Page 181 of Tempest

“First you rob me. Then you hold me ransom.” She tipped her head, curls falling. “What will you do the next time we meet, Valerian Kane?”

She expected him to laugh, to toss back his golden head and grin at her, to play the carefree captain. Instead, his gaze sharpened, the tempest green threatening to pull her under. He looked as he had on the Credence, when he kicked down the door to her cabin. Burned and remade, she thought then. A true son of the Lyrian Sea.

“I’m more interested in who you will be when we do,” he answered, eyes flickering over her face.

“So am I.”

They lingered, staring, the smell of blood finally fading from the air. Until there was just Valerian again, the heat and salt of him. And the danger too. Cat wanted to touch him more than she wanted anything else in the world. But her hands did not move, and neither did his.

The cabin spun once more, the world shifting onto a new axis, with a new path ahead. Where it led, Cat could not say. But she was eager to find out.

It took all her will to step away, skirting around Valerian to get out of the cabin. She passed the desk, grabbing for the pistol without thought. Indeed, it felt good in her hand, a calming weight.

Valerian cleared his throat, stopping her in her tracks.

“I believe that belongs to me,” he said, eyes drifting to the adorned flintlock still in her grasp.

Cat glanced down, briefly startled by the gun.

He towered over her, but somehow she felt a little taller, a little more on solid ground. I am alive, Ryman is dead. The scales had not balanced, but they swung more in her favor, inching towards an even playing field.

“Of course,” she murmured, pressing the pistol back into his hand.

For a blistering second, his fingers enveloped hers. Again, she felt the jolt, lightning in its wake.

“May the sea always sing for you, Valerian,” she breathed.

He answered with a grin, too bright and bitter. She tried to commit it to memory, wondering if she would ever see him again. On what new horizon they might meet.

“May the sea always sing for you, Cat.”

Chapter Thirty-Three After

“WHAT CHANGED, VALERIAN?”

Her eyes trailed, tracing the open collar of his loose shirt, running over familiar ground. Scars she knew better than her own. The braiding lines of an old tattoo. In the dim light, in the writhing shadows, she wondered if the Arcayan ink moved in time with his beating pulse.

“Besides the world itself?” Valerian scoffed, still beyond the water line, keeping some distance between them. He seemed to itch under her investigation. “You’re right, the Meridian has returned. And with it the undeniable truth of our extinction, if we do not band together in our entirety. As we should have before.”

Cat lashed out, kicking the water, cursing the heart she knew so well.

“The moment for alliances has passed,” she hissed, taking a raging step forwards, back onto the sand. “Even if you somehow collected every pirate who could still hold a saber, every ship still afloat—it would not be enough.”

Her jaw clenched and she thought about throwing him into the shallows, to hold his head underwater until he saw reason or drowned. But Valerian dismissed her, as he had so many times before. He made her vision slant red, an angry heat washing through her.

It was the usual journey of the old argument, the path walked so many times, their footprints carved a bitter road. But something was different in Valerian now, barely there—but unmistakable.

Cat eyed him through her frustration, trying to read the quiet resolve on his face. And the weariness too. The shadows beneath his eyes, the worn look on his face. They worried her as much as any storm on the wind.

“What am I missing?” she murmured, taking another step closer.

He did not move, unflinching, refusing to cede any ground. Cat took it as an invitation and she scrutinized him one more time, trying to see past the hard angle of his jaw or the storm rush of his eyes. Her gaze traveled down his arm, to the rolled sleeve and the forearm bared to the moonlight.

A line of tattooed diamonds stared up at her, each one an island, holy and strange.

Her body shifted, as if the ship tipped beneath her, and Valerian pulled his arm away, obscuring the tattoo with a sudden jerk.

“Go back to the ship, Cat,” he bit out.