by Pam Godwin
I focused on his lips and made out the word daughter. He was reading the letter out loud, reading my father’s words of love, and I couldn’t hear any of it. I couldn’t interpret the heavy brogue that shaped his cruel mouth.
“Please, Captain.” I tried to lift my hand toward him. “That was…written…for me. I can’t hear…”
He dropped the paper on the deck, and it furled into its original rolled-up shape. His boots pivoted, and he walked away, his attention locked on the second scroll in his hand.
The letter lay only two…three paces away. The chain on my ankle would reach.
Try, Bennett. You can do it.
I rolled to my chest, swallowed my cries, and pushed the blood-soaked curls out of my face. Bearing down against the dizzying agony, I dragged myself forward on my elbow. Shoved another inch with the toes on my working leg. Scraped the raw bone of my arm across the deck. Hacked up blood. Bit down. Pushed again.
Oh God, give me the strength.
I just needed to reach the paper before it blew.
Just help me reach it. Dear God, it’s all I’ll ever ask.
I heaved my broken arm forward, followed it, lugged it again, catching the exposed bone on the seams in the deck. I cried out. Kept moving. So close.
The toe of a boot pressed down on the rolled letter. My insides shriveled.
A hand grabbed the tiny scroll away.
Madwulf bent down and met my eyes. Whatever horrible thing he uttered stopped at my ears. Holding my gaze, he slowly, deliberately ripped the letter into tiny pieces, walked it to the bow, and flicked the remnants over the side.
Gone.
Destroyed.
It would never come back. I would never know the words, never read them, or hear them.
The pain was so powerful, so monstrous, I collapsed beneath the gravity of it. All I had left was the grief burning inside me, my twisted little friend with arms that embraced me in fire and teeth that sloughed the meat from my bones. I sank into its constricting grip and begged it to end me.
Still, my body refused to die.
Madwulf’s men hauled me up and strung me to the foremast. Without the strength to stand, I buckled against the rope that caught me around the thighs, hips, and ribs. My arms were forced at my sides, punishing me with another layer of agony as every broken bone and shredded tendon rubbed and pushed against the squeeze of the restraints.
Then they walked away.
I didn’t need my hearing to know their intent. They’d left me here to die.
Meanwhile, they slaughtered the last goat and passed around the dregs of the wine casks. Ashley’s men had deserted the Royal Navy in hopes of living merry and acquiring riches. Now they would.
They had my father’s map.
As the crew’s morale took flight with smiles and dancing, mine plummeted.
Swelling had set in on the side of my face, pinching my eye shut. My jaw, cheek, and ear felt like a massive knot of fire, pulsing and stretching. My broken ribs turned every breath into a battering strike, and I refused to look at my arm. I couldn’t without passing out.
I went mad with the urge to claw my way out of these ropes and throw myself overboard. I wanted to be anywhere that wasn’t here, hanging from a mast and awaiting my death.
Would the pain follow me when I left this place? I imagined it would, if I never saw Priest and Ashley again. I imagined the pain would be worse.
Hours felt like days, and I still couldn’t hear. The bells of the afternoon watch must have rung, for the watchmen changed. Unlike the dreary weather.
The fog around the ship seemed to thicken. We weren’t moving.
The wind had dropped off. The sails hung loose. I didn’t need my hearing to sense there were no waves. No tide. The ship wasn’t rocking. Were we close to land?
The pale, obscuring mist prevented visibility beyond the bows. I tilted my eyes up and focused on the crosstrees. If I could hear, I imagined I would be listening to my rattling teeth, whimpering gasps, and the dying pulsation of my heart. I could feel the latter like a thudding drum, slowly losing energy.
The decks lay quiet to my broken ears. The glow from a pipe, the flicker of a lantern… Nothing else caught my eye in the gloom. Another hour passed. Two. Still, I kept my gaze on the crosstrees.
The watch changed again.
I felt myself fading, my limbs chilling in the oppressive humidity. Fever setting in.
Then something fluttered overhead. Feathers. Wings. A flash of a red beak. And another.
I knew that species of seabird. They flocked to the low, rocky cliffs of the bird island.
