Page 38 of Knot for Sale

“Am I supposed to be, I dunno, trimming the mainsail or something?” I asked, impatient to be getting on with it.

“No,” Onyx said, more firmly than seemed strictly necessary. “We’re anchored, you great wally. Look here. If the wind holds, and if the boss man’s right about the Titania’s speed and heading, we should be able to reach them tonight.”

“Good,” I replied. “Does that mean we can finally get this thing moving?”

Onyx grunted an affirmative, unfolding their lithe, six-foot four-inch frame from the stool they’d been sitting on while hunched over the charts. Twenty-eight years old to my early forties, tawny skinned next to my London pallor, and with their short-cropped kinky hair dyed a vibrant yellow, about the only thing Onyx Sun and I had in common was that we were both alphas. That, and we’d both suffered enough of a mental lapse to end up working for a rich, self-destructive wanker with a vendetta against a crime family whose members would happily put a bullet through his brain at the first opportunity.

My excuse was that I’d known Gabriel Rosencranz since he was a pup—the daft idiot. I’d known his sister Theresa, too. I wasn’t sure what Onyx’s excuse was. The money, probably. Gabriel paid well.

Willis, my former partner, had retired a couple of years ago. When a half-Black, half-Chinese, non-binary Australian expat with bright yellow hair had showed up to apply for the position as his replacement, I hadn’t expected all that much. I’d been wrong about that assumption—although I still had no idea how Onyx had even heard about the job opening in the first place. It wasn’t as though we’d put out a want ad in the newspaper.

I should remember to ask sometime.

Now, though, we had other things to worry about. “So, do you need help with all the rigging... stuff, or not?”

“Nah, mate.” Onyx rolled sleek, well-muscled shoulders and twisted their neck from side to side, vertebrae popping audibly. “See if you can reach the boss man on the satellite link and update him on our ETA. If I need an extra pair of hands, I’ll let you know.”

With that, they jogged up the steep, claustrophobic staircase leading to the deck, leaving me alone in the cabin.

I sighed and pulled out the laptop. Communication had been enough of a pain in my arse when we’d had a solid internet link on my half of the connection. Now we were both reliant on satellite, and only one of us was on a fancy superyacht. The forty-foot sailboat we’d managed to hire in Piraeus was... not a superyacht, to put it mildly.

I’d managed to pry a few more details out of his nibs while we wereen routefrom London to Greece, but I wanted to talk to these omegas directly. God only knew how Gabriel had managed to reach the age of thirty-four while still being such a clueless prick, but someone needed to address the elephant in the room.

Wishingreally hardthat the girl Emma’s heat would hold off until we got there would make fuck-all difference to the outcome. We had the heat blockers Gabriel had requested—but if it was too late for blockers to work, trying to take them anyway would only make the whole mess worse. Someone had to bring up alternatives and apparently, as the only adult in the room, that was my job.

The satellite link took its sweet time connecting, but eventually, my call went through. Gabriel and his two acquired omegas had been sequestered in his cabin for the last couple of days, so it didn’t take long for him to accept the call.

His stupid, serious face appeared on the screen, glitching and lagging for a couple of seconds before the video settled.

“Yes?” he snapped, and all it took was one look at him to know we werenotgoing to be feeding this girl a blocker pill and sailing on our merry way.

Christ. The poor wanker had probably never been stuck in a confined space with an omega coming into heat in his life, and it showed in the tense lines etched around his eyes and mouth.

“Hello to you, too,” I greeted. “We’re headed your way. Onyx says if the wind stays good and your coordinates are accurate, we’ll reach you sometime tonight. How’s the girl doing?”

Gabriel shot a harried look off camera. “Not great. She’s resting.”

Somehow, I doubted that, but whatever. “I need to talk to her. To both of them, actually. Get them on screen for me, eh?”

He scowled. “What? Why do you want to talk to—” he began, only to break off at my sarcastically raised eyebrow. “Oh. I see. Just a minute.”

Good. He might be clueless, but at least he wasn’tthatclueless.

The screen image jerked and froze again. When it unfroze, two figures were sitting down in front of it, pressed close so the webcam showed them both. My heart clenched. God, they were soyoung.

“Hi,” I said, modulating my tone to something better than my habitual gruffness. “You must be Emma and Elijah. I’m Curran. In case you didn’t hear it earlier, Onyx and I should reach you sometime tonight. But before we get there, we need to talk about your heat, Emma.”

There was no other way to describe it—the poor girl lookedterrified. Her huge gray eyes were red-rimmed, and not just from lack of sleep. She’d been crying.

“Do you have the heat blockers?” she asked quickly.

“I do,” I told her. “But we still need to discuss other contingencies. When would you have normally taken them?”

“Yesterday,” she said, with clear reluctance.

“And from the looks of it, your heat’s coming on early.” I wasn’t proud of the way the words made her wince, but I also wasn’t willing to dance around it.

I met the lad’s gaze through the screen. The video chose that moment to stutter again, but I still saw his tiny, grim nod of confirmation.

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