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In the meantime, he kept his head low and his cannon loaded and firing.

Carleill aimed her like an arrow, straight and true, and the privateer, battered but not defeated, responded with a last burst of spirit.

She gathered speed and courage and determination and threw herself at the Talon’s guns, and from where Dante crouched by the stern falconets, he could see Victor Bloodstone standing on the fore-deck, encouraging his men to shoot as fast as they could reload.

Carleill denied them as much of a target for as long as he could before he reached the point of turning.

He was passing the orders, tightening the crew’s grip on the tiller, when a blast from the Talon raked the afterdeck, shattering through timbers and flesh, sweeping the entire upper castle and everyone on it into the sea.

It gave Dante a moment’s pause, staring at the gaping hole where Carleill had been standing, knowing it might have been Beau.

… but then he had no time to think at all.

The Scout was fifty, forty, thirty yards from the Talon , and with no way to turn her off her course, she was going to ram the privateer at full speed.

Pitt fired the bow guns, then ordered the men back.

Four lethal loads of iron nails were sprayed across the decks of the Talon , wreaking terrible damage, and with less than twenty yards to go, Dante lit the fuses on the stern guns … and fired.

Beau watched the Scout make her stumbling turn and start a bow-on run toward the Talon.

She was expecting Dante to veer off at the last moment, duplicating the feat he had executed against the San Pedro , but something went mortally wrong.

Even from three hundred yards away she could hear the screaming of timbers and the smashing of planks as the two ships collided.

The hull of the Talon was rammed inward.

The privateer staggered and reeled over, pushing a wave of water off her starboard beam.

When she righted herself, the Scout was wedged fast amidships and Dante’s men were scrambling over the side, cutlasses, pikes, and muskets in hand.

Two of the four kegs of Greek fire found their marks, exploding on the Talon’s afterdeck in great sheets of liquid flame.

The combustible ran along the rails and dripped down the sides of the hull.

It fanned across the decks, rippling blue and gold and red in the darkness, running along planks and spilling hot blue fingers between the broken boards.

“Hold yer fire!” Spence shouted over the heads of his gun crews. “Or we’ll hit both ships! Beau! Bring her in to grapplin’ distance, we’ll crowd her on the other side!”

Beau brought the Egret in fast and smooth.

The men, led by Jonas Spence, stood ready by the boards with grappling lines and weapons.

The Talon was still firing her guns and Spit gave them several hot replies to the insult at point-blank range, close enough to bring plumes of sea-water spraying over the rails.

Billy Cuthbert took men up into the shrouds with muskets and pistols and picked out their targets by the light of the fires blazing in the Talon’s stern.

Bedlam had erupted on the deck of the privateer. Men fought in pairs, in trios, in swarms; shadowy couples in macabre dances with swords and daggers, assuming faces and features only when heated by the glow of the flames.

Beau scanned the decks for a glimpse of Dante, but there were too many shadows twisting and writhing in confusion.

She saw Pitt, a pistol in each hand, a blade glinting at his hip, swinging himself over to the deck of the Talon from the Scout And she saw Lucifer, his twin scimitars hacking at limbs as if he were back in the Indies harvesting cane.

There were dead and injured everywhere. The decks were streaked with gore.

Beau drew her cutlass, and with four Egret men behind her she clambered over the boarding planks and dropped into the midst of the fighting.

A shadow with a boat hook came at her from the left and she slashed without thinking, using both hands to wield the heavy sword across the man’s throat.

Two more shadows lunged for her and she shot one with her pistol, then used it like a club when it was spent rather than take the trouble to reload.

The carpenter, Thomas Moone, was on her left, carrying the lid from a barrel to use as a shield.

He swore every time he swung his cutlass, but he did so with a practiced eye, knowing the weakest joints, the most vulnerable bones.

Men charged them and more men poured over from the decks of the Egret , and in short order the Talon’s crew were throwing down their weapons and throwing up their arms, screaming for mercy.

But there was still no sight of Dante de Tourville.

He was, at that precise moment, on the only clear circle of deck space on the Talon. Victor Bloodstone stood across from him, panting and sweat-soaked, circling his hated enemy in a wary crouch, sword in hand, eyes blazing murder.

“Honorable to the end, Victor,” Dante spat. “That is what your epitaph will read. Written in the blood of the men you sacrificed in the name of greed and ambition.”

Bloodstone lunged forward with his blade. The thrust was easily put aside by Dante, though he fought with only one good arm. The other had been torn open in the impact when the two ships had collided, and dripped a steady patter of blood onto the deck.