My heart restarted, pushing through the exhaustion of stress and pain.
Madwulf had taken my bait.
Minutes later, in a fleeting moment of lucidity, I glimpsed a vessel breaching the fog off the starboard bow.
Her silhouette split a hole in the vapor and emerged from the haze like a phantom ship. The bank of mist flinched away from her hull as if shuddering in fear.
I pinned my lips together, trapping the flood of my frantic breaths.
Amid the sound of silence, the air didn’t stir, the wind chillingly dead. She slid across water that was as smooth as glass. Dew glistened along the lines of her rigging. Her decks bristled with armaments.
I would recognize her mighty masts anywhere.
Jade had arrived for a fight.
Jade crept in, stealthy and dark, sliding board-to-board with Blitz. Whorls of mist curled around her spars, her masts looming overhead like the tentacles of a giant monster slowly rising from the sea.
The fog, the sinister stillness, the promise of devastating retribution—all of it shook me to my soul, slaying me at my most tortured, vulnerable depths. I wanted to sob at the sight of her. At the same time, I’d never been so furiously hungry for bloodshed.
By the time Madwulf’s drunken rogues noticed her in the mist, it was too late for them.
Within seconds, my crew threw over pikes and planks and swarmed aboard, their eyes wild and mouths agape. I wished I could hear their unified roar.
I wished I could stand and fight with them.
May the sins of Thanatos grace their hearts and bloody their swords.
Aboard Blitz, they immediately met resistance from the Madwulf’s pirates. But his soused bastards weren’t prepared to thwart the ambush. As they pawed through their weapons chest, my men fell upon them with blades, flintlocks, and boarding axes.
Through the blur of my one working eye, I spotted Reynolds and Jobah as they cut down every brute in their path. I searched the throng, fighting to stay conscious, desperate to glimpse the two men I loved.
More and more of my crew joined the fight, parrying enemy bayonets, cutlasses thrusting, flintlocks firing, blades clashing in the air, and bodies falling and thrashing in death. The smoky aroma of spent powder stung my nose, and the reverberation of so many boots shook the deck beneath my feet.
I experienced it all in chilling silence.
Were Priest and Ashley calling my name? I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t make out the faces of the men storming across the planks between the ships. The fog made it impossible to identify those who remained on Jade to repel unwanted boarders.
Then, amid the noiseless chaos, the haze of smoke and mist shivered, parted, and a beast of a man emerged from the cloud.
His shirt was shredded and filthy, the lacing gone and front edges hanging open to his belts, revealing a wall of rippled brawn from throat to waist.
Skeins of his hair, the color of chestnut, were braided and adorned with shell beads, the top half scraped away from his face and caught in a seaman’s queue. The rest curled around his loose collar and thick neck, and I longed to feel it sliding between my fingers. I missed my husband dearly.
He held his arms stiffly at his sides, fisting two cutlasses. I recognized the brass grip on one. It belonged to me, and my father before me. I’d taken it off the beach the day he’d hanged.
Head lowered, ch
in to chest, Priest set his silver eyes on mine. Eyes that glared from beneath a darkly savage brow, the depths blackening like rain-heavy clouds as they took in my appearance.
It must have been difficult for him to see me like this—a half-naked corpse tied to the foremast with bones exposed in my arm and every inch of my flesh beaten and swollen in various colors.
When his gaze finally returned to my damaged face, his demeanor had taken on so much pain something inside him seemed to have snapped. His arms bulged with tension, his shoulders lifting and spreading out. He opened his mouth, lips curled back, teeth bared. Then he roared. I couldn’t hear it, but I felt it with my entire body. His torment. His intensity. The feral eye contact. The foreboding. I got chills.
Terrible things were about to happen, for he wasn’t angry. He was deeply, spectacularly, viciously enraged.
He charged toward me with all that ire, never looking away. Around him, the battle waged, but he didn’t stop. Didn’t flinch when a blade swung close. He was too focused, too determined to reach me. He erased half the distance before someone broke from the fray and ran at him, wielding a sword.
Priest didn’t twitch a muscle to evade the attack. He didn’t need to.
