Chapter 8: Tides of Vengeance
The silence on the deck was louder than the fight had been. The only sounds were Leona’s ragged coughs, the drip of seawater from sodden clothes, and the wet, dying twitch of the tentacle fragment on the wood. The crew stared, frozen, at Vil. He stood silhouetted against the moon-washed sea, breathing like he’d run across an ocean.
Leona pushed himself up on trembling arms, his lungs burning. He spat out the last of the saltwater, the taste of it mixed with bile and something darker—the lingering, psychic slime of Azul’s song. He looked from the twitching piece of flesh to Vil’s heaving shoulders.
“He’s gone?” Leona managed, his voice a shredded thing.
“For now,” Vil said, not looking at him. He was staring at his own hands, turning them over as if checking for stains. The webbing between his fingers was still pronounced, a ghost of his true form. “I damaged him. He’ll need to heal. It buys us time.”
“Time for what?” Ruggie asked, his voice carefully neutral. He hadn’t lowered his own blade.
Vil finally turned. The wild fury was receding, replaced by a chilling, porcelain calm. His amethyst eyes found Leona. “To fulfill a bargain.”
A cold that had nothing to do with his soaked clothes settled in Leona’s bones. He got to his feet, ignoring the protest in his muscles. “What bargain.”
It wasn’t a question.
Vil’s gaze didn’t waver. “He had you. You were drowning. His tentacles were around your heart. I could have ripped his throat out, but it would have been a second too late. You would have been gone.” He spoke with a detached, clinical precision, as if dissecting a failed experiment. “So I offered him a trade. Your life, for a greater value.”
Leona took a step forward. The air crackled. “What value.”
“Souls.” The word dropped between them, simple and absolute. “I promised him the souls of another crew. Twice the number currently aboard this ship. To be delivered to his trench within a fortnight.”
The collective intake of breath from the Savanaclaw crew was a hiss. Jack’s hand went to the pommel of his cutlass. Rook, still dripping at the rail, watched Vil with an unreadable, sorrowful expression.
Leona laughed. It was a harsh, ugly sound. “You promised him a shipment of my men.”
“No,” Vil snapped, the calm fracturing for a second. “Not your men. Another crew. Any other crew. He doesn’t care whose. He just wants the payment.”
“And you think that makes it better?” Leona closed the distance between them. He was taller, broader, but Vil didn’t give an inch. The scent of lilacs and deep ocean brine clung to him. “You just volunteered me to become a fucking reaper for that thing. To lure how many innocent men to their deaths? Twenty? Thirty?”
“Do you see innocent men when you look in the mirror, Captain?” Vil’s voice was a silken whip. “You are a pirate. You steal. You fight. You kill when it serves you. This is no different. It’s commerce.”
“It’s not my commerce!” Leona’s shout echoed off the water. “I didn’t agree to this. You don’t get to barter with my life and then hand me the bill!”
“Then you should have died!” Vil’s control shattered. The words tore out of him, raw and resonant enough to make the rigging hum. “You were seconds from it! Your vision was gone. Your lungs were full. I felt your pulse stutter through the water! Was I supposed to let it stop? Was I supposed to watch him crush you and wear your skin next?” He was shaking now, a fine tremor that ran through his entire body. “He would have. He would have climbed back onto this ship wearing your face, your voice, and commanded your crew to sail into his waiting rocks. And they would have followed, because they love you. So tell me, which is the greater evil? Condemning a ship of strangers you’ve never met, or letting every soul you care for be devoured by a nightmare wearing your smile?”
The truth of it hung in the salt air, brutal and inescapable. Leona could see it, horribly clear: Azul, with his green eyes and lazy smile, ordering Ruggie to adjust the sails. Jack, loyal to a fault, following his captain’s double to the brink of hell.
Leona’s defiance drained away, leaving a hollow, cold practicality. He was a strategist. This was just another trap, one he’d already been shoved into. Fighting Vil now was pointless. The deal was struck.
