Page 93

From the violence in his eyes, I don’t doubt it.

Suddenly the door to the room bursts open and one of the skeleton crew appears.

“Captain!” the skeleton yells. “I reckon we’ve spotted theNightwind!”

CHAPTER28

Ramsay

I glance at Maren,my eyes going between the remorse in her eyes and the nails on her fingers, knowing how easily they can turn into claws. I can either keep her locked in here forever or I can let her go free. I’m not as worried now that she may do further harm to me, but I am worried she might jump into the sea and leave me.

That’s what you want for her, isn’t it? For her to be happy? To return to what she is? If she doesn’t go now, she will eventually.

She raises her brows at me and jerks her chin subtly toward the skeleton crew member. “TheNightwind.”

I nod. “Aye. Come with me then,” I say, grabbing her by the elbow and pulling her toward the door.

She seems surprised she’s allowed to leave but she doesn’t question it out loud. Instead she looks down at the dirty shirt she’s wearing, stained with my blood. “Is there anything else on this ship that I could wear?”

I turn to the skeleton. “Do you perchance have any old clothes lying around? Stuff that’s perhaps a little too big for you now?”

The skeleton tilts his head, seeming to think. “Yes, I suppose I do.” He waves at Maren. “Come along then, see what we have. Slim pickings I think, definitely nothing for the likes of a pretty girl like you.”

She looks at me for approval and I nod. “Go ahead. Meet me up top.”

She walks off with the skeleton. At least I don’t have to worry about her being alone with him. If anything, I worry for the skeleton.

I head up to the deck where the quartermaster and Sedge are waving me over from the forecastle. The skeletal quartermaster slaps a spyglass into my palm.

“Avast, there be a ship,” he says.

I peer through the spyglass, having the feeling I’ve done this before, only it was when I was on theNightwindlooking at this ship. My god, that feels like ages ago.

And there she is, my glorious ship on the horizon. The sight of her makes my heart skip a beat, a very similar reaction I get when I look at Maren sometimes. There’s has to be some sort of analogy drawn between a captain’s ship and his lover, but I’m not poetic enough to think of one.

All I know is that I am as obsessive and possessive about that ship as I am about Maren, and I would travel to the ends of the world to get the both of them back. They both belong to me. Luckily at the moment theNightwindis in my sights and we are slowly but steadily catching up. As for Maren, I can only hope that her request for new clothes wasn’t just a ruse and she’s secretly escaping into the sea.

Oh, bollocks. That’s what she was doing, wasn’t it? She wasn’t asking to get changed into new clothes, she wanted to be out of my reach and prying eye so she could clobber the skeleton over the head and jump off the back of the ship, knowing that by the time I’d clue into her duplicity she’d already be far gone in the middle of Pacific and impossible to find.

I sigh heavily, a coal of loss sinking in my chest. I—

“Did you spot her?”

I whirl around to see Maren standing behind me and staring at me with an open look, the skeleton at her side. She’s wearing another oversized white pirate shirt with a pistol holster around the small of her waist as if it were a leather corset, and wide black petticoat breeches. Her bare feet flex as I stare at them.

“You’re still here,” I say softly. “You didn’t jump overboard.”

She manages a quick smile. “Well, I have to admit the moment I saw you were willing to let me go, I did think about it. But I also figured I’ll have plenty of chances later. I want to get back to theNightwindtoo.”

I grin with relief and hand her the spyglass. “See for yourself.”

She stands beside me at the rail and peers through the spyglass at the horizon and I take a moment to drink her all in. With her pirate attire, her black hair blowing back in the wind, even those faint lines of gills on her neck, she looks so beautiful that there’s a sharp ache in my ribs, a longing for her that has slowly been coming to fruition. She belongs here, right here beside me, with the ocean breeze in her hair and the sun on her skin.

Yet she also belongs at the bottom of the sea. How can she belong to both places, when only one of those worlds includes me?

Don’t get attached to a caged bird if you only mean to set them free, I think.

“I don’t see anything, just a dot,” she says, frowning through the spyglass. She glances at me. “Are you sure that’s theNightwind?”