Ashley came out of nowhere and struck like a thunderbolt, cleaving the assailant nearly in two with the hack of a sword. Then he turned and met my regard.
His blue eyes were the calm to Priest’s storm, the ice to Priest’s raging fire, his expression blank and smooth, his brow fraught with restraint. But I saw past that mask. Everything I felt with him, everything I wished for, spilled out between us.
I saw the man beneath the rigid armor. He was bellowing in there. Thrashing and stabbing and pounding fists into flesh. A cold, calculating man held my gaze on the surface, but underneath that severe discipline, he wanted vengeance and blood and everything Priest wanted.
He wanted me.
The bandages I’d repeatedly wrapped around my heart over the past two years peeled away. I didn’t need them anymore. God, I was so horribly, foolishly, completely in love with both of them.
Ashley looked taller standing next to Priest, and though he held fast to his stoic demeanor, his appearance was a far leap from the aristocrat I’d met on this ship five weeks ago.
Covered in blood and stripped to the waist like a common pirate, his body gleamed with muscle, flexing beneath two thick leather bandoliers that crisscrossed his torso. They held four pistols. Two more dangled from around his neck, one of which Priest grabbed and fired at someone approaching my side.
The two of them battled their way to me as fast as they could, stopping every second to fight off more attackers. I had to rely on my waning vision to follow the commotion. I didn’t know when a blunderbuss or flintlock fired until I saw the bits of black powder, shower of sparks, and pool of blood.
If Priest or Ashley got hit, I wouldn’t hear it coming. I wouldn’t know until they fell.
My chest squeezed painfully, my entire being locked on their progress as they edged closer and closer. My body wouldn’t hold out much longer. With each breath, the pain grew bigger and sharper, consuming my ability to think. I could no longer hold up my head.
When they finally reached me, Priest swept around the foremast, sawing through the rope that suspended me to the timber. Ashley sheathed his sword and held his trembling hands near my waist, hovering, as if unsure where to grip without causing me pain.
Everywhere hurt. There was no part of me that wouldn’t protest the press of hands. Even his. But I wanted off this ship, even if it killed me.
“Do it.” My throat burned, dry and sandy. “I won’t bite.”
A rabid pirate ran up behind him, poised to thrust a rapier into Ashley’s back.
“Behind you,” I tried to shout.
But Priest was already there, cleaving the man across the face. Then he used the pirate’s own rapier and plunged it into the belly, jerking upward on the blade until it opened the stomach and part of the chest. The man dropped.
Pivoting aft, Priest screamed something at someone, raging, spitting, his face contorting with feral madness. I’d seen his temper at its most dangerous peak, but never this. His wild eyes, demonic expression, and mercurial bearing embodied a violent storm. A savage war. A roaring, consuming fire of wrath.
He was terrifying.
Returning to my side, he yelled at Ashley, who calmly answered, seemingly unruffled by Priest’s rage. I tried to read their lips, but my focus was ebbing, the darkness pressing in at the edges.
Priest slid a knife beneath the rope around my midsection and paused. His hand shook. His chest rose and fell. He desperately needed an outlet for the fury that snarled inside him.
Ashley touched my waist, fingers featherlight, and his mouth moved through a string of words, of which only a few were discernible at the end. “…I’ll hurt you.”
“Already hurt.”
I could no longer see the blue of his eyes, for the dangerous shadows that lowered over them were too dark and stricken.
“Can’t hear. No…sound.” I wasn’t sure how well I could talk. My face was swollen, and my voice didn’t reach my ears. “Find Madwulf. Below deck. He took… Opened compass. Tiny map. My stone…”
My father’s letter.
A tear leaked from the corner of my eye.
Priest set his jaw, nodded, and cut the rope.
The fetters unfurled, and I fell into Ashley’s arms. He caught me as delicately as he could, but everything inside me moved at once. Bones shifted. Muscles engaged. Weight displaced. The shocking, wracking pain was too much.
Nausea invaded. My stomach heaved. I drifted in and out of awareness.
