by Pam Godwin
“Madwulf?” I gulped through an insufferable sweep of spasms as something was tied around my arm.
Ashley’s mouth shaped the word, Contained.
His gaze flicked to Priest, who shifted out of my view and returned a second later, opening a leather pouch. From within, he removed my compass, the jade stone, and the tiny scroll that presumably held the location of my father’s treasure.
“Thank you.” I tried to make my lips smile, but I couldn’t breathe without crying.
His features turned stony as he pulled out a rag stained with blood. Unfolding the cloth, he tilted it downward so I could see what it held.
A severed hand.
Pale, freckled skin. Jagged fingernails.
Madwulf.
I closed my eyes and nodded, knowing that was the first of what would be many gifts. In my present condition, I couldn’t partake in Madwulf’s torture. But I could count on Priest to bring me all the bits and pieces.
Perhaps that made him an animal. I was accustomed to his feral behavior. In fact, it endeared me to him. Maybe that made me an animal, too.
Ashley showed no revulsion to it. Not that I was surprised after witnessing the brutality he’d inflicted on the admiral.
Over the next few hours, Ipswich and Flemming worked feverishly on my injuries. I blacked out through most of it, my awareness coming and going in fits of seething pain.
When I could talk, I answered their mimed questions on how each injury had been inflicted. Amidst my delirium, I might have fixated too much on the loss of my father’s letter, but Priest and Ashley understood my grief. Every word fueled the rage radiating off them.
I had so many questions for them. How did they know each other? What were their plans for tomorrow? And the next day? And next year? What did they discuss together over the past week? Did they share everything they knew about me? About my history with each of them? Did Ashley tell Priest that I’d started our relationship as a ruse to escape? That I hadn’t set out to fall in love again? Did they fight? Work things out?
They seemed tolerant of each other at the moment. I didn’t know what that meant and didn’t have the mental capacity—or the hearing—to interrogate them.
Exhaustion pulled at me, dragging down my limbs. I just needed sleep, and it heard my plea. It reached up from the depths and took me.
When I woke, the cabin was dark and empty, save for the glow of a single lantern. And Priest and Ashley.
I lay on the desk in a vacuum of unnatural silence. Ashley sat on the edge beside my head, washing my face and hair. Priest leaned over my lower half, running a warm, wet towel over my nude body.
The pain had ebbed into dull clenching convulsions, concentrating in my arm, my ribs, and the side of my head. I didn’t move, didn’t try to speak. The caresses of their hands felt too precious, each touch a heavenly balm on my battered spirit.
Priest took his time cleansing every bruise, contusion, and abused inch of flesh. There wasn’t a part of me he didn’t inspect and tenderly wash before he draped a sheet over my hips and stood.
Ashley finished with my hair, his fingers sliding unhindered through the long spirally curls. He’d removed every tangle, a task that would’ve taken hours.
From what I could tell, they didn’t speak to each other or make eye contact. Was jealousy simmering beneath the surface? Were they behaving themselves for my benefit?
I didn’t know what they were doing while I was unconscious. Trying to kill each other, perhaps. But I appreciated this. Everything. All of it. Just having them here was more than I could ask.
For the first time in weeks, I felt clean. Loved. Safe. Maybe I would survive, after all.
A glance at my arm confirmed it hadn’t been sawed off. Yet. It lay strapped to a brace of wood. Jagged lines of stitches closed the flesh over the bone. Infection could still arise and require amputation. Or worse, it could kill me.
“What is my diagnosis?” I asked into the empty hush. “Broken arm and ribs?”
Above me, Ashley nodded and gently ghosted his fingers across my forehead, his mouth wrapping around the word, Concussion.
“Anything else broken?”
No, he said without sound.
“And my ears?”
When he didn’t answer, it was Priest who shook his head, his expression grim in the lantern light. Then he started talking, his features growing harder and meaner-looking with every word.
“What? I can’t…” I couldn’t even hear my own voice. “What are you saying?”
