The devil and his deep blue sea.

Chapter 21 - holding hands - podesion

The hand holding the whip is not my hand. It doesn’t feel like part of my body. Not the hand, not the arm, not the shoulder that flexes to bring it back or the feet planted on deck. It’s not my fury that comes down over me like a fine rain. It wasn’t mine in the beginning, and it’s not mine now. I don’t want it to be mine, but it is. This body is the one that keeps moving. That keeps hurting Ashley. She’s reaching the limit of what she can take, and I know it, and instead of stopping, I put another red line across her back. Her ass. The tops of her thighs. She writhes against the mast. Begs it for mercy. Tries to press herself into it, to hide. There is no hiding from this. From me. I know she doesn’t see me anymore. I know she doesn’t feel anything but thin, searing strips of pain that expand after impact until they’re covering her from head to toe. I know how unfair it feels, how the whip leaves narrow cuts that seem to touch every part of you, even the parts that you think are safe. I know she can feel it in the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands. The whip can’t reach them. That doesn’t matter. I know, because my father was skilled with a whip. I know, because he used it on me. My brother Hades was easy. He could be tortured with the sun and his own eyes. Zeus was easy, too. For all his bullshit bravado, he still loved, and all a person had to do to hurt him was hurt the people he cared about. Not me. I didn’t love anyone or anything but the sea, so my father gave me two things to hate while I served as the distraction that would keep my siblings alive. The whip and the water. He beat this knowledge into me, of how to hurt another person with this whip. He made it part of my muscles and cells so that I can never, never rid myself of it, or him. He’s the one who swings back hard to hit Ashley with this vicious strip of leather, who looks for pale skin to make sure she screams. I’ve been her. So many times, I’ve been her. It was a tree by the lakeshore instead of a mast by the sea, but the principle of it is the same. Pain I thought would never end, and for no purpose other than to drag my weaknesses out and let them burn in the light. That’s what he did. It was a twisted game, but the end result was the opposite. He didn’t break the parts of me he wanted to break. He couldn’t make me stop missing my mother, or loving the sea. All he could do was make me stronger, and look at me. Fucking look. I am as strong as I’ve ever been. I bring the whip down one more time in the space between Ashley’s ass and thighs. She presses her forehead to the mast and lets out a cracked whimper. Her voice is gone, and I can see this place where we’ve arrived, where she’s past pain and past everything else, and this inanimate object is her only hope of relief. That whimper sweeps up the illusion of strength, and it shatters across jagged rocks. It’s gone, like that, washed away in a fall of salt and wind. A trick, all along. It wasn’t anyone else’s hand who whipped her. My father—my foster father —the bane of my existence and the man who haunts my nightmares, is dead. I helped kill him. I don’t want to think of him. I never want to think of him, and I am always thinking of him. He is a chain around my ankle, a ball that’s always in mid fall to the water. All that time I spent tied to a tree and then strangled in his hands with the lake closing over my head didn’t make me stronger. It made me meaner. I hurt her to prove I can. Because that old rage broke its levees and came up on the shore of me, and it met the fresh new indignation that comes from falling for a person. I’m furious that I fell for her. I’m fucking furious. I can’t allow that weakness in myself. I know how it ends. Ashley’s crying with her face on the mast and the last raindrops falling on her skin. The clouds roll past. It was a weak front, not the kind that can stir up the sea and turn it against me. It was nothing. Choppy waves tap at the side of the ship. They’re trying to get my attention, or trying to remind me that they are there, or they’re just fucking waves and they don’t mean anything at all. A pair of gulls cry over the bow. My men don’t move, but I can feel them anticipating the moment when they’re not bound by the order I gave them to witness this. I didn’t order their eyes off the deck. They would have mutinied if I had. They didn’t want me to hurt her, and I did. The lost, rich princess is the one who’s naked and whipped and crying, but I might as well be stripped, too. My skin feels raw with what I’ve done. I stopped, I fucking stopped, and my body doesn’t belong entirely to me. The way my heart beats is too huge for my ribs. A feeling I can’t name punches out at the bones, bruising from the inside out. The air is too thick to breathe. It’s not air; it’s a clouded lake. It’s not my ship; it’s the lake by the farmhouse. It’s not sky above but my father’s face through water, his expression focused while he holds me under. I breathe again and it goes away, but these things are not far. They’re never fucking far. I take five steps toward the railing and hurl the whip into the sea. Nicholas is there first. He’s always running into a hurricane, that guy, always first to throw himself into the fire. He doesn’t say anything. Just presses a small box into my hand and steps back, waiting for orders. I know what it is before I open it. The pearl rests on black velvet, no setting from the original necklace. One pearl. One more to add to the collection. The tension from my hand and arm releases. I’m not so heavy on the deck, so unbalanced. I have it. I found it. I’m almost done searching, almost done undoing what my sister did. There’s one more thing to find. The sea approves of this. It does not seem to approve of Ashley’s soundless sobs. The tension has not gone out of her. It’s there on her shoulders as she waits for the next blow to land. “We’re putting holes in the hull now,” Nicholas says. “What the fuck are you talking about?” “The ship.” He meets my eyes. Doesn’t glance at Ashley. “You wanted us to sink it. The guys are punching holes in the hull now. We can be underway in twenty.” I shake off the last of the haze I’m in and force myself to return to this hellish reality of my own making. Maybe I dream of a man with silver eyes and cruel hands, but I’m the nightmare here. I’m the living nightmare. I don’t know how Nicholas can look at me. I don’t ask. The box closes with a soft click and I put it into my pocket. Both palms ache. My