Zahara jolted at the sound of thunder that shook the room, puncturing her hand with the needle she had been mending her dress with as she did. Ghaul turned to look and stopped her before she licked the blood.

"Don't do that," he grunted. "It's bad luck."

Samarrans and their superstitions, Zahara thought wearily, would have said it out loud only she knew now was not the time to insult his lineage. Being left behind by Muradi to look after her while his master was out to fight had given him an agitation to match a starving beast caged in the middle of a group hunt and being made to watch. For the past hour, Ghual had been pacing the room furiously looking for somewhere to dump that frustration.

But she, too, needed to dump her own frustrations somewhere. "I'm not from here," she said instead, and proceeded to lick the blood clean.

Ghaul stilled––a reaction that made her uneasy for how much it didn't suit him. On his face was an oddly rigid expression unknown to her given all the years they'd been forced to share a space without killing each other. On a normal day, the need to bring that axe down on her head would have been heard from the room next door the moment she decided to pick a fight. Tonight, the man seemed awkwardly tired, and the axe a burden. There was, she thought with no more than a woman's intuition to back her conclusions, a strange weight Ghaul had been carrying since his return from Rasharwi.

"How hard is it," he said, quietly, uncharacteristically, "for you to respect other people and what they do for once? When is it not about you and your vengeance or what is important to you?"

Since when, the thought sprang up in her mind like self-defense, like instinct, am I the monster here?

She dragged it back by the hair, placed a foot on it. "When your people respect ours," she said, felt the sharp end of that statement on her tongue, and decided now was not the time to address it. "Where I come from we drink blood to survive. Nothing happens."

The sky flashed again, lighting up the side of Ghaul's face where long, numerous scars resided. "You are in Samarra," said Ghaul, a mouthful of judgement queuing impatiently for release behind that add restraint. "There are different forces in play here. What you just did brings bad luck to your kin, your––"

"My kins are all dead." It came out of her like a whip, triggered by a mixture of old rage and the unexplained anxiety that had been bothering her all night. "They have been dead for decades, thanks to your master."

"Are they?" Ghaul's voice was always rocks and stones in texture, but now it grated like a dull, serrated knife. "I understand the hate for the father, but never how far you hate your son. Do you still want him dead, woman? Or have you decided he's dead already? Is that why you insisted on licking that blood?"

Still, he'd said, still want him dead. "You understand nothing about me or my son." She paused to breathe. It was the heat, the humidity that seemed to have tripled in this small room. Nothing more. "And since when do you care?"

The sky flashed again. A rumble followed in swift succession, as if to feed the hammer in Ghaul's voice. "He is a son of my master, a man who is out there fighting to protect what he's lost, what you and your hatred have taken from him, from the Salasar, while you sit here a burden and a risk to us all with no care whatsoever whether he lives or dies. Whether your son lives or dies. Why," he said, raising the hammer to a deadly height, to accommodate a killing blow, "are you still here?"

The rain came down all at once, like someone had punctured a hole in a sky filled past its capacity with angry, dirty rain. It drowned out all the sounds in the room, locking the two of them in a heavy silence that nailed them in place while their demons came out of hiding.

Why am I still here? She knew that answer once. She had wanted to make sure he suffered and paid for his crime. That had been why she decided to keep him alive, to stay. But now...now that things have changed, what was her purpose here? To keep him company? To stall for time? To answer his wishes? There was––any fool could see it––a part of Muradi that needed her by his side, especially now that Jarem was gone. But that was a role she would not––could not––play even if she were to one day desired it so. Ghaul knew this. For all the years they'd known each other, he knew the impossibility of what his master wished for, just as Jarem had, just as Muradi had when he'd offered her his life in that cave.

Kill me, Zahara. That is the only way out of this mess, for the both of us.

But there was, oh there was, something else too that needed to be addressed at this opportune moment when they were alone together. Another monster that must be dragged out into sunlight, perhaps even before her own.

"You asked me why I'm still here," she said, rising from her chair to look him in the eyes. "Why are you?"

The hitch in Ghaul's breath was audible, even amidst the loud rumbling of the gods outside. Zahara stepped forward, delivered it like a knife to his throat.

