Page 10 of The Withering Dawn
I slowly rolled forward onto my hands and knees, dragging my blanket with me, and crawled toward the corner of the cell where Nazario was lying on the floor. He still clutched the rum bottle. For a bit, I lay on my stomach, my hands under my cheek, and watched him sleep. He was quite stunning in a rugged way. He was not as clean cut and polished as the men I was used to, but I learned long ago that a man’s appearance had no bearing on his character. Those polished men had hurt me many times in many ways and Nazario had yet to do that.
After some time, I felt fatigue starting to claim me and I reached out from my cell toward his big hand. I pulled the bottle from his fingers and set it upright, placing my hand in his palm instead. He was warm and his fingers were calloused and covered in thick rings, but I didn’t care. It felt good to touch someone. To feel someone’s warmth when I closed my eyes. It felt good to have company.
Perhaps I would wake in the morning to him shooting upright, appalled, but my gut told me he wouldn’t do that. So, I stayed like that, our hands interlocked, and searched for the sleep I so longed to surrender to.
“You’ll never be free,” Antonio said. “You’ll always be mine.”
I felt his fingers brush down the space between my shoulder blades and I shivered, that familiar sense of disgust gnawing at my gut like a vulture feeding on parts of me that were slowly rotting away. Hope. Affection. Happiness. They’d all been left for dead in the desert my soul had become.
“And your brother,” he continued. “He is mine, too. You know that, right? I will find him and I will show him what his defiance has done.”
I smelled the wine on his breath. He never smelled like anything else. Wine, sweat, and whatever perfume he used to try and cover it up. The smells together made me sick. Antonio rarely bathed and it was a nauseating thing to endure.
I heard the familiar sound of a knife sliding from a leather sheath and closed my eyes. I wouldn’t scream. I wouldn’t struggle. Not like the other boys did. He knew they were weak, but I would not let him see me squirm. The vultures hadn’t started feeding on my strength yet. That part of me was still standing firm, the only pillar in my soul fighting for my life when nothing else was.
I would never lethim see me crumble.
I opened my eyes and saw the wooden ceiling of my ship above me, an unlit lantern swinging on a hook like a pendulum trying to put me back to sleep. My heart was racing and the gross feeling of dried sweat inside my clothes made me wince. I was filthy. I hadn’t thought about it until then. With Oliver’s death, my injury, and our new captive onboard, my mind had been in too many places at once to think about the layers of salt and grime on my skin.
A new captive…
Slowly, my eyes shifted and I saw the metal bars of the holding cell beside me. My arm was stretched out just enough for my hand to be between the bars and inside the cell. The woman was lying on her side with the thin blankets we’d given her covering her lower half. Her dainty hand was rested inside mine, her fingers curled around my thumb. My knuckles were so close to her lips that I could feel her breath feathering across them.
I was expecting her to open her eyes, but she did not. She remained motionless. Serene, almost. There were hints of color in her cheeks as if the small amount of sustenance we’d given her was already doing its job.
God, she could be human. I wished she was. Then, I would not have to contemplate what to do with her. I would clothe her, feed her, and take her to shore. I would make sure she had a place to go and I would send her on her way with a little bit of the treasure we’d taken off that ship. But a siren was another matter. They were violent, vengeful, manipulative beasts. They were a plague so deadly that hunters were in high demand, lest traders and fishermen be lost at sea every time they left port.
Glancing at our joined hands, I realized I’d been sleeping through the night, vulnerable to her hunger. She could have done countless vicious things to me in my drunken state, and instead, she’d fallen to sleep beside me and I was unharmed.
I didn’t know what to think.
Instead of ripping my hand from her grip in terror, I slowly pulled it out of the cell, easing myself away from her relaxed grip. I sat up, crouching in front of the bars to look at her for a moment, searching for something—anything—that would give away what a vile beast she was under it all. I intended to find something ugly about her. A tell. Something that told me her tender demeanor was a lie.
I found nothing. For the life of me, I could not see a single hint of malice.
Perhaps I really was too inexperienced to understand when a predator was luring me into its trap.
I stood upright, trying not to linger too long, and walked out of the hold. Cathal and a few others were gathered around, talking quietly. On the horizon, I could see thick, gray clouds swelling in the sky.
“There ye are,” Cathal said as I emerged. “Gettin’ friendly with our prisoner?”
I did not have time for his comments. I marched past him and the others, shrugging my coat off my shoulders as I headed to my cabin.
“Keep going east,” I said. “I’m going to take a bath.”
I disappeared into my quarters and swung the door closed behind me.
Alone, I stripped down naked and hung my clothes over a bed post. A bucket of rainwater sat in the corner and, knowing I could refill it if the rain on the horizon came our way, I dipped a soap bar into it and scrubbed it over a rag.
I could smell myself. The scent of sweat and stale air made my nose wrinkle with disgust and I began washing away the past few days of exertion, dirt, and blood. I scrubbed my arms. Legs. I cleaned every crevasse, the somewhat swollen flesh around my stitches, and the back of my neck and when I’d rubbed my skin raw, I hung the rag on the edge of the bucket and dunked my whole head into the water, massaging my scalp with my fingers. As I stood, I squeezed the excess water out of my hair and then flipped my head back. My hair hit my shoulders with a slap and immediately, a sense of relief poured overme. I felt lighter and more like myself as if pails of stones had been dropped from my back.
I took out a clean set of breeches and a fresh shirt from my trunk and discarded my dirty clothes in a cloth bag for cleaning. Hair damp and cold on my neck, I walked out of my cabin with my coat in hand and let out a deep breath as the fresh air cooled my skin. Cathal was coiling a rope around his forearm but paused when I came back out.
“Feel better?” he said, his tone a bit weighted since we dumped Oliver overboard.
I nodded. “Rain’s coming. I want everyone to bathe and then replenish the freshwater barrels.”
“Sure. Any port in particular we should aim for?”
