Flames of Love and Sweet Perfume

He’d relived the gorgeous expressions on Jacob’s face again and again in the roughly twenty minutes that he’d waited to make the walk to the captain’s quarters. In his mind’s eye, he wound time backwards and watched the moment he had taken Jacob into his mouth under the masthead. The way his head had flown back and his entire body had rippled with waves of pleasure at Christopher’s skilled touch. The way the silver moonlight had washed Jacob’s skin in a milky glow. The mesmerizing moment when the captain surrendered to his building orgasm.

You’re so beautiful. He’d thought as he stared up into the man’s moonlit face.

He’d given Jacob all the time he needed to come down from his climax, his face glowing under the light of the stars. Christopher had stayed there, his cock pressed deliciously against Jacob’s thigh, until cuddles turned into neck nuzzles and Jacob’s teeth found their way to Christopher’s ear, sending fresh throbs of desire coursing through his erection. A few more minutes of teasing and Christopher may have given in to the urge to bend the fearsome Marauder over the railing of his own ship and fuck him until the whole ocean heard him crying out his first mate’s name in the throes of ecstasy.

Instead, he’s insisted that Jacob go ahead to bathe, freshen up, and gather his strength for the next round. Jacob had obliged, but not before turning to wink over his shoulder and shamelessly let his gaze linger on his first mate’s trousers, standing resolutely at full mast.

Christopher quickened his pace the last few feet to the captain’s quarters, his heart pulled forward by a heavenly body driving him mad with frenzied need. He opened the door without knocking, turning quickly to latch it behind him.

He spun on his heel, facing the spacious room, and stopped as though caught in a spell. Lanterns and candelabras were scattered throughout the space. They lined the desk and peaked out from the corners of bookshelves. The wall sconces on either side of the bed were also alive with flame. Flickering firelight danced across the walls, bathing the wood in a golden, honeyed glow. Cool, silvery moonbeams cast ethereal light through the porthole window.

And there, crowned in silver moonlight and bathed in the glow of amber flames, lay the most beautiful creature Christopher had ever seen. Jacob was strewn across the bed, completely nude save the captain’s hat on his head. He lay on his left side, chocolate waves spilling from beneath his hat and kissing his shoulders. He was propped up on his elbow, a book held delicately between his fingers. His right foot was planted on the bed, knee bent, a fresh cloth neatly bandaged around his wounded thigh.

Light glinted off the silver necklace that collared Jacob’s throat. Two longer chain necklaces, each with a Spanish peso at the end, dangled down his smooth, naked chest. His skin reminded Christopher of soft, buttery caramel, the way the surface of the candy shines like polished marble before entering one’s mouth. It looked as though it would melt on his tongue, filling his taste buds with sugary pleasure. Teasing a whisper of salt.

If not for the bandage around his thigh and the thin, dark scratch across his left breast, there was scarcely any evidence of the harrowing battle they had fought early that morning.

Christopher held back a moment, drinking in the sight. When he spoke, his words were low and reverent. “Hello, love.”

Jacob glanced lazily up from his readings, though the smirk playing at his full lips and the black spark in his eyes betrayed his eagerness. “What took you so long?”

“It’s been twenty minutes, just as I promised.” Christopher strode casually toward the bed. Unhurried, as though he hadn’t just had this beautiful man’s dick down his throat barely a quarter of an hour ago.

“I didn’t need that long to recover.” Jacob’s words oozed like honey as he gripped his own cock with his free hand and tauntingly stroked it from tip to base and back again. “I was hard again as soon as I reached this cabin and set eyes on the bed where you’re going to fuck me.” Jacob’s hand wrapped harder around his cock, pausing the stroking motion to grip at the base, showcasing his length.

Chrisopher felt his erection strain against the confines of his trousers.

“So I see.” Christopher stopped at the foot of the bed, the bulge in his trousers at eye level with Jacob’s head. Jacob’s stormy gaze flitted briefly to Christopher’s trousers before returning to his eyes. His chest heaved, breathing growing heavier.

Chrisopher leaned down so that his lips were just out of reach of Jacob’s. “But who’s to say I’m going to fuck you on the bed?” He plucked the book from Jacob’s hands, eyes on the man’s parted lips as he stood. He noted the catch in Jacob’s breath as the anticipated kiss was temporarily denied.

With a smirk, he snapped the book closed and strode a few steps to place it gently on a nearby table.

“Where else do you plan on fucking me?” Jacob’s voice was teasing, laced with curiosity and lust.

Christopher crossed back to the bed, maintaining his slow, measured gait. He reached down, cradling Jacob’s cheek in one hand while the other tipped his hat back, revealing dark chocolate eyes gazing back beneath the brim. He bent down, his lips brushing Jacob’s ear as he whispered, “Wherever. I. Want.” He punctuated the breathy declaration with a gentle nip at Jacob’s ear lobe. The captain’s body shivered at his touch, a gasp of pleasure escaping his lips. Christopher’s hand moved from Jacob’s cheek to the back of his neck and pulled him in for a long, promising kiss.

His captain smelled of cocoa butter and tasted of rum. Warm, sweet and decadent, the hint of sea salt providing an added bite. Christopher’s fingers glided up Jacob’s neck and through his hair. Their tongues slid against each other. Jacob slid a palm against Christopher’s trousers, cupping his bollocks through the thin cloth and massaging them in a way that prompted a hungry moan from his lips. A moan that was immediately swallowed by Jacob’s kisses.

Chrisopher rocked his hips forward, pressing himself into Jacob’s touch.

“I was sorely tempted to bend you over the railing of your own ship and fuck you until the whole ocean heard you screaming my name.” He leaned in for another hungry kiss before lowering himself onto the creaking mattress, positioning himself alongside Jacob, laying on his side to face him.

Jacob lowered his bent leg and shifted to lean closer. “Why didn’t you then?”

“Because I remembered that I don’t like sharing you with anyone.” His fingertips roamed gingerly along Jacob’s side, following the dip of his waist and rising with the curve of his hip, dipping again along his thigh. He paused when he reached the edge of the bandage.

“You should have let me re-bandage this for you.” His voice was soft and tender, not an admonition so much as a wish spoken aloud.

“I’m perfectly capable of dressing my own wounds.” Jacob’s tone was playful, but beneath his enchanting eyes was a flash of defiance. It was that all-too-familiar independence. That fiery determination that had led a penniless orphan from grimy streets to the deck of his own ship.

“You are amply capable.” Christopher slid his hand around the curve of Jacob’s ass, giving it a squeeze. “But it’s my job as your…” He paused, the word “partner” lapping at the edge of his brain, then quickly course corrected, “… as your first mate … to make sure you’re taken care of.”

“Well then…” Jacob leaned in close, his lips just nearly touching Christopher’s as he spoke, like the soft brush of fairy wings, “I guess you’d better take care of me.”

“With pleasure, Captain.”

His fingers pressed into the muscle of Jacob’s glutes, applying just enough pressure to ease the strain built up from the day’s battle. Tender and sensual enough to draw a moan from Jacob’s lips, a beautiful sound of immediate relief mixed with unbridled need. Chrisopher quickly closed the whisper of distance between them, muffling his captain’s moans with his own mouth; slipping his tongue into Jacob’s open mouth and kissing him with deepening passion. Jacob’s moans lowered in tone, growing hungrier. He devoured Christopher’s kisses like a feral creature, unsure of when its next meal will come. Craving more.

Christopher drug his fingers across Jacob’s ass, down his hip, then reached down between them to wrap a hand around his swollen cock. Jacob’s entire body seemed to pulse at Christopher’s touch. His cock throbbed. His back arched, hips pressing forward. His tongue left Christopher’s as his head flew back, a sound that was part cry, part groan escaping his lips.

Chrisopher’s own pulse quickened at the sight … and the sound. Releasing his grip on Jacob’s throbbing erection, he moved his hand up to playfully cover Jacob’s mouth. Jacob’s groans of pleasure turned to frustration at the sudden absence of Christopher’s hand around his cock.

Christopher chuckled, amused and pleased that he had the power to drive this demi-god-like creature into such a frenzy. “We still need to be quiet,” he gave a little nod to the wall at the head of the bed, “Sorbello could be listening just on the other side.”

Jacob pulled Christopher’s hand from his mouth, planting a kiss on his knuckles. His dark eyes flashed with mischief and defiance. “Fuck Sorbello.”

“I’d much rather fuck you.”

“Why does it matter if he hears us? Let the man speculate. Let him think that I’m a woman if he wants. Let him hear the rapturous sounds you pull from my body. Let him imagine me as a fair maiden, my breasts bared to you, my lips wrapped delicately around your pulsing cock. Let him writhe in jealousy at the thought of you buried to the hilt in such a fair and fearsome Captain.”

Chrisopher felt his entire body grow hot with jealousy, despite the teasing tone. The memory of Sorbello’s leering expression when he suggested that Jacob may be a woman flashed through his mind. He pulled his fingers from Jacob’s and reached up to tenderly cup his cheek. Jacob leaned into the touch.