"How did you find us?" She pressed that knife closer, harder. "How did you escape from Rasharwi?" Something about that story didn't feel right. "Why are you so certain Lasura is alive? Why exactly are you here, tonight? What," she said, taking the final step to stand a hand's width away, her chest heaving from an anger she couldn't tell from where it came, "did Deo di Amarra promise you?"

It was unreasonable, unimaginable even, to believe that Ghaul's loyalty could be bought. To her, to anyone who knew the two of them, Ghaul was the one incorruptible weapon and shield Muradi had. And yet watching that face completely drained of color, seeing the pain in those eyes that seemed to have lost their lights all of the sudden, and the unwavering strength of a man who had always been the mountain between the Salar and his enemies leaving him all at once told her that one reliable shield, too, had been cracked.

She turned toward the window, at the sound of rainfall being altered by something outside. A shadow passed by, telling her someone was coming.

No, not someone. A group of men. Men belonging to the only person who could have orchestrated this.

"What have you done?"

Ghaul made no reply. He stood there in silence, staring at a spot on the floor with an expression of someone who had seen his end coming and decided to accept it without a fight. And it dawned on her, just as Deo di Amarra's assassins came in, as they took off their hoods and revealed the silver rings on their right ears, that for all the unpredictable, ever-changing circumstances in her life, there was one constant and immovable thing she could always count on, one indisputable truth those who knew the Salar of Rasharwi would not doubt if their lives depended on it, one certainty that Ghaul understood better than anybody as he watched them take her away...

Betrayal was not a thing one could ask Muradi to forgive, or forget.

***

The rain had come down all of the sudden. The storm had materialized out of nowhere. It was storm season, to be fair, but Matteo had been checking the weather carefully to plan this attack, and the old man was rarely wrong.

Lucidra resisted the urge to swear out loud the string of words that would make Niroza groan. She might have found his politeness hilarious for a pirate, but when it came to leading men, her brother knew what he was doing.

'Never,' he had said every time she threw a fit, 'allow your men to see you unarmed by anything. If you must lead them to their deaths, make sure they die thinking you knew exactly what you were doing.'

It wasn't even her plan to begin with, and the rain was going to complicate everything tenfold. The poor visibility and the wet condition would slow them down, make it more difficult to spot the ships waiting to facilitate their escape. Her ships––that was the worst part––might not even be able to anchor or stay close enough to the shore in this weather. Even if they managed to get out of here as planned, they might never make it far past the gate of the Barai. And this time all of them would be captured with Niroza.

She turned to the men behind her, yelled at them to keep moving, looked around for the son of a bitch who'd come up with the plan to fix it. Didn't find him.

"Where's Ranveer?" She asked at her quartermaster who was running beside her, keeping her voice low. "Where's Qasim?"

Matteo shook his head, avoided her eye contact. "Lost them when we turned that last corner."

Lost them? Ranveer didn't get lost. He was up to something, had taken men with him for it. To do what? To distract? To buy them more time? To sell them out? Anything was possible with that suicidal, back-stabbing bastard.

But if Ranveer was gone...

She wheeled toward the men behind them again, knowing, even before she started searching, that she would find an absence. Leandras.

Matteo cuffed her arm, yanking her back from darting off in the direction they came from. "Let him go," he said. "He's made his call. You can't protect him forever."

She knew that, but they were in the Barai, and it was raining tonight. Every time it rained something in her life turned to shit. "Take the men." She looked him in the eyes, made sure the command in it was clear. "Get Niroza out. Don't wait for me."

A grunt from Matteo told her he disagreed. A sigh said he was still bad at denying her anything. "What will you do?"

What will I do? "What I should have done a long time ago." The moment he'd turned up again in her life, perhaps even long before that. "Grab the son of a bitch. Negotiate. Trade him for Niroza, for my son."

It might even be too late. The thought crippled her for a second.

Calm the fuck down. What was it Roz had said?

'What hasn't happened hasn't happened. Use what you're given, never what you fear.'

She gritted her teeth, grabbed that thought by the neck, and flung it back where it belonged.

"Go on," she commanded. "Lead the men. Get my brother out."

Matteo opened his mouth to protest, then turned swiftly toward the prisoner's quarter to squint at something through the rain.

"A bit late for that now." He gestured ahead a few second later, where dark figures of men––hundreds of men––appeared to be coming toward them. "Here's your big chance to negotiate. Shall we see if your old flame is worth as much as we think he does?"