whole torso is bruised with want. What I want to do is go to Ashley and fold myself around her and make a shield of myself between her and the rest of the world. I want to whisper soothing things in her ear while I untie the rope. I want to catch her before her knees give out and take her back to my bed. But those things belong to a man who doesn’t exist. To a future that I held under and drowned with my own two hands. “Untie her.” Nicholas runs. It’s only a few steps, but he runs to her. The cook is right behind him, slower because he has an ankle that doesn’t like the rain. Cook puts his hands on Ashley’s shoulders but he doesn’t know what the fuck to say, doesn’t know what to do, and when Nicholas is finished untying her wrists she crumples to the deck. My body moves toward her, but I stop myself before I can take a step. I will not take a step. I clear my throat so they hear me over the rustle of feet and voices. My crew isn’t going to stand here forever. The pulled-tight tension is unbearable, and the best way to break it is to go back to the business of the ship. Two of them look over the railing to the other ship, and there’s a back and forth with the guys there. They were good at welding my ship back together, and they’re good at removing the parts from the other to make it sink. We’ll take everything worth anything. There is nothing worthwhile there. Not in comparison to the girl sprawled on the deck right now in the ship’s lights. The sunset died while I wasn’t looking. It’ll be dark soon. The search is a holdover custom from a time when sailors couldn’t depend on repair docks or reliable shipping contracts. I let the crew go about it anyway. Let Jason corral a few more of them into taking the pirate ship down to the bolts. They’re efficient. By the time Nicholas is kneeling by Ashley on the ground, they’ve got crates coming over the railing in a neat line. He said we could leave this place in twenty minutes, but they’ll make it fifteen. Ashley has turned herself over, onto her side, one hand on the deck. Slow tears leak down over her cheeks, and then, because hell is real and it goes with me always, she looks at me. Her blue eyes meet mine and she doesn’t look away. She does not need her lost voice. Her eyes ask for me and my entire soul answers. Yes, I will come to you. Yes, I will take you from this place. Yes, I will fix what I’ve done. I can stitch together all the tattered ends and make them whole again. Nicholas turns and follows her eyes. I don’t care to see what’s in his. It’s worse than hate. Sorrow and wary caution, as if I’m the damaged one, the broken one, and not the woman I whipped for the pain of it. “Take her to the brig,” I tell him. We do have a brig, a small one, because this ship is an echo of the past and men are unpredictable in the present. One cell is all I’ve needed in all my years at sea. Ashley closes her eyes. Lays her head on her hand, there on the deck. She used the last of her strength to look at a nightmare. Nicholas gets his arms under her and picks her up, keeping his back to me. He speaks to Cook in a hurried, low voice. Like the both of them are afraid of what I might order next. I have no more orders to give. A man can only have one great love, and mine is the sea. I go to the bow of the ship and listen to wind over water and the screech of metal collapsing under manpower. I lose myself in the act of staying on board, of the act of keeping my head above water. The engines engage. They’re done with the other ship now, and we have contracts to meet. All reasons for me to stay where I belong. I have only ever loved the sea. I will only ever love the sea. I just made sure of that. I open the box in my pocket and pull out the pearl. It’s flawless, opalescent and precious, and I roll it between thumb and forefinger and think of taking it back where it belongs. To a depth no one else will ever reach. The sea stirs. I feel it reach for the ship and push, and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. The pearl goes back into the box. Back into my pocket. Hidden. Safe. The shout comes off the starboard side. Behind me, there’s motion on deck, men shuffling themselves into a new formation. Guilt is a slow blade through my gut. I didn’t feel them coming because I was too busy writing hell on Ashley’s skin. A ship trundles into the pool of light in the water. A shadow on their bow hops up and waves something over his head. A cell phone. I pull mine out of my pocket. Running footsteps warn me of Nicholas’s approach. He takes it out of my hand and taps at the screen, cursing under his breath. I take it back. I don’t want it. “We’re closed for business.” The shadow laughs. “It’s only a trade between friends, Poseidon. We don’t want a fight. Just the girl. We didn’t think we’d find her again. So her boyfriend’s murderers have been looking for her. So Joseph Donnelly offered a reward. “No such person on board.” “That’s not what her father says.” A pause. I back up from the railing. “Hand her over. We’ll split the reward with you.” The other ship bobs in the water, its running lights blinking at us. Anger bristles on the scraped-raw inside of me. I gesture to Nicholas behind my back. I will shoot this man in the head, and then this game will be over. Instead of handing me a rifle, Nicholas puts a hand on my shoulder. I turn to let him see how badly he’s fucked up, and a light gleams in the corner of my eye. Nicholas is stone-faced. Behind him, Jason is coming up the steps from below, two rifles slung over his back and one in his hands. My first mate makes the smallest possible gesture. We’re surrounded. The other ships pop into my consciousness as soon as he does it. Six of them, all around us, all jockeying for Ashley. Her daddy doesn’t know what he’s done. Ashley’s never going to speak to me again. She never will, and I shouldn’t care about that. So I’ll put off caring. Until I’m dead, if necessary. “It’s an interesting proposition.” I’m buying time. A precious few seconds for the crew to pretend they’re oblivious. To stroll casually across the deck. To reach for weapons. “I’ll consider it.” “Will you?” The dealer on the other end of the line sounds cautiously optimistic. His shadow hesitates, watching. The water rolls beneath us, dark and waiting. The seconds stretch tight. Let my crew be ready. Let Ashley be safe down below. Let the sea carry us. Jason puts a rifle on the deck of the ship and shoves it toward me. It stops underneath my foot. “Fuck no.” The shadow stiffens at the words. “She’s my hostage. If you want her, come and get her.”