slamming into my senses.
I never thought I’d see her again. When she leaped into the sea, I wanted to dive in after her.
Follow her into the abyss. But when the strange lights came and sank out of sight, I knew the sirens had found her.
So I turned around and went to the one man relentless enough to find her. Cedric.
Having her back felt like a gift from the Guardians, a blessing I would be grateful for the rest of my life.
And a curse. All the same, my shoulders dipped in relief as I held her.
Her breath against my neck, the faint whisper of her heartbeat against my chest, all proof that she was safe, in my arms again.
I cared so deeply for her. She had saved me.
Kept me sane. Showed me I was capable of cracking open my chest and allowing another to witness my scarred heart.
“How did she survive jumping into the ocean?” Cedric asked, too calmly, as he latched his now vacant hands behind his back.
“Her prayer beads, they hold some type of power—”
“How?” he asked concisely, not giving me a breath to spare. “We found her miles away from where you said she jumped. How, Arlo?” He countered like we were playing fucking chess.
“I don’t know, and I don’t care. I’m just happy she’s alive.”
The look in my brother’s eyes told me he was too, and that turned my stomach. We had both fallen for the same woman, like the idiots we were.
“These are not the clothes she left in,” I said, laying her carefully on the cot in the light-house’s room beside the sea. Below, in the cells, we were once prisoners. Not anymore. Jessal was scheming again, so Elowyn and I would remain physically free as long as we followed her commands.
Elowyn’s red hair tumbled in fiery runnels around her. Wild, wicked, fool.
With a forefinger, I moved an insubordinate curl from her face and tucked it behind her ear, but the curl sprang back into place.
The very embodiment of Elowyn. Rebellious.
Unpredictable. Fucking stubborn. Just like those breathtaking curls.
Like the day I was tasked with transporting her to my brother’s island and she cursed like a sailor at the thought of being locked behind a door.
A stupid smile tugged on my lips. Guardians above, I fell for her then. Wanted to keep her there, locked forever. To be behind that door with her. To get lost in her curls, her hips, her legs. To be burned by the blaze that emitted from her amber eyes, her scalding temper and ferocious wit.
But I’d loved a woman before with that same fire in her soul. My mother had killed her for it. And loving another woman was something I had resolved to never do again after Cat.
“Lady’s maids changed her into something more suitable,” he said, pulling me from my thoughts.
“What she wore before was unbecoming,” he added, knowing the jealous bitter thoughts that circled my mind.
Jealous of my brother. Because I knew just how deeply the man loved.
Once you were in his heart, you were never free.
“Good.” I met his green-eyed stare laden with his own envy. Because Elowyn hated him and cared for me. Just one more thing I’d taken from my brother.
My whole life, I’d fallen under that green gaze that resented my freedom, my ability to evade Jessal’s clutches and resist falling into her schemes. Yet it was he who shielded me, he who allowed me that freedom, protecting me from Jessal’s schemes by taking them on himself.
He who helped me marry Cat when we were still baby-faced. He who gave me my ship and allowed me to flee when Jessal had Cat killed before my eyes. He who cared for the daughter I could not bear to look at because she looked too much like the woman I loved and lost.
And it would be he who let me have Elowyn, all while loving us both endlessly and resenting us in the same heartbeat.
“Tell me everything you know,” Cedric said tightly.
“I’ve told you all I know. It’s your turn to talk, you fucking bastard.” Because that’s what we truly were. Children Jessal found to keep her husband at bay. Babes of whores who looked enough like the man. Possibly his own bastards even.
That’s what we suspected Cedric was, at least, when we were boys and realized the truth of our parentage. But I knew my father. He was the luthier, Giuseppe. He told me once, when I asked about his wife, that she had died in childbirth and had eyes like the sun.
The way he had looked at me as he paused in fixing the duke’s virginals that the duke never even looked at, let alone played, told me all I needed to know. That she was my mother, he my father, and that they loved me very much.
“Fine, what are your questions? Speak plainly,” Ced asked.
“Why my ship?”
“You know why your ship,” he said, emotionless.
Because he wanted Elowyn safe from Jessal and my ship was a secret. My routes a secret. To protect her. Because he wanted to use her. Because he loved her.
“Why did you not tell me who she was?” I asked.
“It wasn’t important.”
I scoffed, tonguing the inside of my cheek.
“And why not warn me of the sirens?”
“They do not concern you,” Cedric answered, shaking his head like it was the most ridiculous thing I could ever ask.
“They held me and the king’s fucking daughter captive for weeks. That was a little concerning, Cedric.”
Elowyn stirred, and for a moment I hoped my yelling would wake her. That she would say something annoyingly clever in that languid voice, like, “Could you please keep it down, I’m trying to get my beauty rest.”
But she didn’t.
I kneeled beside her. Three days. Asleep for three whole days. What happened when she jumped into the ocean?
“You will marry her in a few months,” Cedric said.
Shock surged through me as I meet his envious eyes.
“What?”