Black Pearl

Chapter 47

Oceana's first reaction was one of laughter. She stared at me for a brief second before bursting into a fit, snorting as she went. Her crystal blue eyes squinted and her perfect hair was tousled about as she tossed her head, hands clutching her belly.

I said nothing, just watched her, wondering how any of this could make her laugh. All I could think was that staring at my bloodied hands, feeling the grip on my skin long after the body had gone cold, was nothing to laugh about. Did she not understand what I had been through? Did she not know what this could mean for my future? For our future?

Her eyes opened, focusing on me once more. And when she saw my serious features and the gleam of unshed tears in my eyes, her laughter slowed but did not vanish. 

"Oh Ember, you have always had such a twisted sense of humor. Come on, tell me the truth."

I said nothing, hardly aware if I was blinking or even breathing.

The corners of her mouth turned downwards ever so slightly. "You have to be lying. How could you have murdered his brother? Leo surely wouldn't have let it happen. I know the humans are emotional, but surely there are rules in place to prevent things like that. And, to be fair, if you were going to kill anyone, I would assume it would be River and her mouth. You couldn't kill him. You couldn't hurt anyone. You don't have it in you."

My heart gave out a pitiful twist at my husband's name. God, he was the last thing I wanted to think about right now, my stomach rolling with the images of a crimson coated dagger. "This was long before I met Leo. He has nothing to do with it." I swallowed hard, feeling like my mouth was full of gravel and cotton all at once. "And he doesn't know."

There was no amusement in Oceana's voice now. "That's not possible. We weren't allowed to leave the island. We still aren't. Certainly there is no way that his brother came here."

I stared out into the water, wishing that it was angry, unsettled. But the waves had slowed to a gentle lap. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut. Maybe I should have carried my secret with me to the grave. She clearly didn't believe me, it wasn't too late to laugh it off. But something made me continue. "The queen was right when she said I was fascinated with the human world."

"You were when you were younger," Oceana agreed. "But that stopped shortly after you started carrying the dagg-" To her credit she didn't gasp or curse, but it was probably just the disbelief that kept her collected in that moment. "How did you even get there? And you have no combat training, how could you kill a man? Plus, I know that you would never go alone because we are all well aware of how dangerous humans can be."

Some part of me, the part that wanted to keep everything safe and inside, seemed to have vanished. I only felt numb, not feeling the rocks beneath me, the wind on my skin, or the torment in my soul. "I swam. I stole the royal dagger and I swam. No one would come with me, I knew that, but I wanted to see the human world so badly that I didn't care. Turns out, I didn't need to have formal training to kill a man. I just needed to be desperate."

My sister seemed to choke on her words for a moment, then they all came out at once with wild hand gestures. "I don't believe it. I don't. I know you. I know you! You would never do something like that. You-you just couldn't."

I remembered being like her. I remembered hearing stories about the humans pillaging my species and thinking that a truly awful being had to be responsible. How could anyone take another life? How could anyone sleep at night when they had snatched away a mother, a daughter?

But I didn't really sleep at night, not well. And I now knew that anyone was capable of anything when they were fueled by fear. 

"I was barely out of the water before he was on me," I began, the words falling out of my mouth on their own accord. "I was so stunned by the ships and the clothing and the vendors that I hadn't even realized that I climbed onto the docks. But he spotted me right away. At first he was just talking to me, asking where I had come from. It was when I didn't reply that he got aggressive." I thought saying all of this out loud, reliving it for the first time so completely, would be haunting, would make me ill, but it came out easily, like a relief. "He told the men around him, men I now know must have worked for the crown, that I must have been a mute, an incompetent. His men just cheered him. They told him things I didn't understand at the time, like that he should take me, that no one would miss me, no one would know and no one care."