“I would rather rot in the Red Raider’s dungeon than let Sorbello or any of the men imagine what you look like when you cum.” His thumb traced gently along Jacob’s plump lips, tinged a rosy pink from Christopher’s rough stubble. “I would sooner plunge myself onto his sword again than share the symphony of your moans and cries with anyone who hasn’t earned the right to hear them.”

And above all, I won’t allow our time in each other’s embrace to sully your reputation. He kept the last fear to himself.

Jacob was silent for a moment and Christopher was half worried that he would retreat inside his own head once again. There was no witty repartee, nor a flippant dismissal of his dramatic confession. Instead, his eyes were pensive, gaze locked on Christopher’s for a beat before shifting to the bandage on Christopher’s shoulder.

“Then gag me.” His soft eyes met Christopher’s again.

“You … want me to gag you?” Before he could fully process the suggestion, his mind was already conjuring images of a white cloth covered tightly across Jacob’s mouth, or between his lips, his desperate moans muffled by the gag. Chrisopher’s pulse surged with fresh desire.

“Gag me. Tie me down. Fuck me however you see fit.” A devilish grin spread across his face, flashing teeth like saltwater pearls. “Because if you don’t, I’m going to start begging for your cock as loudly and sensually as possible, until you have no choice but to fuck me into oblivion against that wa-” He started pointing toward the wall at the head of the bed, but Christopher grabbed his hand and drew it against his chest as he silenced him with another kiss. They chuckled lightly against each other’s lips, the kiss starting out playful before quickly devolving into raw need.

Chrisopher felt a sharp twinge of pain shoot through his wounded shoulder as he shifted his body toward Jacob, drawing his mind immediately to his captain’s injuries. He pulled out of the kiss to speak, “What about your wounds?” He glanced down at Jacob’s freshly wrapped leg. “I don’t want to re-open any wounds and cause you more pain or … hurt you even worse.”

“I trust you to navigate around my wounds.” Jacob reached to cradle Christopher’s cheek, his thumb lovingly stroking the rough stubble. “I don’t think you could ever hurt me, Christopher.”

Christopher’s heart surged, nearly overwhelmed by the new levels of trust afforded him. First Jacob sharing the secret about his powers, and now this? His captain was opening himself up in new ways and Christopher was acutely aware of the responsibility on his end to nurture that trust.

“As you wish, Captain.” Christopher hauled himself off the bed, careful to avoid rolling onto his wounded shoulder. He crossed to a shelf filled with a selection of lotions and fine oils, collected throughout their voyages. He selected a bottle of ruby-colored glass, filled with perfumed oil, and tossed it lightly to Jacob, who caught it easily. “Start rubbing yourself down all over with this.”

Chrisopher pulled a coil of rope from a metal hook on the wall and began unwinding it. “We wouldn’t want you to get rope burn while you’re hanging from the rafters, now would we?”

***

Jacob did not answer. His eyes were vacant and his pensive expression was turned toward the enemy ship, his face a silver circle in the night. Either he didn’t hear, or he was too entrenched in his thoughts to respond.

“Go below, for now,” Sorbello volunteered, “Rest. Collect yourselves, and await the Captain’s next orders.”

There was a moment of pause, as though this moment represented a turn of a page. A transition from before to after a moment of revelation. Every soul on board seemed stuck in place where they stood, Jacob against the railing, Christopher in the crossbreeze on the stairs, Sorbello leaning solidly against the mast.

Then the crewmen filed away to their individual corners of the ship, their voices a low swell on the wind.

Christopher held eye contact with the Second Mate. He wanted to ask him why he’d come to Jacob’s defense, when only hours ago he’d accused him of sorcery, of disguise and manipulation.

But with a curt nod it was understood between them: Whether the accusations were true or not, the outsider had no place in the private dealings of this ship. It would be advantageous to keep this secret between the two officers–At least until they’d learned more. There were too many loose questions. Too many Jokers in the deck.

Sorbello sniffed and withdrew to his quarters.

Christopher shuffled numbly up the stairs and placed a steadying hand on his Captain’s shoulder. “He is gone. We’ll turn in and plot a new course. Then you need to rest.”

Jacob looked up. His profile caught a pale sliver of moonlight as the crescent above them awakened, illuminating every curve of his soft features like a hilly horizon. But he seemed so thin and withered under Christopher’s hand, as though the Raider’s presence had leeched something from his blood.

He gave a wan smile, “I think we both know I won’t be able to sleep.”

“You must. I insist,” He squeezed fondly, “We will live until tomorrow. The events of today will not change if we neglect ourselves.”

Jacob nodded mutely. Then the silver on his face winked into darkness as the tilt of his hat blocked the light.

***

“Thought I’d find you here,” A soft, rugged voice accompanied the creak of the hatch behind him. Jacob could feel Christopher before he could see him, his proximity almost a palpable warmth on his back.

“I so hate to become predictable,” He murmured, having been tugged from the mire of his thoughts. But he smiled. It was a welcome distraction.

“Well, it wasn’t much of a mystery; You are perturbed, and when you need solitude there are limited places you can go,” Christopher sidled close to him, his ribs meeting his own like the fond nudge of standing cattle, “I’m just glad you didn’t climb the fucking jibboom and perch on it like a crow, because I certainly wouldn’t be able to follow.”

Jacob exhaled a gust through his nose - the closest thing to a laugh he could muster. Indeed, he’d thought to take a shift in the lookout nest atop the world and watch the horizon until it blushed with the sunrise. But his injured leg felt leadened and dead beneath him, his adrenaline and stubbornness having finally yielded to pure weariness. He wouldn’t be climbing anything for a while.

There was hardly room for the two of them on the narrow foredeck beneath the ship’s figurehead, where the bowsprit thrust like a spear into the dark. The carved woman at their backs leaned eternally forward, her wooden hair streaming, her blind gaze fixed upon the horizon. Beneath her outstretched hands the water peeled away in silver-capped ribbons, parting around Marauder’s prow.

The rail curved tight against their hips; the timber underfoot was damp with brine. Each slow rise of the hull lifted them, then lowered them again, so that they swayed in an unconscious rhythm.

The air changed around them in the few moments of silence. Jacob could feel Christopher’s shift in mood and could sense the dreaded question before it had even formed on the First Mate’s lips.

“We didn’t outrun the Starcatcher by our own strategy, did we?”

Jacob fidgeted with the ring on his finger. He pulled an uneasy breath, “No, we did not.”

“I see,” Christopher’s neck bobbed, “And the skies were clear this morning. Storms don’t move in out of the clear blue.”

“No,” He agreed numbly.

“Neither do…” A swallow, an exhale, “Krakens.”

“Indeed not,” Jacob felt too warm, too trapped on this narrow ledge. But he knew there was no escaping his First Mate’s deductions. He’d lived through the same day, and had seen all the same unnatural events unfold. What else could be done, but to confront it?

Christopher faced him, then waited for the eye contact that Jacob couldn’t muster yet.

“I do not know why I hold sway over the patterns of the ocean. I have never understood it–Only that I can…feel it, hear it,” He kept his voice barely above a whisper, lest some unsuspecting soul atop the main deck overhear, “I can guide it.”

“Guide it,” Christopher echoed thinly, “Is it magic?”

He lifted one shoulder, then dropped it.

“Raider said he was your brother. Perhaps it is hereditary?”

“Perhaps,” He mused, “But I have no family line to speak of, no surname, no home. Neither of us do.”

“Surely you have a father,” Christopher scoffed, “You two didn’t just appear out of sea foam like in the Greek storybooks.”

Finally, Jacob’s eyes alighted on Christopher’s blue ones, now steely rings of moonlight, “Perhaps you can see why I kept that secret close. I don’t understand it, so how could anyone else? It would only make this ship a target for someone like Red Raider—Someone who would seek the glory of conquering a demigod.”

“A demigod,” Christopher seemed to taste the word in his mouth, to feel the way his tongue fit around it. How strange it must be: for a man to learn his lover was a different creature than the one he’d come to know—perhaps one that wasn’t even human to begin with.

“I am sorry. I had hoped there would never be occasion to use my influence over the seas, and therefore never an occasion for it to come to light,” Jacob could feel his chest getting tighter, so he soothed himself with the repetitive, smooth glide of metal on his skin, rotating around and around the axle of his finger, “But Raider had other plans.”

“Mmm,” Christopher waited, as if for more words, more explanations.

And as he waited, the pressure of his silence seemed to coax them out. Jacob squirmed. The firmness in that steely gaze was like the oil press to an olive - a constant, gentle pressure that would open even the most unwilling of fruits.

“His name is Joshua,” He confessed, “Even our names match, as though someone intentionally gave them to us - though we can never recall what happened at our birth.”

“Or who birthed you,” He finished.

Jacob gave another shrug, inhaling weakly against the squeeze in his chest, “Some things we can never know.”

Christopher picked at a fraying edge of his sleeve. Jacob was relieved that he didn’t move away, but instead chose to remain alongside him, his side a solid plane of warmth.

“How does it work?”

