Blood Ties

Chapter 20: Declan

They neared the end of their journey. Nadia had yet to comment on his proposal, and he pretended he had never offered it.

Declan would be almost sad to leave the ship, if it weren't for the malevolent captain and his far more malicious seasickness. On the journey, it had felt like a space separate from obligations or duties or any sort of societal role. He could be the most raw form of himself, not needing to fit into any categories or labels that others placed upon him. He could see Nadia, unfettered by titles others would place on her. So much had happened in these weeks at sea that he felt like it had been nearly a year.

Yet soon they would set foot on land, and everything would become real again. Olivia Delrose would truly be dead. His father would place genuine expectations on him to produce a key, a magical artifact, and all he would have was this girl.

This girl, whose introduction to court could go one of many ways. She could be added to a harem. Treated as a novelty. Trapped as a prisoner. None of them were right - none of them felt right. Not to him, not now, not after all that had happened.

He would go to bed and think about that day in Vytia, when they'd been thrown into that cargo hold. When the wine had spilled on her, when his fingers had grazed a part of her body that he was certain no other man had touched. Not even scandalous, barely even intimate, yet more vulnerable than any other moment he'd spent with another woman before.

And now they were nearing Astroia, and all of it would shatter, fading into nothingness.

All of what they were, what they could be, sinking into the bottom of the ocean.

But not yet. Not today.

He exited his chamber, straightening his deep green cravat. Declan would make the most of his time on this ship. He always did.

On his way to the dining room for breakfast, he ran into the ship's captain, Captain Hayes. Normally, Declan would have disregarded the man's name, as he did often to those who were not useful to him or absolutely essential to the tasks he wished to accomplish. But not this ship's captain. Not a man who had threatened Nadia's life, and, when they were at the end of this voyage, still had not made it clear how Nadia had been pushed off of the ship beyond veiled promises and guttural threats.

"Good morning, Prince." The captain was whistling a sea shanty.

Declan despised sea shanties in the same way that he despised bawdy drinking songs: they told too many myths with slivers of truth, and were always packaged in that haunting yet bawdy way that reminded him of love lost. No, he had far too much of that in his life already.

"Good morning, Captain Hayes," he said, striding past the man.

Captain Hayes stuck out an arm physically prevented him from moving. Though a few inches shorter than Declan, he was a barrel-chested man, the buttons of his shirt straining across his trunk. "Before you go, I wish to speak with you."

"Then for the gods's sakes, speak," he said, waving an arm. He felt the knife strapped to his thigh, the one in its sheath at his boot, a dozen weapons all over his body and hanging from his weapons belt. He was ever-vigilant nowadays, not entirely sure that the slavers' ship they had encountered in Vytia hadn't been an act of ill circumstance. "I'm sure neither of us have time to waste."

Captain Hayes dropped his arm, apparently so easily convinced. It lessened the view of him in Declan's eyes, if that was even possible, to see a man be so easily duped and so easily persuaded to give up. "I know who pushed your... priestess off of the side of the ship."

"Who?" he asked.

"Rowena Mills," he said. "Your servant girl. My men saw it with their own eyes."