Alphas of Black Fortune Complete Series (2 page)

“I’m Captain Avery.” She reached down, smoothing a hand over the cuff of the shackle on his left wrist. “Who has the keys to these?”

Reza hesitated. “Officer Wentworth.”

Cressida nodded. “Hanky, get the keys and unchain him. He’s coming with us.”

“Are you sure, Captain?” Hanky asked.

Cressida smiled up at Reza. “Yes. Put him in my quarters and see that he doesn’t escape, but don’t hurt him.”

Reza looked at Hanky, then right back down into her face, and she saw confusion flit through his eyes.

She let her hand fall away and took a step back, shrugging. “If you hurt any of my crew, I’ll kill you. If you behave, you might find freedom with us. Do you understand?”

Reza nodded, but said nothing, and lowered his eyes.

Satisfied, Cressida gestured for Hanky to get on with it. “I’m going back to the
Fortune
. We’ll head to market once all the sellables are loaded. Let Dox know.”

“Aye, Cap’n,” Hanky said.

This time she took the stairs to the top deck, and even as she crossed perilously upon the ropes back to her own ship, her mind wasn’t filled with gold or goods or the politics of the crew. She couldn’t get Reza out of her thoughts. More particularly, she couldn’t get the hard lines of his body, the strange tilt of his eyes or the ferocity on his mouth out of her thoughts. It had been a long time since any man had held her attention for more than a moment or two, but this one filled her with longing and curiosity, and both were very, very dangerous for a pirate.

Reza watched the woman go, his heart pounding in his ears. Rage hummed through his bones, but the fire behind it banked, smoldering, and he closed his eyes and tried to calm his instincts. He was not a foolish man, though some might have called him reckless, and he knew an opportunity when one got in his face and caressed his wrist and brought with her the scent of woman and honeysuckle and sea wind.

He’d been chained on board this clipper for months, and enslaved on it for over two years. That might have been enough to tame the heart of a weaker man, but Reza was not weak and he was determined never to be tamed. After half a year at sea, fed scraps and treated like vermin, he’d ripped out the previous captain’s throat and that had gotten him thrown in irons and put in darkness, but it had not killed his spirit. That, he would have admitted now, had been reckless. He’d killed the man in a fit of rage with nowhere to go even if he did escape, no land close enough to swim to, just the open water. Perhaps he’d been hoping, in a secret place in his heart, that the crew would just kill him for it. But they hadn’t, and now he was grateful for their stupidity. Or greed. Probably greed.

He’d seen greed in the pirate woman’s eyes too, but not
only
greed, and not when she looked at him. He thought if he could just hold himself together a little while longer, he could use her to escape. And if he could escape, perhaps he could even make it all the way home, though home must have been…an entire world away, by now.

He held the image of home in his mind as the dark-skinned pirate called Hanky unlocked the shackles on his wrists. The memory got harder and harder to conjure as time went by, the details fading. But he knew the shape of the sky with the mountain’s peak kissing the clouds, the glint of bright moonlight off white sand beaches, and the hunched figure of his mother by the communal fire, cleaning fish for dinner. He could summon the scent of the wood smoke and feel soft mango flesh between his fingertips as he scooped it into his mouth, listening to his mother’s tales of pale monsters and the laughing gods who fought them. Childhood fairytales. He still found comfort in them, though.

Reza felt a hundred stone lighter as the chains hit the deck. Hanky bound his wrists with rope, but that was a minor annoyance compared to the irons. He could snap rope with his bare hands, or better yet his teeth. He wondered why Wentworth hadn’t warned them as much, but as Hanky marched him through the lower decks towards the stairs, he passed by the brig and all the crew piled into it. Wentworth was standing by the bars and Reza met his eyes for just a moment.

The man was glaring, but he also looked a bit smug.

Ah
, Reza realized. He thought Reza would kill all the pirates now that he was free. Indirect revenge. Reza snapped his teeth and smiled.

The smugness fled Wentworth’s face in an instant. He was way off the mark and he knew it now. He’d just granted Reza his freedom and that was all. The pirates were not the ones who’d taken him from his home and his family. It hadn’t occurred to Reza before that moment, but now he intended to go to extra lengths
not
to kill any of them, just to spite Wentworth.

“Wait!” Wentworth was shouting, as Hanky pushed Reza up the stairs to the poop deck. “Wait, you don’t know what he is! You don’t know what he can do! Throw him overboard or he’ll kill you all!”

Hanky glanced over his shoulder, looking concerned.

“He hates me,” Reza told the pirate, trying to keep his tone mild. “He tried to bed me and I wouldn’t have him. He’s angry.”