Jacob took a chance at levity, “Well, you see: when a man and woman love one another—”

Christopher’s elbow drove lightly into his ribs. “Don’t be clever.”

“I am not,” Jacob said, though the ghost of mischief lingered at the upturned corner of his mouth. “Though I admit the temptation to let you believe I was instead hatched like some sea creature, and rose fully formed from the tide.”

Christopher shot him a look.

Jacob’s smile thinned. His gaze drifted past Christopher’s shoulder to the water below, to the dark swell sliding along the darkened planks of the hull.

“It would be easier,” he added quietly, “if it were something so simple.”

“Jacob.”

Jacob held his gaze. Those ice-blue irises held the weight of shared storms, of narrow escapes, and of quiet nights spent with hands clasped in the dark when the rest of the ship slept. Christopher had followed him without question into waters that no sane man would chart willingly. He had bled for him. If there was any soul aboard the Marauder to whom he owed the entire truth, at least as he understood it, it was this one.

He let his gaze drift outward, beyond the silvered wake.

“It is…like standing in a crowded room and hearing one voice clearer than all the rest of the noise. The ocean is never silent, not to me. She groans and chatters and mutters to herself. Most men hear only the bubbling upon the surface.”

Christopher’s jaw tightened, but he did not interrupt.

“I can feel the tension in a current before it turns,” Jacob continued softly. “Where pressure gathers. Where it will break into a wave. If I focus - if I open myself to it - I can manipulate it. Only slightly, though. A degree to starboard. A swell lifted here, a trough softened there. Enough to spare us from a razor-sharp reef. Enough to coax a storm into skirting our path instead of swallowing us whole.”

“And this time?” Christopher asked.

“This time I called upon the lightning to assist.”

“I could feel it in the air this morning,” he continued. “That the conditions were too still. The water had a cross-current beneath it, though the surface lay smooth. You know that feeling before a squall? The way the world seems to pause, as though it has drawn breath and forgotten to release it?”

Christopher gave a small nod.

“That is when it is possible,” Jacob said plainly. “I cannot summon lightning from a truly clear sky. The charge must already be building between cloud and sea. The wind must be waiting to turn.” His eyes flicked upward briefly. “When the tension gathers and lightning is searching for its path downward, I can…persuade it.”

“You knew of this ability as well,” Christopher said quietly.

“It is indeed not new knowledge to me.”

He exhaled, shoulders lowering as the admission hung between them.

Jacob’s fingers clumsily fidgeted with his ring again, and the small, habitual motion betrayed his anxieties.

“You could have told me,” Christopher said quietly.

Jacob stared past him into the seam where the sea met the dark, moonlit sky.

“I did not know how,” he admitted, “And I did not want you to look at me differently.”

A flicker of disbelief crossed Christopher’s face. He stepped closer, until the fabric of their coats brushed together.

“I am looking at you differently,” he replied.

“Jacob,” he continued, “I just watched you drag a storm out of what the naked eye would perceive as a clear sky and hurtle it towards an enemy. I already know that you’re different.”

“That’s precisely my point.”

Christopher shook his head once. “No. Your point is that you decided for me what I could handle.”

The ship shifted beneath them. Jacob shifted his weight from his injured leg onto the other and Christopher’s hand came to his waist automatically, steadying him. He didn’t remove it.

“I wasn’t trying to shut you out,” Jacob said, “I was only trying to keep you safe.”

“From what?” Christopher asked. “From you?”

Jacob flinched almost imperceptibly.

“I don’t even understand it fully, whatever this is,” he said, his voice cracking in frustration. “How was I meant to explain it to you? ‘Good evening, by the way, I can turn the tide and redirect lightning when the air’s right.’ It sounds absolutely mad when spoken aloud.”

He swallowed before continuing. “And I was afraid.”

Christopher’s jaw tightened. “Of me?”

“Of losing you,” Jacob said plainly. “I thought if you saw the whole of it - of me, of what I can do - you might decide it in your best interest to step away.”

Christopher stared at him, as though the suggestion were clearly absurd and he was waiting for his Captain to realize it.

“Do you really think I’d run?” he asked.

“I think you’re sensible,” Jacob replied, “And this is not.”

For a moment neither spoke. Then, Christopher lifted his hand from Jacob’s waist to the curve of his neck.

“Listen to me,” he said. “You’re not just some kind of dangerous weapon lying in wait until an opportune moment to wreak havoc arises.” His voice dipped lower. “You’re the man I chose, and you are still him despite the weight of what you hold inside.”

Jacob closed his eyes, and for a moment, he let the weight of Christopher’s touch anchor him to the railing. The night was growing ever colder, but his skin buzzed with heat along the places where their bodies met. He could almost believe, in this moment, that he was just a man and not a thing to be studied, not a mechanism for violence, not a problem to be solved.

Then Christopher drew him in until their foreheads touched and spoke,

“You could directly command every storm that I encounter in this life and it would not scare me away, but if you ever try to spare me from yourself again, I’ll throw you overboard myself. Understood?”

Jacob nodded against Christopher’s brow. The words "the man I chose" reverberated in his mind, ricocheting into the deepest parts of him that had always ached for belonging. He let the silence linger between them, not wanting to break it with an ill-fitted joke or to shatter this rare, pure stillness. The ship rolled lazily beneath their feet, but with Christopher’s hand still at his neck, and their bodies aligned, Jacob felt capable of braving anything.

It was only then that he stopped to consider how impossibly close they stood, which was far beyond plausible deniability or the guise of simple camaraderie.

It was completely dark now, the sky a mottled shade of deep blue and black. Under the main deck Sorbello and the others would be long abed by now, or at least in quick pursuit of the bottom of a bottle. Up here, beneath the figurehead, they might as well be the only men in the world.

Christopher’s thumb moved to trace the line of Jacob’s jaw - a slow, deliberate motion that sent heat pooling low in his belly.

“Christopher,” he breathed a weak warning, unable to care about how desperate the name sounded as it rolled off his tongue.

“I know, love,” Christopher muttered. His other hand slid to Jacob’s hip, fingers curling into the fabric there. “Tell me if you want me to stop.”

Jacob’s answer was to close the remaining distance between them, capturing Christopher’s mouth with his own. The kiss was far from gentle; it carried the weight of the day’s revelations, of the fear knotted in Jacob’s chest now seeking release. Christopher’s tongue slipped into his mouth, causing him to utter a sound that was half gasp, half moan. His hands found purchase of their own in the lapels of Christopher’s coat. He could feel the evidence of his first mate’s arousal pressing against his thigh, and it made him weak at the knees.

“Here?” he asked, though the tone of his voice held no real protest. They had been reckless before in their encounters but never quite so exposed as this, with only the cover of darkness to shield them from anyone’s wandering gaze.

“Here,” Christopher confirmed. His hand slid to the front of Jacob’s breeches, cupping him, causing his hips to jerk forward involuntarily. “Unless you’d rather I take you back to your cabin, where I’ll have to keep you quiet.”

Jacob’s breath hitched at the suggestion.

“You bastard,” he said weakly.

“You love it,” Christopher smirked. There was such warmth in his voice, such affection beneath the air of teasing, that he thought his heart might burst.

Christopher kissed him again, slower this time, as his fingers deftly worked at the fastenings of Jacob’s breeches. The night air was cool against his flushed skin as he was freed from the confines of the fabric, and he shuddered at the contrast. The thought was cut short as the warmth of Christopher’s palm wrapped around his length.

“Look at you,” he murmured, his voice turning low and reverent the way it always did when they were able to sneak in a moment alone like this. His hand stroked once, then twice, and Jacob had to bite down on his lip to keep from crying out. “So perfect and responsive for me.”

“Christopher, please -”

“Shh,” Christopher soothed, ”I will take care of you.” He immediately sank to his knees, his hands steadying Jacob’s hips as he took him into his mouth.

The first touch of his mouth sent a shudder reverberating through Jacob’s entire frame, and he was almost brought to his own knees. Christopher’s tongue traced the underside of his cock lazily before taking him deeper, and Jacob’s hand flew to his uninjured shoulder in response. He gripped him almost hard enough to bruise, bracing his other hand against the base of the figurehead. Her carved eyes stayed fixed on the horizon, almost as if she’d agreed to keep watch as they stole this moment for themselves.

Christopher worked him with the practiced ease of a man who had learned Jacob’s body as thoroughly as he’d learned the Marauder's rigging.

“God,” Jacob gasped, tangling his fingers in Christopher’s windswept, flaxen hair. “Christopher, I -”

Christopher hummed around him, and the vibration sent sparks up Jacob’s spine. His hands slid around to grip his ass, pulling him in deeper still. Jacob clamped a hand over his own mouth in a mostly fruitless attempt to muffle the sound of the loud, broken moan that suddenly tore from his throat.

Christopher had set a maddening rhythm, and Jacob knew that he wouldn’t last long at this pace. His injured leg throbbed, but the pain was becoming distant now, drowned out by the overwhelming pleasure of Christopher’s mouth on him, by the pressure, the wet heat, and their shared obscene sounds. Jacob's fingers tightened in his hair - a silent warning - but he didn't pull away. Instead he doubled his efforts, and Jacob finally came with an audible, strangled cry. Wave after wave of pleasure crashed through him, leaving him shaking and boneless, held upright only by Christopher's hands and the railing at his back.

