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The truth is, I acted out of a much older instinct. It was as if I had claws again. My fingernails are short and stubby and only did minor damage, but still I’m surprised that I was able to even break the skin.
I almost apologize.
Almost.
I swallow it down instead.
“I’m merely claiming what’s mine,” I add.
His brows raise, wrinkling his forehead. “Me? Or the rum?”
“The rum,” I say coldly.
“It’s all yours then,” he says, gesturing to it. “My apologies for even thinking otherwise.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “So are you saying that I was asleep all night here in the corner of this cage and you were in your bed over there?”
Another hint of a smile. “Aye,” he says.
“And I’m to believe you just stayed there and didn’t…”
“Come over here and pester you? No. You were knackered, Princess, but I don’t doubt you would have awakened and plunged your little claws into me had I even the thought of touching you. Which I didn’t.”
I mull over that for a moment. I believe him. I was tired but I’m also so on edge that my instincts would have woke me had he come near me at all. At the very least, I would have heard the cage open.
I guess I had been through so much that I slept like the dead.
And he’s still watching me, that intense look in his eyes ever-present.
“Need an escort to the privy?”
“I don’t need an escort,” I retort. But the moment he mentions the toilet, I realize I really have to use it. I know most sailors use the “head” at the front of the ship, which affords them no privacy at all, but on the royal ship, Aerik and I and some of the servants had private toilets to use. I’m hoping this ship isn’t that much different.
Regardless, I’m not going to do my business in a bucket with him here. I may have lost a lot of pride, but I still have some.
“But you’ll have an escort nonetheless,” he says. “I’ll stay outside the door and keep you on a leash. Just in case you decide to go out the window. Just remember we are very far from land and I’ve seen you in the water. You’re not very good at swimming.”
He has no idea how much that last sentence irks me.
He goes to the table in the middle of the room where a spool of rope is and notices the knocked over crystal. He stoops down to pick it up and gives me a curious look. I don’t say anything.
“Skip,” he says by way of explanation. “Always up to trouble.”
“Skip?”
“The cat,” he says as he puts the crystal back on the shelf.
“You named the cat Skip? As in the skipper? Not the most original name for a cat on a ship.”
“Listen, we were calling himCatfor a few years there. We aren’t always known for our originality.”
He comes over and unlocks the cage door with his set of skeleton keys he has clipped to his breeches. “Now do I need to tie you or will you—”
Before he can finish the question I wind up and punch him right in the face again. For the second time, the feeling of my knuckles smashing into his nose sends a murderous thrill up my spine.
He gives out a cry of pain and surprise and while I make a feeble attempt to run past him, he reaches out with his one hand, taking a firm grip of my elbow, while his other covers his nose.
“Did you really think you’d have any chance of escape?”
