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A second cannonball came only moments later.

This one landed on the main deck, not twenty yards from Rebecca.

Three men were blown to pieces—including one of her boys who climbed the masts of the Ghost .

A hole opened up in the deck, and as the ship reeled, barrels and weapons and injured men slid towards it.

From somewhere below came an explosion, and then another, and then another, as the fire found the ship’s store of gunpowder.

Jack Davies screamed over the melee, “Back to ship!”

It was a mad scramble from there. Rebecca swung her machete in wide jerks to keep the men from the Whimsy from getting too close as her fellow pirates returned to the longboat.

There were seventeen of them now, and Jack Davies ordered them into the boat without waiting to take a head count.

Just as Jack and Fuego began lowering the boat by the ropes towards the water, a slaver rushed forward and sliced the ropes from the pulleys.

Rebecca screamed. Mrs. Adams, too. But the Whimsy was not a tall ship, and while the boat landed in the water with a thud, it did not shatter, nor did any of their bones. Jack shouted—his voice hoarse—“If you’re not dead, row!”

And they each took up an oar and pulled themselves back to the Ghost.

I t always felt like walking on water after a battle like that.

Even though he hadn’t gotten to swipe his knives at any slaver in particular, Chow’s whole body felt like it was flying as he swaggered around the ship, putting it to rights.

Especially when the longboat arrived and he spotted Rebecca on it—alive, with all her limbs.

The crew gave three cheers to welcome the boat, and Jack Davies threw his cap in the air to accept the accolades.

Relief rushed Chow, along with a primal urge to grab Rebecca in his arms and cover every inch of her skin in kisses.

He resisted. First, they had to navigate the Ghost out of the fiery waters.

Then, he had to make sure the prisoners—some three dozen or so saved from the sinking ships—were properly constrained in the brig.

And then there was making sure the Ghost itself was in sailing condition after blasting so many cannonballs from its hull.

Rebecca disappeared. Chow saw her take the goat below deck—without even looking his way—and expected her to come up to help set sail. An hour later, he couldn’t find her as he ordered the first watch down for their mess. Nor did he see her when he set the second watch to inspecting the sails.

When, after sunset, the boys pulled out their instruments to start a jig and Rebecca didn’t emerge from wherever she was hiding, he began to worry.

She loved evenings like this, when the stars were clear and the mood was high and she could lift her skirts to dance a reel with the crew. After three songs, he began to fear some terrible reason was keeping her away.

He descended the ladder in two big leaps, then went directly down to the lowest deck, the one where the prisoners were tied up in the brig.

They had captured thirty men in all, the rest of the slavers’ sailors perishing in the deep.

Chow’s fear—that Rebecca had for some reason come down to see them and that they had in turn captured her —disappeared as soon as he saw the two pirates guarding the prisoners.

“All good, Sharkhead?” asked one.

“Aye.” Chow pushed away the anxiety gripping his stomach. “Has Rebecca been down here?”

“Not that I’ve seen.”

He went back up to the deck with their hammocks and livestock. She wasn’t in the nook where they slept; she was all the way in the aft of the ship, sitting with that goat. Petting that goat.

Moping with that goat.

Chow approached carefully. “They’ve started the jigs up on the deck.”

“I can hear.”

“I thought perhaps you would want to dance.”

“I don’t.”

That was one way to end the conversation. Shifting on his feet, Chow tried to think what to ask next. He ended up saying, “I heard you were fierce on the Whimsy. Jack Davies won’t stop talking about how you singlehandedly protected the longboat from the slavers.”

“Jack Davies is exaggerating.”

“Still.” Chow dared nudge her boot with the toe of his. “You make a good pirate, Rebecca.”

A compliment he thought she would appreciate, since almost every day, she had asked him once or twice whether he thought the rest of the crew accepted her as one of them.

Her fingers curled around the goat’s rope. “Why did you feed them supper?”

It took Chow a moment to realize she meant the prisoners. “Everyone has a right to eat.”

“That was a proper meal we gave them. More than a slave would get on one of their ships.”

He felt strange towering over her while she launched her argument at the goat’s face instead of his. He lowered himself to squat over the wooden deck. “You would have us treat them by their standards instead of our own?”

“I would treat them as they deserve. They are slavers. There is no lower man than that.”

The judgment in her voice stole away the last remnants of Chow’s good cheer. He braced a hand against the floor. “You know how they get sailors to work a slave ship?”

“They don’t kidnap them, I know that,” she scoffed.

“But they do.” His voice cracked a little because that small sentence allowed distant memories to leak in.

