Fifteen

FIFTEEN

He was dead. Zola was dead.

I tried to fit that bit of truth together with everything that had happened over the last ten days. This was why Clove had taken the job on Zola’s crew. It was all leading to this very moment.

Zola wasn’t just a problem for Saint or West. He was a problem the Narrows needed solved. Saint planted Clove on the Luna to get him into Holland’s hands. He’d convinced Zola he could be rid of her threats once and for all. But how had he done it?

The coin she’d given Clove looked like a bounty, and my gut told me Saint’s name had stayed out of it. To Holland, Clove was just a trader from the Narrows looking to make a lot of copper.

It was brilliant, really. My father used Zola’s feud with Holland to get him to sail to his own death. And why kill a trader and risk the fallout with the Narrows Trade Council when a powerful merchant in the Unnamed Sea could do it instead?

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, my voice far away.

Clove looked at me with an expression that echoed sympathy. But he kept his mouth shut, his eyes sliding to Holland. He didn’t want her knowing more than she needed to.

Clove took orders from Saint, and Saint had a reason for everything he did. The bottom line was that even if I trusted him, Saint didn’t trust me. And why would he? I’d worked my own schemes against him to free the Marigold.

My gaze drifted back to Zola’s blood on the white marble floor, and I watched the way it gleamed as the firelight moved over it. Only moments ago he’d stood next to me. I could still feel his grip on my arm, squeezing.

The deafening silence made me blink and I realized that Holland was staring at me, as if she expected me to say something. When I didn’t, she looked disappointed.

“I think that’s enough for one night, don’t you?” she said.

I wasn’t sure how to answer that. I wasn’t even sure what she was asking.

“You’ll stay here.” There was no invitation in her tone. She wasn’t asking. Her eyes were still studying me, moving over my hair, my shoulders, my feet. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but West was already speaking. “She’s not staying,” he said, clipped.

Clove picked up the box of coin lazily, tucking it under one arm. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to agree with him.”

He and West didn’t seem the slightest bit afraid of Holland, but I was terrified enough for all of us. At the lift of Holland’s finger, they’d be dragging West or Clove into the dark next.

“You’re all staying,” Holland said. “Fable’s not the only one I have business with.” But that calm in her eyes was the same one that had been there a moment ago when she’d lifted that finger.

In the hallway, I could hear something being dragged over the marble. I swallowed hard.

“I hope you’ll make yourself at home,” Holland said, reaching for the shining handle of another door. She pulled it open and a hallway lit with bright lanterns appeared.

She waited for me to walk through, but I didn’t move. I was staring at the portrait of my mother over the mantel, the firelight catching her eyes.

The rings on Holland’s fingers sparkled as she took a step toward me. The fine fabric of her dress rippled like melted silver, and the combs in her hair twinkled. I couldn’t help but think that she was like someone from one of the old tales. A specter or a sea fairy. Something not of this world.

The same had been true of my mother.

Holland reached for my hand, taking it into hers, and she held it between us, turning it so my palm faced up. Her thumbs spread over the lines there, and her hold on me tightened when she saw the tip of my scar peeking out from beneath my sleeve.

Her pale blue eyes lifted to meet mine and she let me go. “Welcome home, Fable.”

Home.

The word stretched and folded, the sound of it strange.

I clutched my skirts with both hands and walked through the door, biting back the turn of my stomach. Saint may have gotten what he wanted, but now Holland was the one with the upper hand, and she knew it.

The guard led us into another corridor that ended at the foot of a winding staircase, and we followed it up to a salon that overlooked the bottom floor. He didn’t stop until we reached a door at the end of the row. It was painted pearly pink with a bouquet of wild blooms at its center.

“Someone will come for you at the first bell,” he said, letting the door swing open.

The room was bathed in pale moonlight cast through a large window. Beneath it was a bed, half of it shrouded in shadows.

West stepped inside first, and the man caught him in the chest with a hand. “This room is for her.”

“Then I’m staying here too.” West shoved past him, holding the door open for me to follow.

I looked over my shoulder to Clove. He leaned against the banister, giving me a reassuring nod. “See you in the morning.” His manner was cool, but there was an unsteady look in his eye. I wasn’t the only one who could see that Holland was the oil in a lamp, ready to catch flame.

The guard who’d dragged Zola into the dark appeared at the top of the staircase. He walked toward us with quick steps, and I studied his jacket and hands for any sign of blood. But he was crisp and clean, just like the gala and its guests below.

