Chapter 2
Nia collapsed onto her back on the mattress, breathless and sweaty.
The man beside her wrapped an arm around her waist and planted a kiss on her shoulder.
Even though they’d literally just finished having sex, the gesture felt a little too forward.
She didn’t even know his name for gods’ sake.
Didn’t know what to moan during the act.
She blinked slowly up at the timbered ceiling of her attic room and bit her lip.
She was coming down from the post-coital bliss too fast. It wasn’t that the sex was bad, far from it, but it hadn’t been enough to banish pressing thoughts from her mind.
She placed a hand on the man’s warm chest, admiring the handsome nose and strong jaw that had attracted her in the first place.
“When do you sail?” she asked, injecting the expected dreaminess into her voice.
He was a sailor on a merchant ship out of Souna. But down in the tavern, she’d overheard him bragging that he used to have a place on the ship of Silver Stroud.
“Tomorrow morning,” the man answered sleepily.
Nia propped herself up on her elbow, tracing lazy circles through his chest hair.
“I heard you say something about Silver Stroud,” she cooed, like a lovestruck girl enraptured by the idea that the man in bed with her was once a dangerous pirate.
The man gave a wry smile, and Nia internally rolled her eyes.
The ego of a man like this was so easy to read, but often got in the way of the truth.
She’d chased down so many leads like this, only to have them turn out to be baseless bragging.
This man looked too straightlaced to have been a pirate, but then again, no sailor was truly upstanding.
“Did you know him?” Nia asked. “What was he like?” She honestly didn’t care. She knew the answer already, but she couldn’t jump straight in with her real questions.
Nia only half listened as he glancingly answered her question, instead regaling her with a tale of his own supposed swashbuckling adventures. She kept an interested look on her face, and her fingertips continued circling over his chest.
“—he always carried that damn key around,” the man was saying. Nia perked up. This was something true. Maybe this sailor had actually known Stroud.
“What was the key for?” Nia feigned a gasp of realization. “It couldn’t be the famed missing treasure?” Her hand pressed flat on his chest now, and she leaned forward eagerly, hoping the gesture made her seem like an impressionable girl, and not a woman probing for information.
“Could be.” The man chuckled. He pulled her against him and smoothed her ginger hair back from her face. “Perhaps I have a piece of the treasure with me.”
Nia’s stomach performed a painful flip. A piece of the treasure? It was not something that should be separated into pieces like a collection of useless baubles. Either this man was lying, or the treasure had been cut apart. If it truly had been, her life was over.
Nia’s heart raced.
“C-can I see it?” The question came out shaky with dread and hope, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“You’ll have to promise not to tell anyone,” the man said with a wink. He released her and rolled to the edge of the bed to fish for his trousers. His hand slipped into the pocket, and Nia knew even before he withdrew the object that he was a liar.
He rolled back toward her and held up a broach.
A broach, as if that could even come close to the value of the true treasure. She wanted to slap him for wasting her time. Then again, she’d had an ulterior motive in sleeping with him in the first place, so could she really blame him for being a liar too?
He smiled at her charmingly, expecting her to melt with how impressed she was.
“You know…you can have it if you want. A pretty girl deserves pretty things.” Indeed, she did deserve pretty things; she had a whole box of trinkets from men just like him under the bed.
He took her hand and placed the broach in her palm. It was surprisingly light, definitely tin instead of silver. She peered more closely at it, and tried very hard to hide her disdain. The inlaid gems were clearly glass.
Nia forced down the anger that threatened to boil up. Not only was he a liar, but he didn’t even have the grace to lie with convincing props. Perhaps she had laid on the simpering barmaid act a little too thick.
“How lovely!” she exclaimed. Her voice sounded strained to her own ears, anger and disappointment warring in her stomach. Her skin felt like it was crawling off her body. She glanced at the small round window tucked up under the roof gable and clapped her free hand over her mouth as if shocked.
“Oh my, it’s getting late. I must get back before dinner, or I’ll be scolded.”
The man frowned, but got the hint.
Once he was gone, she leaned against the wall of the kitchen, trying to calm herself.