He turned away, walking stiffly to the rail. He looked out at the dark, calm sea that had just tried to eat him. “Who.”
“What?” Vil’s voice was quieter now, frayed.
“Which crew. You must have someone in mind. You don’t make a deal without knowing the price.”
A pause. Then, “The Gilded Chance. A merchant slaver out of the Silver Isles. Heavily armed. Sixty hands, mostly press-ganged or convicted. They make a run past the Siren’s Crags at the new moon. Three nights from now.”
Leona closed his eyes. A slaver. That was Vil’s moral salve. Not innocent traders, but cruel men dealing in human misery. It was a distinction, but it felt thin, greasy.
“You know a lot about their schedule.”
“Azul has many songbirds in many cages,” Vil said, his tone flat once more. “The information is reliable. They will pass the Crags. We will be there. We draw them into the straits. I… handle the rest. Azul collects his payment. Our debt is cleared.”
“Our debt,” Leona echoed, sourly.
“Yes.” Vil moved to stand beside him at the rail, not touching. “You owe me your life. I owe Azul a shipment. We are both in arrears. We clear it together.”
Leona looked at him. In the moonlight, Vil’s profile was pure, clean lines—a statue of a vengeful angel. The necklace was a dark line against his throat. “And after? The coordinates?”
“After,” Vil said, meeting his gaze, “I lead you to the lair. As agreed. A bargain for a bargain. This… interlude changes nothing.”
But it did. Everything had changed. The straightforward map to vengeance was now paved with the souls of sixty men. Leona felt the weight of it, a new anchor dragging at his ribs.
He pushed off the rail. “Ruggie. Set a course for the Siren’s Crags. Full sail at dawn. Jack, get this… garbage off my deck.” He gestured to the tentacle flesh. “Burn it.”
He didn’t look back at Vil as he headed for his cabin. The door shut with a firm, final click. Inside, the dark was a relief. He stripped off his soaked shirt, the fabric peeling away like a second skin. He could still feel the ghost-pressure of those tentacles, the wrongness of that stolen face.
He sat on the edge of his berth, head in his hands. A pirate, yes. A killer, when necessary. But this was different. This was predation of a purer kind. It wasn’t a fight over gold or a ship; it was laying a trap with a siren’s song as the bait. It was wholesale slaughter as a transactional fee.
A soft knock, then the door opened without waiting for an answer. Vil slipped inside, closing it behind him. He had dried off and found a fresh, simple linen shirt from somewhere. It was too big, hanging off one shoulder. He looked younger, oddly vulnerable.
“What,” Leona said, not lifting his head.
“You’re angry.”
“Astute.”
“You’re angry because you have a conscience. I didn’t think you did.”
Leona looked up then, a bitter smile twisting his lips. “Yeah, well. It’s a recent acquisition. Comes and goes.”
Vil leaned back against the door. “They are slavers, Leona.”
“I know what they are.”
“The world will not mourn them.”
“I’m not the world. I’m the guy who has to deliver them.” He stood, pacing the short length of the cabin. “You made the choice for me. That’s what pisses me off. You didn’t ask. You just decided my life was worth sixty others and moved on.”
“Would you have said yes?”
“No!”
“Then my choice was correct.” Vil’s logic was infuriatingly solid. “You are alive to be angry about it. That was the only outcome I was interested in.”
Leona stopped pacing, staring at him. “Why?”
The word hung there, too big for the small room.
Vil looked away, towards the porthole and the slice of night sea. “The coordinates to the lair are no good to me if you are dead. You are the weapon. I merely aim you.”
“Bullshit.”
Vil’s head snapped back, his eyes flashing. “What do you want me to say? That I couldn’t bear the thought of you ceasing to be? That the sound of your heartbeat is now a song I prefer to my own?” He laughed, a sharp, brittle sound. “You are a means to an end, Captain. A very irritating, stubborn, surprisingly resilient means to an end. I preserved my asset. Nothing more.”
