Continue…

A cold creeping dread replaces the hot prickle, like ice water so cold as to be slush, and even on a hot night like this it is wholly unwelcome.

“W-wwhait wh-“

It’s all you get out before the giant steers you into the embrace of the double doors, yanking one open and marching you through it. Nothing but stammers come. It feels like your words fight with those she spoke, as though unable to compete with them at all.

‘Take her to my room, strip her naked, and tie her up.’

What can even be said to that?

The room beyond the double doors is the antechamber you suspected, though you didn’t guess the large low table in its middle. His insistence and the painful lift he puts into your arms makes you jump the knee high height onto the table’s surface, which is apparently standard procedure as he jumps up as well -though it’s more a small step for him- and marches you forward relentlessly.

A step through the next single door and the room with the large table is left behind. Before you stands the room you spied upon, now with the unseen areas on full display. The large double bed is across from you, as you remember it, still with its sheets ruffled and no doubt soiled. To your left is a line of wardrobes and dressers, and beyond them, closer to the bed, the wall turns a small corner that you know contains a hole. You see a door just beyond that, close to the far wall, into the space eaten off the other room, and you know it must be a dead end unless it has another window. The right of the room contains a round table of a more sensible height, with several chairs about it and empty mugs atop it. Beyond that, and upon the same wall as the doorway you just crossed, there is an empty fireplace, and far to your right -further than the uneven room goes left- that you see a wide open window and the tempting glitter of stars in a dark sky.

The only other elements of note that you see are the many small crumpled heaps of clothes dotted about the room. Apparently, the captain is not one to tidy things away, and while their placement seems odd -almost artificial- you have no time to consider why that might be.

The thick rope of fingers bare down on your wrists, dragging you to the floor and planning you face down on its surface. A few kicks of your legs is all the resistance you can muster; his strength is like being caught up in a water wheel, ready to be broken like tinder should you fall wrongly into its movements. A knee kicks up the back of your black top before resting a small portion of his weight upon you: more than enough to pin you like a butterfly in a display case, leaving your bones and muscles groaning.

You breathe heavily, which feels hindered by his weight, which makes you breathe even more heavily. What you know is coming doesn’t help. He lets go of your hands and they spring forward from your back, going no further than stretched out across the floor. He tugs up your top with both hands.

“No! N-“

He pulls with the strength of wild horses, dragging the material up and over your head, turning it inside out and forcing your arms out simply by its pull. You hold onto your sleeves, but it’s pointless and the act bends your arms back painfully until you let go. You turn to look at him, your face painted with anger.

He holds the material in his hands, but his attitude is only one of practical consideration. It’s…reassuring, as much as anything about the situation can reassure you; there is no lust in his eyes, or joy, or much of anything at all. You’re just a task to him, like livestock, and the feeling is both comforting and its own flavour of terrifying.

He makes up his mind and grabs your arms again, returning them to the small of your back and using the black material to tie them tightly. You grunt and wince with the pain of it.

Hands secure, he lifts his knee only to grab the hem of your trousers, baring you instantly. You try and bend your knees to hold it, hook the material with your feet, and for your troubles you buy a pointless drag across the floorboards, made doubly painful for your bare front pressing against them. An odd whine comes from your throat, born of some primordial instinct, and you twist back, torn between wanting to keep your chest hidden and wanting to see what he’s doing. When you look, he isn’t even looking at you, wrapping you ankles in the tight bindings of your robbed trousers. You press your thighs together tightly, hoping to keep what lies between them from his eyes, but the bump of your exposed buttocks gleam humiliatingly for all to see. Why this? Why did she order this? You feel like the catch of the day!

He turns back to you, dropping your ankles and looking to your legs. You yelp as his hands touch your thighs, sliding between their hard press like a spade cleaving turned dirt and moving his hard calloused digest up you inner thigh.

“No! No no no no, please!”

It’s all you can think to say, but it doesn’t stop him, and nor, as it happens, is it necessary. He grips the leather strap still about your middle thigh and roughly turns it, leaving the knot you tied so long before facing him and allowing it to unravel at his touch. The thin strip tugs free with ease and somehow leaves you feeling even more naked for its absence.

The knee returns, pinning you as he reaches for the last piece of equipment. The black facemask is probably the only piece you don’t mind him taking, with the bloody cloth at this point only adding foul tastes to your struggling breath. It comes loose and away, and unexpectedly, he begins to untie the black top from your arms. It’s another small relief, letting blood flow back into your hands, but it’s only temporary. Apparently, he reasoned that the leather thigh strap made for a better restraint and so it quickly begins to take the tops place.

This is the first time in your life, you realise, that you have been alone and naked with a man. The implied association doesn’t help your mind, which you feel running back and forth, searching for any way out or anything you can do. You can’t walk, you can’t fight with your arms, can’t kick, you’re naked, you’re not a little bruised, and your pinned by a man almost twice your high, definitely twice your width, and probably three times your weight! Every weapon, every tool has been taken from you, save one.

You lick your lips and clear your throat. This will be a difficult conversation.

“Errrr… Unite me. Help me escape.”

“No.”

His monotone word sounds bored, and you don’t blame him. Not your most compelling argument.

“W-we could kill Wendigo together. You could be rich!”

“No.”

“Think about it, I-“ you consider for a moment, deciding that now is better than later, “I’m an Agent. I could get you pardoned! You could walk into any city a free man, East or West!”

“No.”

You blow a breath of frustrated air through your nose.

“It would be the right thing to do!” It seems a poor argument to use against a pirate, but you reason that he’s just holding you down. As a man and a criminal, alone in a room with a naked woman who he has completely within his grasp, there are far worse things he could be doing right now. Perhaps he has a heart? “Think of the people who have suffered at her hand!”

“No.”

Perhaps not.

There was something in his voice though. Some element there that gives you hope. Hopefully you didn’t imagine it out of desperation.

You swallow and turn your head to look at him. He still rests his knee on you, though your hands are fully rebound. His grim stony expression looks down at you, his body turned to face your head and bare back. He doesn’t even glance at your bottom, which would be more than easy for him to do.

“You seem like an alright sort.” You hope he is at least. “You know that killing her is right. Think of those whose lives have been ruined by,” -you, your friends- “the greedy and the lustful.”

His head began to shake when you talked of killing his captain, but the last part stopped him, making his eyes lose focus with thought or memory. You’ll certainly take that over a blank ‘No.’

