My body wasn’t broken like my mother’s, but I was empty all the same. And tired. So very tired.
Closing my eyes wasn’t hard. They pulled shut on their own.
When I opened them, I was greeted by nightfall.
Moonlight sparkled over my mother’s skin, giving her an ethereal glow. Eventually, someone would find us and take her away from me. Or maybe the crabs would take her. I leaned up to flick one from her hair, and a pair of jackboots stepped into my view.
Craning my neck, I looked up to find Charles Vane standing over me.
I licked cracked lips and rasped, “My father…”
“I tried to rescue him.” He crouched beside me, his expression unreadable in the moonlight. “They hanged him at dawn. Moved the gallows to the beach and did it right there to send a message to us. His crew.”
“You were there?”
He nodded stiffly. “So was she.” He glanced at the countess. “Your mother?”
“Yes.”
“She arrived as it happened and…” His brows furrowed as he gazed up at the peak of the cliff. “She went mad.”
I followed his gaze. “Did it take her pain?”
“I suppose it did.”
“This day took everything from me. Everything I loved. Everything I had.” I studied the rocky face of the cliff, wondering if I had the strength to climb it.
“Not everything.” He bent over me and scooped up my mother’s body from the rock. “I couldn’t save Captain Sharp, but I can save you.”
As he strode away with her, I pondered his words with a sluggish mind. Did I want to be saved? What was left to salvage?
Moments later, he returned and lifted me into his arms. I’d never felt so weak and lifeless. I didn’t even have the will to struggle as he carried me into the sea.
Muscles flexed beneath me as he lowered me into a jolly boat. My father’s boots and cutlass joined me.
And I wasn’t alone.
Two dead bodies lay at my feet, and the sight of them together breathed life into my heart.
“How?” I crawled toward my parents and gripped their cold hands, lacing their fingers together in the squeeze of mine.
“I stole his body from the gallows.” He climbed into the boat behind me. “Captain Sharp deserves a burial at sea.”
“Thank you.” I lay down beside them and wrapped my arms around my father’s chest. “What will happen to me?”
“That’s up to you.” He stabbed the oars into the black water and pushed out to sea. “Jade is yours. The captain was very clear on that point the night he took her.”
“I’m only fourteen.”
“I’ll captain her until you earn the crew’s trust.” He tipped his head, studying me. “I was younger than you, orphaned like you, when I chose this life. I have no regrets.”
“I’m a girl.” A broken, empty girl. I tightened my hand around my parents’ entwined fingers. “The crew won’t accept me without my father.”
“Don’t give them a choice.” His gaze flitted over me, and a smirk touched the corner of his mouth. “I saw a fearless fire burning inside you yesterday. Get that back, Bennett, and naught will stand in your way.”
I felt it. A spark of something beneath the cold, heavy weight of pain.
Something to live for.
My hand fell to the compass that hung from my waist.
When you’re ready, you will follow it and claim what’s rightfully yours.
I closed my eyes and cried.
March 1721
Port Royal, Kingston Harbor Jamaica
Seven years had passed since I lost my parents. I still felt it, the deep gnawing pain in the torments of my soul. I tried to shake it loose, tried like hell to pretend the damage wasn’t there. But it clung.
Especially tonight.
The mantle of twilight shrouded me in desolation as I stood before another corpse hanging from a noose.
Another buccaneer.
Another great man ripped from my life.
One day I might find the hempen halter around my own neck. Pirates never died in their beds. But today wasn’t my day.
A reminder that I shouldn’t be here.
I’d been on the run since I was fourteen, constantly looking over my shoulder. Even now I subtly tilted my head, probing the empty alleyways around me, my senses on alert for the one thing I couldn’t outrun forever.
Death.
My would-be reapers came in many forms. Pirate hunters sought the bounty my capture would award them. Navy officers desired the accolades from bringing down the pirate daughter of Captain Edric Sharp. Enemy buccaneers and fellow criminals wanted to eliminate me as the competition. And there were others, one in particular, who hunted me with single-minded focus, determined to reclaim what he’d lost.
He was the most dangerous of them all.
My presence in Jamaica was a risk. But I had to come, even as I knew I would arrive too late.
When I’d learned of Charles Vane’s capture, I was a week’s journey away.
I arrived three days after he hanged.
And he was still hanging.
I covered my nose against the stench and ordered myself not to cry. I hadn’t exposed that kind of weakness in a very long time.
Charles had seen me at my lowest point. One of them, anyway. The night he collected my parents’ bodies and carried me away from Carolina, we began a friendship that survived battles and sickness, victories and losses, time and distance.
And now death.
I owed him my life. A debt I would never be able to repay.
My trembling hand went to the jade stone that hung on the leather choker around my neck, one of the few things I retained from childhood. I’d lost so much in the past seven years and smiled so little.
Just like my mother.
But unlike her, my dream had always been to live on a ship. I’d obtained that and fought every day to keep it. Jade belonged to me, and I’d wrangled her under my command with a ferocity that would’ve made my father proud. I loved the life I’d chosen, craved the rocking beneath my feet even now, but it wasn’t easy.
I’d made a lot of mistakes, one of which left a terrible hole in my heart.
Shadows stirred in my periphery, and a well-built pirate approached my side. We didn’t make eye contact as he paused to view the body with a respectable amount of space between us.
He towered several heads taller than me, all lean muscle and vibrating intimidation. His brown hair was sheared up the sides, leaving a stripe of tousled length from the peak of his forehead to the base of his skull. Rings of gold lined his ear, and a square jaw underscored his hard mouth.
As wickedly attractive as he was ruthless, he could probably eat me in one bite.
I trusted him with my life.
Reynolds wasn’t just my quartermaster and second in command. He was one of my closest friends.
“We should go, Captain,” he said under his breath. “A lady of your station wouldn’t linger at Gallows Point after dusk.”
“I never claimed to be a lady.” I ran a hand over the bodice of my disguise.
Since I couldn’t enter busy ports dressed as a woman pirate, I had to exchange my trousers and weaponry for an appearance that was more readily overlooked.
I’d spent my teenage years clad in boy’s clothing with my hair chopped to my ears. Then my hips rounded, and my chest expanded, leaving me little choice but to don the stifling torture devices women favored.