When he finally came back to himself, Christopher was rising to his feet, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. There was a satisfied smirk on his face that Jacob wanted to kiss off of him, and so he did. He gently tucked himself back into his breeches, then pulled him close, pressing a kiss to mouth and then another to his temple. He buried his face in Christopher's neck, breathing in the familiar scent of him. He could feel the hard line of his neglected arousal still pressed against his hip.

Christopher's hand came up to cup the back of Jacob's head, his thumb stroking through the hair at his nape. The simple touch held an unspoken promise - later, it whispered against Jacob’s skin, when we're somewhere I can take my time with you - and Jacob shivered in response.

They stood there for a long moment, wrapped in each other's arms, the ship rocking gently beneath them and the stars scattered across the night sky like diamonds on velvet. Whatever came next, whatever Raider had planned, they would face it together. For now, that was enough.

***

The table was worn and cluttered, just as it had always been—with journals and maps and diagrams of the stars. The bed had been stripped of its bloody sheets and a fresh set beckoned him into their fragrant warmth. Lantern light wrapped him in flickering gold. It was impossible not to feel at ease here, where he’d always found such respite and comfort. This place had begun to feel more like home than any place on land.

And there, in the chair at the head of the table, sat his Captain. Jacob’s clothes were loose, his neckline open, shirt long and untucked—As though he’d begun to undress but had been distracted by a more pressing task. He was positioned sideways in his seat, one heeled boot beating a soft rhythm against the floor. The other thigh was flung over an armrest, upon which rested a hefty tome, its leather cover cradling delicate yellowed pages. Jacob slouched low over his writing.

“That can’t be comfortable,” Christopher smiled.

As Christopher neared, Jacob tilted the book shut. Entrancing dark eyes flicked up at his entrance, “Hello, love.”

“You never dressed your wounds,” He gestured, “I should’ve returned the favor and seen to them for you.”

The shadow of an endeared smile toyed at his lips, “You were in no condition.”

“Even so,” He shrugged, “I would’ve—Should’ve.”

Jacob kept his face downcast and dropped his gaze, his fingernails distractedly tracing the borders of the intricate design on his journal. His heel tapped unevenly. His leg bobbed against his armrest. Ever a bundle of untapped energy, every gesture revealed a mind tumultuous with thoughts, a man wound as tightly as a rope.

A rope being pulled, pulled, pulled from both ends.

“May I?” Christopher knelt.

Stoic coffee eyes melted with warmth, their corners crinkling, “If you like.”

For a few heartbeats he just watched upward, soaking in every swell of breath, every nuanced detail in his expression. He’d shaved the wispy remains of his facial hair—perhaps in defiance of his doppelgänger—and now his face was as smooth as a babe’s, reverting his years. Dark hair framed Jacob’s soft features like the mane of a lion, the chocolate waves tumbling freely down his shoulders. His sun-bronzed skin soaked up the candle light. Lips the delicate pink of a child’s hair ribbon hung ajar, as though almost forming words.

“I would. That is, yes. I would like to.” Christopher murmured gently, “And to remind you this: While you have so faithfully been my caretaker, I am also yours.”

Jacob smiled fully—a genuine, truthful one.

How had Christopher ever thought that the Red Raider had been a doppelgänger? Surely that face could never match the pure beauty that radiated from his lover now? How had he seen anything but malice in the stranger’s eyes, when they were incapable of warming with the same fondness he saw here? No, Raider was simply a shadow of his love.

Christopher took Jacob’s thigh and guided it off the chair arm, then eased the molded leather boot off his heel. It fell with a clumsy thud behind him.

Jacob’s pupils seemed to dilate at the gesture, the metered rhythm of his breathing catching in the silence.

“Give me the other,” He coaxed.

Jacob obediently offered his wounded leg. Its muscles were far less willing, his foot dragging against the wood like a lame animal’s.

“That’s it,” He grunted as he slipped the opposite boot off, wincing in sympathy as it came away bloody, “Oh, you bled everywhere. Fuck, it’s all over your stocking.”

Indeed, the metallic tang of a battlefield filled his senses as he revealed the extent of the damage. So much had been concealed by the dark fabric of Jacob’s pants and the cleansing waters of the storm.

“I thought it was rainwater,” He shrugged indifferently, eyes flat and cold. Defensive.

“Take off your trousers?” Christopher steeled himself to face the injury. He could not bear it if Jacob’s wounds had been deeper than his own, and yet he had been the one to sleep like a babe. If he’d been the one swaddled in warm sheets, his wound lovingly stitched and bound, had Jacob been wordlessly suffering? How could Christopher have been so oblivious?

Jacob unfastened his belt, his pants, then shimmied the garment out from beneath his hips, his long shirt hem concealing all but the topmost aspects of his thighs.

Christopher took over, easing the fabric away one fraction at a time. Then he reached the blackened and dirtied paste of dried blood. Here he paused and pulled an uneasy breath.

“You don’t have to, Christopher,” He sighed, pearl colored teeth gnawing the pinkness of his lower lip into a bruised shade.

“No, I just need—“ He found the bottle of liquor, which still rested there on the table from Jacob’s earlier efforts, “I think the cloth is fused to the skin. I need to wet it again.”

Jacob nodded in acceptance, breath bated as the bottle hovered in midair above the gash.

“Ready?”

“Mmm,” He nodded.

“It will hurt dearly,” He clenched his teeth in preparation, in empathy, knowing the way it would feel, “You can slap me if it helps,” He joked.

Brown eyes converged on his blue ones, offering an encouraging smile, “I am no stranger to pain.”

Christopher barely had time to register that statement before the alcohol dribbled in a pungent, vaporous stream.

Jacob merely let his eyelids flutter shut. His teeth pressed two symmetrical divots in his lip. His hand clenched down tightly on the spine of the book at his side. Otherwise there was no reaction, just the sound of his strained breaths in the quiet of the cabin.

“Ach, I’m sorry,” Christopher pulled back the cloth from the glue of his hours-old injury, taking scab and flaky blood with it. “Blast, I’ve started it bleeding again. I’m so sorry.”

“Stop apologizing,” Jacob winced, “Just do as you must.”

The pants came away completely, leaving him bare, exposed, his smooth skin streaked and stained like a rusted barrel. The cut at Christopher’s eye level wept droplets like ruby beads at a lady’s throat, and the incision ran deeper than he could say. All he saw was scarlet and black in a horizontal ribbon across his thigh.

He poured more liquor and tried to ignore the aromas mingling into a nauseating blend of iron and alcohol. Of sweaty skin, severed and oozing. It was the smell of pain, and he was the one inflicting it.

“Alright, I’ve got to clean it,” Christopher took a handkerchief and a rolled bandage from the table and drew nearer. He might’ve been distracted by how intimately close he was, surrounded by the warmth of his Captain’s bare legs—a place he’d been many times before. But all he could see was the terrible wound before him. Each pass with the kerchief came away red with both old blood and new, revealing more and more of what lay beneath.

Jacob’s back arched involuntarily as Christopher poured, wiped, and poured again. A wrinkle set itself firmly between his eyebrows. Then a shudder betrayed his well-concealed agony. But he never made a sound, his voice dormant behind slow, meditative breaths. So he was accustomed to hiding pain. How much more lay hidden inside him, to be peeled away and exposed like this physical wound?

“Your men suspect you may be a woman,” Christopher made an attempt to distract him, careful to hide which man had divulged this information.

Jacob frowned, in confusion or in pain, Christopher couldn’t say, “And why do they suspect that?”

“Because you are beautiful,” He said frankly, “And they envy me that I warm your bed at night.”

“They say beauty is like a fruit tree’s blossoms; Flowers have their season, but their true purpose runs deeper than their face.”

How very cryptic, Christopher noted.

“Perhaps that’s another reason the men suspect: You’re a poet and a beauty,” The cloth finally exposed the wound in its entirety, and now the alcohol ran unhindered through the bed of the incision. It was not too deep after all—Only ugly and weeping with neglect, “You are full of pretty words.”

“I see,” Jake mused over this awhile, breathing slowly, allowing a silence to brew and build and stretch the seconds. Then, “Let them suspect, I suppose. It does no harm.”

Christopher dared a look up into that youthful, bronzed face, “You aren’t dishonored?”

“Why would I be? There is no dishonor in being a mystery,” He leaned his temple against one fist, propping his elbow against his armrest and holding his eye contact with an amused smile, “Or in being found feminine, if that’s what you mean? Nay, the feminine is the birthplace of the world; the very creator of humanity.”

“The Christians disagree, Jacob,” Christopher laughed lightheartedly. He had never been religious and their pious mythologies amused him.

But above him Jacob’s smile decayed, “Tell me, Christopher, is Calypso not feminine? The very womb of the ocean we tame?”

