own. My mind seemed too lucid and focused for the damage to be brain related.
Or so I thought until I woke again that night.
Within hours, I plunged into feverish confusion. Lethargy sank into my muscles. Chills wracked my body, and fuzzy vision disoriented the world around me.
Infection had set in.
I succumbed to delirium.
Time slipped away. Conscious feeling spooled in starts and stops. The doctors hovered at the edges of the murky silence, conversing and administrating medicine, but I couldn’t make sense of it. Couldn’t concentrate enough to read lips or body language.
Someone had moved me to the bed in my cabin. Drenched in sweat and confusion, I was given draughts of laudanum for the pain and blood-letting treatments to purge the infection from my veins.
The bleeding and opium rendered my incoherency worse. I lost days.
Either Priest or Ashley was always stretched out beside me on the mattress. Always. Even if I couldn’t see or hear them, I felt them. A hand in my hair, fingertips on my skin, lips against my neck, comforting, reassuring. I never slept alone.
Their constant presence gilded my darkest hours.
Amid intervals of fogginess, I found new gifts from Priest waiting for me on the table beside the bed. Severed fingers and toes. Two ears. An entire foot. Then the stump of another. Most of the extremities had been flayed to the bone—likely before they’d been sawed off.
As the body parts arrived, I wondered if my arm would meet the same fate. I checked it often, relieved to find it still attached and lying beside me on its brace.
Sometimes I was lucid when Priest delivered his grisly spoils. He brought me an entire arm once, with the bone protruding like mine had, only this limb was missing its hand. He studied my reaction to it, his gaze gloriously dark and rotating with violence. A skirt of bloody knives draped about his waist, his face and chest dappled in sanguine spots of gore.
He exemplified a barbaric warrior. Not just of body. His heart bellowed for revenge.
Revenge in my honor.
I didn’t think I could love him any more than I already had.
Eventually, the gifts stopped coming, and I knew Madwulf had succumbed to infection or blood loss.
To watch one’s body being hacked away bit by bit was a positively grueling way to die. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been able to exact a better punishment myself. Still, I wished I’d been there. I wished it had been me who’d swung the fatal blow.
But alas, I was bedridden, and Priest was indeed a terrifying executioner. I tried to express my gratitude to him in my eyes, but I couldn’t make my face work right. So I settled on a weak, “Thank you.”
With Madwulf dead, Priest didn’t leave my side again. He and Ashley took turns feeding me, bathing me, and holding me on the chamber pot. Not my finest moments as a pirate captain, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to care.
Priest slept here every night. Sometimes in the bed with me. Other times I woke to find him in the chair beside the mattress, his weary frame bent over his knees, with his head hanging in his hands. It hurt my heart to see him so troubled. Worse, I didn’t have the strength to comfort him.
Ashley spent his evenings on Blitz. When he wasn’t here with me, he was trying to take command of what was left of his career. While I’d been shackled to the foremast, Madwulf’s men had boasted about all the soldiers they locked in the hold—all the men who had remained loyal to Ashley.
The pirate hunter still had a crew and a Royal Navy warship depending on him. With the admiral dead and his enemies destroyed, he could return to England, marry his betrothed, and carry on like he’d never met me.
If he did that, I would fight for him. But first, I needed to fight this infection.
Despite my fuzzy head and lack of hearing, I knew Jade was on the move, sailing to some unknown destination. Since I still saw Ashley every day, Blitz must be sailing with us, plotted on the same course.
Where? My questions were met with shaking heads and silent reassurances. They wanted me focused on regaining my health rather than trying to command the ship from my bed.
Reynolds popped his head in frequently. In my feverish daze, his face looked like a blurry dream in front of me. But I knew he checked on me often, even as he was busy