Page 8 of Crossbones
Our half of the table falls silent as the attention turns to me. I grab the wine and refill my glass.
“Seems more like a slaughter than any sort of real victory,” I shrug and take a large sip. I slouch back, meeting Aldric’s eyes over the rim of my glass.
“Those backwood towns breed unrest,” Lord Haldon states. “Better to tax them ruthlessly or simply eliminate them and move our own landholders in.”
“You mean give the land to the Houses to build estates and then enslave the previous inhabitants.” I state.
“Do you sympathize with the commoners then?” Lord Haldon asks.
“Well, when you’re paraded around the aftermath as a child, the horrors tend to stick with you,” I say, referencing our lovely childhood where father would take Aldric and I out to a town his army had just leveled and force us to walk among the wreckage. Usually talking of the benefits of some such tactical maneuver or taxation method. “Or at least for those of us with a soul.”
“One must have a certain constitution for such things,” Aldric says condescendingly. “The wine and revelry must have weakened yours, brother.”
“God, I hope so—I’d hate to be sober for all of this,” I jest.
Uncomfortable laughs echo around the table.
“Quite.” Aldric’s eyes slide to me with a smirk. “Sober men tend to remember what they’ve done. I imagine that’s inconvenient for you.”
The atmosphere in the room plummets and I have to bite back the snarl threatening to escape.
“Oh? And what is it I should be remembering, brother?”
My tone is low, threatening, daring him to bring up the past—a dangerous, provocative current that is constantly the source of contention between us and always in the forefront of both our minds. My father clears his throatloudly—an explicit warning. After a tense moment, Aldric seems to remember his present company and takes a sip of wine, shaking his head.
“It’s a tragedy isn’t it? Lacking responsibility you hide behind cowardice and call it the moral high ground.” Silence descends upon the table. “You drown your guilt in wine and sarcasm like it makes you better than us,” Aldric says. “But the truth is—you’re not—you’re just…irrelevant.”
My hand tightens around my glass so hard it’s a miracle the stem doesn’t shatter. I throw back the wine and aggressively shove my chair away from the table as I get to my feet. Painful memories feel like knives in my chest and I want nothing more than to wipe that smug smile off Aldric’s fucking face but I can’t. I have to sit here and take the abuse because there are people who are counting on me. People who rely on me. And none of these wastes of space know a goddamn thing about it. The thought pushes through the violent haze enough to steady my impulse to lunge at him. I slam the empty glass down on the table so hard the dishes rattle.
“If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ve had enough moral decay for one evening.”
I don’t dare look at my father—I can already feel the rage emanating from him. Instead, I fix Aldric with one more scathing look before storming away from the table.
“You’ll have to excuse my brother—he’s always had a flare for the dramatic—”
I don’t bother listening to whatever else Aldric is saying before the heavy doors close behind me. My relationship with my brother has always been tenuous but now it’s downright hostile. He blames me for what happened—thescandalthat rocked the De’Vero rule.
Scandal—the word grates on me. An oversimplification of the actual horror of what happened to our family. But it’s a shadow Aldric will have to rule under one day and he blames me for it. Even though it was my father’s idea to push it all under the rug and move on despite the pain we were all feeling in the aftermath.
Get over it. Man up. Forget it ever happened.
Until the day he’d said those words to me, I think I had deceived myself into justifying what our House did in the name of the crown. But after what I went through and his blatant disregard for my pain, I realized the truth. Monsters come in all shapes and sizes, and the sooner I learned how to spot them under all the guises, the better chance I had at taking them all down.
JAMES
Suffocating. Trapped.
My chest is tight, anxiety and anger crawling under my skin, but I try to keep my pace measured as I exit the stifling hold of theSeraphine. On deck, the cool air catches the canvas above us, the snap and creak of rope and cloth ominously echoing over the otherwise dead-silent audience. My crew parts as I approach the Captain who is huddled near the main mast, visibly shaking. No one meets my eye and that’s exactly how I like it.
“Why does your hold look like it recently transported human cargo?”
The Captain seems to shrink under my attention. The ship is a De’Vero merchant vessel but the hold looks like it housed human occupants which would make him a slaver. It appeared to be too many humans to simply be a charter.
“This isn’t a slave ship if that’s what you’re implying, sir,” the Captain says.
“Is that what I’m implying?” I ask.
“They were refugees,” the man’s voice shakes in earnest.
