Page 9 of The Worst of Them

Life, then? Did she want to be a pirate?

The thought nearly had her chuckling. Her, a pirate—she couldn’t picture it. She’d imagined death plenty of times, so it seemed much more realistic. Perhaps that was why she wavered.

At the very least, she knew she wanted to be out of the brig.

The wooden planks creaked under her boots as she pushed to her feet and stepped out of her cell. Her heart kicked faster. These were the first steps in a year that were her own, the first time she was allowed to move of her own volition, without shackles or force.

She ghosted toward the light cutting through the hatch. The sound of the sea and voices grew louder as she wandered up from the belly of the ship and through the crew’s quarters. When she came to ladder that would bring her into the open air, evening light bloomed brighter around her.

She looked up.

In the space of a heartbeat, she forgot the ship and everything around her as the sky peeked through the hatch, cast with fiery orange and pink clouds.

She hadn’t seen the sky like this since…she couldn’t remember. Even the day she’d boarded the Sparrow had been cold and dreary, as though the sun couldn’t bear to look at her. Now the sky burned as though the world had been put to flame, chasing away the muted shadows behind her.

Hardly daring to blink, she began to climb. The sky stretched impossibly wide, fading from violent reds and oranges in the west to cool, starry indigo in the east—colors she’d never been able to replicate at the home inside her head.

When she emerged from the hatch, something soft brushed her cheek. A breeze, she realized, as gentle as a kiss. She gasped—and inhaled her first breath of fresh air, sweeter and cooler than those she’d imagined countless times. Another chill gust pulled at strands of her hair, teasing them this way and that, begging her toward every corner of the world as she fully emerged from the bowels of the ship and stepped onto the deck.

For several breaths, she stood under the vastness and simply pulled it into her lungs, as though the air might wind through every shadowy part of her to make her as light and beautiful as the sky above. It was cleansing and bright, and she remembered what it was to live⁠—

The wind turned, and suddenly smoke and gunpowder assaulted her senses. She lowered her gaze from the heavens and back to this hellish boat.

It seemed she hadn’t been wrong about Copson. He was exactly who she’d heard he was.

Dead sailors lay sprawled over the deck, covered in blood and pocked with bullet holes and stab wounds. They’d been picked clean of their belongings, their mouths gaping with the shocked expressions they’d worn when they died.

Bile had risen in her throat the first time she’d seen a dead man. The times after that weren’t as terrible as the first, even though they’d happened in relatively quick succession.

At the helm, the Sparrow’s captain had been tied to the spokes of his wheel by his arms and neck, his eyes bulging from his purple face as he tried to scream past the rope squeezing his throat.

Such a brutal death struck her as unnecessary, but she struggled to summon any pity or feel much of anything for him at all. In the back of her mind, Morgyn’s voice whispered, Monstrous bitch.

Cecily looked away.

The Fortuna Royale floated beside them, at least double the size of the Sparrow. There were three masts, as opposed to the two on the prison ship, impossibly tall and rigged with massive canvas sails. Pikes extended from its dark hull, spearing the Sparrow like an oversized fish, and a gangplank stretched between them, which most of the prisoners and pirates had already crossed.

Beyond it, the evening sun hovered over the sea, sparkling over water so deeply blue that it was nearly black. She wanted to pause and marvel, but the side of her face prickled—like a brand, or a searing cut along her left cheek that distracted her from the sheer grandness of the world before her.

Her gaze snapped to side, finding the culprit only paces away.

Eyes. Cold, bright blue eyes set in the most severe face she’d ever seen. The young man watched her from where he stood near the gangplank with his arms folded, his fair hair crowned with gold against the setting sun. He was tall and lithe, perhaps three years older than twenty, and his features were all sharp angles and hard lines.

If there was any sort of beauty that might distract her from the glory of nature, here it was, studying her with searing intensity.

His gaze swept over her in a single, clinical look. She did the same to him, taking in his long legs, the sword strapped to his hip, and the way his royal-blue vest hugged his broad chest and narrow waist, the fabric stitched with tiny pockets that sheathed a litany of throwing knives. Loose white shirtsleeves billowed in the wind.

Indeed, she hadn’t seen anything so beautiful in a long time. She looked her fill, as unapologetically as he did to her.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, it occurred to her what he would see. Her dress had once been as white as his shirt, but was no doubt soiled to an entirely new color. She probably smelled horrific too, but she’d gone nose-blind to her own filth ages ago.

She didn’t care what he saw, only that he cared to look, and that it felt like being lit on fire. She wasn’t afraid of it—she’d been frozen solid for so long that no amount of infernal heat would bother her.

“What did you do to end up here?” Like the captain, the young man’s rich, smooth voice drifted to her with startlingly proper diction, as though he were a gentleman, shaping words as stern as his handsome face.

“It was a rather horrible misunderstanding,” she said flatly.

His brow quirked, cutting a harsh shadow over one eye. “Was it?”