“Why is a man like you even here? Hm? There are better places for you to be and you know it.” His expression moves, eroding a slight grove of consternation between his hard brows. “Y-You could be a a a-“ You try to think of something, somehow managing to forget, in this moment, every profession that has ever existed. Come on, something honest, where a person who did it would let you go, or at least help a stranger. “You could be a shop assistant, o-or you could join the guard! Or be a pioneer, or serve an honourable captain if you want to still sail, or _be _a captain if you want! You could be a fisherman, or a bounty hunter, or sail a merchant ship as a guard, or even join the army.”

His hard face cracks a scowl at the last suggestion and you don’t blame him.

“The army are scum.”

Thank the Gods, it’s more than a ‘No.’ Really, you only said it because your **** attempt at remembering jobs dumped a whole load into your lap at the last moment. Still, it got him talking; not by a lot, but four times the number of words is nothing to be sniffed at.

“Yes, true, the army are scum.” It seems safest to agree with him. Also, it’s true. “But the worst professions need the best people to make sure they are done right. Is that not so?”

It’s the best thing you can think of to say. You want him to keep talking -the more he opens up and drops his guard the better- and as the army is the only thing that’s gotten more than a single word from him, it seems best to stay on topic. Then again, would just agreeing with him be better?

“The same could be said for pirates.”

It’s two more words than before, making a new record, but still, you don’t quite follow.

“How do you mean?”

“Piracy is a bad profession, so it needs the best people. Is that not so?”

He speaks in a rote monotone which you can tell is natural for him, yet the sarcastic quip of the last part is not subtle. He has a point, and you confirm something else for it: that he is not stupid.

“You…” You try to think. “Piracy is not a profession. Not an honest one!”

He simply raises an eyebrow: a display that looks positively flamboyant on the set lines of his carved face. He’s right, it’s not like soldiering is honest work. You change tack, trying to get him responding in words again. His captain could be back soon, and for all the nights’ summer heat, it feels cool in some uncomfortable places.

“The army is the lesser of two evils. At least they…” You try to think of their positives. “At least they’re not pinning me n- not pinning me to the floor.”

“You think they wouldn’t? You must not be familiar with their ‘enforcements’ on country land.”

He must really hate the Principality Army, and while there is ample reason to do so, it sounds personal with him. If you can convince him that his current comrades are as bad as the army then maybe…

“‘Enforcements’ are illegal and limited by the max levies on nobles. The Guard can counter those enforcements easily if they are brought up! Pirates have no such restrictions; your kind does the same, just with no one able to stop you, so it’s worse!”

“The Guard barely exists outside of the cities and villages, and the farm country, especially on the frontier, gets fucked every time, with no help coming. We, at least, have to run when we’re done.”

His voice thaws a little the more he talks, and you’re sure you heard a tone of life near the end of his flat words there. He even sounds surprisingly articulate for someone who looks like he could break bricks on his head.

“The archipelago has been made just the same thanks to your lot. You may get chased off, but that just means the next place gets attacked all the sooner! A-and your captain, there are less and less to stand against her! Soon, she won’t run either.”

“The army fills the pockets of the nobles, but we drain them. Our raids are limited as much as possible to the land and property of merchant lords and nobles. We don’t rob poor people, or stay and **** them.”

“But it’s still poor people who suffer! Who farms the land? The noble? Is each present girl his wife? You may take from the pocket of a noble or some trader, but only through the pockets of honest folk!”

The faces of those honest folk you interviewed to get here flash in your mind. It’s hard to keep a cool head when you picture some of them.

“Yes, but it’s the only way to make those at the top suffer.” His voice actually seems fairly animated now. You’d guess his size has left him with few people willing to talk back at him and he’s likely relishing the chance to debate someone outside of his own head. “And if the people suffer too much then they are more likely to rise up and cut down those at the top, who would also be weakened.”

His talk of rising up is a useful clue to who he is. There are always taverns and clubs whose patrons while away the days with muttered talk of revolution. In Coronac, only founded a few hundred years ago and still being ruled ostensibly by the far off nobility of the principalities, there is always talk somewhere of ‘how things _should _be.’

Perhaps you can use that, driving a wedge between his goals and the goals of his captain.

“A revolution… or a civil war, or whatever you want to call it, would be chaos. Lots of people would die; a lot more than the army makes suffer. And if it did happen, what would come of it? The people who gain power would **** it, unless they answer to a higher authority.”

By people, you of course mean his captain, who’s power grows in chaos like a cancer, and by a higher authority, you of course mean the gods. You don’t follow the arguments of unemployed philosophers and their uninformed ideas, but what you have overheard of such things is how the gods and the temple is often side-lined in their future utopia. Robbing the world of the little guidance and structure it has never struck you as smart.

To the man who’s knee still rests on your back (though with ever lesser pressure) responds enthusiastically, making you jump at the outpour of such enthusiasm, especially coming from one so taciturn before.

“Yes! Exactly! We should get rid of the nobles! They’re only in place because they were born there. And we should get rid of the merchants! They only have power because they took it! And we should replace them with one leader that everyone votes for! You see? _People _would be the higher authority. We hold a vote every few years, and if they weren’t good, nobody would vote for them!”

You think on it for a moment, not really considering it. You’re a Principality girl and the idea of changing the way everything is to a fairy-tale system of votes and kings chosen by the people they own is so bizarre and unlikely that it takes a moment to get your head around it. Holding a vote in a room or on the deck of a pirate ship may be one thing, indeed pirates sometimes elect their captains when one dies, but for a country it would be constant chaos, impossible to organise, and what’s more, whoever was elected to power first would undo any system able to replace them! At that point, they would be worse than those currently in power as there would be no others to hold them in check. Say what you will about the nobility, when one of them goes far wrong the others are quick to tear them down, if only for their own gain.

That may be what you think, but what should you say? Talk of politics was never something that interested you, and you have far more pressing concerns to focus on right now.

“I don’t think anyone would follow such a notion.” You phrase it carefully, not wanting to say that such a thing would not work at all; it comes out sounding unsure.

“There are already many in Coronac who like the idea, and if trade breaks down in the sea, it’s only more likely to happen.”

A stray thought crosses your mind, and while far from a full plan, you try to steer the conversation that way in the hopes more will reviled itself.

“Whoever sets up the system will make sure the people who can vote will be the people who will vote for them.”

“That’s why everyone gets an _equal _vote. Everyone, everywhere.” He’s actually smiling. It makes him look ten years younger.

“What about slaves?”

He shakes his head. “There would be no slaves.”

“Surely, whoever is put in charge decides if they are slaves or not.”

He smiles again, finally having a chance to preach his ideals to a literally captive audience “If the person in charge does something the people don’t like, they are no longer in charge. Slavery isn’t popular. It’s not going to happen in a country controlled by the many.”

