VIOLENT DO NOT ENGAGE #2
Before prison, the lines between good and bad seemed rather obvious.
Now they were up for interpretation. Was life really worth it if she was forced to become a pillaging, murdering, torturing pirate herself?
Would that be any better than what she’d already been through?
She doubted it would make her any more or less worthy of anything, and it certainly wouldn’t bring peace.
Greyson moved down the rows of cells with a set of keys. One by one, he opened the doors and removed the inmates’ chains. Once freed, the women rushed for the steps. He wasn’t rough or hurried, and he said nothing at all.
When he reached Hester and Morgyn’s cell, he released Morgyn first, then knelt before Hester to unlock her shackles. The whole time, Hester grinned. When he met her gaze, he smiled back, and Cecily was horrified to see his smile was as awful as the butcher girl’s.
Then Hester rocked forward, took his face in her hands, and kissed him so thoroughly that Cecily could only stare in open-mouthed shock.
“Thank you,” Hester gasped when the two finally separated.
Greyson seemed at a loss for words. Staring dumbly—was he blushing?—he managed a nod. With a swish of her hips, Hester traipsed from the cell. At the steps, she glanced over her shoulder, winked at Greyson, and fled upward with a giggle, leaving Cecily as the last to be released.
Greyson stared after Hester. “She’s pretty.”
Cecily nearly laughed in disbelief. How in hell’s name was she not only not being tortured or killed, but this man—who was perhaps one of the scariest people she’d ever seen—had taken time to notice her friend was pretty?
What were these pirates? Was Copson a showman or charlatan?
Or maybe the infamous captain liked to scare his victims before he killed them, solely for his own entertainment. Cecily cherished a decent amount of hate in her heart, and she’d played with Morgyn’s mind only a few minutes ago merely to protect her sanity.
How much more hate did a wicked man like Copson harbor?
He’d kill her. Or Greyson would once he saw the sign on her door and figured she was more trouble than she was worth.
Her heart swayed, balancing scales between what she deserved, wanted, and expected.
“Hester won’t be hurt, will she?” Cecily asked, her shiv warm where it hid in her palm.
When she had his attention again, she flicked her gaze to the sign on her door.
She considered this as putting the decision in God’s hands—if Greyson killed her, then she deserved it. If he didn’t, she still got to choose.
He glanced at the sign, then looked at her with deep brown eyes that held no malice.
Perhaps he couldn’t read.
“Nah,” he said quietly. “I like that one. She’ll be fine.
” Seeming unconcerned by the sign—should Cecily read it to him?
—he unlocked her door. Before he reached for her wrists, she tossed her open shackles aside, letting them clatter loudly to the ground with the thought that maybe this would be cause for concern.
He seemed befuddled, but still not the least bit bothered. A twitchy, half-smile crept over his lips.
“Clever,” he said. Then he left her cell, walking quickly, she assumed, to catch up to her friend.
She turned her shiv over in her hand before concealing it along the inside of her longest finger.
Maybe these were good pirates, if such a thing existed, and choosing to live among them for a time wouldn’t be so awful.
Copson had assured safety on his ship, and though she didn’t fully believe him, there’d be weapons and money.
If either of those failed her, she always had her wits—enough to keep her alive for long enough to get her somewhere better.
Life, then? Did she want to be a pirate?
The thought nearly had her chuckling. Her, a pirate—she couldn’t picture it. She’d imagined death plenty of times, so it seemed much more realistic. Perhaps that was why she wavered.
At the very least, she knew she wanted to be out of the brig.
The wooden planks creaked under her boots as she pushed to her feet and stepped out of her cell. Her heart kicked faster. These were the first steps in a year that were her own, the first time she was allowed to move of her own volition, without shackles or force.
She ghosted toward the light cutting through the hatch. The sound of the sea and voices grew louder as she wandered up from the belly of the ship and through the crew’s quarters. When she came to ladder that would bring her into the open air, evening light bloomed brighter around her.
She looked up.
In the space of a heartbeat, she forgot the ship and everything around her as the sky peeked through the hatch, cast with fiery orange and pink clouds.
