Chapter 6
Chapter Six
WENDY
S neaking around the Death’s Right Hand at night was surprisingly harder than I expected. One, there was always someone on the deck, even with our anchor dropped and the sky pitch black overhead. Two, every time I shifted in my hammock in the crew’s quarters, a light sleeper awoke and glared into the dimness suspiciously. Three, when I finally slid out of my hammock and tiptoed out of the large room to the tight, wooden corridor beyond, a shadow fell over me and I stopped dead..
I lifted my head slowly, and locked eyes with the captain. “Do you ever sleep?” I asked, surly.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice like gravel.
“Taking a piss.” I cocked my chin out. “Unless you’d prefer I’d do it on the floor of this lovely, polished hallway.”
His eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “Three minutes. I’ll wait here for you to return.”
I gave him a strange look. “That’s weird. You’re being weird.”
“What I am,” he said, stepping closer, looming over me with menace and composure and scary calm, “is wary of a man who just killed one of my crew members and who is now sneaking around in the dead of night.”
Ah. Yeah, he had a point.
“For a piss,” I reminded him.
“You now have two and a half minutes.”
“Fuck,” I muttered and stalked past him, making for the wooden stairs at the end of the hallway. If I was going to be thwarted, I might as well empty my bladder. 1
I had just enough time to rinse the cup and wash my hands before I made it back down to the crew’s quarters, where the captain waited.
His hand was in the pocket of his brown coat, his mouth thin. “You’re late.”
“You don’t even have a watch; how would you know?”
Everything in his face hardened at once—his eyes, his mouth, his jaw. “Get back in your hammock. If I see you again, I will shoot you on sight.”
My shoulder throbbed pointedly. I got back in my hammock.