…risk going it alone.

Escaping is a risk, always was. Assassinating Captain Washkin is the bigger risk. You’re willing to accept both on your own terms. But bringing a man, an honourless bounty hunter, who you have just met into such a dangerous situation is a risk you’re not willing to take. You would only do this with someone you trust, and how could you possibly trust him. Better to rely on the one person who’s loyalty you can be sure of, yourself.

This mission could lead you to your ****, but even that would be honourable if it was the last **** on Wendigo’s hands.

“Thanks but no thanks. I’m going for Captain Washkin on my own. Do you know the best way upstairs?”

The bounty hunter looks a little upset but quickly hides it behind a serious expression. “You’re sure about this? Let me tell you, if I couldn’t do it then you have no chance on your own.” Considering that you first saw him engaging in a violent act you don’t really want to think about right now, his arrogant concern for you is almost chivalrous by comparison.

“I need to see for myself. Do you know the best way up there or not?”

He pauses for a moment before shrugging his shoulders. “The servant’s stairs. Go through the kitchen to the other side of the house, down the first corridor that splits off from the main one. Take a left; the stairs are through a small door around there.”

He picks up the lantern and walks towards the door, pausing as he passes you. You smell the sweat coming off him in waves, suffocating your senses. He smells manly. Your face reddens again.

“From one professional to another, use the door to the right of the room Wendigo is in. It has a peephole that looks into her room. If you make it out of this, find me in East Lilia. I’ll buy you a drink and we can exchange names. Until then, try not to get tortured too much.” With that sombre note, he walks through the door and disappears.

You wait a moment before setting out behind him, stepping out into an empty corridor. You move into the room across the hall and retrieve your lantern, brightening it up for your journey back to the kitchen. So, it was worth exploring further. You consider searching more rooms but the timetable that the man outlined wouldn’t really allow for further dallying. Best to get to this peephole and see what they’re doing, maximising your window of attack. There must be some moments where she’s alone, between negotiations, when she’s ****. You pass through the kitchen and continue on down the corridor to the small door he described, and sure enough, it leads to a narrow climb that takes you to the manors upper floor. It looks like the stairs go all the way up to the roof, but the middle door is more than enough for now. You open it slightly and peek out onto a long corridor that stretches from one end of the manor to another. In the middle of it, you can see the yellow light of the foyer, split by banisters before the big double door.

You snuff out the lantern and put it to one side before moving through the empty darkness of the corridor to the landing. A peek around the corner let you look down on the men in the foyer, the rich merchants talking amongst themselves with heads down and eyes on each other. Choosing your moment carefully, you dart across the landing, staying low as to not attract their sight, passing the double doors and the stairs and slipping into the darkness of the continuing corridor. A brief look tells you that you weren’t seen by any of the foyers residents. You stand before the room to the right of the double doors and listen for any noise. Hearing nothing, you open the door and look in. The room is long and dark, containing floor level cloth mats, wardrobes, cabinets, blankets and even a washboard and tub. It’s all lit by a small amount of moon light just teasing the oddly narrow windows. If you had to guess, you would say this is the servant’s quarters.

You creep in and look around, seeing the length of the room stretching to a balcony on your far right and the all-important wall directly to your left. The door slightly creaks as it drifts closed behind you and you move along the left hand wall, looking for the peephole. The muffled words of the two pirate captains bleed through the wall, and they seem to get clearer the closer to the far corner you get. As you approach the corner, you look through the nearby narrow window and confirm that the room the voices are coming from stretches further back than this one. A small tiled roof just under the window bends around the corner in an ‘L’ shape, meting up with a window that looks into the room they must be in. Their voices sound very muffled up to the corner; there must be a room through the double doors that sits between the one the Captains are in and the landing. There can’t possibly be a peephole here, unless that room is smaller than this one and the corner connects.

You put your ear to the wall and listen to their muffled conversation, clearly hearing a woman’s voice say, “Mmmm, this is always the best bit of our little talks.” You look down the plain white plastered wall and see nothing that could even be mistaken for a peephole. “Ahhhh! Ohhhh. It’s so, mmmm, big...” The bastard lied to you. Why would he-

You hear footsteps from behind. Arms wrap around you, locking tight about your chest and squeezing. You grab one and pull it, transferring its momentum across your back and over your shoulder, sending the assailant crashing into the wall with a loud thump. The noise from its other side stops. You look down and see a man several years younger than you, crumpled on the floor. His face is covered with freckles and pain but otherwise appears to be quite handsome, if a little cross eyed, and you also take in with a glance the brown servant’s vest he’s wearing, and the trousers he’s lacking. The sudden sight of a penis only gives you more reasons to panic.

More footsteps. You turn to see woman fly at you with a great leap, arms and legs in front of her as though pouncing onto something with intent to climb. Unable to avoid her, you put out your arms and try to halt her at the midsection. Her arms grab your head and her legs slide under your arms but you manage to catch her and redirect her momentum, swinging her around to your right and slamming her onto a small cabinet next to the wall, which nosily shakes with whatever loose items it contains as you slip out of her grip.

