Chapter 5
Chapter Five
WENDY
“ T hat’s gonna get confusing as fuck real fucking fast,” Sterling, the onyx-skinned man huffed, an easy smile on his face as he leaned forward on his skinny elbows. I’d learned he was the master gunner, in charge of weapons on board the Banshee. “We’ve already got Wynton and now there’s Wendell.”
“We’re thinking of starting a double act,” I told him brightly, trying very, very hard not to glare bloody murder at the behemoth sitting across from me. Barrington. Instead, I looked at Rolando, the Schnauzer with his bushy moustache and scowl as he read his hand of cards, and the rotund man beside him, his head bald and polished, the grey-black striped shirt he wore straining across his belly and starlight glinting off his round spectacles. “You could start one, too. Rolando and Ramone.”
The big man snorted. “A double act for what? Drinking ourselves into a coma and pissing money off the railing?”
“Hey, that’s talent,” I remarked with a genuine smile as I looked at my own cards. Oooh, I had a good hand. I loved good hands. “Some would miss the railing and piss on deck. It takes real skill to piss over the railing.”
The behemoth snorted. Barrington. My sworn enemy. I couldn’t keep the fury off my face—I felt it knot my brows into a deep V, my jaw clenching, eyes narrowing to a sliver of pure murder, my shoulders tensing.
“You got a problem, boy?” Barrington demanded with a smirk that threw oil on the fire of my rage.
Yeah, asshole, you kidnapped my sister. Where the fuck is she? I hadn’t seen her, hadn’t heard a whisper about a woman, hadn’t heard anyone screaming or crying or even singing like she loved to do.
“No problem,” I replied, the words like gravel against my throat. “I just don’t like your face.” I turned to Sterling, whose face didn’t incite me to murder. “What are we playing?”
“Imperial Ruin,” he replied with a little grin. “Unless you don’t know how to play…”
I snorted. Growing up in the Silver Isle, I knew how to play every card game in the Chain and Saints. Even the big, scary ones that made wimps back out. “Sure you wanna play Imperial Ruin with me?” I asked, giving them all a cocky grin that fit my character but wasn’t entirely faked. “I’ll bleed all your coin from you.”
Rolando laughed, his moustache fluttering. “Big talk.”
“Big game,” I assured him, looking at my cards, letting my confidence show. Let them wonder if it was real or fake. “Shall I go first?”
Barrington gestured for me to play and either didn’t care that I looked at him like I was picturing cutting his skin off his face or was used to people planning his death.
“So magnanimous,” I muttered, but played a six of shells. Not a bad start.
The deck had five suits—shells, sails, crowns, swords, and monsters, numbered from one to ten, with a black card in every suit. Play a black card and you collected all the money from a player of your choosing. Play all five black cards and you won the game instantly. I’d only ever played five blacks once, and I’d been playing since I was eight.
The part that intimidated most players was a black card meant you had to give up everything, not just whatever coins you put on the table—guns, knives, coins, jewellery, treasured family possessions, whatever you had on your person. I’d won a house from a man once because he forgot to remove his keys from his pocket. 1
Across from me, Rolando smirked, exchanging a swift glance with his portly buddy Ramone. I wondered if they bonded over a lack of hair. I could see their plan a league away, and they weren’t subtle about it. Ramone handed his Schnauzer buddy a card under the table, Rolando passing one back. Consolidating their blacks, no doubt. They probably had a deal to split the winnings when they’d fleeced me.
I leaned back on my crate, inclining my head to Sterling who laid a seven of sails on the overturned barrel with a hand dripping gold jewellery and jewels, no doubt biding his time, saving his better cards for later. He could have had a bad hand, though. He was so smiley and friendly and upbeat; it was impossible to read these types, because they smiled no matter what.
Barrington matched Sterling’s card with a seven of swords, meeting my hostile glare with a little smile that made my nostrils flare. I pictured cutting him up into little pieces to calm myself down but I wanted to scream in his face. Where the hell is my sister?
The only issue was, the whole crew were involved in the kidnapping. We knew to look the other way when you saw black sails, and to run whenever any crew member noticed you. No matter who—massive behemoth or scrawny little shit or silent grunter like Neville. Every member of this crew must have kidnapped a woman. If they hadn’t, they were complicit. Following captain’s orders.
