Chapter Five After #2
“Not even close,” she shot back, jumping up to approach the bars.
Fell didn’t move. “You’ve been named a traitor—”
“I don’t recall swearing allegiance to anyone, least of all some boy king on a throne three thousand miles away,” Cat snapped, gesturing vaguely to the northwest. Or what she thought was northwest. It was impossible to tell underground.
He was undeterred, his tone clipped and severe. “A traitor to Crown and Empire. A danger to the Meridian colonies of the Lyrian Sea. An accomplice to piracy. Guilty of—”
“Survival?” Cat scoffed and turned, her skirts swirling around her feet. “Of staying alive in these godsforsaken waters while the Meridian Empire fled back across the ocean? I survived here with no one and nothing but my own wits.”
Beyond the bars, Fell chuckled low in his throat.
“No one and nothing,” he repeated, throwing the words back in her face.
“Part of me wishes you could have a trial so I might see this performance fully played out. Catrine Rose, a destitute widow by the age of twenty, left behind in the Lyrian Sea with nothing more than a few coins and a crumbling estate. What kind of Meridian lady could continue on amongst pirates and whores?”
He leaned in, inches away from the bars and her face.
“No lady at all.” He smirked, glancing not at her neck or exposed collarbone, but to her left arm. At a spot above her elbow, well hidden by her sleeve.
Instinctively Cat shrunk away, as if Fell might see right through her dress to the marked flesh beneath. Her skin flamed, the tattoo itching even now.
“Oh, Cat, don’t turn modest on me. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before,” he said, winking.
It was enough to make her see red.
“And what of your performance?” she snarled back at him. “Does it exhaust you, acting with every breath you take?”
She jabbed between the bars, shoving the captain’s chest. He gave no quarter and his medals bit into the flesh of her palm.
“Jasper Fell, the storied captain, a pirate hunter, another pet of the governor.” Cat spat out the words like poison.
“Laughing at bad jokes with worse company, holding on to his new commission with grasping fingers. Hoping it might earn him something a little more permanent, a little more real. A plot of land in Meridia, maybe even a title, something to pass on. Something he never had at all.”
Every sentence landed as she intended it to, cutting deep despite Fell’s best efforts to mask such weakness. His gaze dropped, his jaw clenched.
She twisted the knife with ease.
“An orphan of no name, press-ganged into the Meridian navy, shipped across the ocean as little more than cannon fodder.” She paused, pretending to think. “But I cannot recall—your father was in debtor’s prison, yes? And your mother, she ran off as soon as you could walk?”
A violent flush burned across Fell’s face. His hand twitched, his thumb worrying at the silver swan.
“That is more than enough, Widow Rose,” he said softly.
Cat raised her chin, looking down her nose at him. As if she were still a lady, and Captain Fell bound to obey.
“Wearing that ridiculous ring,” she said, her gaze dropping to his smallest finger. The silver signet gleamed even in the low light. “Stamped with the crest of no one and nothing.”
“Enough!”
His fist hit the bar closest to her head, the ring clanging on the iron. Cat held her ground, enjoying the victory, small as it was.
“My apologies, I am not myself this morning,” she said in a demure voice, as if she were apologizing for a spilled glass of wine. “I wonder why that is.”
His breath came ragged, his gray eyes boring into her own. Fell was not known for his temper, but it existed when provoked. Cat knew better than anyone where to push him. And when to retreat.
“You did not gloat over the others,” she muttered, looking back to the bench and the days clawed into the wood. “You could barely watch the other hangings. But you come to gloat over me?”
“I am not here to gloat,” Fell replied. He raised his fist, examining his swiftly bruising knuckles with a scowl.
Cat arched an eyebrow. “Then this is a very strange goodbye.”
“You are guilty of many crimes over many years,” he said, his voice tight and annoyed. “There’s no denying them all.”
Fell touched the inside of his coat where the execution order must have been. Cat wanted to rip it out of his pocket and tear it apart.
“Which is precisely why we made our deal,” she said, pressing her face to the bars. “You promised me a clean slate and a new start. You owe me that at least, Jasper.”
He glared back at her, only the bars between them.
“I owe you nothing.”
Since earning his commission, Fell smelled like expensive sandalwood oil. Yet another trapping of a man raised high. Even so, it was a welcome reprieve to the smell of the prison and the infernal bucket. Cat inhaled, catching the scent of sweat beneath the perfume. The man beneath the captain.
“You owe me your life, and I don’t mean your rank or your ship,” she said. “I mean the breath in your body. Or have you forgotten?”
“Have you forgotten?” Fell answered, taking her off guard. Then he touched the pistol at his hip, the only thing about his appearance that had not changed in nearly ten years.
His meaning was clear. For a second, the ground beneath Cat’s feet rolled like the deck of a ship, and not the floor of a cell. Her fingers curled, remembering the weight of the same pistol in her own hand, the kick of the recoil, the smell of gunpowder.
And blood, so much blood.
“What’s done is done. We’re square, Cat.” Fell’s voice sharpened, snapping her from the memories. “But there is another bargain to be made.”
Another bargain.
Cat swallowed against a ragged burst of hope. She searched Fell’s face, looking for the lie, for any hint of falsehood. Fell was many things, but not a sadist. He had no reason to dangle freedom in front of a woman set to die.
Or so she used to think.
“For some reason,” she muttered, pointedly examining the cell. “I don’t trust you.”
He did not blink, eyes on her face as one hand slipped into his coat, retrieving the parchment again, crisply folded.
Fell carefully unfurled the heavy paper, peeling it open to display an ornate signature and a familiar seal. The Meridian lion, stamped in golden wax. He held the page out between two fingers, his mouth twitching into his usual crooked smile.
With a jolt, Cat realized this was not the same document as before.
“What is this?” she breathed, her gaze trailing from the governor’s signature to the words above it. Impossible words, scrawled in lazy handwriting, not so formal as she expected an execution order to be.
Because it isn’t one, she realized, reading what she could.
I hereby order a stay of execution for Lady Catrine Rose of Archenport, in exchange for services rendered to Crown and Empire. At the discretion of His Lordship, Jon Osprin, Governor of the Meridian Colonies in the Lyrian Sea.
Cat swiped for the order, but Fell was faster, his hand darting just out of reach.
“So eager, Cat,” he said, tsking her. “Unbecoming of a lady.”
She bared her teeth.