At that, Hanky’s eyebrows shot up and he nodded, turning a scowl back on Wentworth. “I’d fucking bite ’im too,” he muttered, and carried on up the stairs, shaking his head in disgust.

On the deck, Reza closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, letting the sunlight warm his skin and the wind kick his hair about. It was the first time he’d been out of the hold in months, and it was bliss. He just wanted to stand on the deck for hours, remembering what it felt like to lie about in the sun, but Hanky shoved him towards the gangplank that had been laid between the two ships. He growled, but checked himself before his temper could get the better of him.

“Captain wants you cleaned up before we disengage,” Hanky told him.

Reza grunted but made no real comment. The pirates were amassing what goods they could find to steal on the deck, and Reza felt their eyes upon him as Hanky guided him to the planks. Unfriendly and curious eyes, all of them, not unlike the first time the clipper’s crew had seen him, though he hadn’t been so hungry or so filthy then. Just
different
, other, and he would not apologize for that. He’d refused for a long time to speak their ugly language even after he’d learned it. He hated their food; it tasted like sand. They wore so many clothes he wondered how they didn’t suffocate standing still. But he’d learned his lesson, and though he could harbor these prejudices in his mind and hatred in his heart, he had to keep the words off his tongue. He had to pretend, if he wanted to be free.

They made it across the gangplank to the pirates’ ship, and by then Reza’s eyes had finally adjusted once more to sunlight. He looked around, took in the sight and the size of the ship itself, a slightly larger vessel than the merchant clipper but still built for speed. Snapping in the wind, attached to the mainsail, the Jolly Roger flew above it all, the singular image no sailor ever wants to see. Unless you were the sailor flying it. Reza had played lookout on the clipper for a few weeks and he had learned that image first. The skull and crossbones. Always shout if you see the Roger, though by the time you can make it out it might be too late. This time it certainly had been, Reza thought, with some satisfaction.

Then he saw the Captain sitting on the forecastle, an apple in one hand and a knife in the other. She was carving the rotted bits out of the apple so she could eat what was left, her nimble fingers flicking the browned bits over the railing on the edge of the knife. As though she could feel his eyes, she looked up and right at him.

She was beautiful, he realized now, free of his rage. She looked nothing at all like the women from his part of the world, but she was stunning. Pale, from the golden hair braided back from her face to the sun-reddened skin of her bare arms, and full of figure, rounded in the right places. Those curves were familiar to him, at least, and in spite of himself he imagined how soft she might have felt beneath him. What her generous mouth might taste like. What her expression would be as her pale blue eyes held his until she had to throw her head back, and the sound of her voice moaning with pleasure.

His desire got the better of him swiftly and he had to look away, dropping his bound hands to hide the manifestation of his thoughts. The torn remnants of his pants were woefully thin at this point. He almost thanked Hanky for pushing him roughly towards the doors below, and he stole another glance at her and saw her smirk with recognition. Perhaps he truly was foolish after all.

It was several hours before Cressida could further inspect her new prize. They’d gathered what food and carpentry supplies they could, along with an array of silk that would fetch them quite a price at market. There were other sundries that would benefit the ship, but the silk was the real treasure aboard the clipper, and the oriental spices that were so popular and expensive these days among the upper classes. A solid haul, and everyone was pleased with it. After market, each man would have purse enough to dally happily ashore for a few days before his greed would motivate him back to the sea for another bout with fortune.

The take was all well and good, but Cressida was distracted through the entire meeting with Dox and Hanky and Shep, the carpenter. They sat on the forecastle discussing how to divvy up coin they didn’t even have yet, where the
Black Fortune
should go next and which port to put into, where the best market was, and who had connections they could use to push their bounty. Cressida listened with half an ear, her thoughts turning again and again to the man in her quarters.

“Are you going to keep the slave?” Dox asked, and that snapped her attention back to him.

“Maybe.” She shrugged.

Dox scowled. “He’d go for a penny. We should sell him too.”

“Maybe.”

“We have to vote on it,” he insisted. “You don’t get to just decide.”

She frowned. “We’re a night to New Providence. He’s mine until then.”

“Hale said ’e nearly bit ’is nose off,” Shep muttered.

“Has it occurred to any of you breathing piles that he is from another part of the world entirely?” Cressida snapped at them, huffing. “You idiots. That clipper has been to the lengths of the Earth and back and they brought — what? Silk? Who cares about silk? It’s him they were after the whole while. I want to know why before you toss him onto a block.”

They seemed to take her meaning all at once, poor sots, and she sighed. Not a
one
of them had wondered after the clipper’s journey or what it might have been for. The storeroom had been piled with provisions instead of goods. The trip had been years, not months, the distance far and away beyond what one would need to travel just for
silk
.

