Page 130 of Wicked Tides
“Perhaps we were meant to be good,” I said, pressing a kiss to his shoulder. “We just missed a turn somewhere on our paths.”
“You mean the turn that would have steered my father’s ship away from that island?”
I held his eyes for a while, soaking in the gold flecks that littered them in the firelight.
“I am glad for it,” I confessed. The words nearly broke me. “That day stripped a mask from my face that I didn’t know I was wearing. Painful as it was, I do not think I could bear having to wear it my whole life.”
Vidar reached up, taking my hand from his shoulder and pressing my knuckles to his lips.
“You forced my eyes open, Dahlia. I pray I never close them again.”
“And? You know now that even in sleep you cannot be rid of me. The only way to sever this bond is to kill me.”
“I’ll not be doing that anytime soon,” he said, placing his hand on a stool to stand.
The stool tipped his leather folder of papers onto the floor. I glimpsed the many charcoal drawings and canted my head at one in particular as it drifted toward me and landed near my feet. A new sketch. I reached out and picked up the parchment, staring at the face of a woman, her hair blowing in the wind. On her cheek sat a long scar which was all the indication I needed to know it was a drawing of me.
But… I was beautiful. The drawing was delicate and the lack of malice in the eyes made it look like an entirely different creature to the one I’d always envisioned myself being.
Vidar crouched to scoop up the drawings as I ogled the piece.
“Why’d you draw this?” I muttered.
“Because you haunt my dreams. Quite literally. I draw what I want to understand and I’ve wanted to understand you for some time.”
I took another moment to soak in the picture and then slid it back into the folder for him with a sigh.
“You know a lot,” I said. “But you don’t know everything. The one with the blue skin. The Gorgos. They’re from tropical waters. If you saw one, she was displaced. There’s been a lot of infighting among my kind. More than I’d like to admit. And if the sons are truly surfacing, they could be migrating.”
“There’s been a lot of infighting among humans as well. There always has been. We move to avoid it and it follows. We have that in common.”
I pulled my knees to my chest and looked up at him as he set the leather folder back on the stool.
“You’re a product of that. Do you regret killing your sister? Your blood sister, I mean.”
I shook my head with a shrug. “No less than I regret killing the men on the Cornwallis.” I dragged my finger across the scar on my throat. “She gave me this. There was a time that I wanted to please her like I wanted to please my mother, but in the end, our shared blood meant so little to me.” I paused for a moment, watching Vidar get dressed, and then glanced back at the folder of sketches. “That drawing. It’s beautiful.”
His eyes met mine and a handsome grin spread crookedly across his lips. Reaching out, he took my hand and lifted me to my feet, pulling me against him.
“Would it surprise you that much to know that you are that beautiful to me?”
“Perhaps.” I ran my finger lightly down the healing cut on Vidar’s chest. “I do not know how to navigate these waters. You think I’m beautiful. I believe you to be charming. With our past—”
“I don’t care about the past anymore,” he grumbled. “There are many names there that will be lost with time. But I’m still making my mark on this world and I won’t have it be a tragic one like those before me.”
“You truly think there is any other mark we can make, you and I? A siren and a pirate.”
“A privateer. We’re different”
“Right. Privateers kill lawfully. Then what do you call what happened to the Widow’s Smile?”
“An accident.”
I almost laughed. Almost.
“We accidentally murdered them all, then.”
“That’s a way to put it, love.”