“That’s only if the many stand up for themselves.” You turn your head more, trying to look him as much in the eyes as possible. Time to strike. “Your captain trades slaves and you say nothing, right? Didn’t you vote for her?”

His smile drops. You pursue the advantage.

“What’s going to happen to me?”

You really don’t want to know, but they’ll find the bloody mess a few doors down. Whatever they’ll do in vengeance won’t be pretty.

“That’s for the captain to decide.”

“Would you kill me, if she told you to? An unarmed, naked woman?”

He pauses before responding. “Yes.” He at least has the decency to look away. “I’ll do whatever she asks, so long as she keeps doing what she’s doing. It will be worth it, eventually.”

The distant double doors open and you feel the window of conversation coming to a close. If that’s his attitude then perhaps you never stood a chance. As the barefooted steps grow near, crossing the large low table, you decide to whisper your final words to him.

“That’s why I wouldn’t want to live in your future country.”

His eyes snap to yours, looking hurt.

The door opens with a loud bang that makes you jump, even as you watch it happen.

“Well, that’s that sorted.”

The Captain walks through the open door, still in her thin blue gown that hints with almost no subtlety at all the curves below. It opens ever so slightly with each striding step, her thighs pushing it wide and hinting at sights only visible to your low vantage. Her sword is still in hand, but fully within its sheath.

“Soooo, which are you? Hired assassin? Bounty hunter? Somebodies daughter or lover out for ****?” She prowls around you as she speaks, watching you and taking in the sight of your naked form. You look at her with a single eye, like some flat fish caught in the shallows, and offer no insight to her questions.

After looking at you for a moment, she leans down, flicking aside the fall of her long blond hair. “Quite a mess you made.” Her eyes harden as she says it, making her reference clear. “You’re lucky I found you; Samara was quite fond of Garren.” She turns her focus to Rock, who was still kneeling on you.

“Pick her up.”

The mountain of a man grabs your upper arms like handle bars and hauls you to your feet. There is nothing of you in the movement as you just go from floor to feet, picked up as though a fallen hat stand set to right. What’s more distressing though is that for the first time, your naked front is bared to the room. You try not to squirm.

The captain looks at you up and down, now seeing both halves of your face, but also the smallness of your chest sitting atop skinny ribs, your gaunt stomach and protruding hip bones, your thin thighs ending in a private black tuft. You squirm. You can’t help it. You feel like meat on a butchers table.

“Only fair don’t you think? You spied on me while I was naked and now I spy on you.” She takes a step closer, whispering conspiratorially. “Tell me, did you enjoy it?”

The confusion you feel must be painted across your face. Enjoy what? She smiles.

“Did you enjoy watching us fuck? What did you think of Roland’s cock? Hm?”

This is some kind of trick, it must be, why else would she ask something like that? Perhaps it’s the wording or your nakedness or both combined, but a discomfort runs through you, tingling with embarrassment. You think of it, in the blurred and half obscured sight in your memory, and as you do, you feel a shaft touch your inner thigh. Pinned as you are, the jump of shock is no more than a sharp twitch, and you look down to see that captains sword, still thankfully in its sheath, tracing its wood and leather covered point up your inner thigh.

“Seen bigger? Did you touch yourself?”

The rounded point reaches the hairy slit of your lower lips, and no matter how hard you press your thighs together, there is no stopping its harassment.

“No? He’s well above average. Or do you not care about size?” Whatever the silent discomfort on your face looks like, she gasps with mock realisation “Oh! Don’t tell me…”

The sheathed sword that stirred uncomfortably between your legs blessedly retreats, drawn up to its wielders gown as her other hand pulls free its cord, pulling the loose knot apart to draw wide the material, leaving the once closed hem resting either side of her ample bosom, and hiding nothing from head to toe.

“Is this what you wanted to see?”

Her body is as you remember it, though unblurred with distance and not spied cyclopticly though a small hole. Her chest is heavy without sag, and hold the gown well enough to part it unaided by her hands; any man would be glad to see such a pair, you’d imagine. While far larger than your own, her hourglass form holds a far stranger sight than her naturally robust breasts. Her thighs are weighty and thick, yet her stance leaves an airy gap that reaches from mid-way up them to their terminus at her hips, exposing her not-so-privates completely to the room, and while that’s not so odd in and of itself (you yourself have a similar gap between your thighs, even pressed together as they are), it’s the fact you can see her lips clearly that gives you pause, shorn as they are of every single hair. The idea of even bringing a razor or scissors close to such a place… While the black bush of your shorthairs is hardly untameable, you cringe at the thought. Why would she do that? For Roland? Do men prefer such things?

She laughs, making her taught belly shake in its naked display.

“I’m was only joking. No need to look at my pussy so much.”

She takes a step closer, quickly looming over you. Naked or not, her presence is undeniably intimidating, and her body overshadows yours in more ways than one. Red heat creeps into your face. Embarrassment? Anger? Shame? Perhaps even a little envy? It’s not like you want to look like a whore. Here, on this island with these people, it would be nothing but a hindrance, but you have to admit, even bitterly, that she’s, well, so much more of a _woman _than you are.

Her swords handle comes under your chin, tipping up your head as she grows even closer.

“Or my breasts.” She fixes you a gaze. “My eyes are up here.”

The final step leaves the hard points of her nipples brushing just under you collar bones. She pauses there looking down at your upturned face, and you try desperately to keep the fear off it, the strangeness of it all keeping strategy from your grasp. It’s all been too foreign, too unstable and changeable to do anything other than play it by ear. You entertain thoughts of attack, but the where and how and why defeat you. You could say something, but you’re unfamiliar with the etiquette of nakedly begging for your life to an equally naked prostitute pirate queen. The thick heavy hands, one on your upper arm and the other resting about the back of your neck like a scarf, kill any thoughts of escape, even more than the bindings.

‘What should you do now’ is not even a question asked in your frightened, confused blank brain.

The face before you, lined almost imperceptibly about the eyes and painted in perfectly applied makeup, has a hard core behind her gaze. The smile is gone, and for all her nipples press against you, there is no closeness in the space between.

“You know, I think you saw a little more of me than I have of you. I think,” she lets the words hang as her eyes bore into you, replacing her pushing sword with her hand on your jaw and neck, “the only way we can even out that particular imbalance is if I watch Rock here fuck you like a whore.” You go cold. She tilts her head, watching. “What do you think? Would that be fun? Hm?”

You shake your head, barely moving it for the fear, yet sending the message through her hand.