Bloodstone retreated and circled, waiting for another opening.

His enemy was big, solid with brute strength, but some of that strength was melting away.

Moreover, he had seen Dante fight before and knew he had lived too long on the deck of a ship to trouble himself with the intricacies of footwork.

He preferred to hack and slash, mostly to good effect, especially if his opponent had not looked into the menacing steel of his eyes before.

Victor had looked—and laughed—as he did now when he executed a perfect feint and left a thin red ribbon welling across the massive chest.

“Why?” Dante snarled. “Why did you do it? Was it the gold? All for the gold?”

Bloodstone shook the sweat out of his eyes.

His back was to the flames and the hated face was lit before him, burnished by the glowing heat.

Farther yet, looming out of the shadows, another face, uglier than sin with a smashed nose and stealth in his mutilated smile, caused Victor to stop, to steady his blade a moment as if contemplating something profound in his answer.

“The gold? Yes, partly it was the gold. And partly … it was you.”

“Me? What in God’s name did I ever do to you?”

Bloodstone’s lips curled in derision and he laughed, “Absolutely nothing, my dear Comte. Nothing your many righteous generations of noble blood could even begin to understand.”

He nodded and Horace Lamprey raised his pistol, aiming squarely for the back of Dante’s head.

He pulled the trigger and the pan flashed; a fraction of a second later the gun jerked to one side as the hand holding it was impaled on the mast beside it, stuck fast by a needle-thin stiletto.

The shot discharged and Dante whirled around in time to see Beau throw a second knife and reduce Lamprey’s screams to a gurgled hiss.

Victor’s sword flashed and Dante moved to block it.

The two blades crossed and slid down to the hilt, sending a shower of sparks flying off the steel.

Weapons parted and crossed again, drawing sweat and curses on both sides.

The impact shuddered down their arms and Bloodstone bared his teeth in anticipation as he bore down on Dante, seeking to weaken the vulnerable left side of his body.

He deliberately invited the Frenchman to lock swords again, then gave his wrist a vicious twist, bringing the blade around and up, effectively breaking the strength in Dante’s arm.

He saw his opening and took it, leaning back and thrusting forward, following through with a triumphant cry as he expected to feel flesh, muscle, and bone sliding the length of his sword.

But in a move that had been almost too swift to believe, Dante had anticipated the strike and pivoted—with the grace of a dancer—a full circle around and back, bringing his own blade hacking forcefully across the base of Bloodstone’s spine.

Bone cracked and flesh parted. The cry of triumph turned into a scream of agony as Bloodstone was split almost in half.

The impact sent him crashing forward through a broken gap in the deck rail and he fell, with Dante’s sword embedded in his back, into the pool of flames that were now engulfing most of the main deck.

Dante staggered to the rail and Beau rushed forward to catch him under the arm.

He stared at Bloodstone’s body until the flames licked greedily over it and then he looked at Beau.

Her face was streaked with grime and ash, her doublet was torn at the shoulder, and a gash on her chin leaked blood down the side of her throat, but he thought he had never seen anything quite so beautiful before.

Stubborn, disobedient, reckless, defiant …

but beautiful enough to make his soul ache.

“One of these days,” he gasped, “you are going to have to start doing as you’re told.”

Beau leaned into his chest and buried her face against his throat. “One of these days you are going to have to start trusting me. ”

Dante pressed his lips into the soft silk of her hair. “Yes. I know.”

The flames were growing hotter. Men were shouting, running past them, leaping to the safety of the Egret . Pitt, Spence, and McCutcheon were calling to them, warning them they would have to cast off in the next few seconds or run the risk of the fire jumping across the ships.

Dante frowned and tucked his finger under her chin, forcing her face up to his. All of the gold and treasures in the world were right there, shimmering up at him, brimming with emotions as raw and ragged as his own.

“How much do you trust me?”

“With my life.”

He glanced over at the Egret and murmured, “That should be just about enough.”

Heedless of his injury, he scooped her up into his arms and hoisted her onto the top of the rail.

He climbed up beside her and, using the shroud lines for balance, caught the length of cable Pitt swung over to them.

Most of the grappling lines had been cut and the galleons had been pushed apart everywhere but at the bow.

There, a single umbilical cord strained between them, and as Dante curled his arm around Beau’s waist and swept them across the twenty-foot gap, Lucifer brought down one of his scimitars and chopped the two ships free.