Chapter Twenty-Seven
Dell didn’t understand how he’d gotten where he was. Growing up in a small village, he’d had nothing except his mother. When she died and his father came for him, he wasn’t sure he’d survive the city, especially with a cruel stepmother and two conniving half-brothers.
But his father had been kind. In a single storm, that too was taken from the scared boy. He went from returned son to the stable boy within days of his father’s shipwreck.
He swabbed the decks of ships, cleaned horse stalls, and slept with the animals. Unlike his brothers, he’d never had any ambitions other than to find a way out of the city.
And then he’d met her. Or them, really. Edmund and Helena changed his life.
Lenny. She’d come dressed as a boy and seemingly in need of saving. But he’d been th