“Who do you work for?”

“I’mmAgent.” You slur the words, caught in the trap of her eyes and mumbling them in a whisper.

“An Agent is it,” she nods her head with understanding, “and are you alone?”

You nod back, again in quick pathetic movements. Anything more may risk hitting the chest behind you, or the bottom of her face. She’s close; the pink rings about her points pressing you fully now and the pressure plumping her pillows.

“Are you sure?”

She doesn’t break her gaze as she tosses her sword, and you don’t even look for which pile of clothes is landed on. The lack of a weapon doesn’t lessen the tension. Indeed, she reaches about your waist and grabs another.

“Because it feels like Rock doesn’t share your lack of enthusiasm.”

You hear his sigh, and feel the heavy breath blow down and break on the top of your head. No one can see her hand move, but you’re sure everyone in the room can feel it do so.

“Speaking of _well _above average… oh, but you aren’t into that yet, and vice versa, how did you get in here? Tell me everything.”

Her words growl together in a husky flow, and your mind seem to lag behind on their meaning. The last part may have run on from the first, but the question it contains stands out. You swallow before mumbling your response.

You tell the story as best you can, downplaying things where possible and sticking mostly to the truth. You gloss over the specific merchants that directed you to the island. You don’t mention your guide. When you reach the beach, you literally fall into her grasp, jumping as her hand switches from stroking his front to squeezing your behind. It goes unquestioned, with only your already quiet voice continuing on in a higher, slightly hysterical pitch. You rush on after that, squirming under her wide predatory smile and her heat and her ever shifting grip, past the woods and into the manor and its upper floor. She smiles savagely when you reach the bloody part, genuine and hateful, and she gives you a hard squeeze that brings you to your tip toes. You hurry past it and into the room and the hole and the details of what you definitely didn’t see.

That’s the point her hand moved from your rear to your front.

Fingers play, gambling their nails through the meadow mane of your crotch, and as they find the ridge of your mound and the valley of your entrance, your story finishes its last words with a whinny of shock and a crack of **** panic.

“Thank you for telling me all that.” She sounds calm. Your thighs can’t keep her from turning you, round and round on the nub of your flower. “In exchange, I’m going to give you some advice.”

“Sstop.” It’s all you can mumble. In the past you would have yelled out, or struck her, or told her how insane and hateable her actions are, anything to keep her from touching you in a place so personal, but she looms over you like an idol and eclipses your courage in the shadow of her presence. She could kill you with ease, and with the desire to live so strong in your heart, whispering as you did is nothing short of miraculous.

The fingers stop, resting against you, and she looks at you as though daring you to speak again. You look back, defiantly at first. Her middle finger pushes inside.

You don’t speak as the flat muscle of her palm presses you, pushing the upturned finger as much to the knuckle as possible. A sour expression twists your face, and as much as you try to retreat your hips, there is only the hard thighs of the man behind you. They press quickly for his closeness, and an involuntary lean forward only brings your face closer to her bosom.

“First off,” she continues as if nothing unusual is going on; back and forth, back and forth, nail to knuckle as though it the most normal thing in the world, “size is all well and good, but if there’s no stamina behind it, it’ll just leave you half cooked and making stupid horny decisions. It’s a good way to get an ache, you know? And when you have that ache, you can either get another man…” she looks at you, panting, half listening, “or woman…or you can dip your own fingers and see yourself home, which is the surest way.” She smiles conversationally, as though telling a joke, “I do try and be sure when I’m…in such a state. Don’t want to make any bad decisions right?”

Her dammed digit rides you a few more stokes, silently rubbing against a tender spot that briefly has you dancing toe to toe, and when she withdraws, she brings the finger into the space between you, waving its damp length like incense. She gently strokes your face, streaking it before stepping back.

When she steps away, it’s like pulling free a scaffold that was holding you up. Your legs want to buckle and crumple and without the strong hands moving to grip your upper arms more firmly, you’d be flat on your face. The air of the room is summer hot, but as it washes over where your bodies met, it begins to prickle coolly on the dew of sweat oozing out your pores.

The captain looks to the floor, scooping up a few of her discarded clothes at random and continuing her unasked advice.

“Secondly, if there is a chance to enjoy the show, enjoy the show. I don’t blame you. I’d watch two people fucking over some sunset any day.”

The clothes, for whatever reason, aren’t quite right and she throws them back to the floor, moving to a different pile and extracting a long white cloth, like a scarf. In a second, she holds both ends and spins it, wrapping it into a thick rope and moving it to your mouth. When it meets your lips, she pushes onward, forcing it into your teeth and rubbing the cloth up and down while pressing forward, finally pushing your resistant jaw wide enough for the material to push to your molars. Then ends meet at the back of your head, and as though caught in a dance, she spins you out of Rocks grip, placing your back to her instead while she ties the improvised gag just under your bunned hair.

Rock stares impassively down at you, his eyes examining your naked front with detached interest. He need only raise his arms slightly to trap you in their grasp, and from his size, neither you nor his captain could stop him, if he really wanted to.

She pipes up, talking directly into your ear as some complex knot is wrought from the hasty bind.

“Thirdly, I never said Rock wouldn’t fuck you if you told the truth, I implied it. Look out for that next time.”

You grow cold in the shadow of the mountain. The conversation of before, which had managed to split his hard face into a grin, was long lost in the frigid stony expression. There was no passion there; he looks as lifeless as a golem, animated only by the will of his master; a different man to the one who spoke words and wild ideas. It was like he could bury that part of himself, and looking at him now, you know the captain speaks truth: he would and will violate you at her word, and he’d take whatever joy he could if he was able to feel such things.

The captain reaches around you, at both sides, pushing you forward until she can snake her hands about his hips. Her hands clap on his buttocks, and a shiver of an expression moves across his face as she grips them. She pulls, but it’s not he that moves, and instead she slowly draws herself and you to him, forcing you like a press against an anvil to lay your bare front upon him. You have to waddle on your toes to stay upright. When you press his front, you nearly collapse for a different reason.

“You feel that?”

She presses your back for emphasis, pushing your belly harder against his hips. You feel it. You can’t not. Were his arms the thickness of your own instead of well-established trees, you’d accuse him of hiding a spare. The length is below cloth, with his short armour not quite reaching far enough down to cover its raised salute, leaving it defined in the press of your bodies, reaching from below your navel to between your breasts. You look directly up, past his chest, and to the stubble below his jaw in dismay. She called him well above average, but for his dizzying height, it’s about right for him.

“That’s all for you. And while he’s fucking you,” she emphasizes the word, flicking the F into your ear, “I’m going to be watching.”