I tried not to glare his way, lest I get thrown overboard for insubordination before I could exact my revenge and find Joanna. I couldn’t make a move on the captain who shot me until I’d found her, but this asshole… A smile curved the corners of my mouth. Oh, I could rid the world of him.
He’d made a mistake by sitting down to play Imperial Ruin with me. Pirates were notorious for their temper, and oh boy was I tempestuous.
I waited until we were each down to two cards, not a single black played yet but two eights, a nine, and a ten just put into play. I had a ten of monsters, the card illustrated with a fearsome giant squid with three rows of teeth and twenty black, beady eyes. The paintings gave some people the creeps, but I’d never been scared of monsters, or the dark, or the depths of the ocean. I’d never had normal phobias. My only fear was letting someone else be taken from me.
I saw their not-so-sneaky passes under the table, engineering their cards so that I’d lose and they’d all win. I let it slide most of them game, content in my amusement, but I was starting to get bored and this had never been about winning the contents of their pockets. When Barrington glanced at something over the deck and narrowed his eyes, clearly meaning to distract me for a moment as he passed a card to Rolando, I leapt off the crate so hard it turned over.
“You bald, cheating bastard.” I whipped out a knife before anyone could stop me and launched across the scant bit of space, the slick deck aiding my speed, almost gifting Barrington’s stomach to my blade. I had enough momentum that the knife sank easily, burying itself in his gut before anyone could react, let alone stop me. “I saw you passing cards, asshole,” I said loudly. “So here’s an important lesson: I’m the last person you want to cheat.”
I twisted the knife, gripping his coat when he struggled, trying to push me off him, kicking my ankle. As it was, he kicked my good ankle, so I was lucky. Wrenching him closer, my voice dropped to a whisper, I hissed, “Where the fuck is my sister? The girl you took at Silver Isle? Where is she?”
His eyes widened. I wrenched the dagger out and drove it into another, fleshy part of his middle, my grin growing. God, it felt good to take out some of my rage on someone who actually deserved it. Mr. Maudlin had been a homophobic dick, but he wasn’t the source of my rage. This bastard, however? He deserved everything he got. I leaned my weight on my arm, ripping open a hole in his middle. He yelled and screamed so loudly that I sensed the crew’s attention snap in our direction.
“Tell me quickly,” I taunted. “Or I’ll kill you.”
“Bitch,” he bit out, his eyes full of pain and loathing. I jerked back when he spat on my cheek, and had the pleasure of watching the blood drain from his face at whatever he beheld in my expression.
“Wrong answer,” I breathed, everything going still and cold inside me, my hand steady, my body strong, powerful. Everything else fell away; I slapped at the hands that tried to pull me away from my enemy, elbows driven into stomachs until they fell back, allowing me to cut a vicious chasm in Barrington’s stomach, whipping my dagger up past his ribs and into his heart next.
“Bye, bye,” I whispered, watching the light drain from his eyes.
I would have loved to extract more information from him, but even with the world falling away, I knew I stood on the deck of Death’s Right Hand, surrounded by people, and I couldn’t show myself yet. Not until I found Joanna.
I let them think this was about the cards, and money, and cheating. Besides, the whole crew had taken my sister, which gave me a lot more people to torture for her whereabouts. Nobody would miss this guy.
I was breathing hard, the stillness wearing off, by the time rough arms snapped around my middle and dragged me away from the corpse I was determined to hack into bits. I kicked, thrashing, hissing, but the bastard didn’t let me go. I twisted my head, snarling into Ramone’s face, noticing a scar on the bald man’s cheek in the shape of a heart. Cute. I’d still kill him, though.
“Enough, lad, he’s dead,” Ramone said, harsher than I’d heard him speak all night. His eyes were hard behind his glasses, too. Clearly he was more friendly when he thought he was winning all my worldly possessions.
“Do you want to be next?” I asked sweetly, a grin hooking one side of my mouth. “I know he wasn’t the only one cheating.”
“Enough!” a deep voice boomed, resonant and crackling like electricity in the air before a storm. “Anton, who’s the new kid?”
“Kid? I’m twenty-five, asshole,” I spat, elbowing Ramone in his impressive gut. He grunted and let me go, rubbing the point of impact and giving me a sour look. I noticed his buddy Rolando kept his distance, his arms crossed over his lanky chest, Sterling beside him watching me with new consideration.
Yeah, don’t underestimate me, asswipes.