He made a face that usually accompanied a low growl. He was frustrated that I couldn’t hear him. Frustrated for me.
“The doctors can’t fix my hearing,” I said.
His nostrils flared, confirming my assumption. My heart sank with sadness and anger, but I was too tired to cry.
I’d lost my hearing when the plank of wood slammed into my head. Was it a brain injury? Or something torn inside my ears? Perhaps it would heal on its own. My mind seemed too lucid and focused for the damage to be brain related.
Or so I thought until I woke again that night.
Within hours, I plunged into feverish confusion. Lethargy sank into my muscles. Chills wracked my body, and fuzzy vision disoriented the world around me.
Infection had set in.
I succumbed to delirium.
Time slipped away. Conscious feeling spooled in starts and stops. The doctors hovered at the edges of the murky silence, conversing and administrating medicine, but I couldn’t make sense of it. Couldn’t concentrate enough to read lips or body language.
Someone had moved me to the bed in my cabin. Drenched in sweat and confusion, I was given draughts of laudanum for the pain and blood-letting treatments to purge the infection from my veins.
The bleeding and opium rendered my incoherency worse. I lost days.
Either Priest or Ashley was always stretched out beside me on the mattress. Always. Even if I couldn’t see or hear them, I felt them. A hand in my hair, fingertips on my skin, lips against my neck, comforting, reassuring. I never slept alone.
Their constant presence gilded my darkest hours.
Amid intervals of fogginess, I found new gifts from Priest waiting for me on the table beside the bed. Severed fingers and toes. Two ears. An entire foot. Then the stump of another. Most of the extremities had been flayed to the bone—likely before they’d been sawed off.
As the body parts arrived, I wondered if my arm would meet the same fate. I checked it often, relieved to find it still attached and lying beside me on its brace.
Sometimes I was lucid when Priest delivered his grisly spoils. He brought me an entire arm once, with the bone protruding like mine had, only this limb was missing its hand. He studied my reaction to it, his gaze gloriously dark and rotating with violence. A skirt of bloody knives draped about his waist, his face and chest dappled in sanguine spots of gore.
He exemplified a barbaric warrior. Not just of body. His heart bellowed for revenge.
Revenge in my honor.
I didn’t think I could love him any more than I already had.
Eventually, the gifts stopped coming, and I knew Madwulf had succumbed to infection or blood loss.
To watch one’s body being hacked away bit by bit was a positively grueling way to die. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been able to exact a better punishment myself. Still, I wished I’d been there. I wished it had been me who’d swung the fatal blow.
But alas, I was bedridden, and Priest was indeed a terrifying executioner. I tried to express my gratitude to him in my eyes, but I couldn’t make my face work right. So I settled on a weak, “Thank you.”
With Madwulf dead, Priest didn’t leave my side again. He and Ashley took turns feeding me, bathing me, and holding me on the chamber pot. Not my finest moments as a pirate captain, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to care.
Priest slept here every night. Sometimes in the bed with me. Other times I woke to find him in the chair beside the mattress, his wear
y frame bent over his knees, with his head hanging in his hands. It hurt my heart to see him so troubled. Worse, I didn’t have the strength to comfort him.
Ashley spent his evenings on Blitz. When he wasn’t here with me, he was trying to take command of what was left of his career. While I’d been shackled to the foremast, Madwulf’s men had boasted about all the soldiers they locked in the hold—all the men who had remained loyal to Ashley.
The pirate hunter still had a crew and a Royal Navy warship depending on him. With the admiral dead and his enemies destroyed, he could return to England, marry his betrothed, and carry on like he’d never met me.
If he did that, I would fight for him. But first, I needed to fight this infection.
Despite my fuzzy head and lack of hearing, I knew Jade was on the move, sailing to some unknown destination. Since I still saw Ashley every day, Blitz must be sailing with us, plotted on the same course.
Where? My questions were met with shaking heads and silent reassurances. They wanted me focused on regaining my health rather than trying to command the ship from my bed.