A wet suck, slight and hungry, caresses your neck and shoulder. The body behind you is close, defining its own assets upon your back.

“I’m going to watch you like you watched me.”

Her hands shift from his behind to the sides of his hips, looping a thumb under the material and drawing them down. He gets the point and doesn’t ague it, reaching back and casually undoing the straps of his leather vest, dropping it just as quickly.

You gulp, feeling your swallow race down your throat and trace the rod down to your stomach. It’s hot against you. You feel the beat of his heart through it as it touches, more steady than your own.

“And you know what I’m going to do then?” You jump. Her presence had been dwarfed, even pressing against your back, in the face of the monster at your front. She laughs.

She actually has the gall to laugh.

“I’m going to…” a thrusts of her featureless hips humps against yours, as though she were equipped as he is, forcing you hard against him and his, “Enjoy,” hump, “The,” hump, “Show.” hump.

His shirt, the last of his clothes, sails away through the air before landing on the floor. A chest as hard as granite, bare and haired, presses your face. You sweat, and breathe hard, your every short intake stroking him with the rise and fall of your chest and the slim mounds of your bosom. This can’t be-

But it is. It is happening. As much as you wish it wasn’t so, it most undeniably is. A cold sickly feeling runs through you, so at odd with the summer night and the burn of the bodies front and back that you half expect the hiss and sizzle of water on a hot pan. You feel scared, sick, angry, disgusted, horrified, but somehow, just by a thread, you don’t panic.

The soft flesh pressing at your back peels away, stepping about you to the side of both you and him. She keeps a grip on his behind with one of her hands while the other is dragged free from him in the movement, sliding to you and your bottom. She holds you both pressed like some obscene matchmaker.

“Watching isn’t something I’m known for.” She grips, tightly, making you wince and look at her as she scrunches a whole cheek into the palm of her hand. “But for you I’ll make an exception.”

There is a smile on her face. No humour. No mirth. Not a speck of friendliness. The smile is a bitter, angry, hateful thing, laced with an expression of lust as she looks down at you. There is no mercy there, only a hunger for satisfaction.

Even so, hope is an ever blossoming thing.

“Eeez.”

You can’t help but plead, bleating weakly through the cloth between your teeth. Please, please, please. You’d beg it a hundred times if you could, but her expression was answer enough, even before she laid down your sentence.

“Ah ah ah.” She takes her hand of him, bringing it to your face and grabbing you by the jaw, squeezing your cheeks tighter than the rope. “It’s going to happen. If I wanted to hear you beg I wouldn’t have gaged you.” Her sea blue eyes, ringed in black marks of makeup, catch and hold your own, drinking in the expression you feel twist your face.

Hate.

Of all the emotions you felt before, seeing her eyes twinkle as she stamps out your pleas makes one feeling within you dominate. Hate. You hate her. You think of all the others she has made suffer, simply to make them suffer. You hate her. It boils in your blood.

“Feel free to scream though.” She pulls at your buttock, separating you from your Rock and tilting your gripped head down. “Not that you have much choice.”

It’s big. No bigger than you felt when it rested up your body, but that was more than big enough. The thick meat shaft ends in a bulbous bell shaped head, and in its centre is a fine slit, brought closer to your gaze for being stooped towards it.

You want to scream. It’s not even inside you yet and you want to scream. You don’t though. Be it from your own will or the vicious certainty of the captain’s statement, you resolve not to scream, or shout, or otherwise satisfy her sadism.

“You come to _my _house, _my _island, _my _archipelago, and you make a mess of _my _people, well, my people are gonna make a mess of you.”

She shoves you back into him, grabbing him by the hand and placing the heavy weight upon this side of your hip. His other hand mirrors it unprompted.

“Rock, if you’d be so kind, fuck this girl.” She retreats to a safe distance. “Do it right here.”

You’ve never been picked up solely by the hips before. It’s an odd feeling, your legs dangling like old ropes while your torso sits above. Your waist is not a meaty thing, and the bones of your body press against your skin and define themselves well at the ribs and the pelvis. His hands swallow you, and while his fingers may part the scant padding of your cheeks, but it’s his palms that hold you by the bone. It almost feels like he could turn them -and by extension the rest of you- like he might a box, tipping you back and forward by the hips and letting your upper and lower halves be dragged along in the process.

Instead, he lifts you higher, toward him, letting you rest upon the harsh grain of his chest and lay your forehead turned upon his clavicle. It’s a gentle rest, breathing deeply back and forth and steeling yourself for what’s to come. You could struggle and strike at him with knees and head, of course, and perhaps even bruise him more than the act would bruise you, but it would only serve to antagonise the man who could break you easily and irreparably.

Perhaps he will be merciful? There was a time he didn’t seem so bad.

He manoeuvres your hips, setting the tip of his manhood between the topward gap of your pressed thighs and upon the outer lips of your flower.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Hate.

The Captain is behind you, unseen, yet felt in the gaze upon your spread cheeks and thighs, brought wide by his holding hands and displaying his ready joy.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Hate.

He starts to control your decent, letting you fall.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Hate.

Your forehead slips from his clavicle.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Hate.

The fall becomes a pull.

Breathe in. And in. And in. And in. And in.

Your forehead slides along the hairs of his chest, your breasts lift, turned in the drag down his body. The steady air becomes gasping, wild, hitching up and up until your lungs are full to bursting. Your toes curl, your legs twitch, you clench and strain and shut your eyes. You feel it, the stretch of it, pushing you apart, pushing you in on yourself, and it rides up your passage with dizzying infinity. More and more and more. You try to feel it, just to know where it ends, to know where the bell shaped head is up to in its pilgrimage to your deepest reaches, and know how much more shaft is still to strain your outer wilds. You kill a scream. No screams. None can be let out. Yet silence is undone all the same. A long shaky exhale, tinged with your pained voice, flows out of you when you breathe again, unable to hold it throughout his ingress. It sounds akin to dipping a foot into a too hot bath, scalding yourself yet climbing in all the same.

You take another shaky breath in before he stops, finally running out of shaft to put inside you. For all you thought him capable of mercy, it manifests only in giving you time to catch your breath. Time to feel and time to adjust. The sensation of him is clearest at your entrance. So tight is the press that you can make out the pulses of your two distinct heartbeats thumping against each other. You even feel the tickle of his shorthairs through yours and the press of his sack on your thighs. Yet inside you is different. He reaches too far to feel the crown of it with any clarity; only the fullness and squeeze and the vague sensation of your organs making room under his pressure. He’s bigger than any man who’d been that way before. That list was short, not even filling the fingers of a hand, but the distinction is palpable. It fits, for it feels it doesn’t; fits like an arrow in a man.

