The cell they'd shoved Zelene into was smaller than the hold, but somehow felt colder — a narrow space with a single barred window too high to reach, straw scattered thin across the floor, the lock heavy and final when it clicked shut behind her.
She sat with her back against the wall, knees drawn to her chest, hands still raw from the rope even after they'd finally cut it free. Her skin still crawled where Marrow's fingers had touched her jaw, and no amount of scrubbing her sleeve against the spot seemed to make the feeling lift.
He looked at me like I was already sold. Like the only question left was the price.
She pressed the heels of her hands hard against her eyes, breathing slow, forcing the shaking in her chest to still.
Don't fall apart. Not now. Not while he's still walking around this ship believing he's already won.
Anger came easier than fear, and she let it, welcomed it, because anger at least gave her something to hold onto that wasn't helplessness.
He does this to women constantly. Not just me. Every single one of them in that hold below. This has been happening for months, and this whole town let it.
She thought of Della, still somewhere in that crowded room, still believing rescue was coming. She thought of the woman with grey in her hair who'd stopped counting the days. She thought of every frightened face that had turned toward her hours ago, hoping, however faintly, that Zelene actually had a plan worth trusting.
I still do. I have to still have one.
—
Two cells down, Finn paced the narrow length of his own cage like a caged animal too furious to sit still, blood dried dark along his jaw, fists clenched at his sides.
"I want to kill him," he said, not for the first time. "I have never wanted to kill a man in my entire life, and I want to kill that one so badly I can taste it."
Silas said nothing. He sat against the far wall, knees drawn up, staring at nothing, his split lip still bleeding faintly at the corner.
"Did you hear me?" Finn snapped, rounding on him.
"I heard you." Silas's voice came out flat, distant, entirely stripped of its usual charm.
Finn studied him a long moment, some of his own anger giving way to confusion. "You've barely said a word since they locked us in here."
Silas didn't answer right away. His jaw worked once, twice, like he was trying to find words for something that refused to fit into any shape he understood.
"I don't know what's wrong with me," he said finally, quiet.
"What do you mean?"
"I've seen worse than what happened up there." Silas's voice had gone rough, low. "Three weeks on this ship. I've watched men do far crueler things to far more women than that. I trained myself not to feel it, because feeling it meant I couldn't do my job, couldn't stay calm enough to actually get anyone out." He pressed the heel of his hand hard against his own sternum, like something there ached badly enough to need physical pressure. "But when he touched her — "
He stopped.
Finn crouched slowly in front of him, some of his own fury quieting into something more careful. "When he touched her, what?"
"I wanted to burn this whole ship down with him still on it," Silas said, voice cracking slightly. "Not just stop him. Not just save her. I wanted him to suffer for it, specifically, in a way I've never wanted for any of the other men I've watched do worse." He shook his head slowly, disbelieving of his own reaction. "I've known her for one day, Finn. One day. Why does it feel like I've known her my whole life? Why does watching him touch her feel like watching someone touch something that was always supposed to be mine to protect?"
Finn went very still, something working behind his own eyes.
"You don't know," he said slowly. "Do you. About what she is."
Silas looked up, sharp. "What do you mean, what she is?"
Finn hesitated, weighing how much wasn't his secret to give away — but something in Silas's raw, bewildered anguish made the decision for him, some instinct insisting this mattered more than caution right now.
"There's a reason her hair looks like that," Finn said carefully. "A reason people like you — Corvin, Nym — end up feeling pulled toward her before you understand why."
Silas's breath caught. "Corvin. Nym?"
"You'll meet them," Finn said. "If we get out of this." He studied Silas's face, watching something dawning there, slow and disbelieving. "You already suspect, don't you. Some part of you already knows exactly why you feel what you're feeling."
Silas didn't answer right away, staring instead at his own hands, turning them over slowly in the dim light — searching, Finn realized, for something he half expected to find there and hadn't yet.
"I don't feel anything," Silas said quietly. "No warmth. No pull, the way you're describing it. Just this—" His jaw tightened. "This rage. This need to protect her that doesn't make sense for someone I only met yesterday."
"Maybe that's exactly what it is," Finn said. "Just slower to show itself in you than it was in them."
Silas said nothing to that, only stared at his own open palms in the dark, something old and unnamed twisting behind his eyes — grief, maybe, or recognition, or some tangled combination of both that he wasn't ready yet to call by its true name.
Above them, footsteps crossed the deck, heavy and unhurried, and somewhere beyond the hull, the water carried them further still from shore — toward whatever Marrow intended next, and toward a reckoning neither cell full of furious, helpless men currently had any way to stop.