Page 176 of Fallen Stars

“Merissa is a what?!” Adrian exclaimed.

Elara waved a hand through the air dismissively. “Do keep up, Adrian.”

He began to splutter, but Enzo cut him off with just a look.

“Merissa has proven her loyalty time and time again,” Elara bit out to Eli.

“Ah yes, by stabbing you in the back.Literally,” he mocked to Merissa, whose face was shot with contempt.

“Enough,” Enzo snapped. “We’re in the middle of the damn ocean. No one is going to run and tell anyone right now, so we may as well just try to trust each other. A wordof this spreads, and I’ll know it was one of you five.”

He pinned each of them with a warning glare.

Elara could feel familiar panic seizing her throat, trying to claw up and consume her whole. She wanted to scream. She had bargained with a devil and expected the terms to be fair.

“El, are you okay?” Leo asked quietly.

Elara shook her head, raising her eyes to the table.

“No, I’m not all right,” she whispered. “There’s always something. I meet my soulmate, but there’s a prophecy that we can never be. We lift the prophecy, but he nearly dies. I save him, and now his life is tied to me. It’s not fuckingfair.”

She scraped her chair back, rising.

“It’s not fair to Enzo, who has been through enough. It’s not fair to me. I have hadeverythingstolen from me. The Stars won’t let us rest.”

Eli cleared his throat. “Present company excluded,” she added more softly.

“We’ll find a way to fix this,” Merissa said softly. “We always do. We just need to find out which magick he used and reverse it.”

Elara sighed. “Blood magick. That’s what he used. He must have tampered with the tether before he gave it to me.”

She didn’t add that it wasn’t the first time he’d have used that power—the memory of what she’d asked him to do when she was the Moon haunting her. Another thing she’d kept from Enzo. Another thing she had to tell him when they had another moment alone.

She brushed a hand over her face, Enzo watching her closely. “It was too easy. And I was too fuckingnaïve.” She slammed her fist on the table. “I should have known there would be one last hurdle, that Ariete would never just allow us to both escape alive without some ulterior motive, despite what I did for that tether.”

“You couldn’t know, El,” Merissa said.

“But I should have. I’m supposedly a disgraced queen of the damned cosmos, and I can’t see when I’m being duped before my very eyes? How am I meant to lead you all? How is Enzo, if we are tied together? Ariete has just made us that much easier to kill.”

“Right now, Ariete is the least of our problems. If only he knows what he has done, and no one at this table is breathing awordof it to anyone else, then we can put this on the backburner for now. Ariete is lying low; this we already knew. It’s Kaos we need to get to,” Eli said

“And why is that?” Elara asked, exasperated. “You’ve told us all where we need to go and failed to tell us why. Why do we need to go to Kaos?”

Eli already had a cigarette pushed between his lips, responding out of the corner of his mouth. “I suppose it’s about time I told you all, though I didn’t want to add to the already absolute fuck-up of a day that today has been.”

“Speak,” Enzo said tightly.

Eli sighed, standing. “I think I need to show you, rather than tell you.” He nodded to the door. “Everyone, follow me.”

Chapter Sixty-Two

Elara followed Eli along thecherry-wood corridors of his ship, Enzo’s hand wrapped firmly around hers.

She looked behind her, checking that all of her friends were accounted for.

“Adrian?” she called.

Isra rolled her eyes as her arm disappeared around the door, dragging Adrian out—the pirate looking sheepish with a half-drank tankard of rum in his hand.

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