He was here now, in fact, sitting at the table with Jobah and Priest. I watched the three of them together, their camaraderie, their brotherhood. Priest smirked at Reynolds and smacked Jobah over the back of the head. Jobah laughed and hit him back.
Priest had missed them, and the realization spiked a new pain in my chest.
I hadn’t just deprived him of his wife for two years. I’d deprived him of his family. His brethren. I’d turned his closest mates against him and made them choose sides.
I hated myself for that. When I’d discovered his infidelity, I shouldn’t have left him in Nassau. I could’ve let him remain on my ship as part of my crew while keeping him out of my bed. I could’ve handled it like a captain instead of an emotionally scorned woman.
That night, when he crawled in bed beside me, I told him all these regrets. I rambled on in a silent, feverish haze, my disordered stream of thought losing focus as I spoke. But he heard the gist of it.
His arms came around me, holding without hurting, and his lips moved passionately against my cheek. I felt the rumble of his I miss you’s and the heated breaths of his I love you’s. His tender kisses traced my jaw in a language without words. It was more potent than sound, more profound than speech.
Every declaration was a sensation produced, not through the ear, but through the soul.
It brought to mind something he’d said the night he found me in Jamaica.
No man will ever live up to the ideal you hold for Edric Sharp.
“You were wrong about something.” I shifted my head so that I could watch his lips move.
Just one thing? he asked.
“Well, no. But…” I drew a ragged breath, my entire body afire and shaking in a cold sweat. “I left you. Tried to give you up. Yet you never gave up on me. Never stopped pursuing me. You came for me when I needed you the most. Priest… You’ve far surpassed the ideal I hold for my father.”
He and Ashley both. The commodore risked his career, his family, and his life to remove me—a pirate prisoner—from the admiral’s flagship. Now he was commanding a two-thousand-ton warship with only a fraction of the crew needed to sail it. The deepening creases around his bloodshot eyes attested to the sort of sleepless pressure he was under. Yet he still spent hours here with me every day.
He and Priest had sacrificed so much. I owed it to them to recover.
I needed to pull my damned self together, harden my bones, and drag my battle-scarred body from this bed. The sooner I did that, the less of a burden I would be, and the quicker I would find my father’s treasure and repay my crew for their loyalty.
But the infection wasn’t finished with me.
My acute pain combined with continued strong fevers was to be dreaded, no mistake. The danger that I would fall into deep delirium and die loomed in the tired eyes of Priest, Ashley, and my doctors.
As the fever wore on, chills overtook my senses and smothered my consciousness, leaving me to wander alone in my mind. I found myself back in the hole on the admiral’s flagship, surrounded by the stench of death.
Whenever I woke, it was in flickers of warped reality. I was still in that black hole, watching a door open and close only feet away. Priest and Ashley flashed in and out of the doorway, talking to me without sound, reaching for me, always too far away.
Shackled and weak, I couldn’t crawl toward them. My legs wouldn’t move.
Gradually, the door opened less often, and the murk around me grew darker, stretching longer. Flashes of Priest transformed. His cheeks hollowed out, narrowing his face. Whiskers thickened, lengthening into a short beard. I barely recognized him.
Where was Ashley?
I called out for him, but he stopped appearing in the doorway. Sometimes Priest was there, his silver eyes ablaze with grim emotion. But Ashley was gone. I sensed his absence like a missing limb.
Perhaps that was the impetus that drove me from death. From within the suffocating black hole of silence and decay, I clawed my way out. Hands scrabbling, muscles writhing, and lungs panting, I woke on a gasp in the blinding rays of sunlight.
There was no motion. No rocking or waves. I was on land?
My surroundings came in bursts of hazy images—silk fabric, sumptuous wood furnishings, embroidered brocades, silver