But he was lying. They both knew it. The fury in the water, the visceral horror at the violation—it hadn’t been about an asset. It had been personal.
Leona saw it, the cracks in the porcelain. The faint tremble in Vil’s fingers where they gripped his own elbows. The shadow in his eyes that had nothing to do with Azul and everything to do with the cost of the choice he’d made.
“Get out,” Leona said, his voice tired.
Vil stiffened. For a second, he looked like he’d argue. Then the mask slid back into place, smooth and impenetrable. He turned and left without another word.
Leona listened to his retreating footsteps. He looked at his own hands, imagining them steering the ship towards an appointed massacre. He was a weapon, Vil had said. Aimed at a monster, loaded with someone else’s sin.
He lay back on his berth, staring at the timber ceiling. The gentle rock of the ship felt different now. It felt like a cradle for a executioner.
Three days. They had three days to sail towards a place where the water was said to sing with the voices of the damned. He would have to look his crew in the eye and give the orders that would make them accomplices. He would have to watch Vil work, and see the beautiful, terrible reality of what he was.
And after, if they survived the delivery, they would hunt a different monster.
Leona’s mouth was a grim line in the dark. He hadn’t wanted a crown, back home. He’d wanted freedom from the weight of decisions. But here he was, on a stolen ship, his freedom bound by a siren’s debt, about to bear a weight he’d never asked for.
He closed his eyes, but sleep was a long time coming. The only thing waiting in the dark was the memory of tentacles, and the certainty that when they reached the Crags, the real nightmare would begin. Not with roaring cannons, but with a song so beautiful men would swim gratefully to their doom.
And he would let it happen. To save his own skin, and the skins of everyone on this ship. The arithmetic of survival was a filthy, desperate thing.
Outside, the waves whispered against the hull, a constant, mocking applause.
The cabin door clicked shut, a sound of absolute dismissal. Vil stood in the narrow, dark hallway, the rough wood of the door mere inches from his nose. He didn’t move. The ship’s gentle sway felt like the world tilting beneath his feet, trying to spill him into some unfathomable dark.
Get out.
The words echoed, sharper than any blade Azul could conjure. They carved through the residual adrenaline, the fierce and terrible pride of his victory in the water. They left nothing behind but a cold, hollow vacuum.
He had made a calculation. A strategic trade. Sixty vile lives for one… complicated one. It was arithmetic, clean and precise. It had been, in the moment, too easy. The number fell from his lips without hesitation, because the alternative was watching the light leave Leona’s defiant green eyes forever. The bargain was made before his mind had even fully formed the thought.
Now, standing in the silence Leona had imposed, the equation decomposed. It wasn’t clean. It was filthy. He had not just bartered lives; he had assumed a god’s authority, deciding who was worthy of the deep and who got to keep breathing. He had become a procurer for Azul. A merchant of souls.
Leona’s voice from the tavern, weeks ago now, surfaced in the murk of his mind. You’re not a monster. You’re just stuck. The words had felt, at the time, like a key scraping in a rusty lock. A possibility.
Now, they felt like a joke. A cruel one.
The hollow in his chest caved in. A hot, sharp pressure built behind his eyes, a sensation so foreign and unwelcome it was a panic in itself. He couldn’t be here. He couldn’t let this terrible, human weakness break open where anyone might see.
He moved, a silent glide down the hall and up the companionway. The night watch nodded to him, their expressions a mix of awe and wariness after the display on deck. He ignored them, crossing to the starboard rail where the shadow was deepest. He didn’t pause. He placed his hands on the smooth wood and vaulted over, his body slicing into the black water with barely a sound.
The cold was a shock, a baptism. He dove deep, away from the ship’s glow, until the pressure was a comfort on his skin. Here, in the absolute dark, he finally stopped. He floated, suspended. His body trembled.
