Page 36 of The Worst of Them

Morgyn hadn’t seen anything Cecily had done just now. She’d been off somewhere else, playing at being a pirate, and missed the violence and bloodshed Cecily had hoped would be enough of a warning.

“If you like,” Morgyn said, sidling closer. “I can tell the captain you got swept up in the moment and meant no harm. I’m sure he’ll listen to someone who knows you so very well.” Then she settled her arm around Cecily’s waist, like they were sisters or friends.

Only the fiercest presence of mind kept that blade angled down as disgust ran like oil over her skin. Morgyn had just made her an offer—risk the captain’s punishment, or accept Morgyn’s favor and influence, which would come at the price at bowing, at subjecting herself to the prison queen’s rare mercy and whatever came with it.

Cecily subjected herself to no one.

She was tired of being goaded. Tired of being scared and on edge, and if Morgyn hadn’t seen Cecily tear through these guards, then fine. She would just have to tell her.

Tossing her sword to her other hand, Cecily shoved Morgyn away, pulled back her fist, and slammed it into her face, exactly as she had the day they’d met.

By the time Morgyn hit the deck with a breathy grunt, Cecily had passed the sword back to her right hand and retreated a step. It was a broken article, but one she could afford. She would give Morgyn what she wanted, just not in the way she had hoped.

Outrage flared over Morgyn’s face before she remembered herself. Her vicious glare turned to watery-eyed shock as she lifted a shaking hand to touch the blood dribbling from her nose.

Around them, the women had gone quiet, though the men hardly realized anything had happened as they moved below deck, fetching crates and chests of gold.

“You’re insane,” Morgyn said, as aware of their surroundings and listening ears as Cecily was. “You’re really determined not to let anyone like you. No matter what we do, you’ll always be a vicious little terror.”

Several yards to her right, Copson paused, his face rigid. Many of the crew stopped too, glancing between Morgyn and the captain, waiting for him to scold or intervene, but he only folded his arms, his eyes hard with expectation.

Perhaps he, too, knew there was a power dynamic that needed to be worked out among his crew. And Cecily had to work quickly before she pissed him off for wasting time.

She flexed her fingers around the hilt of her sword hanging limp at her side, its weight a comfort in her hand as the crew looked on. “I don’t care to be likable, Morgyn.” She flipped the sword over her hand, sank the tip into the deck, and dropped into a crouch. Clutching the hilt like it was the only thing keeping her grounded, she bolstered every shred of confidence she had—false or otherwise—and said, “I stopped caring what anyone thought of me the night I slaughtered six men.”

Morgyn gaped, taken aback, her lips thinning as she considered whether Cecily might be telling the truth. Cecily’s smile widened as she waited, even as her insides grew uneasy at the admission of her own guilt, laid bare for all to witness.

A mass murderer. Six men killed in cold blood.

“You’re a liar,” Morgyn finally said. “We all know what you were in for.”

Cecily pointedly eyed the dead around them—the men she had killed to save Hester. For them, she had no pity or remorse. Bringing her gaze back to Morgyn, she asked, “Am I a liar?”

As though seeing them for the first time, Morgyn blanched at the sight of the bodies, the blood on the sword in Cecily’s hand, Hester cowering nearby. Thoughts churned behind those horrible, dead eyes, trying to determine if Cecily was truthful, or if this was simply another game of prison politics and power she could somehow win.

Morgyn’s eyes hardened to flinty pits of black, and she said, “They would’ve hanged you.”

Cecily snorted, acutely aware of the silence on deck. “Oh, they tried. But then a nobleman paid a fortune for my life. He said death was too merciful after I butchered his friends.”

She stood then, looking down on the fear creeping into Morgyn’s face. “You’ve called me a monster, but I’m so much worse because I never asked for what I got.” Her lip curled, true disgust leaking into her words. “Someone else forced my hand. They made me this way. And if you believe it’s a worthy use of your time to mock me, I assure you that nothing you say will descend far enough to hurt me. If you think you will get me killed, death never bothers to come for me—and I’ll kill you long before it ever does.”

Her fingers tightened around the hilt of her sword, but the tip of the blade remained firmly on the deck, its presence a warning for Morgyn and a boon for Cecily.

Morgyn’s lips twisted into a sneer, a glimmer of fight still burning in her eyes. “If you were truly such a terrible murderer, you’d’ve killed half of us in prison. And yet you were a coward.”

A scornful laugh burst from Cecily. “A coward! Fine—I’ll tell you what happened, and you tell me how cowardly I was.” She lifted her sword from in front of her, only to jam it into the boards on her right, the blade ringing with the force of it. It grounded her and, newly emboldened, her voice rose, sharp with venomous contempt. “After my father died, my cousin took my home and sold me because he thought a bag of money was worth more than my life. I was ripped from my bed in the middle of the night and taken to a brothel. The owner brought out a bottle of wine to welcome me, perhaps to calm my nerves for what he had planned. I shattered it and shoved the broken glass through his neck.”

The memory rose, as clear and visceral as the night it happened. Hazy candlelight, fireplaces, pipe tobacco, and thin walls with wooden doors. A choking fear had rendered Cecily silent while a man spoke to her like she was a spooked horse. She had watched the reflection of the hearth’s flames in the green bottle to ignore the expectation in his hungry gaze. When she reached for the bottle, she had hardly known what she was doing—only that she wanted him to stop looking at her.

“I didn’t know there could be so much blood in a body,” Cecily said, flames dancing in her mind. “It came out so fast. I was covered in it, and I remember it was so warm—but not nearly warm enough. Losing the only person in the world who loved me left me cold and dead, and that man’s blood hardly helped at all. So I found more.”

She could smell the iron tang of it, and this time she wasn’t sure if it was real or not. This part was a lie—yes, she’d killed the men, but not because she craved their blood. They died because they tried to stop her, to keep her there. They’d even laughed at her, until they noticed the blood, and then they thought she might be easy to restrain. She never gave them the chance to try.

“There were five other men there that night,” Cecily went on, remembering the blinding, desperate panic and rage that had driven her. “I ran them through with a fire poker or slit their throats with more broken glass. I might’ve gotten away with it, but there was another man I never had the chance to kill. He summoned the constables.” She laughed harshly to drown out the memory of the shrieking women who’d stood behind her as she stumbled over the threshold into the night. Though it had been late spring, she’d been so, so cold.

“He was the one who gifted me this fate instead of letting me dangle at the end of a noose. He paid a judge to make prison records show I’d been executed, and then he gave me a new record that reduced my crime to the very situation I had killed to spare myself from so that I could go to Bridewell and spend my days being called a whore.” She longed to shout the last bit and shook with the effort to control herself. To keep that sword pointed at the boards beneath her feet.

Around them, pirates nervously waited for her to strike as she fed the growing tension and let them see the truth that had carved away so many pieces of her. Cecily was a girl with a rotten heart, a shattered soul, and a past she didn’t deserve. And she’d be damned if she let anyone take anything else from her.