A concave hole hollowed out his head. All that remained of his face was a bowl of splintered bone and red mush. The skull, the eyes, all of it was crushed, completely pulverized beneath whatever had caused the repetitive thump, thump, thump…
I looked around for the weapon and paused on Ashley’s broken, bloody knuckles. “Did you…?”
“If I could kill him again, I would. But I would slow it down. Draw it out. Make him suffer for weeks.” His teeth ground together as he set the bowl of salt fish in my hands. “Eat. I know it’s the last thing you want right now, but you need your strength.” His eyes narrowed coldly. “Who else hurt you?”
“Just him.” My stomach tightened.
The mutilation extended beyond the face. Multiple stab wounds covered the abdomen so as to permit the bowels to fall out. A knife protruded from where the genitals used to be, the hilt jutting upward like a crude erection. A few feet away lay the severed flesh that had hurt me so brutally.
Sick satisfaction hummed through my soul. Ashley had disemboweled, castrated, and defaced this man in a matter of minutes. The only person I’d ever seen do something so swiftly and grotesquely was Priest.
“Who else knows what was happening in here?” He collected the knives from the bodies of the officers. “Be very certain, Bennett, because I will slaughter every man on board this tarnal ship.”
“Only these three as far as I know.” I swallowed down a sour bite of fish and fought back nausea. “Did you recognize the man who raped me? He always smelled like—”
“Onions. He ate them raw.” He cast the body an intense, fevered glare. “Sir John Dycker.”
“The admiral? You killed your superior?” I clutched my forehead, whirling beneath the implication. “They’ll execute you, Ashley! They’ll hang you right alongside me!”
His gaze narrowed on the hatchway as if daring it to open. “Neither of us is hanging.”
A flutter tingled in my belly. That was the first time I’d ever heard a promise of my survival from his mouth.
“I have a great deal to tell you.” He paced around the bodies, his expression pensive. “First, we need to get off this ship. Finish eating.”
I choked down the remainder of the fish in seconds. “How do we get out of here?”
“I’m working on that.” He handed the knives to me and scanned the space. “When I opened that hatch and saw him with you…” His eyes burned with renewed fury, his lips twisting back from clenched teeth. “I had no plans beyond beating his face into the back of his head.”
“You achieved that quite successfully.”
He lifted the admiral’s shoulders and began to drag him toward the black hole. “I left you here, thinking you were safe, so that I could find Priest Farrell and ask for his help.” He paused, growling angrily. “I never found the bastard.”
“Wait. You wanted Priest’s help?” My pulse quickened. “For what?”
“To free you.” He resumed moving the corpse, presumably to hide it. “I was going to make him an offer.”
“What offer? Ashley, forget the body. You need to clean the blood off your face and—”
“Any second, a soldier is going to come through that hatchway looking for his officers, his admiral, or perhaps even me, because I’ve been down here longer than acceptable. I spent the day arguing my way through a dozen different lieutenants before I reached the lower deck. It’s not normal for a commodore to visit his prisoner.” He glanced over his shoulder at the black hole and scowled. “What is that smell?”
My heart sank. “That’s where they kept me.”
A vein bulged in his scarlet-smeared forehead. He dropped the admiral’s body and spun toward the hole.
“Ashley, wait!” I planted my feet, refusing to go anywhere near there. That stench would forever haunt me, and I wasn’t brave enough to breathe it again.
He crossed the threshold and staggered to a stop. His head swung toward his shoulder, and he buried his nose there, gagging and coughing.
“How long have I been down here?” I asked softly.
“Two weeks.” He gripped the door, his fingers digging into the wood, his accent slurring with rage. “You were in there for two weeks with what I can only imagine is a dead body. Two weeks I spent hunting a pirate who might as well be a ghost. No one has spotted Priest Farrell in months. I should have turned back the first day when I learned he wasn’t at the brothel. Had