His fingers closed around the silver knife, gripping it until his breath was steady. Disbelief. Disgust. Worse, even, than Sophia’s open malice.
They’d made their introductions just as Captain Hall and the Challenger were readying to sail. Not a single word had passed between them after the captain left; they’d merely studied one another, Wren taking stock of him the way he would a horse he was considering purchasing. Nicholas returned the favor now.
Dark hair, dark eyes. Heroically bruised and bloodied, naturally. Wren was a great deal shorter than Nicholas, but walked with his chest puffed out and his chin raised, as if he was always on his way to meet the king.
“Watch that one,” Captain Hall had muttered as he returned to the Challenger to continue their hunt. “Both eyes open, Nick. He’ll make as if to cut your throat from the front as another knife slices clean through your back. You won’t see his hands move.”
“A charming image.” Nicholas laughed, but the older man was grave.
“I know his type. More wind than a tempest, and more pride than Lucifer himself.”
Nicholas wished he could have convinced the captain to stay. But Hall, floating on the wave of victory, was already eager for another prize—and, no doubt, to have Nicholas make a quick journey of it back to New London.
Captain Hall had clasped his shoulder and pounded his back, light eyes sparkling as the sunset turned the sky a warm rose. “I know you’re ready for this and more. Finish your business with the family and meet us back in port.”
A pure thrill moved from his scalp down his spine, warming him to the core. I am ready. He wanted his own command the way the dying wanted their next breath; it was just a matter, as always, of money. Of outrunning the ghost in his past that seemed to haunt him at every turn.
Nick! Help me, help me—!
He breathed in deeply through his nose, his fingers twisting in the tablecloth as if caught in a memory of their own.
The past was past. Now he needed to see the young ladies safely delivered into the hands of Cyrus Ironwood, and escape whole and preferably unscathed.
By the time he was finished with that task, finished with that family for once and all, Chase and the others would already have the Ardent in the hands of the Lowes’ agent, who’d then bring her and her cargo to the prize courts for a ruling.
A crucial part of that process was the testimony of the ranking officer of the captured vessel. He couldn’t stab his fork into Wren’s eye—well, he supposed he could. The man only needed his mouth to serve as witness to the courts that the vessel had been fairly won. Did every nicety need to be observed?
His stomach soured again as Miss Spencer gave a pretty little gasp of dismay. Wren, brave Mr. Wren, consoled her by saying, “Do not fret, my dear. I have stitched up more than one wound myself. This was, however, the first time I had ever seen my own entrails.”
Nicholas scoffed. If a man could see his own entrails, he could also see the hand of God swooping down to take him to his eternal reward. There was no living with a wound like that. He had seen enough proof to drive that fact home, even if his guest had not.
Guest. A dark, humorless laugh welled up inside him. Hostage, really, but why use the true term when you could be polite? If there was one thing Nicholas loathed more than almost anything else, it was this. Behaving, even to an enemy, with hollow civility and false flatteries. He preferred to be direct in his dislike, and if that did not make him a gentleman from society’s mold—well, then so be it.
“—the ship was tossed onto the reef by the swells…there was simply nothing we could do other than hold on to her as she was wrecked. Those of us that survived, who made it to the sandbank, crawled ashore. We lived as savages for a week, foraging for food, hunting wild boar, creating shelters from palm leaves and whatever dry wood we could find, searching day and night for water. There was only a single knife between us—a blessing, I think, for we were so out of our minds, we might have killed each other in murderous rage had there been more.”
“A cryin’ pity that would have been,” Chase grumbled, jabbing his spoon into the stew. Nicholas cleared his throat.
Chase’s green eyes slid over to meet his, and he raised his glass. The prize crew was, by Hall’s design, filled with sailors who had known Nicholas for years. Davy Chase had known him the longest.
He and Chase had been brought aboard Captain Hall’s old ship, the Lady Anne, to serve as cabin boys—just weeks before the Lady Anne was torn apart at the seams by a squall. Both they and the captain had been pressed into temporary service in His Majesty’s Navy by the very same ship that rescued them from the waves.
Wren told his story in hushed tones, his voice rising and falling with each imagined danger. Having survived his own ordeal at age eleven, living through two days and nights of starvation, thirst, and fear of death from exposure in the rough winter waters, Nicholas found himself growing steadily more impatient. Hall had kept him and Chase alert and distracted by relating stories about his travels as a young man in the West Indies—his favorite dock doxies; a past storm when the water, the masts, the deck, had been lit by strange blue flame; the small hoard of old Spanish bullion he’d all but tripped over, running from the British Regulars through Tortola.
The experience wasn’t something Nicholas spoke of now. It wasn’t something he enjoyed thinking about. His lips had cracked and bled, burning at all hours from the salt water, and there were times even now when he imagined he could still feel the splinters beneath his nails from the section of the bulwark he had clung to. His vision had gone dark at the start of the third day, and panic had choked him, until Captain Hall had swum to his side and held him afloat by force. The rescue had only been the beginning of another nightmare.
Something ugly in Nicholas stirred when the first mate put an all-too-forward hand on Etta’s bare wrist. Something made him want to promptly remove the whole arm from the man’s body.
She is a job.
She is a means to an end.
But she was also not Wren’s.
“Mr. Wren,” he interrupted. The resulting silence cracked over the cabin like a whip. “Perhaps you’d be so good as to clarify one point in your story?”
The other man’s face twisted into a smirk. “Of course. What troubles you?”
Wren’s first mistake had been to assume that those around him had never sailed through the Virgin Islands.
“You mentioned that the island where you ran aground was about two leagues from Tortola, did you not? Just northeast of Peter Island?”
Chase’s chair creaked as he shifted his weight.
Wren’s own smile slipped for a moment, but he said, “Yes, I believe I did.”
“I thought, surely, that you must be referring to Dead Chest Island,” Nicholas began, wondering if he looked half as diabolical as he felt.
“I am,” Wren said, a slight flush creeping over his face. “I wasn’t aware you were familiar with it.”
That much was obvious.
“I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a sailor who hasn’t heard of it, sir,” Nicholas said. “That is the island where Blackbeard set his fifteen sailors ashore with only cutlasses and a bottle of rum between them in retaliation for their mutiny, correct?”
“That is correct,” Chase confirmed happily. “They tried swimming to Peter Island, but drowned. That’s why they call that stretch of sand ‘Deadman’s Beach,’ of course, owing to the bodies that washed ashore.”