…your thirst, letting him walk away.

You return your head and your eyes to the position they were in, staring blankly ahead. It’s a good thing you did as he turn around soon after, stopping at the stairs and looking back at you. Neither of you move.

What feels like a solid minute passes, but eventually he walks back over to you and returns to looking between your legs in silent contemplation. After another minute of this, he puts the bucket and the bread down and steps back, returning with a key and rattling it in the lock before opening the metal framed bars wide. He draws something from the back of his hip before kneeling down.

“You see this?” He waves the stubby metal blade -no more than a piece of sharpened metal wrapped in string for the grip- close to your eye left eye. “If you’re faking, you get this.”

You look ahead.

Seeing you unmoved, he pulls at your arm, trying to bring it from your back. His suspicions are quashed when the other is tugged with it, though it’s held in your grip instead of the rope around it. His knees between yours, he pushes them wide before lowering himself, elbow against the floor and blade to your neck, his other hand reaching low to free himself from his britches.

You look ahead.

He pushes forward.

You look ahead.

“Ahhh. Mmmmm.” He braces himself, putting his other hand on the floor by your head, leaving his hips and his pushing feet to do the work. Heavy breaths come from him, breaking on your face and drying your unseeing eyes. He feels…smaller, than Roland, despite being taller, sliding back and forth inside of you like a gentle but insistent tide. Grey hairs hang limply from the back of his bandanna, and his lined face watches for signs of life that you do not give him. After a few minutes, the arm not holding the knife to your throat moves to the same position as its twin, putting elbow to floor and hand on your person. This time it’s your bosom, his attention there slowing the flow of manhood into womanhood. He needn’t bother, pressed flat as they are by lying on your back, but he mauls greedily at what he can, squeezing free whatever joy he can that’s not provided in his thrusting.

His grunts and his breathing reach far in the quiet of the dimly lit room, no doubt reaching the cells whose mutterings have been silenced by bread and the soft echoing sounds of flesh in flesh. He gives up on your chest and neck, resting fully on his forarms and grunting noisily as he pushes you back and forth. His free hand steadies your head, and on seeing no life behind your eyes, he kisses your lips, pressing them hard with his own.

At some point, with gradual growth, his humping had grown more frenzied; deeper, faster, and moaning louder and more readily each time his hairs met yours. The **** had made your limp legs roll together with the energy of it, offering a poor but irritating barrier to his hips as he pushes you up the stone floor. His every thrust knocked your thighs, jolting them, and he has to stop and reposition several times, to bore his hips back towards yours and begin again. Eventually, he can’t take it.

Panting, he pulls himself back, kneeling long enough to lift your knees and pull up your legs before pushing them apart, spreading your thighs like the pages of a book. You feel the blade briefly against your knee, held tenuously in his hand, but in a moments it’s over and he returns to fucking you like a whore.

He moans into your mouth, his climax building as his twitching hips begin to falter. His free hand holds your head still, keeping it from rocking free of his kiss as he rides you, and his other holds the knife-

He puts it down.

The blade clinks on the stone as its point sinks its way through the thin layer of straw acting as your bedding. His panting moaning mouth opens to lick yours, and his free hand moves to your jaw, opening your mouth like he did with the others, this time to let his tongue writhe along your own. It lasts only a moment.

“MMMMMmmm! Mmmm! Ahhhh. Ahhhhh.” Once more you feel hot wet seed spill into your loins in sprays of self-gratification, his twitching rod pulsating inside with each moan and each half-hearted hump. His lips part from yours with distracted ecstasy, still close enough that you feel the bristles of his unshaven face grate along your skin, and his panting moaning breaths pour directly into your mouth. After his cries are done, but before the spilling of his load, he goes back to your mouth, re-joining and re-tonguing it in the parody of a kiss, and pawing your breasts with both hands, rocking back and forth as the last of his is squeezed into your folds. You stare ahead.

Before he can take his spent dick out, you drive his dagger in.