He glanced upwards again, attempting to decipher whatever hidden meaning resided behind those solemn eyes, “Calypso, yes, but also sirens. The deadly vipresses of the blackest seas. Harlots. Temptresses of myth and lore.”

“The myth and lore are written by men who crave creation—or credit for it, rather. They would demonize one to glorify the other: a male god they cannot prove,” Jacob began that old habit, releasing his journal from his grip and instead spinning the signet ring on his finger, “But the ocean breathes, does it not? Does the world not teem with life that sprang from some womb? Can we not see the proof before us?”

Christopher just watched him, his hands falling to rest on the meat of his Captain’s upper thigh. He suddenly felt like a saint kneeling at his altar, privately worshipping a god all his own.

“No, I am not dishonored.”

The ring kept spinning, his thumb pushing the metal over and over, as repetitively as a mill’s wheel. So Jacob was indeed thinking of something deep and private, but Christopher could not connect his words with anything of substance. Instead he had more questions than answers.

“Well, you are an enigma, Jacob,” He thoughtfully chewed his lip and began to wind a bandage around the thigh, “Why let them believe you’re something other than what you are?”

“They have believed me to be many things in my life on the sea—A demon, a philosopher, a soothsayer, all of which I am not,” He spoke plainly now, but it revealed nothing—It only made Christopher dizzy, “The illusion is the game. The reputation is everything. The mystery is what keeps their fascination, and in turn their obedience.”

Pay attention. Our Captain has been keeping secrets. And he is much more powerful than we know.

“And what are you?”

Jacob leaned forward and slouched low over his wound. Those gentle lips touched Christopher’s with an intoxicating, amorous softness, a kiss that was over far too soon, “A man. One with a thirst for the unknown and the unexplored. One who has gained a crew—a First Mate—by his own merit and wiles.”

“And what else?” He hardly spoke the words.

Jacob stilled, the spiced rum pigment in his eyes roaming studiously over Christopher’s features. Candlelight flickered through the silken curtain of his hair. For one so fidgety, he was also capable of such stillness, such pregnant silences. He ran his tongue over his lower lip, whetting it in preparation, “What else? A twin, I suppose.”

A twin. So Raider was not a doppelgänger, and not an inhuman monster from the sea. Sorbello had been right in that regard: both Captains were of the same blood, the same womb—Whoever’s womb that might be.

“Oh,” His voice shook. He couldn’t properly enjoy Jacob’s closeness, his thighs surrounding Christopher’s ribs and his pulse soaking into his skin. He was remembering Red Raider the instant they’d clashed swords, when he’d been caught, petrified by marble-white eyes, “I didn’t know you had any living kin.”

“Neither did I,” He confessed thinly. His newly shaven jaw revealed his revulsion for the man, however, as though Jacob had done it purely to separate his likeness from Red Raider’s. This detail was a comfort to Christopher—evidence that he wasn’t alone in his distrust of the masked one. That perhaps Jacob hadn’t sold them out willingly, but had instead been forced into a stalemate.

“Is that why he spared us? Is Red Raider a friend, simply hunting family ties?”

His gaze darkened, his pupils swelling with hidden memories. There was a distant growl, barely on the edge of Christopher’s awareness—A roll of thunder on the horizon.

“I thought surely that was the end for us. How did we walk away from that?” He was all too aware of the advice he’d been given—to pay attention, to listen well and glean whatever information he could. So many lives hung in the balance of Jacob’s secretive arrangement, “What did you say to him?”

Warm, gentle hands cradled either side of Christopher’s face, the blown pupils gazing fixedly into his own, “Love, can I trust you?”

He swallowed thickly, “Implicitly”

“You will stay by my side? Always?” An intensity crept into his expression then—The same thinly veiled panic he’d worn at their bloody reunion.

The ship groaned beneath them and they could feel a change in its monotonous rocking as it tipped over a stronger swell of the sea. It was the kind of swell that made his insides feel as fluttery as butterfly wings. A loose coin slid from the table and skittered away in a looping, lazy pattern. Either the moon pulled the tides stronger tonight, or the winds were changing.

“Yes,” He said, even as Jacob’s pupils enlarged further. The honey sweetness in them was being swallowed by pitch and fear, until only the outer rim retained its rich brown hues. He looked like a prey animal ready to bolt. He looked terrified.

He opened his lips, held his breath, “I—“

“Captain?”

The color returned to Jacob’s eyes in a blink as a heavy-handed fist thudded thrice at their door.

“Lifeboat approaching portside,” It was Sorbello, his voice distinctive and clear through the wood, “It is Red Raider. He requests permission to come aboard.”

“Raider?” Christopher gasped, a sudden fear slicing in his chest. His shoulder ached anew at the mere mention of the man.

Jacob’s inhale fluttered unevenly through his throat. But then he passed a hand through his chocolate mane, and whatever emotion had soaked through his stoic front retreated again behind a mask of stone, “Let him aboard—And be hospitable toward him, lest you bruise the jackanape’s pride!”

“I thought we were rid of him,” Christopher frowned deeply as Jacob stood and slipped dexterously around him, shirttail billowing in his wake. Even wounded and tired, he barely moved with any limp, and his soft footfalls were completely inaudible without his boots.

“And Sorbello?” Jacob hurriedly stripped his bloody stockings off. Then his shirt came over his head in a wad of linen, wrinkled by the rainwater that had dried across his sloped shoulders, “Tell him I only require a quarter hour more. Placate him with the rum if you have to.”

There was a grumble of confirmation before the man lumbered off, lightening their threshold of his shadow.

“Fuck,” Jacob cursed. He crossed to the vanity, where a low table stood laden with a shallow basin and pitcher of water. There, he poured the sudsy mixture over its accompanying cloth and haphazardly began to bathe himself, “I had intended to have more time, before…” He faded off as he determinedly cleaned the center of his chest, the sides of his neck, under his arms—anywhere particularly smelling of sweat and human.

“Before…?” Christopher could only use one arm as he pulled himself from the floor, wincing as he enlisted the help of Jacob’s empty chair. He could feel the stitches stretch with the motion, the chapped heat of his severed edges flaring.

Dark eyes sliced his way, “You will hear it soon enough. He intends to address us all.”

A weight settled into Christopher’s stomach. He nodded slowly, realizing just how entangled they must be. They were to be occupied by the enemy, and Jacob would allow it.

“Oh.”

“He gave me a few hours to gather myself, but it wasn’t enough fucking time,” Jacob passed a sopping rag down the bloodstained streaks on his leg. Loose droplets of water fell to the floor around him, tinged the rusty brown of his aged blood.

Christopher chewed the inside of his cheek as he took in Jacob’s smooth, narrow shape, watching the golden softness of his skin disappear behind fresh new garments. One moment he was naked as a babe, save for the white cloth ribbon around his thigh. Then a loose new shirt hid a birdlike chest. Jacob slipped his agile, leanly muscled legs into plain burgundy breeches, then hopped in place as he tucked the bottom hem of his blouse.

Christopher smiled. Though he favored his good leg and the motion was endearingly crooked, Jacob still managed to have the grace of a dancer.

“My belt please, Christopher?” Jacob asked. His voice was tight and clipped, but he spared the First Mate a shred of warmth through the gaps in his defenses.

“Hmm? Oh, of course,” He found it there, the leather strap snaking through the discarded garments on the floor. He watched as slender, spidery fingers fastened buttons and ties with jerky, distracted movements, but he didn’t really see them. Christopher’s mind was away with his thoughts.

“Love, can I trust you?”

What had he been ready to say? What had he been writing in that book he held so close? So much had transpired today, and the questions ate holes in him.

“Christopher,” Jacob drew near, crossing the floor in two brisk strides. Suddenly he was within his reach again, those magical eyes mere inches from his own and the warmth of his proximity warming his skin. That velvet smooth face was set again in a panicked, hollow stare, “Promise me—I must warn you not to believe anything he says. He is a gambler behind a snakish smile, and will say anything to achieve an end.”

Christopher nodded and allowed his hands to fall naturally at Jacob’s waist. He understood gambling—That anyone was capable of hiding behind a front. All humans wore masks in their own right.

Jacob searched his features as though hunting for whatever doubt hid behind them. Then, satisfied, he nodded tensely, “I will explain when I can. Tonight, aye?”

“Aye, tonight,” He whispered. He felt a sudden rush of affection as he beheld a tanned and lovebitten breast, silver necklace pendants collecting there in the depression at its center. Christopher had left those marks. He still remembered the way that golden skin had felt under his lips, sweating and then bruising and then trembling. And tonight, he might leave more.

Jacob’s expression shifted slightly, as though he saw Christopher’s thoughts—As though he was joining him there in his fantasy. He breathed gently between soft lips, the short gusts playing at Christopher’s neck like a spring breeze.

Suddenly he seemed so small, his dainty stature made even more evident in moments like these—when Christopher still wore his boots and Jacob stood barefoot. Now, Christopher could see the pale stripe of skin in the off-center part of his hair. He could cup his face and look down on him like the sun looks on a daisy. It made him human. It brought him from his lofty, unreachable glamour as a guarded Captain in his regalia, and placed him within arm’s reach.