My stomach tangled strangely when I saw the captain’s dark eyes on me as he strode across the deck, cutting an intimidating figure in his long brown coat, his jaunty hat nowhere to be seen. Instead, black hair fell around his forehead, tossed in the wind, and that windswept hair ought to have made him less intimidating, but it didn’t. It really, really didn’t. Captain Hook had a presence I didn’t like, and it turned my stomach into a mess of knots and nerves.
Eyes as black as obsidian fixed on me with a level of wrath I usually only saw in the mirror. I took my nervousness as a challenge and straightened my back, holding his gaze with my chin high, a little smirk on my mouth I’d learned could make anyone lose their temper.
“This is Wendell,” Anton, the quartermaster who gave me my position, rushed to say, falling into step with Hook. He looked harried and stressed, and he speared me with a cutting glare that told me I was the source of everything that had ever gone wrong in his life. “We picked him up at Swordfish. Dalton failed to show, probably started a fight he couldn’t win.”
Well, that was true.
Hook never looked away from me, his wrath palpable. I half expected him to draw the broadsword I saw running down his back, the hilt poking above his shoulder, but he only speared me with his unsettling black stare.
I assessed him quickly. He was taller than me, a surprise since I towered over most men I met, but I’d learned how to fight Mama and she was three inches taller than me. I reckoned I could take the captain. The way he moved told me he was well used to fighting, though, and not just firing shots with a pistol like some of the pirates aboard the Banshee. It would be a close fight, difficult. And I’d be vastly outnumbered because he had a whole crew at his back.
Best not to start shit with a captain.
I flourished my hand and dropped into a bow. “Delighted to meet your acquaintance, your captainness.”
“Is he of sound mind?” he asked Anton.
“Probably not,” I answered before the quartermaster could, and had the pleasure of watching Anton’s face darken, a muscle pounding in his forehead. “But do I have to be sane to crew a ship?”
“You do to not murder every last one of my crew,” Hook rumbled, talking to me for the first time. A little frisson of warning went down my spine at the gravel of his voice, the flash of warning in his eyes as he stopped three feet away from me. His jaw didn’t clench, hands didn’t curl into fists—oh, hand singular; the other arm ended at his wrist, just visible beneath his sleeve—and he didn’t snap or shout. It was the absence of those signs of temper that turned my nerves to cold, icy fear. It was a novel feeling. I hadn’t felt it in years. I got icy butterflies.
“I won’t murder all of them,” I said reasonably. There were probably a few of them that felt bad about the kidnapping; I could leave those ones alive.
When Hook’s expression darkened, his face all angles and warnings, I gave him a winning smile, bouncing on my heels. There were a lot of angles on his face, from the sharp lines of his brows to the slash of his cheekbones, his chiselled jaw, and even the knife-sharp cupid’s brow at his mouth. I could cut myself on him. I’d enjoy it.
No, god no. You came here to kill him, not fuck him, Wendy.
No matter how scary-delicious he was. Or how composed. I couldn’t help it; I wanted to break that calm of his, wanted to see what it took to make him snap.
“You won’t murder any of them,” Hook said calmly, his voice an order no matter how soft it was.
“Not even if they cheat at Imperial Ruin?”
“No.”
“Or if they steal my coat?” I glanced down at it. “It’s a very nice coat, look at the buttons.”
“No.”
“No, to murder or no to looking at the buttons?” I asked, tilting my head.
Hook just looked at me for a long moment, the deck silent enough to hear a pin drop. “Anton, how long did you give him before we throw him overboard?”
Anton stepped forward, his mouth pinched. “Two weeks, sir.”
“Make it one,” Hook said, holding my stare. “What’s your name, psycho?”
“Ooh, you can call me psycho, I like that.”
“Name,” Hook commanded, his voice a whip-strike but still contained, still level. What would it take to make him shout?
“Wendell, Captain,” I said, and threw up a salute, straightening my back. “The name’s Wendell.”
His mouth thinned. “Report to Sterling from now on. You can put that passion for murder to better use against our enemies.”
“Ooh, we have enemies?” Big fan of the idea of their enemies slaughtering the whole crew. It would serve them right for kidnapping women. “Do tell.”
Hook shook his head and turned away, striding towards the stern of the Banshee.
“Got it, need to know basis only,” I said with a nod, just noticing Barrington’s blood on my hands, flexing them with appreciation.
“Report to Sterling,” Hook barked at me. “And no more trouble.”
I didn’t reply. I certainly didn’t agree to that.