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Her jaw dropped. “You’re pirates?”
“Privateers. We get a target from the crown, and we go after it.”
“Still…” She paused, looking over her shoulder at the hands on deck. She’d noticed it earlier, that these sailors were thicker…taller…stronger than the sailors she’d encountered in the past. She hadn’t thought much about it. But now it made sense. The riches her investigator had discovered Roe had made at sea. And the men around her—these men weren’t just sailors, they were warriors.
Her gaze traveled to Roe. “This is dangerous work you’re in, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “It can be.”
“What happened to Captain Folback? Did he retire?” Her stomach sank, for she was already guessing at the answer.
“He retired as much as any captain like him could.”
Her eyebrows lifted as she studied Roe’s profile—at the hard line of his jaw and his strong nose that had a noticeable bump in the middle, as though it had been broken more than once. His steel grey eyes focused on the waves, not veering toward her.
It struck her in that moment. The man was handsome. Wickedly so. The crook in his nose the only thing keeping him real to this earth and not solidifying him to the mythical beauty of the Greek gods. She’d known what he looked like for years, yet she’d never once thought of him as handsome.
She didn’t care for the revelation. Not at all.
Her head went straight and she focused on the smooth water, her fingers tightening along the railing. “What happened to him?”
Roe expelled a long sigh. “I had his back when we attacked ships. He liked that about me, my ability to fight, my instinct for it. He trusted me for that.” His hand lifted up and he rubbed his forehead for a long moment. “His trust in me was misplaced. He died because I made a wrong move, shot the wrong man in a melee instead of the one that had a dagger aimed at his chest.”
“He died and you became captain?”
His feet shuffled backward and his torso shifted downward, his face dropping between the white sleeves covering his upper arms. “I didn’t want it. I actually abhorred the thought of it. A third of us were wiped from the earth that day. So much of their blood—it had stewed into a stain on my hands that took weeks to fade. I had no intention of staying on the sea after that day. But the men that were left demanded I step up to it.” He looked up with a slight shrug. “So I stayed.”
Her look narrowed at his profile, at the still fresh torment reflected on the side of his face. “Do you like the sea?”
“No. But I’m honor-bound to stay on theFirehawk a while longer.”
“Until when?”
“Until I can right a very specific wrong.”
Her head tilted to the side. She didn’t like any part of this conversation. Didn’t care to think of him past the riches she knew he’d amassed at the end of a subjective sword. Didn’t care to think of him as anything more than one of the men that killed her family. “I had assumed you did this for the riches.”
“That is the least of it. Yes, the business of it has made me rich, but at the cost of good men.” Hanging past the edge of the railing, his hands clasped together, his knuckles turning white. “I cannot reconcile that trade off—not anymore.”
“Yet you once could?”
“Could what?”
“Trade a good man’s life for riches without consideration?”
His left hand lifted, rubbing his eyes, his fingers collapsing to pinch his nose for a moment before dropping away from his face. “Not a good man. But a bad man, aye. I honestly never thought twice on it back in the day.”
Her eyes dipped down for a long moment. “I forgot about the trade you were in before prison. You were a smuggler—or so it was said?”
His grey eyes swung to her, not hiding any of the truth. “Smuggling, stealing, strong-arming shopkeepers, blackmail rings out of whorehouses—any and every thing that makes St. Giles a miserable spot of land to exist in, I was part of.”
Her jaw dropped. “You did all of that?”
“Smuggling—the very thing that had brought me up to Scotland to your family’s farm—it was the least offensive scheme I was in.” His eyebrows collapsed together and he looked directly at her, his gaze slicing into her. “Make no mistake on my person, Torrie. I come from the lowest of the low. The dirtiest beings St. Giles has ever seen. The things I have done in my life—I’ve lived five lives over mired in the worst choices a man can make. The hand of the devil on my shoulder since I was three.”
She reeled slightly back. “What happened when you were three?”
His look shifted from her eyes to look over her shoulder. “My father died and we moved to the squalor of St. Giles. Moved into the realm of a man named Bournestein. He ran a corner of St. Giles, ran it with fire and an iron cane. But he was infatuated with my mother and she traded away her life to him—her sanity—so that her boys could eat, could sleep under a roof. But there was nothing in St. Giles for us except for destruction, the most abhorrent of humanity, day in, day out. The people we broke. The friends we watched being broken. We were brutally strong and brutally helpless at the same time. No way out.”
