He stayed on his knees, watching as she lit a lantern by the bedside and her silhouette moved on the other side of the screen. Who was this woman who had driven him nearly to marking in a single tryst? It had been a long time for him, of course, but he’d always imagined himself as having more self-control than that. And she was human.
He located his trousers and pulled them on, the weariness and satisfaction of this encounter weighing down his bones just as much as the unsettling heat that lingered, a reminder of how close he’d come to marking her. He sprawled on his back on the floor, hands still bound and resting on his stomach, and inhaled deeply. At least there was a carpet. And it was warm, and dry. A massive improvement upon the chains and bilgewater that he’d left on the merchant clipper.
He let the gentle rocking of the ship lull him, eyes closing though he could hear her moving in the bed behind the screen, and her scent filled the room. Reza had never marked a mate before, not even one of his own kind; he’d never even been tempted. And what was this? Just a rutting that would hopefully get him to freedom, not a binding act of love meant to join them forever. He thought perhaps captivity had finally ruined him. Maybe the beast in his heart and the man in his mind were broken beyond repair and he would never be able to reconcile them again. A human?
His dreams were fitful and unkind that night, full of wide beaches and soft sand, and the distant, familiar silhouette of the mountain set against a rising sun, as though the sky itself was on fire behind the island peak. And on the white shore of a home he now struggled to remember, washed up by the tide, this lady pirate captain, naked and beckoning.
He came awake with a start sometime before dawn. The sky outside the wide bay window was a bruised violet, the lantern still swinging, lit but smoldering down towards smoke. Things could never be said to be still on a pirate ship, but Reza imagined that this was as close as it ever got to serene: the sound of gulls circling beyond the portholes suggested they were close to land. The ship creaked and groaned softly, but all the thumping, bellowing pirates were still themselves asleep. That was his first, sleep-fogged impression. And it was quite wrong.
Only a few seconds after he awoke, he caught the scent of grime and sweat and gunpowder. He started rolling to his side, to get to his hands and knees, but the door burst open and a crowd of pirates poured in, led by the tall, dark-bearded fellow he’d seen talking to the captain as Hanky had marched him belowdecks.
Before he could get to his feet, that same fellow kicked him in the face. Pain exploded between his eyes, his head ringing as he fell back, and the animal inside him roared for violence, but he fought the impulse down, bile burning in the back of his throat. If there was one thing he’d learned over the last two years, it was definitely to pick his battles. As he lay groaning on the floor, the tall pirate walked right over him and to the silk screen, and Reza heard steel being drawn. He heard the captain curse, and there was a scuffle, but then the bearded pirate dragged her, in nothing but a sleeping shirt, out from behind the screen and wrenched the rapier right out of her fingers.
“Let go of me, Dox,” she growled, twisting in his grip.
“We’ve voted,” the man Dox said darkly. “You’re out.”
“What madness is this?” she cried, looking at the other assembled pirates. “What the hell are you doing?”
Through the blood dripping into his eyes, Reza could see the other pirates shift about uncomfortably. He caught sight of Hanky towards the back, his head bowed, expression regretful and resigned.
“The men don’t want a woman captain anymore,” Dox said. “You’re soft and weak and they’ve voted me to replace you.”
“You bloody swine,” the captain hissed. “You can’t have a vote without me even there!”
“Well, we did,” Dox snapped.
“Let go of me,” she shouted. “I can dress and remove myself, thank you very much!”
“No.”
The tone of things changed dramatically then. Reza stayed on his knees on the floor, head bowed over his tied wrists, but he knew a shift in the wind when he felt it.
“Dox, what are you doing?” the captain asked, a tremor of horror in her voice.
“We’ll put into port in an hour,” Dox said darkly. “And we’re selling your slave here and you at market.”
The room descended into chaos then, as the captain flailed and tried furiously to fight, but Dox and his attending cronies wrestled her to submission and carried her out of the room, howling like a hellcat through the ship’s underbelly. It was Hanky who came to Reza, pulling him to his feet and leading him along behind them to the ship’s brig, where they would be stowed until it was time to put them on the blocks. The captain could be heard bellowing until, presumably, Dox knocked her out to shut her up. Then the ship was quiet again, and Reza thought perhaps that it was too quiet, like the black-sailed ghost ships of sea shanties and myth, the ones cursed to sail through darkness after committing the gravest sins.
Chapter 7
New Providence market was colorful, tropical chaos. Though it had long been one of Cressida’s favorite ports to spend time in, today it was the bright, sweltering epitome of all her nightmares become real. The sun was burning down on them by the time Dox was dragging them, Cressida and Reza chained together, through the crowded streets of the bazaar itself. Cressida was positive she had never before hated anyone as much as she hated Dox now. She’d been stupid and blind; she’d made the mistake of having faith in the men around her. Dox must have been planning this from the moment they’d seen the clipper in the periscope.
He’d left her to spend the morning unconscious in the brig, and woken her shortly before noon by tossing a bucket of cold seawater into her face. He hadn’t given them food or fresh drinking water, and he hadn’t given her pants or boots, he’d just locked the shackles on her wrists and then a joined pair onto Reza’s and dragged them out of the brig and down the gangplank to the pier.
