A Mermaid's Cry

Chapter 55-Threats and Gold

🪸This chapter will have two parts, which will be divided by a set of concept pictures for the girl's masquerade hairstyles, just to avoid confusion. I hope you all enjoy the first part, it was so much fun to write!✨😁😉

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"Alright, now that we are all here," Ares begins, his sharp gaze roaming across all six of us sitting on the chairs and couches in one of the governor's small reading rooms. "Let us discuss how we are all getting back home."

"Well, that should be easy," Zola quips, stretching himself out in one of the chairs, his healed and unbound arm reaching out above his head. "Costa will take us back to her place and we will sail back home on the schooner, simple as that."

Ares sighs heavily, leaning his head down while pinching the bridge of his nose. I let slip a small smile, before going back to my task of braiding a few rows of Adila's hair into even corded strands, with her seated in front of me while I relax on the soft couch cushion. "Have you already forgotten about that Captain?" Octavia huffs, leveling her icy gaze on him from her reclined position on the couch, her head on my leg and her feet perched up on the couch arm. "I don't think he is ready to let us go so soon, not after yesterday and his lovely reminder of your idiotic antics."

"At least I'm not the one that had everyone running scared," Zola huffs back, turning his head away from her to give me a knowing grin. "Or in a certain human's case, pissing themselves from sheer terror at seeing you."

I roll my eyes, focusing back to my current task and tying the end of Adila's braid with a silver ribbon. "If those brutes had not given me cause to intervene," I begin, starting on the last section of my friend's hair while giving Zola a maniacal grin. "Then we would not have been invited to stay here, or to attend their little party later this evening."

"What party?" Arcus questions, crossing his arms and leveling his still irritated gaze on me. "The one that Lucas has pawned us off to dance at, for his little human friend," Zola smirks, earning a murderous glare from my brother in the seat next to the grinning lunatic.

"And how do you know about that Zola?" Octavia sneers, rising up into a seated position while moving closer to the loudmouth with a predator like intent. "If I didn't know better I'd think you've been doing a lot more than listening outside closed doors."

"I wasn't sneaking around," Zola huffs, his cheeks taking on a slight crimson hue, denoting his ever repeated failure of trying to pass lies off as truths. "I just got distracted on my way to meet up with the lads for foraging, and heard Lucas spouting off our well guarded traditions to a pretty little blond."

Before Lucas can open his mouth to interject, Arcus beats him to it with an interesting and not at all surprising question. "Now hold on, didn't you say you were going to get a drink?" my cousin asks, making Zola's eyes widen in horror. "I thought you were getting water from the well, but if you were inside the house then there must have been another type of drink that you had in mind."

We all swivel our heads towards Zola, the memory of his previous trouble making not so easily forgotten. "Zola," Ares growls, his nails digging into the knees of his pants. "Were you looking for the governor's liquor cabinet?"

His silence is all that we need to confirm the question, and it starts a rising suspicion in me about how often he has pulled something like this. "You have got to be joking," Arcus seethes, his hands curling into fists as he struggles for the control to not throttle Zola and chuck him back in the fountain. "After what happened with that damn blood coral, why in the Abyss were you trying to get your hands on more liquor?"

"I thought it would be a good time to celebrate," Zola states, reclining back in his chair like a sunbathing leopard. "Celebrate what?" Octavia says, crossing her arms as her brow furrows, forming deep lines on her pale forehead. "Your inflated ego, you dimwitted squid."