Your eyes refocus when you feel him twitch, sending a shudder up every strained side of your inner and outer path. Hands lift, like sliding stones, and so you are lifted as well, drawn up as he’s drawn out, but there is no relief. You’d rather he didn’t move at all really, him like a sunken blade plugging its own wound, but the ordeal of his entrance is repeated on his withdraw. Or half of his withdraw. The other half is taken by a downturn that sees a return to your core, a grunt from his chest, and a whimper from your throat.

He leans back a little, letting your front rest on him like a baby while he lifts you up and down. You try to breathe steady, but always something catches you out; some deep push, or a withdraw that takes his flared head back to your entrance, or an ill-timed slip that has you fall hard and fast. Whenever it happens, it scatters your calm, your breath as shaken as branches in a storm. You feel him wet your insides and it’s much needed, his girth ever straining you as you’re moved up and down upon it. Scratchy cries, not screams or shouts, saw quietly through your throat each time an exhale coincides with a downward slide, a deep penetration, a hard fuck, and it happens again and again and again.

The captains own heavy breathing catches in your ears, and for the first time in however many minutes, you become aware again of the room, the world outside the penetration of your public pussy. You become acutely aware of the sweat pouring from you; of the captains own quiet gasps and moans; of the feel of air on the soles of your feet, and the creak of the floor, and the heat rising in your-

“Ughhh. C-Come on Rock, bend her back, on the floor if you need to; I want to see you do it.”

Her strained voice comes from the unseen bed behind you, and while her words make no sense to your ears, they mark a change of pace in her giant crewman. He had worked you, slowly, gradually building up until his pace levelled off to a relentless steady rhythm; deep, but made of a short back and forth for the strange positioning. While you had lent upon his chest, adjusting both desperately and unwillingly to his size and violation, he now begins to lean forward, letting your upper body fall off him and taste the comparatively cool air, while your legs press against his, still joined as you are by the hips.

It pauses for a moment. No more back and forth, or up and down. You feel impaled, unsupported by his chest and falling further upon him than ever. A hand slides from your hip to your lower back, hugging you enough for the other hand to leg go and pull at your knees. They’re dragged apart and up, decorating each side of his thighs with the inner edge of your own, and bringing your tied ankles up to below your buttocks.

His hand returns to your hips, holding them steady while he lowers your top half further, keeping the pivot of your thighs in check with the flat edge of his forearm. It’s awkward, with your top half lowered until your head is level with or below your feet, aimed at the floor and wishing to fall if not for his grip. Bent back as you are, the captain is revealed.

“Hello there.” Captain Washkin, upside-down to your eyes, smiles at you lazily. She sits on the end of the bed, gown and legs wide as she looks on. Her hand turns between her legs. “Hope you’re not enjoying yourself too much.”

You could say the same were you not gagged. Her eyes rove your connected bodies, face flushed as her hand rubs up and down the hairless space of her lower lips. She watches eagerly as his other hand returns to hold your hips in place. His hips pull back. His hips push forward.

“Uuuuuhhhh.”

You bite the rope as he hilts himself again, stretching you in new places and directions. The noise bleeds out of you, and out again at he pulls back and pushes forward, repeating every time the scraping bulbous head turns it’s withdraw into a plunge.

You look down at the captain, and she looks down at you, her eyes alight at they look at your hips and the man thrusting upon them. You make the mistake of looking yourself, lifting your head and looking down, up across your suspended body.

Your breasts are in no state you’ve ever seen them before, their slight bumps having fallen with you, hanging up all they can toward your face. They shake, nipple points shivering with each quiver of your breath, but the true sight is beyond them. At your hips, you see him as the captain sees him, watching him _through _you as each deep reaching intrusion bulges the skin of your lower belly. Your waist looks thin at the best of times, but stretched as it is now with your fallen torso it defines his thickness well, showing as a swell under your muff like a leg pushed under a bedsheet and ending in a bell shaped bump just above your hips.

You watch with a horrified morbid fascination as the bulge lessens, reseeding with his withdraw, feeling and seeing him go before feeling and seeing his return. The sight gives context to sensation, and vice versa, like a wound that hurts more for the looking. He’s no longer simply reaching to some unknown deep, he’s there, pushing you out at the extremes with nowhere further to go. The knowledge of it makes you light headed, your eyes fluttering closed as your head falls back, swaying slightly, like a pendulum, with his effort.

Between the grunts and heavy breathing of three people, something else can be heard. A wet sound. A churn. A slick turning and parting and squeezing of meat. You open your eyes to look ahead and take in the source, who still sits on the end of the bed. The captain’s fingers now dive, two at a time, between the lips of her sex. Their gentle, pushing rhythm matches your own, or your partners at least, and the sight of her lower lips, almost as flushed as the painted red lips of her face, spreading their shine to her fingers and every brushing touch of her thighs, fills you with an angry primal envy. Your own slit must be jacked ten times the width, and a hundred times the length, while the dainty tender touch she enjoys looks almost desirable. You feel sweat prickle your chest, droplets combining and running down to your neck as you watch her two fore-digits ride back and forth. You feel his sack slap between the cleft of your buttocks, then peel away while you watch nail turn to joint turn to knuckle.

You feel a droplet, hot and invasive, push a heavy course between the cleft of your rear, shivering you as its path crosses the clenched contours of your back exit. While irregular enough to stop any stray sweat, this fall, you know, has more weight and more reserves to follow. It pushes on, forging its path past and onward, to travel up your spine and bring its musk closer to your head and the floor. With humiliation, you know that the wet sound does not just come from the captain. The strangling tightness that had marked the start of this had slowly become hatefully easy, with his movements speeding to match. Now, there was both too much and too little friction between you, your inner thighs gliding effortlessly over his outer hips, and the busy back and forth between your legs taking on an unnatural sweet feel that spills more noises through your gag.

“Yeah?” The captain responds as though your inarticulate moaning was a thing of sense and civility. She’d sound almost conversational were she not so out of breath, and if her words did not end in a strained sound of her own. “You gonna cum for me sweety?”

You feel hot; hot all over; feverish and dizzier for each moment his thick shaft brings his hairs into yours.

“Oh yes. Aren’t you glad I got you so wet? Even before my fingers, just from looking at me.” Her fingers speed up, her voice changing with the strain. “I bet you’d lick my pussy if I asked you to, you little dike, oh, you little…li…uuugh!”