***

Ranveer stood, staring at the sky that decided to piss on them at the worst possible time, and began to laugh.

Here he was, a king without a throne running with a bunch of pirates, chased into a corner by his own men, and in his last desperate wish for luck, this happened.

It was too hilarious not to laugh. The worst of his nightmares always came with the rain. The worst times of his life happened when it was raining. There was alway a life or death decision to make, a sacrifice of someone close to heart, a loss of something that left behind a scar.

But there was, punctual and reliable as the arrival of blood from a freshly cut wound, a growing numbness that always accompanied these memories to mask every pain inflicted, to make living with it somewhat bearable, to allow you a sense of victory that came from knowing what you could do to stay alive.

And what you could do again, when life calls for it.

'Bad memories are there for a reason,' Eli had written. 'They make you feel confident, comfortable, indestructible even, in the face of a lesser demon than the ones you've survived.'

The reminder circled his mind as he watched the rain, gave him an odd sense of calmness as the sound of footsteps made its way around the corner. Three hundred men. Maybe five. A lesser demon, surely, considering what he'd survived so far.

It was just as he predicted (he always enjoyed being right). Someone had caught on to what was happening, had sent these men out in the right direction, and in large enough number to make sure no intruders would leave the place alive. He'd slipped away from the rest of the group to stay behind and deal with it. The possibility of success was thin yet irrelevant, given the circumstances. Expecting the worst to happen and being prepared to face it could be the difference between making it out alive and dying surprised by those who wanted you dead.

What did surprise him, however, was Qasim and his men who had also decided to stay behind––out of sheer ignorance or the need to see him die very badly, he wasn't sure. Men could be unpredictable, especially shortsighted men.

Not that it mattered. A handful of extra swords wouldn't make a difference. But the audience was bigger now, which was useful, if you were about to do something suicidal.

He stretched out his shoulder blades, felt something move back into place, and pulled free the two crescent moon swords he'd decided to bring with him this time. Been a while since he'd used these, but they were lighter, quicker to move, and offered the two-handed balance he had become accustomed to without taxing his old injuries too much. The other twin blades on his back would have to wait. Obsidian was brittle. No need to risk breaking them until the timing was right.

"Guess this is where we die," Qasim commented with a touch of dry humor, taking a wineskin out for a sip before passing it to him. "Would have packed better shit if you'd said something about fighting a hundred men."

"Make that five hundred." Ranveer took the offered drink, winced at the acidity of the poorly kept, leftover wine, and spat it right back out. "Who's dying?" He wiped his mouth clean, wishing he hadn't tasted that shit. "I have a peninsula to save and a wife I want to go home and fuck. It's a few hundred Samarran city guards, not a thousand White Warriors." He turned to look at the men, saw the need to raise it another notch. Didn't hesitate. "And I've killed them all when some of you were still sucking your mother's tit."

The laughs and chuckles that followed gave him a peace of mind. Desert warriors––black or white––didn't think too much about dying. Those who must live with frequent deaths always find a way to make peace with death. This bunch he had with him were as simple and unreliable as they come, but dumb fighters who could look death in the eyes were useful in hopeless situations. You needed simple men who'd trade their lives for simple rewards for that.

As things stood, there was only one reward left to be given, and they were all listening intently now, ready to be led, or fed to the beasts.

'The men at your back are your weapons,' Eli had written. 'Their morale the bridge that takes you to the other side. If you must set it on fire, give them a good reason why they should die for your cause.'

Qasim's men wouldn't die for him. They weren't even on his side to begin with. They were at his back now, nonetheless, facing a common enemy, for their own benefits. But no battles could be won without someone to lead the army, and you could take anybody to war, be it seven or seven thousand, if you could look past their differences to identify what the men you must lead want in common.

Ranveer sucked in a breath, waited for the cold, wet air to fill his lungs, and peeled back his lips as he spun the crescent moon blades into position.

"Five hundred men is a fine number to get you free drinks for life," he said, smiling wider as the first few guards came into view. "How about it, boys? You ready to make a name for yourself, or do you need more time to go find your balls?"

***

A/N: A double update today. I deeply apologize for the delay, but a part of it was making sure you enjoy these chapters. I hope it was worth the wait. :) Thank you for waiting.