Now, as he pulled them through the muddy, disgusting streets of the bazaar, Cressida barefoot and in nothing but her filmy sleeping chemise, she thought of all the ways that she would kill him and desecrate his corpse the first opportunity she got. She had faced many challenges and many moments of degradation in her life, but nothing compared to this. Nothing like being sold. That was an indignity that, up until now, Cressida had managed to avoid, despite her gender. She swore to herself that she would survive this, and any and every misery to come, if only to have her revenge.
Her heel slipped in a bit of filth on the cobbled stones and she fell, Dox turning to smirk and watch, but Reza caught her by the arms before she hit the ground and eased her back to her feet. She shook him angrily off and Dox yanked on the chains, causing them both to stumble forward and into each other.
“Save your rage,” she heard the slave murmur into her ear.
“Sod off,” she hissed furiously.
Later she might have a better appreciation for the advice, but now she was too angry to focus on anything else. And she knew that it was to be either anger or dread, and dread would not keep her alive.
The slave auction was held in the center of the bazaar, on a raised platform, run by a man named Carver, the local butcher, of all things. Though if anyone could be said to have a keen eye for flesh, one had to presume it was the butcher. He took a cut of all profits made at the auction, which no doubt made up for the infrequency of meat at his butchery, since beef was somewhat hard to come by on the islands.
As Dox dragged them through the crowd, Cressida felt a well of shame open up inside her, people leering and calling out prices already, and a few had the audacity to actually touch her. They pawed at her hair and her breasts through the nightshirt, her ass, and one grubby old man tried to reach up beneath the shirt but she bashed him in the face with her shackles. He went stumbling back into the crowd, a blistering litany of curses filling the air, and the assembled masses roared with laughter. No one touched her again, and in short order
Dox was lifting her onto one of the blocks and locking her chains onto the iron rung built into the base of the platform so she couldn’t run.
“I’m going to kill you,” she told him, firm and low. “And I’m going to take my ship back.”
“You’re going to die as somebody’s fuck toy in the dark,” Dox told her, and smiled, the expression obscene and horrible on his otherwise handsome face. “Captain.”
She tried to lunge at him, but the chains held her on the block.
He laughed and moved on to lock Reza onto his own block, and then she watched him mosey off the platform altogether, standing to one side with the other members of her mutinous crew to watch. The crowd pressed against the platform’s edge, calling for Carver to start the auction, and the pot-bellied butcher ambled up on stage.
Cressida assessed the other slaves for sale. There were eight of them altogether, including her and Reza, and she was the only white on a block and one of only two women. Reza had the most exotic look of any of the men. The rest were all dark-faced and rail thin, probably worked until they had no strength left, half-starved, and now sold so they could be worked actually to death. It was a horrible life. Anytime Cressida herself had purchased a slave from this market, it had been to free him. Half her crew were free because of her, including Hanky. A lot of good her charity had done her. Reza was standing with his shoulders slumped, head bowed low. Cressida felt a pang of…regret? She wasn’t sure what that feeling was, but she didn’t like it.
She looked away from the other slaves and out at the crowd, trying to gauge who would bid on her. If she could inspire the right idiot, one she could quickly kill or clean out, one she could easily escape, then this might not end the way Dox predicted. Men could be malleable if one knew how to bend them properly, and Cressida had spent much of her life learning just how to lean. Her eyes traveled over the sea of dirty faces, a myriad of gap-toothed louts and one-eyed blaggards, hideous rogues and jeering degenerates. Just the sort of crowd one expected to find at a slave market in a pirate haven.
And then she saw him, and her heart tanked into her heels.
Not a face she had anticipated seeing, though she knew he came to New Providence upon occasion, as they all did, for provisions and a break from the tide.
Captain James Kelly was as much a ruthless dog as any of them, but he didn’t subscribe to the filth and muck that often accompanied the sweet trade. No, he was clean and handsome, strapping and tall enough that he stood half a head above the rest. When Cressida’s gaze landed upon him, she realized he was looking right back at her, something impossibly smug in the dark, dark brown depths of his eyes. Cressida felt herself flush with anger and shame. Of course it would be Kelly who saw her like this, trussed up like a turkey at Sunday lunch. Betrayed and worse, just as he’d predicted.
Don’t be absurd, she could hear herself saying. Dox will never gain enough allies to overturn me.
You’re being foolish, Kelly had returned, and then he was climbing atop her, peeling back the sheets that separated them in the whorehouse bed they’d rented. You should just come with me.
He’d said that every time. And, every time, Cressida had said no. She did not want to be just any pirate. She did not want to be just a pirate on James Kelly’s ship, to be drawn into his bed whenever he liked. He was that kind of man and that kind of captain, and Cressida liked him well enough when he was between her thighs because she’d invited him there, but the idea of serving him, or under him, as the case might’ve been, had never appealed to her. She wanted to be captain of her own ship. She wanted to make the rules. And so of course Kelly was present to bear witness to her failure.
