Page 86 of Maggie and the Pirate’s Son

“Please sir, you must believe me,” Bash implored. “She’s innocent in all of this. I should have put her on a ship straight back to Scotland as I intended, but I was a coward. I couldn’t watch her sail away from me.”

The last, he addressed to Maggie, and when she blinked to ease the burning in her eyes, salty tears began to trickle down her cheeks.

“I see,” the officer said, though as far as Maggie was concerned, he saw nothing at all. “And you are?”

Bash stood up straighter. “Sebastian MacLeod, sir.” And then, apparently resigned to his fate, he added, “Sailing master and boatswain of Auldfarrand’s Revenge.”

“Now that does interest me,” Constantin said. “I’ve been searching for you a long time.”

“For me, sir?” Bash asked.

“Indeed. You’re all under arrest. Kindly drop your weapons.”

“Come, now, Constantin, we’ve led a merry chase, you and I. Be a shame for our little game to end this way,” Mad growled. “Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll let you have the boy and a third of the gold. You get your hanging and become a very wealthy man. Everybody wins.”

“Everyone except Bash,” Maggie exclaimed.

And then several things happened all at once.

Mad yanked Maggie’s hair, tipping her head back to better expose her throat.

Bash lunged for his father.

A gun went off, singeing Maggie’s cheek with the heat of the powder.

The captain threw her to the ground, slicing another cut along her throat.

Someone covered her body with theirs.

And then, mercifully, everything went dark.

“No!” Bash screamed as Maggie fell before his eyes.

Without a thought to the naval captain, he raced to her side, shoving Mad off her.

What had the fool been thinking, firing a pistol while Mad was using her as a shield?

She was covered in blood, slick and sticky and warm. In contrast, her skin was white and cold.

“What have you done?” he gasped up at Constantin, who merely scowled.

From both sides of the house—his mother’s former home, perhaps the same structure in which he was conceived one dark night when the devil came to call—a dozen more officers converged, marching in two straight lines.

Bash was pulled away from Maggie and yanked roughly to his feet before being clapped in irons as he watched them encircle her, his beloved, his life. Then he was jostled around so he couldn’t see her at all, no matter how he twisted or craned his neck. Instead, he came face to face with Mad, whose shoulder was covered in blood.

Mad sneered at him. “I always knew. From the moment I heard she was up the duff, I knew you’d be the end of me.”

“Fitting,” Bash spat, “since you were only ever the beginning of me.”

They marched him away, tripping in his leg irons, back up the same streets and through the town center, as villagers who might once have been his mother’s friends, who could just as easily have been his mother’s sister, threw rotten vegetables at him until he smelled like his own death. A chill ran through him when they passed the permanent gallows before turning into a gaol ripe with the stench of piss and the bowels of hell.

He’d known in his heart it would come to this someday. There were only two ways for a life such as his to end. His grandparents had known it, too. It was why he couldn’t allow himself to give his heart to Maggie, more fool him. She had it already—all of it—every beat and the skipping pauses in between.

Bash had also known better than to go looking for Mad’s lost gold. Just as the search had driven the captain mad, that way could only lie destruction. But the lure of freedom had been too tempting, as was the idea his mother might be guiding him and would somehow protect him from her ghostly realm.

When faced with only two bad options, seizing a third had seemed worth the risk, but only when the risk was his alone. Never Maggie’s. She was supposed to be safe.

His only consolation was that if she was dead, he would soon join her. And if she wasn’t, they would go together, side by side, on the gallows come dawn.