Her face twists, pained suddenly with pleasure. Her fingers, both hands now working below, plunge and turn at their fastest pace. Rock stops, fully inside you, long enough to climb down to his knees before continuing, and you in your own delirium almost cry out for the loss of seeing her, moaning louder for the return of his deep and once more changed penetrations. She hunches, back into view, pulled over herself as twitches spasm through her body, moaning and writhing into positions of grand and shameless self-enjoyment. The sight makes a rush of its own between your legs, hammered quickly into reality by the hard man smithing his joy between them. Lowered now, your head rests on the floor, cushioned by the bun of your hair, and your face is turned up to see him; his grim face is cracked with strain and the bobbing consequence of his repetition moves back and forth under the carpet of your shorthairs. Supported now by the floor, he need only hold you in place while working the forge of your fever, bringing its fire to a roar.

You look back at the captain, her eyes **** open by her own will to drink you in again at the height of her throws. She knows. She sees it in you, understanding more of the feel inside than you do, even now. She’s the most knowledgeable in the room when it comes to a man’s penetration; her whole life must have been taken up with the heady rush of men. Some expression twitches across her open mouthed face as her fingers still plunge, and you can’t help but picture it. You picture her as you saw her, on Captain Roland, taking him in, and you wish you saw more. You picture her as she’s no doubt been, where you are, seeing her in your mind as she sees you now, held and fucked to a fit by a man twice her size. You picture her… you picture…

She cries out with fiery ecstasy, and you as well, and like thunder to the twin strikes of your lightning, the mountain rumbles not a moment after.

What follows is hard for you to describe, for it is not something that has ever happened to you before, nor is it oft talked about in the conversations people have with you. You feel a…clench, in your speared sex, and in your heart and in your head. A shock, a thrill, a rising crashing wave. It’s a feeling of yourself, stoked to life by others perhaps, but within you utterly, and both alien and familiar for it. While it shakes and twitches and clenches upon him, it is far deeper inside you than even he ever reached. While it shines like a blinding light in your mind, your eyes roll up and catch only a moment’s darkness. It feels dirty and embarrassing. It feels…good? It feels great! It feels foul and unwanted! You scream hoarsely through you gag in a gargled moan, spilling it into the room, as though your mind cannot contain it.

Throughout this, within your valleys spasmed grip, you feel him still, deeply, his rod throbbing like the beat of a heart. Boiling heat arrives, wet and spreading, and he moans with each twitch, which in turn leaves you feeling wetter and wetter. His soaked sack still rests upon your rear, and the curious sensation of its contents rising with each hot spread pierces even your frazzled senses. He’s seeding you; you know it; you feel it.

It feels a lot.

You open your squeezed shut eyes, catching sight of his mark at the last wave of fresh wet heat. It stands as before; the regular sight of the mans end pushing below your belly and raising your mound with unnatural thickness. You half expected something greater, ballooned with his seed perhaps, but this feel is not kind enough to show its cause. He hunches over you, tired and satisfied look on his anvil face, holding you both together until he’s sure he has no more to give.

The question of his seed comes only after the fog about your mind begins to clear. It’s like a sluggish morning mist, with the deep heavy breaths sawing through your nostrils taking the role of the shining sun. He seeded you, a lot, and your cycle does not look kindly upon you tonight. You imagine it taking root deep within you, finding a tilled and fertile womb to settle in. A grim expression returns to your face; that would be tomorrow you’s problem, if there still is a you tomorrow.

He pulls himself out of you, like a cork from the bottom of a barrel, and you immediately feel the wetness begin to ooze out after him, down your stretched slit, spilling too little of his essence out over your abused and no doubt bright red folds. He still holds you raised, and it slips like the musk of before down the crack of your behind and up your back, until he tires of holding you and lowers you completely to the floor. You ankles are still drawn up below you, to the scant padding of your rear. The strain pushing up the muscles of your legs and hips tells you the drop was for his comfort, not yours.

“All of us at once? Nice.”

The captain, sweating and looking down at the floor between her legs, smiles. Her hips are lost to you, leaving just the fall of her legs and the sway of her chest as she leans over them, her arms resting on her knees and her gold hair hanging in sweaty strands. Whatever you felt still tingles within you, and you’re sure it must do the same for her, giving her a flush glow that reddens the pale spots of her face and darkens the sun kissed areas like a drinkers blush.

“Thanks for the show, bitch.”

She lifts her bare foot, stroking its side upon your cheek like a caressing finger.

“Odd isn’t it?” You turn your head away from it, and the appendage moves from your face to your flat chest, clumsily gripping over your nipple with her toes. “I put a rush job on Roland and have to finish with these,” she holds up her two fingers, which you’re sure she dipped again before showing them for emphasis. A shine catches the candle light, far heavier than what you saw before. “While you started with these, and ended up cumming on a fat cock.” She sniffs her fingers, shying away from her own sent. “Nothing in it, just curious is all.”

Said cock moves to stand, his wet and red member diminishing before your eyes. Even deflated, you wonder how it fit. Perhaps the next man, in fair or similar circumstance, will feel his presence in the absence of your own. You clench yourself again, feeling more of him spill.

His captain, whose foot still lazily toys with you, motions him to sit down.

“Catch your breath, catch your breath.” He returns to kneeling, nodding gratefully. “It’s not every day you get to fuck an assassin. Enjoy it.”

She leans back on the bed, disappearing from your view, but the careless rubbing of her foot needs no oversight. She turns over your nipple, flicking it toe by toe and back again.

“When you’re ready, you can take her down to the cellar,” she swallows and sighs before riming, “so we can ‘sell er’” with all the laziness of unthought convenience. Her foot taps you twice and her voice rises unseen. “How do you like that idea Agent? I know several people that would snap up a little thing like you.”

So, it’s to be slavery. Tied and fresh ****, you’re too exhausted to feel anything more than a pang of horror. Whatever the beast that trades in slaves and ‘snaps you up’, he’s, like the seed inside of you, a problem for tomorrow. Perhaps you can escape before then… escape one of those things at least.

Your back hurts from being bent, and you feel the blood that pooled in your head still draining to the rest of your body, but outside of the captains sight, you work to catch the eyes of your **** and fill your gaze with as much tired scornful meaning as you can.

‘I told you so’

It’s a bitter thing; a petty way to hurt him more than anything. If you are to be sold into slavery, at least he can know what the foundations of his rebellion look like. At least he can know he’s a hypocrite.

His mouth opens and then closes, his eyes averting from yours. His face looks pained, troubled, and all to the good; perhaps some damned wisdom is forming behind that granite face.