The sun beat down upon them, brutal at its midday apex, and Carver started the auction by ringing a big brass handbell. Cressida was unsurprised to find that the auction began at the other end of the line, and would end with her. As the shouting began and the gathered pirates started throwing coin and bellowing, and Carver bellowed back, Cressida’s rage began to ebb. Enough that she felt that creeping dread as one by one the slaves were pulled down off their blocks and hustled to their new owners.
She tried to hold on to her anger, but as Carver got to Reza beside her, she began to feel light-headed with fear. It had all happened so quickly. She was dizzy with the velocity of her descent. And then suddenly her knees buckled and she half-fainted right there on the block.
Reza caught her.
She lifted her head, bewildered, as his strong arms hefted her up, and she heard the crowd mumble confusedly. Then she saw why. He’d jumped right down off his block and twisted against his chains, strong enough that the hook embedded in the platform snapped loose. It should have taken the strength of five men to do such a thing, but Reza had done it in the blink of an eye. He stood now with Cressida in his arms, and she could feel the pirates’ regard narrowing upon them.
“Put me down,” she whispered, a knot in her throat. “God, put me down.”
“No,” Reza said through his teeth, his hands firm upon her. “Wait.”
His eyes scanned those gathered, and she watched him inhale deeply as if taking in the scent of the scene — one she could not possibly imagine was very appealing at all. But he seemed to be searching for something specific.
“For the sake of the lady’s health,” Cressida heard Dox shout from the side. “Sell her first, Carver.”
“Aye,” Carver said, nodding. And then he turned to the crowd. “We will proceed to the sale of Cressida Avery! Former captain of the Black Fortune and a beautiful specimen of her gender, we’ll start the bidding at—”
“I’ll pay ten thousand.”
Cressida winced. She knew that voice.
A ripple of curses and wonder tore through the crowd of pirates, but they parted, shuffling out of the way as James Kelly strode towards the edge of the platform and tossed a bag of coin right onto it, at Carver’s feet.
The butcher looked down in surprise. “But Captain Kelly…”
Kelly smirked. “For both of them.”
Chapter 8
It was quite an unexpected turn of events, but James Kelly was nothing if not lucky. Very, very lucky. And he did not think that ten thousand gold was going to make much of a difference, not after he got his hands on the treasure he really had in mind.
And now it looked, by all accounts, like he’d spent that exorbitant amount on Cressida — who, he would have admitted freely, was well worth ten thousand gold pieces. But she had not been what he was after. Well, insomuch as he had not been hunting her. She was always something he was after, but he’d have preferred her to come to him willingly instead of in irons. Still, he’d take her now he had her. He’d told her all along that she should give up the foolish fancy of having a ship of her own. No pirate crew would let a woman lead them very long.
When James saw the slave break through the chains’ latch, whatever doubts he might have been harboring had fled. They’d made careful calculations, and correspondence with his agents in the East had proved helpful, if not concrete or well-timed. Letters were unreliable, especially at sea, but when they’d come across the gutted carcass of the merchant clipper and her crew in its brig, he’d known he was close. And only a few hours behind the Black Fortune.
The lads had not relished falling upon the oars to get them to New Providence in time, but they’d done the work. They trusted him. His crew were all that was left of his family, and he theirs, and this life was not one they had chosen for themselves. He wanted to give them better. He could never give them what they’d lost, but he could give them better. And it was this strange-eyed slave, he thought, who could lead him to it.
Cressida, his hot-blooded sea goddess, was a very generous bonus.
The look on her face when he told Carver the purse was for them both, James thought, was a mixture of bewilderment and horror. The slave holding her, however, had a gritty, determined glint in his eyes that James knew would be problematic moving forward.
&nb
sp; “Well,” he said impatiently to Carver. “Get it done, then.”
The butcher bent down and scooped up the purse with a nod, then went to unlock Cressida’s chains from the block. He latched her and the slave together, just as they’d arrived, and James watched them out of the corner of his eye as he signed the paperwork and laid claim to their lives. They were forged papers, of course, but they were something to wave around when needed.
His men, Cort and Harry, were already pulling the two down from the platform by the chains, and James was actually relieved when he saw Cressida faint dead away in the slave’s arms. Weight holding the slave down for the time being, if nothing else.
The breeze shifted, bustling through the market, and the slave’s eyes widened. James figured he must have finally caught their scent. He finished settling with Carver and tucked the papers into the inside pocket of his vest, turning with a crook of his fingers to draw Cort and Harry, and their prizes, out of the crowd and back towards the docks.
“Put her in my quarters,” he told the lads. “And him in the brig. Lay double the irons upon him.”
James was lucky, not an idiot. And he’d expected the slave to say something, but the man said not a word. Perhaps he was more cautious than clever, James thought, which could also be dangerous.
The Oso Armonia, James’ ship, sat out a ways in the bay, an East Indiaman too big to maneuver through the shallows to the pier. They filed into the dinghy, Cort and Harry settling at the oars, and James drew a pistol, kept level between the slave’s eyes, as he sat on the prow with Cressida slumped in his arms.
As they clipped the waves, plowing out toward the ship, the slave finally spoke. He looked up from a study of Cressida’s face, meeting James’ eyes.
Alphas of Black Fortune (Complete Boxed Set) Page 3
