Page 22 of The Withering Dawn
“I saw the whole thing, you fucking wanker,” he snarled, pressing the edge of the blade to his throat. “I’d have killed yuh.”
“This is madness,” Henry said. “You’ve lost your damn mind!”
Rage simmered inside me until my hands were shaking. He’d betrayed me. He’d put the whole ship in danger. Cilian had been tossed overboard. Rourk was not far from death himself.
Why had I saved him?
What was I trying to prove?
I stepped away from Henry, unable to take my eyes off of him as the world around me became a blurred landscape of muffled chaos.
“I am the captain,” I muttered.
Aleksi’s flintlock was tucked in his belt and without thinking, I reached for it, eyes fixed on Henry. Extending my hand, I fired, emptying the one bullet into his head. His body went limp and with a disgusted hiss, Aleksi stepped away and let him curl to the floor. He sheathed his knife and looked up at me, his nose wrinkled in disgust. I handed his pistol back to him, still staring at Henry’s body. He took it and slid it back into his belt, no questions.
“Coulda let him go overboard. Man’s not worth the bullet,” Aleksi said.
“He can go overboard now,” I said, turning to make my way to Rourk.
I didn’t know the man nearly as well as I knew most of the others on my crew. He was a fairly new addition and now I knew he was the kind of man that let fear guide him. He let it guide him so astray that he got himself killed.
I grabbed him by his arm and hoisted him upward only to feel him slump back over, his entire front painted with blood. His hand dropped from his throat and I could see that the hole Aeris had bitten into him was far beyond what any of us could salvage. Rourk’s eyes drew back into his skull and he fell backward, tumbling over the railing and into the sea.
My crew alone was feeding her voracious appetite.
I swore out loud and threw my hair back from my face with frustration. I could not have them scheming and creating problems amidst an already problematic storm, but I would not have wished death on them.
It was all so mixed up. The siren was in my room and three of my crew members were dead, one with my own hand. From the outside looking in, none of it was right, but I couldn’t forget the way Aeris dove in front of me when Henry pulled his weapon. That didn’t make sense either and yet it happened.
Nikolas had come to aid Cathal at the helm. I felt confident we would be able to ride out the storm without any further complications and that, at least, took a bit of weight off my shoulders and allowed me to get my thoughts in order.
“She kill ‘im, cap’n?” Cathal asked as I marched past.
I nodded once, swiping my hands over my face to clear the water from my eyes.
“Not too sad, are we? Rourk was a right bastard,” he added.
It didn’t matter whether I was sad over him or not. I’d lost four men in total since the Perry Smith and that was a problem. The realization tightened my hand into a fist and with a growl, I slammed it against the wall beside the door to my quarters. My knuckles split and pain shot up into my wrist, but it was the kind of pain I needed. The kind I always looked for. My mind cleared in an instant as I paced, flicking the soreness from my knuckles and coming to my senses.
“Might want to handle the unconscious bird in yer cabin, eh?” Cathal said.
I raked my fingers back through my wet hair again and spun, swinging the door to my chamber open and stepping out of the rain.
Aeris was sprawled on my bed, her hair in a mess of wet, crimson tresses across my pillow. I’d practically thrown her and she remained in that position, one arm hanging off the bed. I took a few deep breaths, still shaking off the excitement of what had just transpired, and shrugged off my drenched coat, draping it over my chair.
“Fuck,” I muttered, shaking my hand again as if that would rid it of the sharp discomfort dancing across my bones.
I braced my palms on the back of the chair and lingered there for a moment, my head hanging low.
What a mess. And all because of the woman lying unconscious in my bed. Thesiren.
I turned to look at her. Her head was facing away from me. I could scarcely see her chest rising and falling. I walked toward the bed and loomed over her, studying the stillness of her body. She could have very well passed for dead with how pale she was. The thin shirt I’d given her was drenched and the dark circles of her nipples shown through the material. So did every angle and divot in her body down to the oddly hairless area at the apex of her thighs. The wet fabric did little to conceal her naked form.
Given what she’d evidently been through, I felt wrong even looking at her that way.
I pulled a throw from the foot of the bed and draped it over her before sitting on the edge of the mattress. I reached out, carefully clearing wet strands of hair from her face to see the abrasion above her temple where Henry had hit her on the head with the butt of his pistol. The water had washed away a majority of the blood, but it still looked irritated. I reached around her, sliding my hand under her cheek to turn her head.
Warm blood drenched my fingers and I noticed it had soaked my pillow, too. Streams of it dripped from her mouth. Enough to make me wonder if she could drown in it. Could sirens drown in their own blood? I turned her onto her side, pulling the throw I’d just put over her toward her face to soak up whatever else was left in her mouth.