A sob ripped through him, a raw, ugly thing that vibrated in the water. It was followed by another, wrenching and silent, all the force in his convulsing chest. He brought his hands to his face, as if to claw the feeling out.
His fingers brushed the chain around his neck. He clutched the moonstone pendant, the hard edges biting into his palm. Leona had given him this. A piece of the sky, he’d said. A thing of dry, solid beauty. Vil held onto it like an anchor, the only solid thing in a world he had just morally incinerated.
Who could ever love a monster? The thought wasn’t a question. It was a verdict. It echoed in the water-filled quiet of his mind, louder than any siren’s song. He was what the stories said. A beautiful, treacherous thing that traded in death. He had just proven every legend right.
He cried until his ribs ached. The salt of the sea and the salt of his tears became indistinguishable, one endless, mourning ocean.
In his quarters, Leona finally drifted into a thin, troubled sleep. It was fractured by dreams of grasping, faceless tentacles and a song that sounded like Vil laughing. He jerked awake an hour later, his heart thudding dully against his sternum.
The ship was quiet. Too quiet. Then he heard it.
Not a song. A broken, muffled sound, carried by the water and amplified through the hull against his ear where it pressed to the mattress. It was the opposite of melody. It was the sound of a structure collapsing.
He knew what it was immediately. He’d heard men cry before—in pain, in fear, in despair after a lost fight. This was different. This was a solitary, suffocated anguish, smothered in the sea where it thought no one could hear.
Vil.
The guilt, which had been a slow, cold coil in his gut, suddenly had fangs. It gnawed upward, piercing his diaphragm, tightening his throat.
He sat up, the blanket pooling around his waist. He stared at the dark wall, listening to the silent aftermath of those hollow vibrations through the wood. His anger from earlier felt cheap now, a petty flame guttering out in the face of this deep-water sorrow.
He was angry at Vil for making the choice. But wasn’t he angrier at the situation that forced it? At Azul, at the entire fucked-up ocean? Vil had looked at a ledger where Leona’s life was on one side and a blank space was on the other, and he’d filled it with the only currency he knew would be accepted. It was a brutal, ruthless salvation.
And the cost was sixty men. Slavers. The world’s garbage. He tried to cling to that, to the righteousness of it. They chained people. They broke families. They deserved the deep.
But did he deserve to be the one who sent them there? To use Vil’s voice as the lure? Was his own life worth becoming a ferryman for Azul’s larder?
The guilt chewed deeper, and he couldn’t isolate its source. Was it the looming mass of sixty deaths? Or was it the shattered sound coming through his ship’s hull? Was it because he’d called Vil an asset, a means to an end, and then thrown him out when the moral cost of saving that asset became clear?
He’d called him not a monster. Then treated him like one the moment Vil acted from a place so monstrously pragmatic it had saved his life.
“Damn it,” he muttered into the dark.
He swung his legs over the side of the berth and stood. He didn’t bother with a shirt. He walked out of his cabin, the floorboards cool under his bare feet. The deck was empty, the watch discreetly looking elsewhere. He went to the starboard rail where he’d last seen Vil.
The water was a sheet of black glass, reflecting the slice of moon. There was no ripple, no sign.
Leona leaned on the rail, his gaze scanning the dark. He didn’t call out. He just waited, listening to the lap of water against the hull, hoping the horrible, quiet crying had stopped.
He was a pirate. He was a killer. He was a man who had just been given a second life he hadn’t asked for, paid for in a currency that stained the hands of the one who procured it. And the weight of that debt, he realized, wasn’t just in the souls owed to Azul. It was in the shattered creature currently hiding from him in the sea, holding a piece of polished rock like it was the last solid truth in the world.
The guilt wasn’t about the sixty men. Not really.
It was about forcing the person who saved him to feel like a monster for doing it.
It was about forcing the person who saved him to feel like a monster for doing it.
The realization sat in his gut, cold and undeniable. He gripped the rail. The empty sea offered no answers, just a dark mirror. He couldn't leave it like this. Not with that shattered sound still echoing in the bones of his ship.
