with relatives, but I would have none of it. So I slipped away the very next morning and snuck aboard his ship.” He stared down at the coals in the grate. “By the time Father discovered me, we were well out to sea. He was furious.” The soft sound that escaped Nicholas almost could have been a laugh. “He kept threatening to put me ashore... but he didn’t want to be apart from me any more than I wanted to be apart from him.”
Sam wrapped her arms around her middle, feeling everything inside her knotting with pain. As he spoke of his family, she heard an emotion in his voice that she had never expected to hear from him: love.
The love he felt, especially for his father, shone through his words, clear and strong even after so many years. “So when your father was arrested, you were only a boy,” she said softly, understanding fully for the first time, “and that was why you were sentenced to the prison hulk?”
“Aye, they ‘spared’ me because I was so young.” He rubbed at his chest. “And sent me to the Molloch. That was where I spent the next eight years, until I escaped during the riots. By then, all I cared about was revenge. I wanted to repay the navy for what they had done to me. And to my father.”
“And that’s when you became a pirate.”
“That’s when I became what they had made me,” he corrected. “And I was good at it—”
“Because you were reckless,” she said softly, moving toward him one quiet step at a time, her bare feet soundless on the polished oak floor. “Because you didn’t care about your own life.”
He kept his back to her, and his broad shoulders rose in a shrug, but his breathing was shallow, his body tense, as if he were waiting for something. “I joined up with one pirate crew after another, and the price on my head went up every year. All I cared about was making as much trouble for the navy as possible. I was a thorn in their side for fourteen years,” he said with satisfaction.
“So all the legends about you being greedy and—”
“Rich and having treasure chests buried on every island in the Caribbean? Bilge invented by the admiralty. I never kept a shilling. What the hell did I care about the future? I didn’t know and didn’t care if I was going to have one.”
She stopped when only a few inches separated them. “But you finally got the vengeance you wanted?”
He started to answer, then stiffened, as if sensing how close she was to him. His entire body went taut. But still he didn’t look at her.
She wanted to reach out to him, to offer the kind of reassurance and comfort he had once offered her, but she stopped herself, unsure whether he would accept her caring.
Her love.
A heartbeat passed. Another.
His breathing and his voice were both sharp when he finally answered her question. “Aye, I got the vengeance I wanted. I don’t even remember parts of that fourteen years. Some of it’s nothing but a blur. All blood and swords and pistols.” He shook his head. “And faces. Sometimes I still see the faces. People I hurt.” His voice broke on the word hurt and he stopped, breathing hard as if he had run a great distance. The words came faster when he continued. “Then on that last night, when I finally had Eldridge in my sights—the man who had betrayed my father—when I finally found what I had wanted for so long... I realized I had lost...”
Yourself, she thought. Everything of value. Everything that mattered. Unable to stop herself this time, she reached out and touched him, placing a trembling hand lightly, gently on his back.
He was so lost in his memories of that night, he didn’t seem to feel her touch. “The ship was on fire. I was cut off. Cornered. I couldn’t reach him. The navy crew were swarming all around me. I was... sweet Jesus, I was so blinded by rage.” His voice started to shake. “I saw what I wanted slipping through my fingers. I turned and fired at the first blue uniform I saw and... it was only a boy. A cabin boy.”
“Nicholas...” She moved closer, slid her arms around him, tried to offer something more, words of comfort, but her own voice broke.
“I watched him fall,” Nicholas whispered. “I was staring right into his eyes, and I watched