She hadn’t seen the sky like this since…she couldn’t remember. Even the day she’d boarded the Sparrow had been cold and dreary, as though the sun couldn’t bear to look at her. Now the sky burned as though the world had been put to flame, chasing away the muted shadows behind her.
Hardly daring to blink, she began to climb. The sky stretched impossibly wide, fading from violent reds and oranges in the west to cool, starry indigo in the east—colors she’d never been able to replicate at the home inside her head.
When she emerged from the hatch, something soft brushed her cheek.
A breeze, she realized, as gentle as a kiss.
She gasped—and inhaled her first breath of fresh air, sweeter and cooler than those she’d imagined countless times.
Another chill gust pulled at strands of her hair, teasing them this way and that, begging her toward every corner of the world as she fully emerged from the bowels of the ship and stepped onto the deck.
For several breaths, she stood under the vastness and simply pulled it into her lungs, as though the air might wind through every shadowy part of her to make her as light and beautiful as the sky above. It was cleansing and bright, and she remembered what it was to live—
The wind turned, and suddenly smoke and gunpowder assaulted her senses. She lowered her gaze from the heavens and back to this hellish boat.
It seemed she hadn’t been wrong about Copson. He was exactly who she’d heard he was.
Dead sailors lay sprawled over the deck, covered in blood and pocked with bullet holes and stab wounds. They’d been picked clean of their belongings, their mouths gaping with the shocked expressions they’d worn when they died.
Bile had risen in her throat the first time she’d seen a dead man. The times after that weren’t as terrible as the first, even though they’d happened in relatively quick succession.
At the helm, the Sparrow’s captain had been tied to the spokes of his wheel by his arms and neck, his eyes bulging from his purple face as he tried to scream past the rope squeezing his throat.
Such a brutal death struck her as unnecessary, but she struggled to summon any pity or feel much of anything for him at all. In the back of her mind, Morgyn’s voice whispered, Monstrous bitch.
Cecily looked away.
The Fortuna Royale floated beside them, at least double the size of the Sparrow.
There were three masts, as opposed to the two on the prison ship, impossibly tall and rigged with massive canvas sails.
Pikes extended from its dark hull, spearing the Sparrow like an oversized fish, and a gangplank stretched between them, which most of the prisoners and pirates had already crossed.
Beyond it, the evening sun hovered over the sea, sparkling over water so deeply blue that it was nearly black. She wanted to pause and marvel, but the side of her face prickled—like a brand, or a searing cut along her left cheek that distracted her from the sheer grandness of the world before her.
Her gaze snapped to side, finding the culprit only paces away.
Eyes. Cold, bright blue eyes set in the most severe face she’d ever seen.
The young man watched her from where he stood near the gangplank with his arms folded, his fair hair crowned with gold against the setting sun.
He was tall and lithe, perhaps three years older than twenty, and his features were all sharp angles and hard lines.
If there was any sort of beauty that might distract her from the glory of nature, here it was, studying her with searing intensity.
His gaze swept over her in a single, clinical look.
She did the same to him, taking in his long legs, the sword strapped to his hip, and the way his royal-blue vest hugged his broad chest and narrow waist, the fabric stitched with tiny pockets that sheathed a litany of throwing knives.
Loose white shirtsleeves billowed in the wind.
Indeed, she hadn’t seen anything so beautiful in a long time. She looked her fill, as unapologetically as he did to her.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, it occurred to her what he would see. Her dress had once been as white as his shirt, but was no doubt soiled to an entirely new color. She probably smelled horrific too, but she’d gone nose-blind to her own filth ages ago.
She didn’t care what he saw, only that he cared to look, and that it felt like being lit on fire. She wasn’t afraid of it—she’d been frozen solid for so long that no amount of infernal heat would bother her.
“What did you do to end up here?” Like the captain, the young man’s rich, smooth voice drifted to her with startlingly proper diction, as though he were a gentleman, shaping words as stern as his handsome face.
“It was a rather horrible misunderstanding,” she said flatly.
His brow quirked, cutting a harsh shadow over one eye. “Was it?”
There came a loud thunk from her right. A pirate had thrown an empty barrel to the deck, its contents having been spilled over the boards.
Gunpowder.
Long fuses spiderwebbed over the deck between piles of black powder, even trailing down into the Sparrow’s lower decks. She’d walked right by them.