Reynolds popped his head in frequently. In my feverish daze, his face looked like a blurry dream in front of me. But I knew he checked on me often, even as he was busy commanding Jade in my absence.
He was here now, in fact, sitting at the table with Jobah and Priest. I watched the three of them together, their camaraderie, their brotherhood. Priest smirked at Reynolds and smacked Jobah over the back of the head. Jobah laughed and hit him back.
Priest had missed them, and the realization spiked a new pain in my chest.
I hadn’t just deprived him of his wife for two years. I’d deprived him of his family. His brethren. I’d turned his closest mates against him and made them choose sides.
I hated myself for that. When I’d discovered his infidelity, I shouldn’t have left him in Nassau. I could’ve let him remain on my ship as part of my crew while keeping him out of my bed. I could’ve handled it like a captain instead of an emotionally scorned woman.
That night, when he crawled in bed beside me, I told him all these regrets. I rambled on in a silent, feverish haze, my disordered stream of thought losing focus as I spoke. But he heard the gist of it.
His arms came around me, holding without hurting, and his lips moved passionately against my cheek. I felt the rumble of his I miss you’s and the heated breaths of his I love you’s. His tender kisses traced my jaw in a language without words. It was more potent than sound, more profound than speech.
Every declaration was a sensation produced, not through the ear, but through the soul.
It brought to mind something he’d said the night he found me in Jamaica.
No man will ever live up to the ideal you hold for Edric Sharp.
“You were wrong about something.” I shifted my head so that I could watch his lips move.
Just one thing? he asked.
“Well, no. But…” I drew a ragged breath, my entire body afire and shaking in a cold sweat. “I left you. Tried to give you up. Yet you never gave up on me. Never stopped pursuing me. You came for me when I needed you the most. Priest… You’ve far surpassed the ideal I hold for my father.”
He and Ashley both. The commodore risked his career, his family, and his life to remove me—a pirate prisoner—from the admiral’s flagship. Now he was commanding a two-thousand-ton warship with only a fraction of the crew needed to sail it. The deepening creases around his bloodshot eyes attested to the sort of sleepless pressure he was under. Yet he still spent hours here with me every day.
He and Priest had sacrificed so much. I owed it to them to recover.
I needed to pull my damned self together, harden my bones, and drag my battle-scarred body from this bed. The sooner I did that, the less of a burden I would be, and the quicker I would find my father’s treasure and repay my crew for their loyalty.
But the infection wasn’t finished with me.
My acute pain combined with continued strong fevers was to be dreaded, no mistake. The danger that I would fall into deep delirium and die loomed in the tired eyes of Priest, Ashley, and my doctors.
As the fever wore on, chills overtook my senses and smothered my consciousness, leaving me to wander alone in my mind. I found myself back in the hole on the admiral’s flagship, surrounded by the stench of death.
Whenever I woke, it was in flickers of warped reality. I was still in that black hole, watching a door open and close only feet away. Priest and Ashley flashed in and out of the doorway, talking to me without sound, reaching for me, always too far away.
Shackled and weak, I couldn’t crawl toward them. My legs wouldn’t move.
Gradually, the door opened less often, and the murk around me grew darker, stretching longer. Flashes of Priest transformed. His cheeks hollowed out, narrowing his face. Whiskers thickened, lengthening into a short beard. I barely recognized him.
Where was Ashley?
I called out for him, but he stopped appearing in the doorway. Sometimes Priest was there, his silver eyes ablaze with grim emotion. But Ashley was gone. I sensed his absence like a missing limb.
Perhaps that was the impetus that drove me from death. From within the suffocating black hole of silence and decay, I clawed my way out. Hands scrabbling, muscles writhing, and lungs panting, I woke on a gasp in the blinding rays of sunlight.
There was no motion. No rocking or waves. I was on land?
My surroundings came in bursts of hazy images—silk fabric, sumptuous wood furnishings, embroidered brocades, silver sconces, and mullioned windows that yawned open to a cerulean sky.
