When it was all finished, all the blood cleaned off them both from the sea, all the bedding and the body disposed of, Thea offered Gia a small thank-you, but Gia simply brushed it off and went into the dining room to join Aggie and Penn for a late breakfast.
Thea had always thought it was a shame that Gia had become one of them. They referred to her as their sister, since the sirens were a kind of sisterhood, but she wasn’t really. Unlike Thea, Aggie, and Penn, Gia’s parents were mortals. She’d gotten a job as a handmaiden for Persephone, and by all accounts she’d been doing a fine job until the other three girls showed up.
In fact, if Penn, Thea, and Aggie hadn’t dragged her away that day, Gia would’ve been content to stay behind and guard Persephone. She loved to listen to Gia sing as Gia braided Persephone’s hair.
But they had dragged Gia away. Then Persephone had been raped and murdered, and her enraged mother had cursed all four of them forever—even sweet Gia, who had the most beautiful singing voice imaginable.
It didn’t take long for Penn to notice that Bastian had disappeared, and she went berserk. Initially, she suspected foul play, since she couldn’t believe that anybody would leave her. But after days of Thea, Aggie, and Gia placating her, Penn had eventually come around to the idea that Bastian had left.
That didn’t do anything for her rage, though. She stormed around the house, breaking things, yelling, throwing fits. She tore apart several servants simply for looking at her the wrong way.
The one good thing about her preoccupation with Bastian was that Penn hadn’t noticed the change in Thea. Her radiance was back, her hair was once again lush, and she wasn’t so frenetic anymore. Her voice was still husky, and Penn taunted her about that—the way she’d been taunting her for months.
None of the other sirens had understood why she’d stopped feeding with them, although Aggie seemed to support it and cut down herself. Not nearly as much as Thea had, because it was maddening and painful, but she’d made an effort, at least.
Penn’s rage came to a head less than a week after Bastian had died. She was tearing apart his room, looking for any clues as to where he might have gone so she could find him and kill him. The other three tried to stay out of her way, and spent the afternoon in the sitting room.
Gia had taken to playing the piano and singing. Aggie was sitting in a chair, working on her needlepoint, which had been her favorite pastime for over a century. Thea sprawled out on a chaise, attempting to read a book, when Penn burst into the room.
“Which one of you did it?” Penn snarled, and Thea’s heart froze.
“What?” Aggie asked.
“Bastian.” Penn had some pieces of paper crumpled in her hand, and she held them up for all to see. “I found this in his room. Which one of you wrote this?”
“Whatever are you going on about?” Aggie asked, but Thea already knew.
As soon as she’d seen the papers, she understood what Penn was talking about, and she cursed herself for being so stupid. She thought she’d been so careful and had cleaned up any evidence of Bastian’s murder, but she hadn’t thought to erase signs of their affair.
“These!” Penn threw the papers to the ground. “And don’t play dumb. I know one of you did it.”
Aggie set aside her needlepoint, and she got up from the chair. She picked one of the pages up from the floor, smoothing it out.
“Bastian, my dearest love, I cannot wait until our next moment together. Every moment we are apart, I fear I will not survive until I can feel your embrace again,” Aggie read. She looked up from the paper and shook her head. “Forgive me, dear sister, but I do not understand. What do your love letters have to do with anything?”
“Those aren’t my love letters, you nitwit,” Penn hissed. “I never wrote those. One of you did.”
Thea sat up on the chaise, but she said nothing and tried to keep her face expressionless. She could feel Gia watching her from the other side of the piano, but Gia didn’t speak up, either.
“How do you know one of us wrote them?” Aggie asked reasonably. “These could be from the servants or any of Bastian’s old lovers. They could even be from his wife.”
“No, no, no.” Penn shook her head and knelt on the floor to tear through the letters. “This one. Here.” She held it out for Aggie to read.
“Your siren song, it calls to me in the night. Even when I am with your sister, I assure you, I am thinking of you,” Aggie said.
Internally, Thea winced, but she remained motionless. She and Bastian used to slip each other love notes under their bedroom doors. Thea would often carry his in the bodice of her dress so she could take them out and read them over and over again.
But in the process of making love, her dress often came off, and the notes would get lost or left behind. That one she’d apparently left in Bastian’s room after one of their trysts.