I don’t notice what they look like.
These aren’t young Greenpeace recruits. There are no Greenpeace uniforms, no leader coming forward to greet me. Only a collection of men, muscled to the last one of them, like Poseidon’s crew.
Unlike Poseidon’s crew, they’re not treating me like it’s normal for me to be here.
They’re looking at me like they want to eat me.
Tongues run over teeth. Eyes shine. The man who helped me onboard strokes a thumb over the butt of his pistol.
This is not Greenpeace.
I am not saved.
I break into a run, one shoe missing, one shoe slipping on the deck. They let me get to the railing across the stern before one of them wraps my arm in his fists and squeezes tight enough to bruise. Poseidon’s ship is already small in the distance. I struggle against him, trying my best to jump. I don’t care about the propellers or the engine or anything else.
“Not for you,” the man says, gesturing to the ocean. And then he drags me backward, away from my last hope.
17
Poseidon
I must look insane, climbing onto the ship. I feel insane. I feel like a waterspout, a tornado over sea, whipping water into a high-velocity killing machine.
Nicholas’s expression confirms it. “Do you need—”
“Go after them.” The sea clings to me, trying to pull me back over the railing and into itself. It’s correct. With Ashley on that ship, that’s where I belong.
“They’re Somali pirates. You know we should fall back.”
“Fuck falling back.” Nicholas has a rifle in his hands, but his face is the one to go pale when I step closer, the sea streaming off me and enough acid fear in my veins to kill me. “Do you want to die today?”
He squares up with me, never mind the fact that he’s smaller and I will beat him in a fight. “I’m trying to keep us alive.”
Those words burrow themselves under my skin. I’ve said them before. I can feel the shape of them in my mouth. I had my reasons then, but I don’t have any now. Not when the pearl I want is on that ship. Not when this particular crew of Somali pirates has the pearl I’ve been searching for.
And Ashley.
“Is this you disobeying direct orders? Very fucking brave, Nicholas.”
“I just think—”
I grab his shirt above the rifle and slam him into the wall. “Don’t think, fucker. Run.”
Nicholas doesn’t think. He runs. I’m not even through the door on the way to the captain’s quarters when I feel the ship change position.
My first mate does deserve a limited amount of praise for keeping his head when I jumped in after Ashley. He was the one to get the crew to hold fire so they didn’t hit her in the water—or hit me. He was the one who sent them below deck when we couldn’t respond with return fire.
He is the one person on this ship who ever tries to disagree with me. That’s why he’s the first mate. He might’ve ended that encounter with a mild concussion, but he went for it anyway. It takes stones, even when you’re holding a rifle.
The praise will have to be later, when I don’t feel this murderous.
My room doesn’t help this at all.
It’s a monument to what happened yesterday. Ashley’s new clothes are a colorful waterfall off the side of my bed and strewn across the floor. The sundress she wore yesterday is abandoned up near the pillow.
It smells like her. Like the sunscreen I bought her at one of those shops and a hint of the perfume of the first boutique and her skin, her skin.
I don’t know when I pressed it up to my face, don’t know how it got there, but the moment I discover the dress in my hands, I’m ripping it apart like I’m going to find her inside.
The remains of the fabric fall to the floor, and I cover them with my own wet clothes. The shower feels like punishment. I force myself, because the sea salt on my skin is doing its best to convince me to swim after her, like a fucking idiot. I have to face the paper bag from the Mexican pharmacy there by the sink when I get out. Ashley never touched the things inside.
I want to knock them onto the floor but settle for crushing the bag in my hand and shoving it under the sink.
There’s a noise in the bedroom.
I ignore it while I put on the first clothes that come to hand. A black T-shirt. Shorts. They’re not what I would normally wear on deck, and I can’t bring myself to care. But the sound doesn’t stop. It’s obnoxious enough that I go looking for it.
I find it in the waterlogged shorts hiding the corpse of Ashley’s sundress.
It’s my phone.
Ringing.
What the fuck.
It’s ringing when I take it out of my pocket. The damn things are indestructible. I thought this time it would finally give in, but no. No. Not only is the phone still alive, but my brother Zeus is using it to call me.
I hate him so much that I answer.
“I’m busy,” I snap, stalking to the window to look out over the sea. A storm front is coming in fast. They do, out on the ocean. Blue skies one minute, midnight the next. “I can’t save your ass right now, no matter what—”
“She’s born,” he says, and then he laughs, sounding so devoid of everything I know about him that it shocks me into silence. Zeus never laughs like this. Not without an edge of violence. “She’s born. I have a daughter.”
Zeus being allowed to have a child strikes me as so unfair, so irresponsible, that I lean my forehead against the window and concentrate on not breaking it. Zeus, who until very recently spent his time running the most sought-after brothel in his city and probably the world. Him. “When do the men arrive to take her away?”
He laughs again. “Fuck you, Poseidon. No one could take you away, could they? No. I would murder them. You’re not supposed to say that to a baby, but it’s true, isn’t it?”
Hurt seizes my chest. There are other daughters out on the ocean now whose fathers didn’t murder anyone for them, much less send the agreed-upon sum of money to save their lives. I pride myself on abiding by the agreements I make, but the fact is that Joseph Donnelly made the first mistake. He let Ashley out of his sight to begin with.
Another voice in the background says, “Brigit wants the baby back. Are you on the phone?”
“Is that Hades?”
Hades, who lives in a mountain fortress of his own design with his wife and his dog and now his new baby. Hades, who takes diamonds from the underworld and sells cold, icy beauty to the highest bidders.
“Who else would it be?” Zeus asks.
“Anyone else on the fucking planet.” Not that I care, but Zeus and Hades don’t visit each other, as a rule. It hasn’t been a year since I had to sail food to Hades after Zeus sent a mercenary army to cut off the mountain from the city. Don’t get me started on our sister Demeter. After that little episode, I thought they would go to their respective corners of the world and leave each other alone.
“Brigit wanted the private hospital experience.”
I have a vague memory of Persephone saying something about this when she called with news of her own new baby—about how Hades has his own hospital wing on his mountain, his own staff, and how Zeus and Brigit had come to be with them for the birth. The memory is vague because I can hardly stand to hear her voice. It’s too much like Demeter’s. It hurts too much to hear it properly. “The hospital wing you donated wasn’t enough?”