“Can we…” His mouth opens and closes again, finally looking back at you. “Can we…not do that?”

The foot stops. After a moment, she sits up and looks at him, looking for all the world as though he’d just grown a spare head. There’s no anger in her expression that you can see though. Instead, it waves through shock, amusement, puzzlement, contemplation, and disbelief, alternating and combining them until she’s left opening and closing her own mouth just as he did.

“And why… would you ask that Rock?”

Her tone is…careful, rather than suspicious, as though a giant docile pet had for the first time growled at her.

There is a struggle for a moment, which plays out blatantly in the fine lines of his solid face. He looks lost, once more in an argument but this time with someone he never thought to argue with, and no ammunition for the conflict. He looks to you, as though you can answer for him.

“Because…I don’t want to?”

You wish he added a bit more certainty.

The captain once more looked a little stupefied, this time looking at you as though you had cast some kind of spell. Again, not angry, just…impressed?

“Are you sure? I mean…yes, if you want her, and the responsibility.” She adds the last part with haste and significance, and you wonder what it means. For a brief moment, you had thought his words might lead to your release, but something else seemed to be happening, which perhaps not even Rock had accounted for.

Regardless, he looks at you and hums an affirmative.

“Ok, er…ok.” She nods to herself, still working it out in her head. When she stops, she looks at Rock for a moment. “Rock, I have to ask…” Again, that caution in her voice and expression; her favourite pet doing something strange. “Do you love her?”

What? No, thinking about it, her question makes sense; he’d certainly made love to you, from their warped perspective at least; then he had asked for you to not be sold as a ****. What other conclusions did that captain have to draw on? You stomach drops; what if she’s right and he wanted to keep you in some way from the start?

He looks at you, appearing to weigh his options. No thoughts can be read on his face, but his head tips from side to side, as though scales weighing his own heart, and finally, his head tips forward.

“Yeah.”

The first man to ever confess his love for you, and it’s ‘yeah’ed out by a giant who **** you. The captain at least looks pleased.

“Great!” she claps her hands, “Fantastic! I mean, I wasn’t really sure what you liked, or…” She spins her hands shrugging the unfished words away. “I was starting to think… I mean, I can marry you both in the morning, if you like?”

What!? Don’t you get a say in that!? Considering what had recently transpired, the answer to your agency remains a resounding no. The captain rubs her hands together, thrilled for some reason at the development.

“Sure.”

The man, now somehow your husband, shrugs. He shrugs! What in the name of the gods!

“Great! Er, congratulations!” She looks genuinely happy, like a mother whose child had made his first friend or something! She turns to you, nodding sagely. “You know that if a man says he loves you after he’s done fucking you, he means it.”

The woman, naked save for the open gown, stands up. Her feet plant themselves each side of your head, leaving her freshly fucked and fingered self on open display without shame to the both of you.

“If you change your mind, you let me know before we set sail.”

She beams at him, and then at you, though it’s clear the offer does not stretch so far. He looks sheepish, but…pleased? It’s hard to tell with his face the way it is. You look at them both with wide eyes and scrunched brows.

What, in the name of the gods blackest curse, just happened!?

---

---

They sail away without you, The Proud Gull, its full rigging drawn and blown wide, rocking and yawing into the archipelago. The sun is in your eyes. It paints the sky red, staining the abundant clouds all the angry shades of morning. This was a morning of sickness.

Five Months. It had been five months since that night. Five months since you had been off that damn ship. Five. Fucking. Months.

You recall the day you were first brought on deck; when she introduced you to her crew as a new hire. She told them all the truth; that you had spied on her and tried to kill her the night before, that you had killed her crewman and there friend, and that you were now Rocks wife and to be treated appropriately. The looks you got were…amusing, or would have been were you in a different frame of mind. Cutthroats, reprobates, and misfits of all kinds made up much of her crew, but suddenly it seemed none were as unusual as yourself.

Curiously enough, you were not the first recruit to begin their tenure trying to kill the captain. Others had tried and failed, and avoided their deaths through the far more productive offer of service, either given freely or taken in humiliation. Sometimes, such people would be **** to commit various crimes under instruction until their reputation was in tatters, or serve as someone’s (or everyone’s) bedmate, or serve as the front line in any attack. They could even be **** to just swab the deck or clean out the bilge if their attempt was pitiable enough. They’d be a **** of obligation essentially, earning trust until, unguarded, they could slink off and try to escape, their reputation in ruins, or, now wanted men, say on for dishonest work and reasonable pay. Some of her most trusted and loyal subordinates were such people, seeing her mercy and her value of their worth with almost religious zeal.

For you though, it was the mountain that had stood behind you as she talked which caused a stir. Rock was well named, with an unfeeling and immovable reputation. They had looked at you confused, wondering how you could have beguiled such a man, or perhaps picturing the mechanics of your respective sizes in the marriage bed.

You found out later that marriage among pirates acts a little differently. While variable, it’s ultimately a union of trust and responsibility, with nothing more owed; two male pirates could marry under the captain, and they would look out for each other, inheriting property on ****, and they wouldn’t necessarily need to bunk together at all. They could be like brothers. The benefit of such a union was that should one betray the other, the punishment could be capital, meaning some trust could be gained in the otherwise cut throat life of piracy, and those with trust could also share their reputation like credit.

However, you did not know this for weeks, and your husband was not forthcoming about it despite his willingness to talk with you. Every night, you would talk and argue for hours before he’d break it off to indulge in the folds of your ‘wifely duties’. It may not have been a traditional marriage, but he was keen to put a baby inside you as soon as possible, no matter what, and you let him, for lack of an alternative.

Five months. You look down at your belly. It seems more like seven or eight. Either you’re holding on to twins or the babe is going to take a great deal after its father. Whatever it is, it will be a rough birth.

Samia pats your back. “Come on then, plenty to do, kind of.” She seems both worried and chipper, her duties never having included midwifery.

You turn at her instruction, making your way up the path to an old mansion you haven’t seen in ages. At least it will be private there. The Proud Gull is a big ship, but three hundred and fifty people is a crowd no matter what. A thin blanket was never enough to hide what you did together, or keep the knowing looks away after, and as for the noise… Gods, it was even a man who first told you you were pregnant! Such was the lack of privacy. How Ref could know for certain before you did will forever be a mystery to you.

Yes, a nice relaxing break from all that; from the work and the crew and the looks and the captain and your-

You look back. The sun is in your eyes.

If that damn fool gets himself killed before you can get your ****, you’ll never forgive him.

You ‘humf’ before continuing your waddle up the hill, wiping your cheek with the back of your hand.