Chapter 34 · Blood on the Water

The door boomed a third time and the whole salon wall jumped. A hinge screw popped out, rolled across the teak, and stopped against my shoe.

Caspian didn't even look at it.

"Sign it." He shoved the pen at me. My pen. He'd taken it out of my bag like it was his now, and he had the transfer papers pinned flat against the bar so hard the edges buckled. "Forty seconds, Helena. Then I let them in and we do this the ugly way."

Another contraction came up my spine like somebody pulling a wire tight. I breathed through my teeth and kept my eyes on his hand instead of the paper, because the paper didn't matter. Nothing on that page mattered.

I'd been feeding him a fake maritime technicality for twenty-two minutes — notary, ship's log, the captain's countersignature — and he'd stood there and argued with me about it, and that was the entire reason the four men he brought aboard were locked out on the other side of a steel door instead of standing behind him.

"You need the captain," I said. "I explained this."

"There is no article. You made it up.