They'd left Marrow bound and gagged in his own ruined cell — Ray's rope knotted tight enough to hold a man twice his size, though Ray's grip on the sword hadn't fully loosened even after the man stopped struggling.
"He deserves worse than rope," Ray had said, low, standing over him with something cold and final in his expression, sword angled in a way that made his intention plain enough without needing words for it.
"Ray." Zelene's voice had cracked with exhaustion, but she'd meant it steady. "Don't."
"After what he tried to do to you—"
"I know what he tried to do." Her hands had still been shaking, she remembered, even as she said it. "I'm not asking you to forgive him. I'm asking you not to become someone I don't recognize, over someone like him."
Ray hadn't argued further. He'd simply lowered the blade, jaw tight, and finished the knot instead — leaving the man alive, furious, and utterly helpless on the floor of his own cell, which felt, in the moment, like punishment enough.
They hadn't asked his name. Zelene only knew it from what she'd overheard whispered among his own men — Marrow — though whether that was truly his name or simply what fear had taught this crew to call him, she couldn't have said.
---
Now Ray moved first through the corridor, sword still drawn, Zelene close behind him with one hand braced against the wall for balance, Corvin bringing up the rear with his eyes fixed on every shadow they passed.
"This way." Ray said. "The guard who dragged you up top mentioned holding two others separately. Male prisoners."
The cell they found stood open already, door hanging loose, the lock mechanism scattered in pieces across the floorboards like it had been forced from the inside rather than picked from without.
Zelene's breath caught. "It's got to be Finn and Silas."
She pushed past Ray before he could stop her, scanning the small, empty space — no straw disturbed by struggle here, no blood, nothing that looked like violence. Just an open door and rope, coiled loose and abandoned in the corner, as if someone had simply shrugged it off rather than fought their way free of it.
"They're not here," Corvin said, unnecessary but said anyway, the words landing heavy in the quiet.
"That's — good, though. Isn't it?" Zelene turned, searching Ray's face for confirmation she wasn't sure she believed herself. "No fight. No mess. That means they got out on their own."
Ray crouched by the loosened rope, turning it over once in his hand, expression unreadable. "Or someone let them out."
"Who would let them out?"
"I don't know." He set the rope down slowly. "That's what worries me."
"The man who runs this," Corvin said, glancing back the way they'd come, "the one we left tied up. Does anyone actually know who he is? A name, a title, anything?"
Zelene shook her head slowly. "Only what his own men called him. Marrow. He's apparently, the leader of all these. I don't know if that's real or just what everyone's too afraid to question."
"Doesn't matter what he calls himself," Ray said. "Matters that he's not the only threat left on this ship, and now we've got two more people unaccounted for."
Zelene pressed the heel of her hand hard against her temple, trying to think past the exhaustion and the ache still throbbing where Marrow had slammed her into the wall. Think. Don't panic. Think.
"They could have gone two ways," she said finally. "Back toward the hold, to get to the other women. Or up, looking for us, the same way we've been looking for them."
"Or captured again," Corvin said quietly. "By someone we haven't accounted for."
Nobody wanted to say that possibility out loud first, but now that it was said, it sat heavy in the small room, impossible to unhear.
Zelene forced her spine straight despite how badly her legs wanted otherwise. "We don't have time to search every corridor on this ship hoping to guess right. We have to choose."
"The hold," Ray said, immediate, certain. "If Finn's thinking clearly — and I have to believe he is — that's where he'd go first. The other women. He wouldn't leave them waiting any longer than he had to."
"And if you're wrong?" Corvin asked. "If something's actually wrong?"
"Then we're already too far behind to fix it by guessing differently," Ray said, grim. "We go to the hold. We free the women. If Finn and the other one are anywhere sane on this ship, that's where they'll end up too."
Zelene nodded slowly, some steadiness returning now that there was a direction to move in rather than only fear to sit inside. "And if they're not there—"
"We have to keep looking," Ray said. "Every corridor, if we have to. I'm not leaving this ship without all of us."
Corvin glanced between them both, resolve replacing uncertainty in his own expression. "Then let's move. Every minute we spend deciding is a minute Marrow's men have to regroup."
They left the empty cell behind, three sets of footsteps falling into an urgent, matched rhythm down the corridor — toward the hold, toward Della and the dozen frightened women still waiting on a promise Zelene had made hours ago, and toward whatever answer waited for them about where Finn and Silas had actually gone.