“The great purpose of life is love.” I met him stare for stare, my heart beating loudly and clearly behind every word. “To know with certainty that we exist, we must love and be loved, even through the pain. It’s the inexplicable fever inside us, which drives us to battle, to sacrifice, and to surrender. Deny it, Ashley, and all you have left is a starving emptiness.”

Priest tightened his hand around mine, his fingers hot and shaking. His emotional investment in Ashley was palpable.

“If you leave for London on the morrow,” I said, “and marry a woman for whom you feel nothing, you’re choosing loneliness. I can’t let you do that. Because I love you. I will not let you end up like my mother. Fear drove her from my father. Fear for his safety and survival. She chose loneliness over danger and love. In the fourteen years that I knew her, there was no light in her eyes. No smile. She wore a stately mask just like you, but I keenly felt what she hid beneath it. Do you know what that was?”

“A starving emptiness.” His wooden voice was an attempt at apathy. Counterarguments loomed on the far side of it. But closer, right there in his eyes, was the man I loved clinging to every word.

Because his heart knew I was right. His thick head just needed time to come to terms with it.

“You will break off the betrothal.” I rotated the hilt of the knife in my hand, calculating the weight and length of the blade. “Desert the Royal Navy. Make whatever arrangements you must with your parents to transfer your obligations. I know it’s a staggering hell of a lot to give up while I stand here, sacrificing nothing. But I swear to God, if the roles were reversed, if giving up my life—Jade, my crew, the sea, my father’s treasure—meant we could be openly together in your life, I would do it. I would relinquish it all and choose you and Priest, no mistake.”

“This is intolerable.” He exuded the bearing of a commodore, his voice layered in steel. “You cannot ask me to—”

“I’m not asking you to choose us, Ashley. I’m demanding it. If you forsake us, I will hunt you down like an animal.”

He straightened, teeth bared and eyes blazing. “Don’t you dare threaten—”

I flung the knife. It spun, end over end, across the kitchen and landed with a thunk in the wall beside his head. He froze, breathless, his gaze cutting to the side and narrowing on the blade that protruded no farther than the width of a whisker from his cheek.