He took a place beside the door and West closed it behind me, stilling to listen when the latch fell into place. When footsteps faded into the distance, his shoulders relaxed. He leaned into the door, crossing his arms over his chest as he faced me.

“What the hell is going on, Fable?” he grated.

My throat ached, seeing him washed in the icy blue moonlight. “Saint.” My father’s name felt foreign to me, somehow. “He used me to lure Zola here so that Holland would kill him.” I wasn’t even sure I understood it all, but those were the pieces I’d put together.

“Lure him how? What is Holland to you?”

“I think…” I searched for the words. “I think she’s my grandmother.”

West’s eyes widened. “What?”

The word sounded odd and misshapen as he said it, and I realized that the darkness was moving around me. I couldn’t draw the air into my chest.

The ghost of my mother hovered between these walls, some echo of her in the air.

In the flood of memories that danced in my mind, I searched for anything Isolde may have told me about this place. But there was nothing but tales of dives and the streets of the city where she was born. Nothing of Azimuth House or the woman who lived here.

“When Isolde ran away from Bastian, she took a place on Zola’s crew.” I pressed my hands against the blue silk wrapped around my torso. “Holland is her mother. That’s why Zola lost his license to trade in the Unnamed Sea. That’s why he hasn’t sailed here in over twenty years.”

He fell silent, but the room was filled with his racing thoughts. He was looking for a way out of this. An escape from the trap we’d both walked into.

I went to the window, looking out to where the harbor would sit in the darkness. “What about the crew?”

West stood and the shadows found his face, making the darkness under his eyes more severe. “They won’t make a move.”

“You sure about that?” I asked, thinking of Willa. When we didn’t show up at the harbor, she’d be ready to tear the city apart.

I sat on the edge of the bed and he stood before me, looking down into my face. His hand lifted as if he was going to touch me, but then he froze, his eyes focusing on the shine of gold tucked beneath the fabric of my dress. He slid the tip of a finger beneath the twine and pulled until the ring dangled in the air between us.

He stared at it for a moment before his green eyes flickered up to meet mine. “That’s what you were doing in Dern?”

I nodded, swallowing hard. “I’m sorry.” The words broke in my throat.

The crease in his brow deepened. “For what?”

“For all of this.”

I wasn’t just talking about what happened that morning at the gambit. It was everything. It was Holland and Bastian and West burning Zola’s ships. It was for everything he didn’t want to tell me about what he’d done for Saint. When I’d stepped off the Marigold, I’d set our course to this moment. And I didn’t want to admit that West looked different to me now. That he looked more like my father.

He touched my face, fingertips sliding into my hair.

I didn’t know what he’d done in the Narrows, trying to find me. But the weight of it was heavy on him. He was darkened with it. In that moment, I only wanted to feel his rough hands on my skin and swallow the air around him until I could taste him on my tongue. To feel as if I were hidden in his shadow.

His face lowered until his mouth hovered over mine, and he kissed me so gently that the burn of tears instantly erupted behind my eyes. My hands moved down the shape of his back and he leaned into me, inhaling deeply, as if he was pulling the warmth of me inside of him. I put what Clove told me out of my mind, closing my eyes and imagining that we were in the lantern light of West’s quarters on the Marigold.

His teeth slipped over my bottom lip and the sting resurfaced from where the skin was still healing. But I didn’t care. I kissed him again and his hands reached for the skirts, pulling them up until I could feel his fingers on my legs. His touch dragged up, and when his hand wrapped around the stitches in my thigh, I winced, hissing.

West pulled away from me suddenly, his eyes running over my face.

“It’s nothing,” I whispered, pulling him back to me.

But he ignored me, pushing the skirts up to my hips so he could look at it. The clumsy stitches puckered in a jagged line at the center of a trailing purple bruise. He brushed a thumb lightly around it, his jaw clenching. “What happened?”

I pushed the frock back down between us, embarrassed. “One of Zola’s dredgers tried to make sure I didn’t come back up from a dive.”

West’s eyes were bright and sparkling, but the set of his mouth was still. Calm. “Who?”

“He’s dead,” I murmured.

He fell quiet, letting me go, and the space between us again grew wide and empty. The warmth that had been in his touch was gone, making me shiver. The last ten days flashed in his eyes, showing me a glimpse of that part of West I’d seen the night he told me about his sister. The night he hadn’t told me about Saint.

I don’t need to know,some part of me whispered. But the lie in the words echoed behind them. Because eventually, we would have to unearth those buried bones, along with whatever else West was hiding from me.