Like this, Christopher felt closer to him. In this dim, intimate room the two could set aside their status as Captain and First Mate. Here they could just be fellow creatures of passion, equal in their lust and affection.

“I want to throw Raider overboard and fuck you until tomorrow,” Christopher murmured, voice husky with desire. He wanted it so badly it hurt. Could they not just hide awhile longer and ignore the dangers and mysteries of the world around them?

This earned him a half-laugh—A beautiful, buttery smooth sound that vibrated low in his chest, “If only.”

***

The sky was beginning to bruise with purple-pink shades, and the Raider fell upon them like a shadow. He stood at the railing of the top deck, a silhouette overseeing his conquest, drink in hand and broad cavalier hat casting his face in darkness.

The sea lapped at the ship’s hull, a constant watery metronome. A heartbeat. Masts rose like cathedral steeples above them, their dark looming shapes forming naked spires toward the heavens, but in a way they felt safe. A canopy to guard them from the great monsters and terrors that had yesterday been only legend.

But they did not protect from the monster in their midst. The one who wore scarlet silks and ruby velvets, encrusted with glass beads and embroidered designs in gold thread. He had changed from his battle gear and now he was dressed in his finery, a king dipped in blood.

“Friends!” The silhouette trilled gaily, almost musically, “A word, if you please.”

Begrudgingly, each battle-wearied man turned at the voice.

“Well, multiple words, rather, chained together in succession,” He laughed—A bright and syrupy one, like a hyena’s chortle, “I wouldn’t dream of being misleading.”

Christopher perched on the stairs between decks and propped his injured arm against the banister. Already he felt nauseous with distrust. Raider’s voice was identical to Jacob’s, but he used it so differently that it hardly mattered—The two were worlds apart. Jacob laughed so sparingly, so politely, that it heightened the sense of falseness in his twin’s character.

“I wouldn’t dream of being misleading.”

He was already weaving his web of deception, using his words to stack his deck at its foundation. Fucking snake.

“Brother, dear? Care to join me?” Raider gave a large, theatrical gesture, “Your men need to hear this from you too, you know.”

A murmur of confusion passed over the crewman like a blanket, their voices a dull hum on the briny twilit wind. Brother.

Jacob stepped forward, his boots thunking hollowly on the deck. He walked heavily—uncharacteristically so, as though this night weighed him down. His back was as straight as a bayonet blade, his face as unreadable as a blank page. Then he stilled, hands braced on the banister, his only movement the gentle ripple of his hair in the breeze and the flutter of the fresh scarf at his throat like a flag of surrender. He stood rigidly, unwillingly, a statue by his twin’s side.

Raider stepped into the light of a nearby lantern and the murmuring rose louder. He wore no mask now, and his facial features were unobstructed, revealing his perfect likeness to Marauder’s captain. Duplicates, standing like matching towers above them, one bearded and one smooth-faced, one befeathered and embroidered and one practical and plain. Both wearing the same bone structure and the same willowy frame. The same dark eyes surveyed them all in tandem.

Christopher tried to ignore the burn of Sorbello’s gaze on him, boring holes into his neck. You see it yet?

Then Red Raider’s face split into a devilish grin, “I know you are frightened of me. Confused. Angry. I upset your voyage and disrupted your day. How very rude of me.”

Christopher had to chew his lip to keep the protests in. Voices erupted around him, but they dulled into silence as the flamboyant man cleared his throat. They all wanted answers. Assurances. Any future other than this lonely death in an uncharted sea.

“But you see, it was all necessary. Nobody was irreparably harmed, and I have made my case to your benevolent Captain, here,” At this, he flung an arm around Jacob’s shoulders with the familiarity of an old friendship, “I’ll allow him to tell you himself.”

Jacob didn’t acknowledge the embrace, nor the brim of the hat that crowded him. He opened his lips, his voice steady, “Men, I commend you. Those of you that fought, you did it bravely. Those who rowed or toiled to save our sailcloth, I thank you deeply.”

Raider nodded enthusiastically along, as though it wasn’t his own monster that had attacked them so viciously. The longest feather in his hat batted at Jacob’s ear like a kitten’s paw.

“And those of you that lost your wits, well,” Jacob didn’t react to the comical intrusion of the rogue feather, only pressed solemnly on, “It is excused under the circumstances. And I hope you’ve found them again, for they’ll be needed in the time to come.”

“There was a Kraken, Captain,” A scratchy voice came from the back.

“Is it really true?” Another asked, “I was below, and the ship heaved as though we’d run aground!”

“I saw it!” This voice cracked in fear, beginning low and ending like a pubescent boy’s, “I saw the tentacles—big around as an ox’s ribs!”

“Oh, that was just my pretty pet,” Red Raider gestured vaguely at the water, “Yes, it’s true that It has an affinity for eating sailors and squashing boats—Great fun, really—But It obeys Myself alone.”

“Which is why—”

“Which is why…” Raider shook Jacob fondly, silencing him with a glance, “It is imperative that my life and limb remain intact. I know you haven’t the kindest idea of me yet, but think on what would happen if that chain link were to break and the harness on the beast released? It has smelled you, and It was denied.”

More murmuring spread like ashes whipped up by a wind. Fear swelled almost tangibly in the air. Distrust. But, Christopher mused, that was by design, wasn’t it? Raider was only stacking his cards and playing them one by one.

“Marauder here—My beloved brother—understands the nuances of this delicate situation,” He fixed his attention on the man beneath his arm, as though he no longer addressed the crew, but instead spoke directly to his ear, “Isn’t that right, beloved? You know the stakes here, and why we must work together to achieve a common goal?”

Christopher could practically see the poisonous honey dripping from his words, the smug glee in his coffee brown eyes. He was reveling in this, in having won, in having Jacob pinned, a moth with its wing tacked down in a gilded frame.

“And what is that common goal?” Christopher spoke with his teeth gritted. He wanted to separate his lover from the grasp of his venomous twin and protectively place himself between them. But he would have to make do with simply drawing his attention away.

“An excellent question,” Raider’s eyes slid reluctantly to his own crystal blue ones. Then his hand tightened on Jacob’s shoulder like a talon, his knuckles armored with a collection of bulky, gaudy rings. He was like a scarlet dragon guarding his hoard, “Shall you tell them, or shall I?”

There was an almost imperceptible flutter of emotion across Jacob’s features. Was it fear? Anger? Perhaps resignation. The twilit sky painted his skin a sickly grey.

“Men, we are abandoning the voyage for now,” Miraculously, Jacob kept his voice steady despite the ensuing uproar, although Christopher could see the change in his breath and the pink blotches on his chest, creeping slowly above the scarf he wore to hide his bruises, “We will adjust our course and make for the nearest port. We need to resupply, make ourselves ready, and repair the Kraken’s damage before we can set out anew.”

“Oh the Kraken didn’t set your ship aflame, dear brother!” Raider smiled broadly, another musical cackle carrying brightly across the deck, “Let’s not lie, now. You owe your crew your honesty, since they so nearly died in your service.”

Christopher caught Raider’s implication, bringing him back to the conversation in Sorbello’s quarters. Who do you think started the fire on the deck and chased off the beast? Who do you think called the lightning bolt? I saw Marauder point and shout his command. It was almost undeniable now, short of hearing it from the man himself. He’d heard it from too many independent sources. But he didn’t want it to be true. Because if they were right, Jacob had indeed used a kind of magic, and Christopher didn’t know him at all.

The damage in question was a deep, splintered hole in the deck nearest the ship’s prow, still smelling of smoldering ash and smoke. Its edges were encrusted with charcoal, signs of a once raging fire. But extending onward like petrified ripples, were random, spider-web patterns like painted tree limbs, etched deeply into the deck.

“It was lightning, Sir,” A voice came gruffly, like the bark of a guard dog, “We were caught in a storm. Lightning struck us. We were saved by nature’s wrath, nothing more.”

All eyes flashed toward the mast, where a burly man leaned his solid shoulders against it, arms crossed above the furry expanse of a muscular chest. Sorbello.

“And we are very lucky it did, as your monster so nearly had us,” He paused to draw a long, deep inhale, the vertical sword tattoo on his breast rising as if in defense of his heart. Then he let his air out in a huff, “Perhaps we should take it as a sign that the skies object to your unnatural beast.”

There was a beat of silence. Two.

Christopher locked eyes with those shining obsidian ones, hidden like beetles under the man’s stony brow. He gave a tight nod. Thank you, friend.

Then Raider relinquished his twin, straightened to his full height, and strode down the steps. Dainty embroidered boots clicked on the planks. Then he stopped for a tick alongside Christopher, who fought to keep himself from shrinking back from his strange, imposing aura. It was instinct, deep and primal, and he could barely resist it.

A hand hooked directly atop the bandage on Christopher’s shoulder, squeezed, then released. “Excuse me, good lad,” He smiled broadly, as though he had enjoyed Christopher’s gasp of surprise and pain, then strolled confidently on.