Memories from his life in London, when he had not yet turned into Sharkhead, when he had collected these stories as evidence of a broken world he never expected to be a part of.

“Some of the sailors sign up based on promises of wealth, sure. But most of them aren’t there because they want to be.

The stupid ones don’t ask where the ship is headed.

Others run up a debt at a public house, and the house says either they can go to debtor’s prison or work the slave ship.

And then there are those who intend to leave ship as soon as it makes it to their home port again, only to discover the captain has charged them for tobacco and rum and the only way they can avoid debt is to stay on the ship for another voyage. ”

Rebecca, at last, was looking at him, her expression shadowed in the lantern light. “Are these the sob stories they use to plead for mercy?”

“Before I took to sea, I used to manage a boardinghouse for the East India Company. These are the stories I witnessed myself.”

“If I were forced to work on a slave ship, I would throw myself overboard before we even reached the coast of Africa.”

Her words were so heavy with derision that they stacked like weights upon his heart. “And if they caught you before you jumped, you would be flogged or chained to the deck. And then you would be forced to help with the slaving.”

“We just sank three slave ships. We killed at least two hundred men. Now you’re telling me I should pity them?”

Chow couldn’t look at her anymore. “I’m saying that if they managed to survive that battle and make it into our brig, they deserve to eat a meal. That’s all.”

“Either they are our enemies and they don’t deserve anything, or they are our allies and they deserve everything. You can’t have it both ways.”

If she needed everything to be so certain, so clear, what would she say if she knew what he had done before joining the Ghost ?

She continued: “I slit a man’s throat today. Just like a butcher. He was my enemy. He chose to work on a slaver. That’s all I want to know.”

Her words were awful. Worse still, they invited some hope to lighten Chow’s heart.

This argument was not about a moral right and a moral wrong, with him falling on the wrong side of the scale.

It was about Rebecca facing that terrible feeling Chow knew so well.

The one that made him feel so very unworthy.

He reached out, touching only her ankle. “You were brave on the Whimsy. You did exactly what you needed to do.”

“I shouldn’t have been there.” Her eyes pinned him in place. “I had no business being in the longboat.”

“But you came through safe and sound, and that’s all that matters.”

“No.” Sitting up, she yanked her ankle away from him. “The captain had no business sending me to that ship, and you had no business letting him.”

Surprised by her sharp anger, Chow replied, “He’s the captain.”

“This is a pirate ship. Isn’t this the one place we are supposed to be free of hierarchy? Isn’t this the lawless ocean where we can stand up and say ‘No, we won’t do as you say because it is stupid and dangerous and petty!’?”

He leaned backward from the force of her voice. “He’s the captain and so I trust him, Rebecca. He is the best man in the world for fighting slavers. If he wants you to go on the longboat, I trust it’s because he knows it is our best chance for winning the fight.”

“It had nothing to do with winning and everything to do with putting you in your place. This captain of yours isn’t the best at anything except for holding a grudge, and if you can’t see that, then you’re stupider than I thought.”

He didn’t like her words and he didn’t like her tone, and he most especially didn’t like her implication.

If Captain Boukman hadn’t been acting out of strategy, then he had been punishing Chow.

And if the captain had sent Rebecca into battle in order to punish Chow, then Chow didn’t belong anywhere near her.

He reeled up to his feet.

Rebecca didn’t let him escape. “Do you know what happened on the Whimsy ? Do you know what great plan your Captain Boukman enacted? The cannons didn’t fire as soon as we were on deck.

They didn’t fire even after Jack Davies gave his little story about the weather.

They still didn’t fire when the captain asked if I was a gift to the crew, and yes, they remained silent as he took me back to his cabin and pushed me against the wall to fuck me.

In fact, husband , the cannons didn’t fire until after I had cut his cock off, just before he was about to rape me.

Tell me. Which part of that was Captain Boukman’s plan? ”

His mouth went dry. His stomach turned. Rage—hot and violent—filled his body. Rage that he couldn’t do anything with. “I didn’t know that.”

“You should have.”

Her words rang so true that Chow could barely hear them.

He had known that Captain Boukman’s order was wrong.

He should have insisted, somehow, that Rebecca stay on the Ghost .

He didn’t know what he had been afraid of.

Insubordination would be easier to face than this, the full extent to which he had failed to protect Rebecca.

He was no better than he ever had been. He should never have believed he had improved.

“And if you come near me again, I’ll cut your cock off, too,” Rebecca hissed.

Chow took himself away without the guts to even look back.