I wasn’t just talking about what happened that morning at the gambit. It was everything. It was Holland and Bastian and West burning Zola’s ships. It was for everything he didn’t want to tell me about what he’d done for Saint. When I’d stepped off the Marigold, I’d set our course to this moment. And I didn’t want to admit that West looked different to me now. That he looked more like my father.

He touched my face, fingertips sliding into my hair.

I didn’t know what he’d done in the Narrows, trying to find me. But the weight of it was heavy on him. He was darkened with it. In that moment, I only wanted to feel his rough hands on my skin and swallow the air around him until I could taste him on my tongue. To feel as if I were hidden in his shadow.

His face lowered until his mouth hovered over mine, and he kissed me so gently that the burn of tears instantly erupted behind my eyes. My hands moved down the shape of his back and he leaned into me, inhaling deeply, as if he was pulling the warmth of me inside of him. I put what Clove told me out of my mind, closing my eyes and imagining that we were in the lantern light of West’s quarters on the Marigold.

His teeth slipped over my bottom lip and the sting resurfaced from where the skin was still healing. But I didn’t care. I kissed him again and his hands reached for the skirts, pulling them up until I could feel his fingers on my legs. His touch dragged up, and when his hand wrapped around the stitches in my thigh, I winced, hissing.

West pulled away from me suddenly, his eyes running over my face.

“It’s nothing,” I whispered, pulling him back to me.

But he ignored me, pushing the skirts up to my hips so he could look at it. The clumsy stitches puckered in a jagged line at the center of a trailing purple bruise. He brushed a thumb lightly around it, his jaw clenching. “What happened?”

I pushed the frock back down between us, embarrassed. “One of Zola’s dredgers tried to make sure I didn’t come back up from a dive.”

West’s eyes were bright and sparkling, but the set of his mouth was still. Calm. “Who?”

“He’s dead,” I murmured.

He fell quiet, letting me go, and the space between us again grew wide and empty. The warmth that had been in his touch was gone, making me shiver. The last ten days flashed in his eyes, showing me a glimpse of that part of West I’d seen the night he told me about his sister. The night he hadn’t told me about Saint.