How? Where did they come from? Perhaps they were hiding behind one of the cabinets or wardrobes further down? But why attack now and why are neither of them wearing trousers?! This is bad. Time to go. You start a run towards the balcony, but the man’s hands wrap around your ankle and you tilt, hitting the floor hard. You roll onto your back, reach into the slit in your trousers and pull out the dagger strapped to your thigh. No sooner does it glint in the air than the woman returns, diving on top of you, straddling your stomach, her arms tangling with your arms as you both struggle for the blade. She grabs your arm, slamming it against the floor. One. Twice. Three times. Forcing you to drop the dagger, which she picks up whip quick, holding it before your wild strike throws it out of her hand and across the room.

The tangle for each other’s arms begins anew, each trying to pin the other, with you already on your back and naturally disadvantaged. You get a good look at her and see she’s taller and a few years older than you, with olive skin and black curly hair barely contained by the string that ties it back. She wears a white shirt and nothing else, her wet and warm womanhood rubbing against your bare belly, its hairs grating your birth button and its wetness possibly explaining what two nearly naked people were doing in the dark.

She grabs your wrists and spits out, “Bitch, you have any idea how good at wrestling I am?!” You try to pull free and throw her off. “I had seven older brothers! Try again!” The hand trapping your leg lets go and you seize the opportunity. You pull your feet up, hooking her face with your ankle and pulling her backaward, away from you. The boy returns, her rear guard, and you take the opportunity to kick him in the face, sending him stumbling back. You turn and roll, standing up when you buck her, and facing the balcony for your second escape. You take a step, only to be tackled to the floor again by the woman. Her arm wraps around your neck in a vicious headlock before she pulls it up, painfully bending your back backwards. You reach back, trying to reach her head but grab only air.

“Told ya bitch! Fuckin seven!” You feel her straddling you again, the disgustingly warm wetness now sitting in the small of your back.

She pulls you back more while the man gets up, but when you hear the door suddenly bursts open and the sounds of people coming in, he, her, and you, all freeze, as though children caught misbehaving. There is silence before a woman’s powerful voice speaks out.

“What, in the name of the gods blackest curse, is going on in here.” Though the voice is angrier, it’s clearly the one you heard through the wall. Captain Washkin!

“This bitch tried to listen in on your room though the wall there mam! We stopped her mam!”

You try to talk and defend yourself, but her arm is crushing your neck. You hear footsteps get closer before seeing a thin blade fill your vision.

Captain Washkin’s quiet “Let her go,” is followed immediately by the woman’s “Mam!”

Your bent muscles spring forward as she lets go of your neck and stands up off you, and you’re barely able to keep yourself from the pointed sword as a result.

You look up at it and its woman wielder, confirming from her demeanour alone that she is Captain Wendy ‘Go’ Washkin.

The young man chips in. “She had this with her mam.” You see he’s holding your stiletto out to the captain. The man that came in with her, Captain Roland you presume, walks up and takes it. His expression is one of white hot anger barely controlled; evidently, he did not want to be disturbed in his midnight meeting. Captain Washkin calmly addresses your two attackers without even looking at them.

“Maxaine, Benji, why are you upstairs and why do you have no trousers on?” You see their faces redden and Benji covertly try to cover his small flaccid self. Maxaine’s short and curly hairs seemed to be getting some attention from Roland but are left exposed as she holds her hands behind her back while standing to attention. She responds first.

“Benji was set to work upstairs mam and, er, I, I mean we, wanted to make love mam! So I came up here to find him and we, er, did. Then we saw this bitch sneak in and listen at the wall mam!” She shifts from side to side. With the sword at your neck, you have **** but to listen and wait for your moment. This seems to be a ‘speak when spoken to’ situation.

Captain Washkin follows up with another question as calm as the first, “Are you two in love?”

Benji and Maxaine share a brief glance before both responding in unison.

“Yes.”

A strange and bitter smile twists the corner of Captain Washkins mouth. “Good for you.” She thinks for a moment. “Well, you did stop a potential assassin so I’ll forgive your being upstairs,” they both visibly relax slightly, “but you, Maxaine, were given duties that should have kept you with the ship.” Her eyes narrow as she looks at the woman who in turn looks petrified. “As you like being naked so much, that’s how you can spend tomorrow. I expect you to work a double shift as well,” she quietly adds, “see how you like wrestling after a full day’s work.”

They both look bitter but accepting, far more accepting than you would be with such an order. She turns her attention back to you.

“Roland, is she one of yours?”

His gaze bores into you as he says, “No, never seen her before.”

“Then we better have a little chat ey?” She stands to one side and looks at Captain Roland until he gets the message. He walks over to you and roughly grabs your jackets, pulling you upright before he gives you a brief pat down for further weapons. Still holding your dagger, he grabs your arm and follows Captain Washkin out the room. She gives a sharp, “And back to work you two!” as she goes.

Your two attackers jump slightly before rushing to get their trousers on.

As Roland drags you through the door and then through the double doors, you at least confirm that the small windowless room containing a low table and various chests and cabinets around its sides, is only slightly smaller than the other room, as you suspected. You think of the bounty hunter. He must have known there was no peephole; he must have learned from the maid where the two lovers were.

‘From one professional to another...’

Now you know he’s a bounty hunter; only they can treat the ‘competition’ so treacherously. Roland takes you around the table and throws you through another door into the room you heard them in previously. You slam into the floor, still catching your breath, now risen in fresh panic. This is not good.

Not good at all!