I tried to stay alert as Ashley carried me across the planks to Jade. Over his shoulder, I spotted Priest at the bow of Blitz. He glowered with a shivering lust for death, his expression boiling, creased, cemented in an unblinking grimace. Once he saw me safely aboard my ship, he would go after Madwulf, no mistake.
A new pair of arms slid beneath me, along with a new level of hell as I was hauled over the gunwale. The pain came in constant waves, piercing and gnawing so deeply I couldn’t stop crying.
Ashley didn’t follow me over. He leaned in and spoke quickly to those on Jade, presumably giving updates and instructions on my care.
Bending down, his warm fingers found the hand of my uninjured arm, and he lowered his brow to my knuckles. I felt the love he poured into the gesture before he straightened and hardened his expression. Then he drew his sword and raced back across the plank to Blitz.
Neither he nor Priest would return until every man involved in my torture was dealt with brutally and without quarter.
Except Madwulf.
When they found him, his demise wouldn’t end in a few hours or even a few days. They would torture him for as long as they could keep him breathing.
As another surge of anguish battered my body, I stared up at the man who held me, blinking through the fog of pain. Jobah’s dark warm eyes stared back.
Dear God, it was a relief to see him.
Missed you, Captain, he mouthed, carrying me slowly, gently into the companionway.
“You, too, Jobah.” More than I could voice.
The last time he cradled me like this, I was bleeding out from a sword wound in the gut. Too bad my present injuries hurt a thousand times worse. I faced a long, rocky road ahead and wasn’t confident I would survive the battle this time.
Today, Jobah said, slowly shaping his lips around each syllable, isn’t your day.
He was reminding me of my favorite motto.
If I had the strength, I would’ve laughed. But he was right. Today wasn’t my day to die.
Tendrils of determination wound around my chest. For as long as I lived, I was still the captain of this ship. So I put on a tough face and swallowed down my pain. “How…are…new passengers?” The two badly beaten men? The slave ship? Did he understand what I was asking?
His smiling lips created a clear answ
er. Healed.
Good. Christ, that was great news. My old surgeon, Ipswich, while ever sour and rude, had an impressive success rate with saving people.
As Jobah conveyed me through Jade’s lower decks, a sense of peace penetrated the torment in my bones. I was finally home. If I died, it would be on my ship surrounded by loyal friends.
Dammit, no. I wasn’t going to die. I’d come too far. I had a ship to command, a map to my father’s treasure, and a crew that depended on me. I. Would. Survive.
I must have passed out before Jobah reached our destination. The next thing I remembered was bolting upward in sharp, wrenching pain. It felt as though something was digging around in my broken arm.
My spine bowed as soundless howls spluttered past my lips. Numerous hands pinned me to a flat surface. I recognized the rafters overhead. The wall of windows. The Caribbee chart tapestry on the wall. I was in my private cabin, lying face-up on top of my desk.
Priest and Ashley stood on either side of me. Reynolds held my feet. Lieutenant Flemming was here, looking on as Ipswich tortured my arm. Something hard and metal scraped against the raw bone, sending me into another thrashing fit.
They were helping me. Knowing that, I tried so hard not to cry or move. But the pain… God’s blood, I couldn’t take much more. I trembled with it. Shook. I’d been shaking since Madwulf had taken me.
Huge blue eyes appeared above my face. Compelling eyes, chiseled jaw, muscular shoulders, and so many other gorgeous body parts that I hoped to admire again someday.
Ashley watched me as I watched him, unwavering, locked. In my periphery, Priest spoke to the doctors, his words heated and firing with threatening fury.
I focused on Ashley, on his carefully controlled reserve. It bothered me how close he was staring. Oh, how my appearance must sicken him.
“I look…” I pinned my lips and silently whimpered through a fresh twist of pain. “Dreadful.”
His gaze didn’t leave mine as he gave a hard swallow. A dip of his head. A slow blink. Then he mouthed, Strong. Fierce. His brow furrowed. Too beautiful, Goldilocks.
“Liar,” I said.
But his words reminded me to give myself some merit. I’d suffered an unimaginable amount of torture over the past few weeks. I was still alive. Still fighting. My father would’ve been proud of me.