Every time they returned, they restrained me, gagged and blindfolded, to the barrel and scrubbed my body with vinegar water to kill the stench of death. Then the other man would come, and it would be only him and his terrible cruelty. Afterward, I was chained in the black hole with the decaying bodies.
As the days passed, the air became absolutely pestilential. How many days? How often did they come? The displacement of time had a way of fracturing the mind. Some days, I struggled to hold onto a thread of rational thought.
They fed me bites of fish after every violation. My hunger pangs remained the least of my torments, and my throat never felt parched beyond what I could handle. They came often enough to keep me hydrated.
Daily visits, I decided. The constant pain between my legs suggested that some of those visits occurred multiple times a day.
I’d been in here long enough that my stitches needed to be removed. When the tight, itchy skin became unbearable, I spent hours twisting unnaturally in my shackles and using the broken edge of a fingernail to pick the threads from the underside of my foot.
Giving up would’ve been so much easier. But I didn’t know how to do that.
By dint of stubborn will, I thrashed and snarled every time they came. Twice, they struck me so hard I lost awareness and woke in a fog upon the barrel. Each time they sent me back to the hole, I was weaker, more depleted, the desire to live gradually draining from my bones.
When they weren’t abusing me, they kept me shackled in the blackness. It wasn’t long before I looked forward to their visits if only to escape the suffocation of rot and loneliness.
The stench was so intolerably loathsome it was dangerous to breathe. I craved fresh air and would take the pain that accompanied it over spending another second inside these walls.
Isolation was my enemy. It had a gravity to it that dragged me down, a choking sadness that warped the mind. Made worse by the galling of the irons on my wrists and ankles and the filth of the planks beneath my nude body. My head grew fuzzy with poisonous thoughts, and my brain began to fail me. I wouldn’t be able to hold onto my sanity forever.
With every bleak hour that passed, I expected to share the fate of my cellmates. Sometimes, I pleaded for the last friend, Death, to relieve me.
But there were still small pockets of time when I hoped for a miracle.
I created fantasies in my head, my favorite being a gallant rescue where Priest and Ashley took down this ship and killed everyone on board. In reality, Priest would do it without hesitation or question. If he were still out there, fighting to rescue me. I didn’t know.
Ashley, on the other hand, would always choose his career first. But could he ignore the evil that took place here? Would he let the admiral’s officers live if he knew what they’d done in the hold of their ship?
I didn’t know that answer, either. It didn’t matter. Neither Ashley nor Priest had come for me. I didn’t resent them for it. I’d never been a woman who depended on a man to save her. This wasn’t their fight. It was mine.
At age fourteen, I could’ve chosen any path. I picked this one, a life of crime and dangerous risks. I lived for pirating, and in the end, I would die for it. I’d always known that. I just hadn’t expected it to end in rape and torture aboard the ship that would carry me to the gallows.
As certain doom descended heavier and harder upon me, I turned my mind to the past, seeking a happier, freer place. I thought of my father often. My mother, too. And I indulged in reminiscences of Jade, Reynolds, Jobah, and the glorious years we sailed together. I missed them terribly. I missed my life. But more than that, I missed Priest and Ashley.
Even as I knew contempt for Priest’s betrayal and Ashley’s rejection, I had a lot of time to sit with my remorse and re-examine it from a new perspective. Ironic how things looked clearer in the dark. Sharper. More poignant.
Despite their faults, I knew they loved me, each in his own way. That meant something.
It meant everything.
Because I loved them, too.
I loved a libertine and a pirate hunter. Of course, I did. Insanely, shamelessly, irrefutably.