wrapped my arms around my father’s chest. “What will happen to me?”
“That’s up to you.” He stabbed the oars into the black water and pushed out to sea. “Jade is yours. The captain was very clear on that point the night he took her.”
“I’m only fourteen.”
“I’ll captain her until you earn the crew’s trust.” He tipped his head, studying me. “I was younger than you, orphaned like you, when I chose this life. I have no regrets.”
“I’m a girl.” A broken, empty girl. I tightened my hand around my parents’ entwined fingers. “The crew won’t accept me without my father.”
“Don’t give them a choice.” His gaze flitted over me, and a smirk touched the corner of his mouth. “I saw a fearless fire burning inside you yesterday. Get that back, Bennett, and naught will stand in your way.”
I felt it. A spark of something beneath the cold, heavy weight of pain.
Something to live for.
My hand fell to the compass that hung from my waist.
When you’re ready, you will follow it and claim what’s rightfully yours.
I closed my eyes and cried.
March 1721
Port Royal, Kingston Harbor Jamaica
Seven years had passed since I lost my parents. I still felt it, the deep gnawing pain in the torments of my soul. I tried to shake it loose, tried like hell to pretend the damage wasn’t there. But it clung.
Especially tonight.
The mantle of twilight shrouded me in desolation as I stood before another corpse hanging from a noose.
Another buccaneer.
Another great man ripped from my life.
One day I might find the hempen halter around my own neck. Pirates never died in their beds. But today wasn’t my day.
A reminder that I shouldn’t be here.
I’d been on the run since I was fourteen, constantly looking over my shoulder. Even now I subtly tilted my head, probing the empty alleyways around me, my senses on alert for the one thing I couldn’t outrun forever.
Death.
My would-be reapers came in many forms. Pirate hunters sought the bounty my capture would award them. Navy officers desired the accolades from bringing down the pirate daughter of Captain Edric Sharp. Enemy buccaneers and fellow criminals wanted to eliminate me as the competition. And there were others, one in particular, who hunted me with single-minded focus, determined to reclaim what he’d lost.
He was the most dangerous of them all.
My presence in Jamaica was a risk. But I had to come, even as I knew I would arrive too late.
When I’d learned of Charles Vane’s capture, I was a week’s journey away.
I arrived three days after he hanged.
And he was still hanging.
I covered my nose against the stench and ordered myself not to cry. I hadn’t exposed that kind of weakness in a very long time.
Charles had seen me at my lowest point. One of them, anyway. The night he collected my parents’ bodies and carried me away from Carolina, we began a friendship that survived battles and sickness, victories and losses, time and distance.
And now death.
I owed him my life. A debt I would never be able to repay.
My trembling hand went to the jade stone that hung on the leather choker around my neck, one of the few things I retained from childhood. I’d lost so much in the past seven years and smiled so little.
Just like my mother.
But unlike her, my dream had always been to live on a ship. I’d obtained that and fought every day to keep it. Jade belonged to me, and I’d wrangled her under my command with a ferocity that would’ve made my father proud. I loved the life I’d chosen, craved the rocking beneath my feet even now, but it wasn’t easy.
I’d made a lot of mistakes, one of which left a terrible hole in my heart.
Shadows stirred in my periphery, and a well-built pirate approached my side. We didn’t make eye contact as he paused to view the body with a respectable amount of space between us.
He towered several heads taller than me, all lean muscle and vibrating intimidation. His brown hair was sheared up the sides, leaving a stripe of tousled length from the peak of his forehead to the base of his skull. Rings of gold lined his ear, and a square jaw underscored his hard mouth.
As wickedly attractive as he was ruthless, he could probably eat me in one bite.
I trusted him with my life.
Reynolds wasn’t just my quartermaster and second in command. He was one of my closest friends.
“We should go, Captain,” he said under his breath. “A lady of your