“Vil,” he called out, his voice cutting through the night’s quiet.
Only the waves answered, slapping the hull with a hollow rhythm. Leona leaned further over, scanning the inky water. He saw nothing but his own fragmented reflection in the moonlight. “Vil. Stop moping and come back up.”
Silence. A profound, submersion silence. He knew the siren was down there, wrapped in the dark and his own misery. He could feel it, a wrong note in the ocean’s usual song. Vil didn’t want to come back up. He wanted to vanish into the element that defined him, to let the salt and the pressure absolve him of his choices.
Leona sighed, a rough sound of surrender. He straightened up, kicked off his boots. The deck was cool beneath his bare feet. “Fine,” he muttered to no one. “If you won’t come up, I’m coming in.”
He didn’t give himself time to think. He vaulted over the rail in a clean arc, slicing into the black water.
The cold was a shock, but a familiar one now. It punched the air from his lungs, a bright, sharp pain. He opened his eyes, salt stinging. The world was a murky, green-black void, speckled with plankton like distant, drowned stars. He kicked downward, his limbs pushing against the resistant dark.
A blur of motion, faster than thought, shot past him. Then a hand gripped his arm, yanking him upward with impossible strength. They broke the surface together in a burst of foam and gasping air.
Vil’s face was inches from his, panic and fury warring in his wide, amethyst eyes. Water streamed from his hair, plastering it to his sharp cheekbones. “Are you insane?!” he spat, the words a hiss of spray. “You can’t just— what if I hadn’t been here? What if something else was?”
Leona treaded water, breathing hard. He just looked at him, at the genuine, bewildered anger etched on that perfect face. A slow smirk spread across his own features, his hair plastered dark and salted to his scalp. “There you are.”
Vil stared, his mouth slightly open. The anger seemed to dissolve, leaving confusion in its wake. He was still holding Leona’s arm, his grip tight enough to bruise. “You are an idiot,” he said, but the heat was gone from his voice. It was just a statement.
“Yeah,” Leona agreed, his breath starting to even. The water was cold, but Vil’s hand on his arm was warm. “Takes one to know one.”
He treaded water for another moment, then nodded towards the ship. “Come on. We’re having this talk where I can feel my toes.” He began a slow, steady swim towards the rope ladder hanging from the rail. After a pause, he heard the soft, powerful swish of Vil’s tail propelling him alongside.
They climbed back onto the deck, one after the other, dripping and shivering in the night air. Ruggie was suddenly there, tossing them both thick, scratchy blankets without a word. He took one look at their faces—Leona’s determined smirk, Vil’s shell-shocked expression—and retreated with a knowing shake of his head.
Leona scrubbed the blanket over his head and shoulders. Vil stood motionless, the wool draped over him like a king’s ruined robe, his tail already gone, replaced by water-darkened trousers. He looked lost.
“You scared Ruggie,” Leona said, a weak attempt at normalcy. “Thought you’d swum off for good.”
“I considered it,” Vil replied flatly. He wasn’t looking at Leona.
“Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“That. The… martyr thing.” Leona stepped closer, water pooling at his feet. “You made a call. A shitty one. In a shitty situation. Welcome to being captain. You weigh the lives you have against the lives you need, and you live with the math.”
Vil finally turned his head. His eyes were red-rimmed, though it could have been the saltwater. “Your math stinks.”
A surprised, rough laugh escaped Leona. “Tell me about it.” He ran a hand through his damp hair. “Look. You saved my life. I yelled at you for the price tag. That’s… that’s the deal. That’s what this is. We’re both pissed about it.”
“I’m not pissed,” Vil whispered, looking down at his own hands clenched in the blanket. “I am… ruined. I am everything the songs say. A merchant of souls. I bartered for you like a… a trinket.”
