Chapter 2
Chapter
Two
Edinburgh
September
The hurricane came hunting just before midnight.
Brodie MacLeod braced himself against the Corbeau’s gunwale as another wave crashed over the bow, salt spray stinging his face and soaking through his shirt.
Around him, men shouted in French and broken English, hauling lines and securing cargo as the winds drove them hard toward the Jamaican coast.
Four years since Edinburgh—since Anne’s betrayal, the English slave ship, and then the Corbeau—had taught him to read the weather the way other men read books. This storm had claws in it, the kind that either killed you quick or changed the world entirely.
“MacLeod!” Renard’s voice cut through the wind. “Get below and check the forward hold. If we’ve sprung a leak, I want to know before we’re swimming with the sharks.”
Brodie’s feet were steady on the pitching deck, his balance earned through countless watches and twice as many fights.
The boy who’d stumbled aboard this ship, still rubbing wrists raw from the chains, was long gone.
What remained moved with the sureness of a man who’d learned to survive by becoming indispensable.
Below, the hold smelled of tar and damp wood, laced with the faint sweetness of contraband sugar from their last raid. He ran his hands along the seams, feeling for the telltale dampness that meant trouble. Timbers creaked in harmony with the storm, groaning like old bones.
Nothing. The Corbeau was sound.
Halfway back to the ladder, the memory ambushed him.
Rain drumming against wood—that same rhythm as the night in Edinburgh. Years had passed, yet Anne McKinnon remained, a splinter he couldn’t dig free.
I’m sorry, Brodie. I’m so sorry.
Her voice breaking as the redcoats hauled him away. Her face pale in the tavern’s dim light, tears tracking down her cheeks while the coins sat heavy in her lap. Thirty pieces of silver and a soldier’s promise.
He’d trusted her with everything. His heart, his future, his fool notion that love mattered more than clan or duty or survival.
Brodie pressed his palm flat against the rough wood of the bulkhead, breathing through the old rage. Since that night, he’d killed men and watched friends die. He’d learned a dozen ways to open a man from throat to belly, and he’d stopped dreaming of heather-covered hills.
But Anne remained.
Shoulda known better, he thought. Connor tried to warn me.
His brother’s voice echoed across the years: That lass will break your heart, Brodie. Mark me.
Connor had been right. Just not about the breaking. Anne hadn’t broken his heart—she’d taught him it was a liability he couldn’t afford.
Above, someone screamed.
Brodie climbed fast, the ladder rungs biting into his hands. He emerged onto a deck filled with chaos. Wind shrieked through the rigging. Rain fell in solid sheets. Lightning split the sky, illuminating waves tall as houses.
In that flash of white light, he saw something impossible.
A figure stood on the water. Not floating. Not drowning. Standing.
She was tall and ancient, wrapped in a cloak that seemed woven from midnight itself. Silver hair streamed around her face like sea foam, and her eyes—saints, her eyes—were the color of river stones worn smooth by centuries.
Thunder cracked. He blinked, and she was gone.
“Did ye see that?” he shouted at Jean-Pierre, the nearest crewman.
Jean-Pierre spat seawater, his face bone-white. “See what?”
“On the waves. There was—”
Another wave crashed over the bow, stealing his words. He grabbed the nearest line to keep from sliding as the ship heeled hard to starboard. His heart hammered against his ribs—not from fear of the storm, but from the certainty thrumming through him like a second pulse.
He’d seen something. Someone.
The same presence he’d glimpsed once before, when the Corbeau had first taken him from the slave ship. A figure in the storm that vanished when he tried to focus, leaving only questions and the taste of salt and old magic.
“All hands!” Renard’s voice boomed from the quarterdeck. “We’re running for Port Royal! Batten down and pray the English are too smart to be sailing in this!”
Brodie worked alongside the crew, hauling lines and securing cargo, but his mind kept returning to that impossible woman on the waves.
His gran had told stories when he was small—tales of an old goddess who walked between worlds at storm-time and threshold.
She who wove fate and watched over doorways, who appeared when change was coming whether you wanted it or not.
Fairy stories, he told himself. Yer losing your mind.
But the certainty remained, lodged deep in his chest like an anchor stone.
Something was coming. Something more than the hurricane.
By dawn, they’d rounded Point Morant and limped into Port Royal’s harbor, battered but whole. Brodie helped secure the moorings, working on instinct while his thoughts churned elsewhere. Around him, the crew celebrated their survival with the usual mix of relief and bravado.
“MacLeod.” Renard materialized at his elbow, weathered face unreadable. “Walk with me.”
They made their way down the gangplank and into Port Royal’s crowded streets.
The morning sun already burned fiercely, evaporating the storm’s memory and replacing it with thick, humid heat.
The smell hit him like a wall—rum and rotting fish, human waste and tropical flowers, all mingled together into the scent he’d come to associate with freedom.
Or at least, with not being in chains.
“I have business inland,” Renard said once they’d left the docks behind. “A plantation owner who owes me a considerable debt.”
“And ye need me to collect?”
“Non.” Renard’s smile was cold as ship’s iron. “I need someone I can trust to watch her. This woman—the Widow Delacroix—she is... complicated. Dangerous in ways that have nothing to do with weapons.”
“What kind of dangerous?”
“The kind that collects beautiful things.” Renard’s gaze was measuring. “She has an arrangement with certain ship captains. We bring her indentured men from England, Ireland, Scotland—those with an education, refinement, a handsome face. She pays well for the right acquisitions.”
Understanding settled in Brodie’s gut, cold and certain. “She’s buying slaves.”