“Fine,” Dox eventually said, shifting uncomfortably. “You sort him out. But when we get to New Providence, have an answer or he’s off.”

“Fine,” she said back, getting to her feet. “We’re finished here. Figure the rest out yourselves.”

Hanky sat up a little straighter. “You’ll be keeping him in your quarters, then, Cap’n?”

She paused, hesitating a moment, and then regretted it. “I don’t know yet.”

“Aye, Cap’n,” Hanky said, looking down.

Cressida shook her head and left them there, descending from the forecastle to the poop deck without looking back. If any one of
them
had taken a slave to the crew bunks, nobody would have said a bloody word about it. Cressida herself was held to a different standard by virtue of the bits, or lack thereof, between her legs. It was as though she owed the entire crew right of first refusal on her nethers, and though it was a farce, it was one she’d used to her advantage enough times that she couldn’t disregard it completely. As the only woman on board, she had more than once taken a lover from the crew. Sometimes simply to satisfy herself, and sometimes because it afforded her a vote, or an ally, or a sword. Only a stupid girl would ignore that her sex could be a weapon in its own right, if wielded properly. But there was a balance to be maintained. She could not let them think her a whore, no matter how many of them she took into her bed. It was a perilous line to walk, but so far Cressida’s keen sense of balance had extended to this as well. She wondered now if the slave with the strange eyes would tip the scale.

He had washed and waited for her, and the daylight wore into evening. Hanky had left him a bowl of clean water, a sliver of soap and a rag, and Reza had done his best to clean the filth and grime of months from his skin.

The captain’s quarters were spacious and well-appointed, he thought, and didn’t really look like they were lived in by a pirate. But perhaps that was because the pirate was a woman. Just one large room that took up a large section of the aft end of the ship, with bay windows and a bench beneath them to, he supposed, sit and enjoy the view. A lush carpet covered much of the floor, and a silken screen separated the large bed and a copper bathtub from a wooden escritoire and dining table. The tastes evident in the floral pattern of the carpet and the polished wood of the escritoire were not like any sailor’s he’d seen before. This woman must not have always been a pirate, and certainly she had never been
poor
.

These Westerners were a puzzle, he decided. In his two years captive aboard the clipper, he’d come to understand a few things about them. Their language, for one. The things they found beautiful and of worth: metals and silks and the pearls his people tossed aside while foraging the low tide for food. And the way the men aboard the clipper had spoken of women in general — it all sounded so unlike the captain of this ship that Reza wondered if she was foreign as well somehow.

The door opened then and she walked in, and those thoughts fled his mind entirely. He stood still, having set the rag over the edge of the bowl of water, and watched her approach, feeling more prey than predator for once. It was disconcerting, but not unpleasant. Her blue eyes traveled over the length of him, from his bare toes up, lingering on his bare chest, and then finally arriving to look him in the eye. She smiled, and he thought it catlike, but then perhaps he just wanted it to be so.

He didn’t bow his head or look away. As she came closer, he simply held her gaze, a challenge there and he knew it, and refused to submit. He inhaled deeply, filling his nose with the scent of her, the same breath of sea winds and delicate flowers that he now associated with the hope of freedom.

She reached out and touched the ropes binding his hands, but didn’t untie them. Just brushed her fingertips against them, and his skin, and he felt a shiver thrill through him. A woman’s touch had been one of those memories he’d thrown away, a dangerous wish he’d denied himself as a prisoner aboard the clipper. He looked into the captain’s eyes and knew she must have seen how suddenly desperate he was to fill his hands with her. To plunge his fingers into the soft golden spill of her hair. To taste her.

“What are you going to do with me?” he asked, voice a bit thick.

“I’m not sure yet,” she admitted, lashes low over her eyes, giving her a particularly sly look.

He stepped boldly towards her, into her personal space, and lifted his hands to trail the backs of a few fingers down from her collarbone, over the soft linen of her chemise, between her breasts. “Set me free.”

He watched a blush climb into her pretty, pale cheeks, and she smiled. “I might.”

“Please, Captain.” He felt her heartbeat leap beneath his fingers, and to his surprise she stepped close against him, their bodies brushing, barely a breath of space between their lips.

He’d thought he had more control over this situation, but he realized quite rapidly that he’d been very wrong. Heat spread through him like a wildfire, desire kindling into full-blown lust for this confident woman who seemed able to seduce, negotiate and dominate all at once. The beast inside him awoke, starving. He growled low in the back of his throat in spite of himself and bent his head to nip lightly at the swell of her bottom lip.

She leaned up to meet him and caught his mouth full in a kiss, her breast filling his hands, and Reza knew he was no closer to freedom with her at all.