Leona was quiet for a long moment. The only sound was the creak of the ship and the distant cry of a night bird. “You think I’ve never traded lives?” he asked, his voice low. “Every time I choose a route, every time I order an attack, every time I walk away from a sinking ship I could save, I’m trading. You just had to do it out loud, to his face. The math’s the same.”
“It isn’t.” Vil’s voice was firm now, edged with a bitter clarity. “You fight. You risk. Sometimes people die. This… I will sing them to their deaths. I will make them want it. There is no fight. There is only a smile and a knife in the dark.”
“And they’re slavers, Vil.” Leona’s tone hardened. “They’re not fishermen. They’re not traders. They’re men who chain other men in holds. If the world has a garbage heap, they’re on it.”
“That does not make me the garbage collector!” The words burst from him, loud enough to echo. He flinched at his own volume, pulling the blanket tighter. “It just makes me another monster in a world full of them. A more beautiful one, perhaps. More poetic. But a monster all the same.”
Leona looked at him, really looked. He saw the prince from the stories, the flawless terror of the deep. And he saw the man who’d stared at fireworks like they were magic, who’d confessed he’d never eaten food made with intention. He saw both, fused together by misery and salt.
“Yeah,” Leona said, simply. “Maybe you are.” He saw Vil flinch, but pressed on. “And I’m a pirate. And my brother is a king. And Azul is a squid bastard in a cave. We’re all something. The question is, what are you gonna do with it?”
Vil blinked. “What?”
“You made this deal to save me. Okay. The debt’s on my tab, too. So we’re gonna pay it. Together.” Leona’s green eyes held a ferocious, pragmatic light. “We’re gonna find the Gilded Chance. We’re gonna lure it into the Crags. You’ll do your part. And I’ll do mine.”
“Your part?” Vil asked, suspicious.
“I’m the captain. I make the plan.” A sharp, familiar grin touched Leona’s lips, devoid of humor but full of cunning. “If we’re delivering sixty souls, we’re doing it on my terms. Not just yours. And definitely not just his.”
A faint, fragile spark lit in Vil’s exhausted eyes. It wasn’t hope. It was more like the recognition of a shared trench, a common enemy. “What are you thinking?”
Leona glanced around the empty deck, then back at Vil. “I’m thinking a siren’s song is a powerful weapon. But a pirate’s ambush is a messy, complicated thing. Maybe we can use both. Maybe we can make the math work for us.”
He stepped closer, lowering his voice. “Azul gets his souls. He doesn’t specify their condition, does he? He just wants them delivered.”
Understanding began to dawn on Vil’s face, slow and cautious. “You mean…”
“I mean we have three days to figure out how to turn a delivery into a fight.” Leona’s smirk returned, genuine this time. “You gave up your moral high ground to pull me out of the deep. Fine. Welcome to the mud. Now let’s get dirty.”
He turned and walked towards his cabin, then paused at the door. He looked back over his shoulder. Vil was still standing there, a soaked statue under a rough blanket, but his head was held higher. “Get some sleep. Tomorrow, we start planning a shipwreck.”
The door closed behind him. Vil stood on the deck for a long time, the blanket slowly warming him. The hollow ache was still there, a cavern in his chest. But it wasn’t empty anymore. Leona had thrown something into it—not forgiveness, not absolution, but a shared purpose. A plan.
He looked down at his hands. Monster hands. Pirate hands. They were, for now, the same hands on the same wheel.
He walked to the rail once more, but not to jump. He looked out at the path to the Siren’s Crags, at the sea that was both his home and his prison. He touched the moonstone at his throat, the cool surface a comfort.
Maybe one could be a monster and a weapon. Maybe one could be a siren and an ally. The categories were blurring, and for the first time, that didn't feel like a failure. It felt like a chance.
He heard Leona moving in the cabin behind him, the sound of charts being unrolled. The quiet, decisive scratch of a pen.
The math hadn't changed. Sixty souls for one. But the equation was no longer static. They were going to rewrite it. Together.