“And how lucky you were,” Raider slid within inches of Sorbello’s tattooed forearms, eyes regarding the man like he was appraising a cut of meat, “How wonderful it is to have such loyal men, so willing to stick out their necks.”

Holy hell, he’s going to kill him.

Christopher’s head swiveled between each twin—His Captain and his enemy—His breath catching in fear. His mouth dried out. He could almost envision the moment when Raider would draw his blade—A straight, dainty one to match the tiny man who wielded it—And bring it down across one of Sorbello’s jugulars in a blurred flash. The blood would stain the floor the same color as Raider’s tailored coat.

But Jacob, normally so fearsome and stately in his tri-cornered crown and smoky kohl lined eyes, seemed deflated and subdued.

“Do not forget, Raider: You are protected by pirate code,” Christopher interjected, willing his voice to boom with authority, “Your protection extends until you break it.”

As if in answer to his rally call, crewmen placed rope calloused palms to sword pommels, their grips braced for battle. Relief softened the sharpness of Christopher’s breaths. Loyal men, indeed. He wondered if Raider could say the same about his own, over on the gilded Starcatcher.

The feathers on Raider’s hat seemed to twitch of their own accord, as though they belonged to an animal. An angry, threatened animal. But the Red Devil simply turned, the same bright, gleaming smile stretched across his features, “And how fortuitous for myself that you are men of honor. The code is gospel.”

He took a step forward, then another, until he was wreathed on all sides by weathered crewmen, all in various states of unrest. Some fidgeted in silence. Some grumbled profanities. Even more gleamed with nervous sweat, glimmering in the lantern light as they waited, poised in the silence before the storm—When Raider would attack again.

But there was no storm. There was no attack. Just a calm, quiet return to the top deck, with Raider meandering through the crowd, a bird poking through tall reeds.

“I will join you in your voyage, lads,” The impish smile shone as he encircled Jacob’s shoulders once again, “We’ll get that ugly burn hole patched, rejuvenate ourselves, and set out for an adventure, aye? We travel as one, and this ship is under my command.”

An explosion of protests nearly split Christopher’s ear.

But nothing rang as loudly as Jacob’s silence, for his silence meant his surrender.

***

Now he sat, rigid and silent in an opulently carved wooden chair, legs crossed in a weak disguise of repose. His molded leather tricorn was settled precariously on his knee, as though the thing had grown sentience and was trying to escape this stifling room. A brief image flashed through Jacob’s mind—of the hat transfiguring into a nervous lap dog and leaping free with a terrified yip. But there was no humor in it.

He felt like a cornered animal himself.

Would he be questioned and tortured? Killed outright? Had he been reduced to a nameless prisoner, another slave to Raider’s whims to be used and discarded, then hung from the mast as an example?

The room around him wept wealth and pretense, the air thick with incense smoke. Wrought iron lanterns glowed merrily from their sconces. The morning sun through the tall windows cast swaths of gold in the air, catching the undulating currents and curlicues of smoke in shifting patterns. There were velvet curtains and tapestries in rich jewel tones at every turn, clinging to the painted wooden walls like a lady’s skirts. And before Jacob stood a table, its surface littered with paper scrolls, books, and wax drippings, along with various trinkets from the depths of this man’s pockets—coins, dice, a lone ivory chess piece, a glass bauble full of dyed streaks. The clutter was suffocating.

Jacob practically vibrated with tension as he waited, on the edge of snapping from his chair and retreating to the familiarity of his own quarters aboard his own ship. At least the clutter there was his own, the papers useful and the trinkets sentimental. Here, he felt like he sat in the center of a dragon’s poisoned hoard.

“So tell me:” This stranger flapped the tail of his exquisitely embroidered coat—likely a motion of flamboyant habit, as he made the gesture with such ease and confidence. Then he flopped into the high-backed chair at the table’s head, “How does a man with an exact replica of my face evade me time and time again? And in my own territory?”

Jacob said nothing, choosing instead to glower in a sullen rage.

“My face isn’t quite so beautiful when it’s so sour and hostile,” He warned, “I thought we were friends by now.”

Off came the nameless figure’s wide-brimmed hat, then he dropped it unceremoniously on the mess of litter between them. The hat’s loud, befeathered presence made a show of almost laughable extravagance—though levity escaped Jacob in these present circumstances.

Jacob only drummed his fingers against the cup of rum he’d been given as a thin display of hospitality. But despite its alluring draw, he didn’t partake. He knew it would dull his mind and thin the blood that still beaded up from the gash at his thigh. So instead he absently fidgeted as his mind raced, his eyes measuring the man across from him as a lynx measures its prey. He imagined the lynx’s teeth sinking into that smooth, tan neck, the blood spurting across the table and ruining that hideous hat—

“I know. I’m wasting your time. You’ll be wanting to get home to your lover—“

Jacob bristled defensively.

His mirror image smiled, those full, pink lips spreading into an almost inhumanly wide grin. A neat row of clean teeth the color of sun bleached whale bone gleamed back at him.

“Oh, was that a secret? I see his kisses all over your chest,” He flashed his matching one, its smooth, hairless contours an exact duplicate of Jacob’s slight build, only without the scattered red-purple marks, “Pardon my deduction—only he practically threw himself on my blade for you, and those bruises are fresh. You’ve been sailing for a third fortnight, so you haven’t a bonny lass at a port town, aye? No buxom bosom to rest your mangy head—”

“You and I are twins,” Jacob supplied dryly, “Estranged from birth—if we were born at all.” He didn’t humor the obvious bait, meant to antagonize and belittle and establish dominance. No, Jacob wouldn’t be buried by this man’s glamour and bravado.

The man leaned back in his gaudy upholstered chair and propped his closely fitted boots on the table, momentarily silenced. He tapped their narrow soles together with three brisk clicks, “It would appear to be so, Brother.”

“I make my own deductions,” Jacob spat, “Like why a man needs to call upon a beast to intercept his opponent.”

“Why does a man call upon a lightning bolt to save his sweet blonde love?”

“A threatened bear bites.”

“Ah,” Starcatcher’s Captain stood and circled the table. His fingers, gaudy with rings and mixed metal baubles, traced the wood with a soft whisper. Then he took the cup from his identical counterpart’s hand, the sickly sweet smile never leaving his dark, shining eyes. He drank deeply and placed one ruffled sleeve against Jacob’s headrest, drawing intimately near. So near that Jacob’s senses were filled with whatever exotic oils perfumed his disappointingly un-bitten neck, “And what does the bear do when he’s kept in a cage?”

Jacob felt a sheen of sweat dampen his underarms. He smelled his own fear oozing from his traitorous body, and it was all he could do not to lash out like a snake in a trap.

The man grinned, wry and wide, and exhaled a sour plume of liquor vapor, “He dances.”

***

Christopher slept deeply beside him, his battered body nestled securely into Jacob’s sheets. His face was weathered and the corners of his eyes were carved with lines from years of squinting against harsh sunlight, but now his features were soft and smooth in rest. He looked so tranquil, so distant from the agony he’d surely wake to.

Jacob reached out and smoothed a lock of fine, brassy hair away from his forehead, then studied every facet of his features. The line of his jaw was strong and his brow bone was stronger, the structure of his face so plainly visible beneath his fair English skin. Blue eyes hid behind delicate kohl-lined lids, the lashes pale and sun bleached. Short, coarse facial hair surrounded soft pink lips—ones that had given kisses so freely.

Jacob smiled. Those sweet lips had lavished him with beautiful words and the tongue behind them had given such blinding, knee-weakening pleasure. And Jacob had freely taken it.

Guilt knotted his insides and the smile died. His heart felt choked, like its chambers were full of stones rather than blood. Stones heavy enough to drag him down, down into the ocean’s depths…

“I’m so sorry, Christopher,” He murmured, barely a whisper, “Your wounds are my own fault. Why do you love me, when all I have brought you is pain?”

Christopher answered only with his rhythmic, gusty breaths.

“Why do I take from you, when I cannot…” Jacob thoughtfully fingered the necklaces at his own sternum, the chains and medallions clinking gently in the dark. Then he reached higher, where his solid silver circlet rested snugly at the base of his neck. It had no closure, no latch and no lock, simply a metal band that was too snug to fit over his head and too thick to break. It had rested there always, just above the notch in his collarbones—a permanent shackle and a cruel heirloom.

Jacob slipped his fingers beneath the band, taking comfort in the fact that he could easily fit four digits between the metal and the skin. He inhaled deeply and focused on this narrow slot of safety. It was far too easy to imagine the metal constricting like the hangman’s noose and collapsing his windpipe. But it offered some measly relief to have his fingertips wedged in the void between life and death, as though he could simply hold back the irrational fear with his hands.

Jacob swallowed and tightened his grip on the necklace as his pulse fluttered erratically against his fingers.

And that was his answer.

When Christopher slept, the nightmares crept in, his mind a leaky hull. Jacob took from his ruggedly beautiful First Mate because Christopher closed up the cracks and took away the fear. He offered distraction. His breaths were a metronomic lullaby that hid the siren song of the ocean. His arms offered safety from the terrors and his cock filled him up so there was no room for anything else.

