Chapter 40

CHAPTER FORTY

H eading back to the ship was a waste of time. The two pirates were no longer here. I didn’t need to snoop through the second floor to know the two pirates had figured out what had happened on the ship.

The doors to the last two rooms at the end of the corridor were open even though Viktor and I had purposely closed all of them.

They knew the truth, and now they were somewhere on the island, looking for us. I hated to admit it, but whoever found the other first would have the upper hand.

“I should have known,” I muttered under my breath as we retreated to the forestry island with no sense of where to go or look.

“There’s no way you could have known,” Manny tried to assure me. The gesture was sweet, but I wasn’t in a very compliant mood right now. Not when all our lives were in danger, and we had just wasted so much time trekking back to the ship not to find the pirates.

It felt like we had been walking forever, looking for the pirates. In reality, it couldn’t have even been an hour.

“Do we go back and check if they’ve returned to the ship?” Caspian groaned, dragging his feet.

I mulled over his question momentarily, but before I could answer, Hammond dropped to his knees behind a bush and pressed a finger to his lips, silencing us all. My eyebrows furrowed together at first, confused by his strange behaviour, but then my eyes widened, and I dropped to the ground behind him. I frantically but silently gestured for Caspian, Roscoe, and Manny to do the same.

“What are they doing?” I asked, struggling to see over the tall bush we were hiding behind.

“The holes seem far too big to be digging for treasure,” Hammond murmured.

Caspian crouched taller from behind me to get a better look. At the horrified gasp that escaped him, I couldn’t hold back my curiosity any longer. I rose on my knees, and the moment my eyes landed on Garth, Dagfinn, Gustav, Latham and Crosby, all dirty, sweaty, tired and overworked, forced to dig holes so deep I could only assume they were their own graves, I reacted the same way as Caspian.

Three pirates watched our crewmates, meaning Viktor and the others hadn’t yet gotten to the lone pirate. Perhaps making our crewmates dig graves for everyone was revenge for the bloody scenes the two pirates had witnessed on the ship.

How could they be so cruel?

When we heard some rustling over our shoulders, we all glanced back. Viktor, Odin, and Jerrik had found their way to us, looking as horrified as we felt.

“I’ve never seen something like this before.” Viktor crawled over to me and shook his head, looking more disgusted than I’d ever seen him. “Who has a weapon on their person?”

Roscoe and Caspian held up their daggers, and Hammond held up his recently acquired sword. Viktor’s eyes lingered on Manny and Roscoe before flicking over to me. I knew what he was thinking. It was the same thing I was thinking. Manny and Roscoe were young and had already been exposed to so much. They didn’t need to be traumatised anymore. He subtly dismissed Roscoe and instructed him to hand the dagger to Caspian.

Together, Viktor, Hammond and Caspian snuck away to take care of the remaining pirates and free us all.

The first pirate was the easiest to kill. Hammond snuck on him from behind and slashed the sharp edge of the sword against his neck, nearly slicing it all the way through. He died almost silently, coughing and gurgling quietly on the ground as the blood oozed out of him. The second pirate was far louder than the first, and he screamed and yelled loudly long after Caspian stabbed him in the back and chest multiple times.

Both were relatively easy kills, but they set off the third, making him more difficult to deal with than he should have been.

The third pirate saw Viktor coming and leapt at him in desperation. He swiped at Viktor, catching him by surprise, and forced the dagger out of his hand. I screamed in fright and jumped up to my feet, terribly afraid for my husband. The dagger dropped to the ground, too far away for Viktor to grab it and defend himself. When Viktor stumbled back as the pirate brandished his sword and charged toward him, he fell into a grave. I screamed louder and attempted to push through the greenery separating us from the clearing to get to him, but Roscoe and Jerrik held me back.

I knew they meant well, but at that moment, I didn’t hate two men more. Perhaps the lone pirate that was still alive, but they came in very close second and third.

Everything felt like it was moving in slow motion.

The pirate leapt forward, and so did Hammond and Caspian, but they were too slow and too far away to get to him in time. I screamed, kicked and fought Roscoe and Jerrik, desperate to stop this man from slicing up my husband, but they were far too strong for me.

The pirate raised his sword high in the air above his head. Viktor threw his arm over his face in a last attempt…and Crosby charged at the pirate from behind, knocking him to the ground. His grip loosened on the sword in the flurry of it all, and it fell into the grave.

The grave that Viktor was in .

I screamed until my throat burned and my chest ached, and then I screamed some more. In shock, Roscoe and Jerrik let go of me, and I pushed through the bush to get to the grave.

Unable to think of anything but Viktor and the sword that had fallen into the grave, possibly slicing him in half, I stopped at the edge and propelled myself forward, peering down.

“Good catch, don’t you think?” Viktor grinned widely as if he wasn’t inches from death merely a moment ago.

The most enormous sigh of relief escaped me when I spied the sword in his hand. He had managed to catch it with his right hand, the sword upside down, and blood trickled down from where it cut into the skin of his fingers and palm, but he was alive .

“That’s not funny,” I sobbed as I dropped myself into the grave, ignoring the scratch on my palm and the way my knees ached from the poor landing.

Viktor threw the sword carelessly to the side a second before I threw myself at him, circling my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist, clinging onto him for deer life. He laughed and playfully complained about surviving having a sword thrown at him but dying from my chokehold, but he held me even tighter than I held him.

If Crosby hadn’t redeemed himself before, he certainly had now.