“She prefers to think of it as patronage.” Renard shrugged. “The men are treated well enough, from what I hear. Better than they’d fare on most plantations. But the debt she owes me can be settled with coin or... other arrangements. I need someone shrewd enough to assess which serves us better.”
“Why me?”
“Because in all your time aboard, you’ve proven yourself clever enough to survive and loyal enough to be trusted.” Renard stopped walking, turning to face him fully. “Also because if she decides she wants to add you to her collection, your pretty face might make the negotiations easier.”
Brodie’s jaw tightened. “I’m not for sale.”
“Everyone’s for sale, mon ami. It’s simply a matter of price.” Renard clapped his shoulder. “But I won’t trade you without your consent. You have my word. I simply need you to accompany me inland, observe, and report what you see. Can you do that?”
The smart answer was yes. After four years aboard, he understood how Renard operated—part merchant, part pirate, wholly pragmatic. Refusing a direct order was grounds for being put ashore with nothing but your skin.
But something about this felt wrong. The same prickling sensation he’d had before the storm, before seeing that impossible woman on the waves.
“When do we leave?” he asked.
“Tomorrow at first light. The Delacroix plantation is a day’s ride from here.” Renard’s expression shifted to something almost sympathetic. “Get some rest. And perhaps spend tonight with a woman. Forget whatever ghosts you’ve been wrestling. I need your head clear for this.”
Brodie watched the captain walk away, disappearing into the crowd of sailors and merchants and women selling fruit from woven baskets. Above, seabirds wheeled and cried, their voices sharp against the morning heat.
He should go back to the ship. Should sleep off the storm and prepare for tomorrow.
Instead, he found himself drawn through Port Royal’s narrow streets, past the taverns already full despite the early hour, past the merchant houses with their shuttered windows and careful respectability. He walked until he reached the edge of town, where buildings gave way to scrub and sand.
The beach stretched out before him, empty save for a few ghost crabs scuttling sideways across the wet sand. The tide was going out, leaving behind debris from the storm—shattered planks, torn sailcloth, a ship’s figurehead with her painted face cracked and weathered.
And there, caught in the sand near the waterline, was a single black feather.
Brodie crouched beside it, sand gritty beneath his knees. The feather was too large for any seabird he knew, midnight-dark and gleaming wet despite the sun. When he picked it up, weight settled in his palm—heavier than it should be, as if made of something more than bone and barb.
The air shifted.
He felt it before he saw anything—like the moment before lightning strikes. Hair rose on his arms. His breath misted despite the heat.
“Ye’ve wandered far from the heather, Brodie MacLeod.”
The voice came from behind him, low and resonant, like stones grinding beneath water. Brodie spun, one hand going automatically to the dirk at his belt.
She stood ten paces away—the woman from the storm.
Older in daylight yet somehow ageless, with silver hair falling past her shoulders and a face unmarked by time. Her cloak pooled around her feet, shimmering like midnight water. Those river-stone eyes fixed on him with an intensity that made his chest tight.
“Who are ye?” The question came out rougher than intended.
“I’ve had many names.” She tilted her head, considering him the way a crow considers carrion. “Your grandmother would have called me the one who watches doors open and close.”
“Fairy tales.”
“Are they?” Her smile was the saddest thing he’d ever seen. “Ye’ve been broken, boy. Betrayed and remade into something harder. But the storm isna finished with ye yet.”
“I didna ask for this.” Whatever this was.
“No one does.” She glided closer across the sand, seeming to move without walking. “But doors are opening. Time is turning like the tide. What ye choose when ye cross the threshold will matter more than ye ken.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Ye will.” She reached out, one weathered finger touching his chest directly over his heart.
Cold bloomed where she touched—not painful, but absolute. The cold of deep water and old magic, seeping through cloth and skin and bone until it settled somewhere behind his ribs.
“Fate opened a door for ye once, in that Edinburgh tavern. It’s about to open another. This time, pay attention to who walks through.”
Before he could respond, she stepped back. Air wavered like heat shimmer, and between one blink and the next, she was gone.
Only the black feather remained, lying in his palm like proof he hadn’t imagined everything.
Brodie stood alone on the beach, the morning sun beating down on his shoulders, while the world tilted slightly. For four years he’d sailed these waters—surviving, forcing himself not to feel anything deeper than the need to live through the next day.
And now this. Magic and mystery and a warning he didn’t know how to heed.
He looked down at the feather, then out at the sea where the Corbeau rode at anchor. Tomorrow they’d ride inland to some plantation where a dangerous woman collected beautiful things. Tomorrow he’d play his part in whatever scheme Renard was weaving.
Brodie tucked the feather inside his shirt, against his skin where the cold still lingered.
A door opening, she’d said. Pay attention to who walks through.
He turned back toward Port Royal, toward the ship, toward—
Footsteps crunched in the sand behind him.
His hand went to his dirk before his mind caught up, but it was only Jean-Pierre, breathing hard and flushed from running.
“Renard’s looking for you,” the Frenchman panted, hands on his knees. “Says to get your kit together. We’re leaving tonight, not tomorrow.”
“Tonight?” Brodie frowned. “He said first light.”
“Oui, well, the widow sent a messenger. Seems she’s eager to settle accounts.” Jean-Pierre straightened, giving him an odd look. “And she specifically asked about you, mon ami. Asked if Renard still had ‘the handsome young Scottish one with the sea-gray eyes.’”
Ice spread through his veins—colder even than the goddesses touch.
“She knows about me? How?”
“Apparently.” Jean-Pierre shrugged. “Renard’s in a foul mood about it. Says someone’s been talking when they shouldn’t. Either way, we ride in three hours. Best get ready.”