Fire (Pirate Cove Academy #3) - Rae Foxx

1

Rage and despair clogged my throat like there was a pulsating cuttlefish stuck somewhere below my uvula, cutting off my sobs. But only barely. I didn’t bother knocking at the dorm room door, I just busted in with the most morose piece of debris that the ocean coughed up, clasped in my fist. I couldn’t even look at it, but at the same time, I had to show them, otherwise they might not believe the princess.

Me, I was the Princess. Yet everyone continued to underestimate me.

Fuck, this didn’t mean I had to bow to Llyr, did it?

“We have a problem,” I announced, the head swung from my grip at my side.

“Manatees and Marlins, Zaniah, you scared the shit…” Llyr started but as my chest heaved from the near sprint that had brought me to their room, he looked down and whatever other curse he’d intended to spear me with died in his throat.

I knew the feeling. “What the fuck?” Llyr’s voice was cracked.

Blinking several times to try to rehydrate my stinging eyes from the tears, I held out the head in my hand, the one with the crooked crown still atop it, so that there was no question about why I’d barged in. Or why I was crying. Or why there was an invisible whale sitting on my chest.

“This little treasure bobbed to the surface while we were…” I trailed off, not wanting to pierce that sea urchin of a subject in that moment. “I…” I started but the words died off again.

Fuck, this just added to the level of frustration in my life. It wasn’t enough that we’d had to run from the fucking Siren kingdom to avoid becoming shark chum. We’d barely gotten Kai out of there with his life and fin. But this, this was the foam on top of the waves, it couldn’t get any worse than this. And yet I had a feeling, I had spoken too soon.

There were only two high-ranking people that the Sirens had taken as prisoners and we’d only managed to get one of them out. Now we’d run out of time.

The fifty-percent success rate soured my stomach and made me want to lurch right there on the perfect floor of Pirate Cove Academy’s finest dorm room. Especially since that failure had cost my father his life.

And maybe cost us the entire Under in the process.

Llyr began to quake in place, his fists balled at his sides and his face turning an angry shade of scarlet. I watched as he stalked over to the nearest dresser, a monstrosity of a thing. He grunted and pushed at it until the whole thing toppled over, making the room shake as the weight hit the ground. The fuck?

I cringed and took a few steps back, my back hitting Caspian who had run in behind me. He now gripped my hips, steadying me in place.

“What in the hell is happening around here? We don’t have the Trident! We don’t know who has it, and now this? I couldn’t even save my own father from a worthless, pathetic Siren.” As the word Siren left his mouth, Llyr’s steely gaze landed on Caspian. Caspian, the Siren who I’d just fucked, puffed out his chest and sidestepped, coming to stand next to me. His eyebrows lifted like he was silently daring my brother to say what he really meant.

“Your father is dead and your focus is your lack of control?”

Llyr’s arm lifted and he pointed at Caspian. “You fucking Sirens are the problem. You are the problem.”

“Llyr, Caspian didn’t do this,” I tossed at him, hoping to fizzle out some of his fire, at least against Caspian.

My brother nailed me with a look that could kill baby dolphins. “He’s one of them. It’s his kind that started this. It’s his kind that are always behind the evil in the Above and the Under. It’s always his fucking kind.” He practically spat the last of the words as the golden scales on his chest moved with his shallow breaths. You’d think he just swam thirty leagues.

“Oh yeah? It wasn’t the Sirens who lost the fucking Trident, was it? No, it was…” Caspian looked down at the head still in my hand and scrunched up his nose.

“You and I both know, Siren, that it was your mother who killed the King of the Under. Your mother. And you don’t want me to lay the blame on the Sirens?”

Well fuck, a coral reef-sized boulder hit me in the gut. I took a