As the mingled aromas of brine and sweet grassy fields tickled my nose, I had no sense of people. No sound. No movement.
Where the devil was I?
“Ahoy? Anyone there?”
Faster than the words could leave my mouth, Priest was in my face, climbing onto the bed and leaning in with bright gray eyes and a freshly shaved jaw.
Everything rushed at me at once—questions, breaths, dizziness, joy, and pain. Yes, the pain persisted. But it didn’t consume. It felt nothing like before.
“Where are we?” I tried to sit up, commanding muscles that refused to respond. “How long has it been? Where’s Ashley? My ship? Reynolds and—”
He pressed a finger against my lips and pinned me with his steady gaze, calming me, compelling my lungs to slow down. His touch lifted to my forehead, his palm flattening to test my temperature.
I didn’t sense a fever. Just dull aches beneath healing wounds. And fatigue. I’d never felt this exhausted and feeble in my life.
He didn’t need to ask if my hearing had returned. Since I couldn’t judge volume or pronunciation, my voice would sound ill-fitting to his ears.
I love you. Sculpted lips gave shape to those three syllables a second before they claimed my mouth.
The scent of sea and leather saturated my senses as he sipped with warm, unhurried licks, kissing me sweetly, without tongue or expectation. His hands rested on the mattress on either side of my head, his arms bracing the weight of his upper body.
The reunion of our lips freed a solemnity of emotion I’d kept buried and guarded for so long. I melted beneath the sheer force of it, surrendering to the love and longing that buzzed through our breaths.
His tongue played along the seam of my mouth but didn’t force its way in. This wasn’t a kiss that took and controlled. This was his devotion reaching out and caressing me, giving and nourishing, making me strong again.
He shifted, trailing his lips across a cheek that no longer throbbed with pain, roaming down my neck to my arm…
The arm was still there, the brace and stitches gone. It felt strange, itchy, sore… Whole. My relief was unwieldy as he kissed a wandering path over the crisscrossed scars near my inner elbow, the flesh pink and bubbled.
No more infection. His mouth fashioned the words against the healing wound, and I felt his smile, his relief, curving upward, tickling the tender skin.
A leather thong held the top half of his hair at the back of his head, but a few strands had fallen free, framing a face that was accustomed to being regarded with feminine pleasure.
He’d thinned out a little, but his complexion glowed with health. I wanted so badly to slide my hands over his sloping shoulders, up the column of his neck, and across his defined cheekbones. My fingers twitched, and he caught them, lifting them to his jaw.
Instant heat hit my palms. So hotblooded, this man, with a temper that always simmered just below the surface.
He’d shaved only hours ago, for there wasn’t a trace of stubble on his satiny skin. A shirt and breeches clad his muscled frame in his preferred pirate style, only these garments appeared cleaner. No rips or bloodstains.
I still didn’t know where we were.
My arms trembled with fatigue as he lowered them. Then he stepped away, widening my view to the bedchamber.
It reminded me of the one I’d occupied as a child in Charleston. I lay in a bed with four large wooden posts. Tiers of dark silk draped the rails overhead. Wool carpets, a table set with porcelain plates, silver sconces to provide light—the room glittered with wealth and elegance.
Off to the side, a wide doorway led into what looked like a bathing chamber. At the entrance, a cheval mirror stood next to an elegant dressing table. I looked away, fearing the reflection it would show me. I couldn’t even bring myself to shift the sheet off my body, knowing I was nude, scarred, and emaciated.
A sitting area surrounded a stone fireplace that spanned the length of one wall. Windows lined another wall, opening to a balcony that overlooked a landscape I couldn’t fathom.
“Where are we?” I tried to sit again, shaking with the effort.
He hooked an arm around my back, adjusted some pillows, and maneuvered me into a quasi-sitting position. My ribs ached with the movement, but it was manageable.
“You’ve been doing this a lot,” I muttered. “Taking care of me.”