Another dead end. Another day that she was trapped here on the Talvan mainland with a box of useless trinkets under her bed instead of the one thing she really wanted.
Because the treasure did not belong to Stroud—it was hers, and it was her only chance at freedom.
“Nia!” Madame Durand’s sharp voice startled her out of her bitter thoughts, and she spun to face the proprietress of the Swan Inn.
“Yes ma’am?” They both knew her good girl act was just that, an act.
But Nia saw it as a fun little game between them.
Nia did what she wanted and Madame Durand pretended to be angry, when really, they both knew Nia was the best employee the inn had ever had.
The Durands would never fire her, even if she skipped out occasionally to sleep with handsome strangers in search of treasure.
Not that the Durands knew about the treasure, they just thought she was a slut.
Madame Durand was red-faced and scowling. Nia felt a twinge of guilt over leaving her alone with the tail end of the midday rush.
“You had a visitor while you were away,” Madame said. “A young woman—”
Monsieur Durand chose that moment to enter the kitchen, hitting his wife on the ass with the door as it swung inward.
“Nia!” Monsieur Durand greeted her cheerfully, ignoring his wife as she swatted him on the arm in retaliation. “A young woman came with a package for you.”
“A package?” Nia wracked her brain for what it could be. She wasn’t expecting anything, but she had many acquaintances and many lovers, any of whom might send her something. “Where is it?” She didn’t see anything sitting around the kitchen.
“Well she said she could only deliver it to you directly. But she couldn’t stay while you were, ah…busy.”
“So is she coming back?” Who could the woman be? Most of her flings were men. They were easier to get information out of, but the occasional woman did pass through her bedchamber. Perhaps one was inclined to give her a gift?
“She said she was leaving with the tide tonight, and to meet her at berth forty-four if you want it,” Monsieur Durand replied. His wife glared at him, but he seemed delighted by the whole thing. “And to ask for Sarah.”
The bitterness was fading now, replaced by curiosity over the identity of the woman and the contents of the package.
She didn’t know any Sarah. But she was never one to turn down a gift, or a chance to get out of work.
She thanked Monsieur Durand and moved to leave through the back door before Madame Durand stopped her, still scowling.
“You’ll not abandon me for dinner as well,” she snapped. “You can go after.”
“But they might—”
“No buts, we pay you to help us around here. We feed and lodge you. You can’t go gallivanting off after every pretty thing that catches your eye.”
Nia sighed. Of course she wasn’t going to get away with shirking her duty twice in one day.
The Durands saw her the same as everyone else did—a frivolous girl who slept around and liked the glittering trinkets her various paramours gifted her.
She’d done nothing to correct them. She bought herself pretty dresses with the money she saved by living in the attic.
She wore the glass-gemmed, tin broaches like the one she’d gotten today.
She preened in front of the cracked mirror in the hall and took sailors to bed.
What the Durands didn’t see was her drawing information out of her sex-sated partners and flirtatious patrons alike. Not just about Stroud’s treasure, which she’d been searching for since before she arrived in Roseforte, but any intriguing information she could sell on to the right people.
It wasn’t completely a ruse. She did like the sex, and the pretty dresses.
They made her feel connected to her body, adorned the way she wanted to be.
Using her body for pleasure instead of work made her feel better about being trapped, and stilled that itching incompleteness that plagued her day by day.
But still, she’d rather be home, if home would have her. She’d rather not hide anymore.
“Yes, ma’am.”
It quickly became clear after the dinner rush that Madame Durand had no intention of letting Nia pick up the mysterious package in time, and it was past dark when Nia managed to escape her duties.
Maybe it was revenge for leaving her with all the work earlier that day.
Maybe she had just forgotten her promise.
Eventually Monsieur Durand took pity and helped Nia sneak out while his wife’s attention was elsewhere.
“Take Bruno with you, he should be done with work,” Monsieur Durand whispered to her at the back door. “I don’t want you going to the docks by yourself.”
Nia nodded and stepped over to the bakery next door where the apprentice, a bulky youth named Bruno, was just hanging up his apron.
“Care to take a walk? I have errands at the docks,” Nia said.