His side bursts with crimson, again and again. He cries out, pain lancing through his voice, quieter than his pleasure and quickly gurgling with punctured filling lungs. His hands flail and so do yours, to his side, to your face, his neck, his chest. You hammer him like he did you, drilling back and forth, inside and out, and eventually stopping only when he is spent and has spilled his last. By the end of it, it’s up to you to push him off and out of you, rolling his blooded lifeless form onto the thirsty scarlet straw and stopping yourself from spilling anymore of his guts. Both the eager white hot knife burning with your cold rage, begging you to stab and stab until none of it happened, and the simple act of rolling his form, with its ragged abdomen, seem poised to hollow him of any unclaimed viscera, but you breathe deep and scrape whatever fell out of him off your naked body.

How is it you can be so coated in boiling crimson, yet all you feel of him is what he left between your legs? There’s an injustice to that. There’s an injustice to a lot of things.

You stand and walk on unsteady legs, leaving your cell only to drop by the bucket. There isn’t much left, but you toss the ladle resting inside and pick the whole thing up, drinking deep from its wooden rim and letting it pour messily about your lips to flood down your body. The bread is next, out of spite, disappearing in three solid bites.

The two in the stocks look up at you, and the noises from beyond had faded to silence as they listened. You stand and look to the bundle of keys. The world may be unjust, but the pool oozing about the soles of your feet shows it doesn’t have to stay that way. Not for you.

Not for anyone.

In the years since, you had done all you could. Few of them were still with you now. Those huddled souls behind their bars had first flinched at the sight of you, but soon you and they had the run of the island. Your enemy had gone, and with her, all the ships that came and went like minnows drawn to the carrion of her presence. But also her men, the enforcers of her whims, leaving only a lazy set of dockworkers, unarmed staff, and a brothel of whores. After they had all fed and rested, the party of freed prisoners -forty one in all- quietly took the mansion and its hidden weapons, then took the village (growing their number by thirteen whores, though some were only children), and finally the docks (where two more whores decided to join). With surprise and restraint, your forces suffered no casualties and inflicted many, with those like the cowardly dock master and vicious whore house madam surrendering only to face a hasty noose drop.

In the end, your salvation came from the arrival of the **** ship, ironically there to take you away. With the same surprise and restraint, your forces suffered no casualties and inflicted many more.

You wish you could say the same for the years since. Many of those who had no home to go back to, and ample reason for vengeance, stayed with you as you sailed the sea’s of the archipelago. But what you hunted was a dangerous breed, and casualties were inevitable. You had killed far more than you had lost, and every atrocity wrought on the innocents of the island villages and shores, swelled your number with fresh recruits, looking to join the only group having any success against the deteriorating lawlessness of Coronac’s once rich trade routes.

Many had returned home of course. You know you shouldn’t resent them, but you’d made peace with doing so.

Your ship makes another pass around the blazing inferno, harpoons at the ready to fish any stragglers out of the water. There were few. You had managed to catch them off guard, and the oil even more so, leaving many no doubt waking to the licking of flame. You had hoped to see his face, but practicality came first. Better he died this way than not at all.

The list tastes the air again. You like to cross out the names where your crew can see, to remind them that their task is still unfinished, but grows more so with each victory. The list is long, and still grows from time to time, but you allow yourself a smile as the second name down is finally crossed out.

The names dance in the firelight, and even a fresh gurgling scream from the choppy waves can’t distract you from them.

Captain Wendy ‘Go’ Washkin (The Wendigo)

Captain Roland

Captain Shan-Mahjour

Captain Cutter

Captain John ‘Croke’

Captain Faidas Graith

Captain Jer Kitcher

‘Quain’

Captain Dofan

‘Bloodwater’

Captain Harriet ‘No-man’ Dolar

Captain Jainus Northwick

‘Black Cowl’

Captain ‘Guts’ Orrak

Captain Michal (the) Finch

Kail-Kalieal (of the Crag Rock(?))

Captain Mich ‘bolt-rain’ Woodson

Zamiora (killer of ten ‘Mikaloka’(?))

Captain Yentan

Reddark ‘The Northern Bear’

Captain Daggarty

‘Old Peat’

…

The names run on and on, into the second column and the back of the page, but your eyes rest on her name, your finger stroking across it for the thousandth time. Soon.

…Soon.