Oh fuck, his cock.

Jacob’s eyes roamed there now, where Christopher’s lap was hidden beneath the coarse woolen blanket. He longed for it now. He wanted to get lost again, to stop this wretched panic that threatened to close his throat. He wanted to join that warm pocket of his body heat amid the sheets and feel both his softness and his hardness against him. He wanted naked skin to touch naked skin, to be fucked in the way only Christopher could fuck him—as though Jacob was something precious and beautiful, and not the despicable monster he’d become.

“I’m sorry, dear friend,” Jacob sighed and wearily passed a hand over his face, “I don’t know how to stop this. I don’t know how to stop needing you.”

He gave no reply. Only the sigh of a man contentedly at rest.

***

“Does my twin have a name?” Jacob asked, his voice dangerously low and even. He focused on the identical necklace wreathing this man’s identical neck—the same silver shackle that Jacob always wore at the base of his throat.

It would appear that they were duplicates in many ways.

The man pulled back, and Jacob could finally take a breath that wasn’t full of his heady perfume oils.“There’s power in a name, is there not? Child Pirate? Ghost? Bonny Mackey?”

Jacob inwardly flinched at every title, each one bringing with it a host of recollections. He was a sickly child, his willowy frame so gaunt and malnourished. He’d passed from fishing boat to fishing boat, as lost and waif-like as a wayward spirit, living on whatever scraps he could pinch. Then starvation had taken its toll on his early adolescence, limiting his growth and forever stunting his stature.

But he’d learned to market his traits—his small, lithe form and sharp, too-large eyes—trading his lookout capabilities for a steady food supply and half the wages of a fully grown crewman. It had named him Ghost Boy, for the way he’d gracefully traversed the rigging, as though his body was an incorporeal as vapor. For the way his dark pupils stood out against his face in the night, always watching and always aware.

“I like Marauder best. It’s fitting that my perfect match at the duel would have a fearsome name to go with it.”

He tries intimidation, then insults, then finally flattery, Jacob thought with a shred of satisfaction. A duller man might’ve missed these tactics. It meant the stranger wanted something, and would chip away at Jacob’s sensibilities to get it. Which meant he’d be kept alive and breathing—At least for the next few heartbeats.

“Shall I only refer to you as Red Raider, then?” He pointedly diverted the conversation back to the man across from him, “Rather a pretentious label, there; Did you choose it yourself? Marauder was earned.”

A muscle ticked in his jaw, “I’m called Joshua, with no surname to call my own,” He pantomimed tipping his hat in greeting, “Means ‘Yaweh is Deliverance.’ Yours means ‘May God protect.’ Interesting, don’t you think—That our names have biblical roots, when God has all but forsaken us?”

Jacob swallowed, at a loss.

“God didn’t save us when we were motherless children, left to chew seaweed and soothe our wounds with saltwater,” The man’s eerie smile finally decayed into something fiercely angry. Something deep and wounded. He sank into his chair again, this time with none of the pomp and flair, “God didn’t stop me from nearly succumbing to the wasting illness as I fought for my survival. And God didn’t stop me from losing my brother, when we could’ve grown as boys together. Think of the fun we could’ve had, you and me.”

A pang of loss struck Jacob then. He was disarmed by the shedding of Joshua’s puffed up persona and the sudden display of genuine emotion. Now he saw himself in those huge solemn eyes. He saw his own hardened visage there, hiding a reservoir of memories and agony.

“My God—or Goddess, rather—is the sea. Calypso. She has watched over me—us—better than God ever has,” Sparks returned to those eyes and the smile stretched his face back into its smug carnivale mask, “She gave you lightning and currents, and I a Kraken to command.”

“You think Calypso—?”

“Yes, of course!” He chirped.

His voice was much more animated and expressive than Jacob’s—a surreal thing to hear when he was so accustomed to his own calm, even tenor in his skill. This one was jubilant, forming words like there were sparks on his tongue, every syllable coming out like an over-enthusiastic street peddler’s call. “Come taste the sweetest fruits in all of the continent! Only a few coins and you’re a scurviless man! Oranges here!” Jacob’s vibrant imagination filled his mind with the sound, almost causing an untimely snort.

“Who else would bestow us with gifts such as these?”

Or curses, Jacob thought (“One beast from the deepest, foulest pit of the ocean—and it only costs one human soul!”).

“How else would we have such power at sea, but not on land? You and I are two halves of Her,” Joshua leaned forward on the table and propped his chin on his palms in a mannerism that almost made him look childlike. It made his face rounder, his brow innocently tickled by the ends of a bramble of chestnut curls, as silky as a babe’s hair, uncorrupted by age or sea-brine.

Jacob found himself watching a perfect ringlet as it wagged against Joshua’s brow, dancing with the motion of his jaw in his decorated hands.

“I daresay that land gods don’t tamper with Her playing field. Perhaps that’s why ‘Yaweh’ doesn’t interfere: we are outside their jurisdiction and simply Her playthings, here to do as She chooses.”

Calypso’s playthings. The thought had occurred to him already, but it was disconcerting to hear his private musings aired out by a voice so similar to his own. It felt like a violation, as though this stranger was reaching into his head and rummaging around, dislodging each piece of logic to add to his dragon’s hoard of trinkets. How many more pieces would he rob from him? How deeply would this man burrow his claws into Jacob’s secrets?

Unnerved, Jacob’s eyes followed those slender fingers as they plucked the lone chess piece from the tabletop and slid it along the irregular borders of a pile of coins.

“Tell me, darling, treasured brother,” He smiled again as Jacob frowned at the name. They were yin and yang. Perfect opposite expressions reflected in the same face—Childlike glee and reproachful hatred, “Do you have gut-twisting nightmares?”

The hat in Jacob’s lap finally fell.

He jerked in surprise.

Joshua didn’t.

***

“What in the Nine Hells happened on that ship?” The Second Mate’s robust black beard wagged over his robust chest. He had rounded cheeks, a balding head, and sloped shoulders, which gave the man an appearance like a jolly shopkeep. Indeed he might’ve looked too round, too soft for the high seas, were it not for the muscle beneath the deceptive belly and the stern ice in his eyes, “What did the Captain trade away for our lives?”

“Sorbello—” Christopher began, his voice much steadier than he felt. Already, he could feel his blood heating his cheeks and his throat clot with doubt. Because in reality he had no answer to give, only Jacob’s cryptic excuses.

He’d been asked to the Second Mate’s cabin under the pretense of a shared drink and a card game, but now the true motivations were laid bare. Now they sat in the humble, but tidy room, its floors newly oiled and the bed’s linens turned down with militaristic precision. Even the table at their elbows was neatly arranged, as though Sorbello spent free moments organizing matchsticks in their box, coins in their stacks, and linens in their designated trunk.

“We were terribly outmatched. The battle hadn’t begun before it was lost, yet still we live. Why?”

All truths, Christopher winced.

“I was not privy to that meeting,” He hid his pink flush with a deep draw from his tankard and cursed his fair, transparent skin for betraying him, “I was occupied elsewhere, remember?”

Sorbello’s dark eyes flicked downward to the bulky bandages beneath Christopher’s neckline, then up again. These eyes were deep-set and small, shadowed beneath the convex curve of his meaty brow. They weren’t long-lashed and sugary as the Captain’s, but cold, scrutinizing, reflective like a beetle’s chitinous shell.

How different brown eyes could be.

“You were privy to another meeting,” The broad man folded furry forearms on the low table between them. His chair complained beneath the solid muscular heft of him—a strength that served him in both battle against their foes and in peacekeeping amongst their own. And now, it made him into a dense, frightening wall.

“Right, you are. I was,” He rolled a few words in his mouth with another draw of ale as he contemplated which ones to spit out. Would he speak plainly and relay his version of the truth? Or would he spin a lie to spare his Captain’s reputation?

“He told me nothing. He wasn’t given an opportunity, as he was preoccupied with stanching my bleeding.”

“Oh, so he’s a surgeon as well as a sailor?” Sorbello drawled.

Christopher bristled at the smugness in the Second Mate’s voice, “He sews like a surgeon. Nay, an artist,” He snapped back.

Well, perhaps he had been too quick to defend. Too like a guard dog at his master’s feet, eager to bite at anyone who came too near. Fuck this infernal blush. I must look like a lady in rouge.

The corner of Sorbello’s mustache lifted, granting those cold eyes a glimpse of warmth, “Must be nice. Having a touch after so long at sea.”

“Are you implying—?” Christopher sobered and coughed up an errant droplet.

“My cabin shares a wall with his, did you forget?” The ice in his gaze was thawing, “But you needn’t worry; I haven’t told a soul.”

Christopher’s jaw set as he noted the Second Mate’s implication: He hadn’t told a soul yet.

“I see,” He absently swirled his drink. Surely by now the flush had spread to his hairline, like the rosy burn the sun left behind. Surely he couldn’t take this bait offered to him now: information for information in an even exchange.

“You’ve seen what lies beneath that scarf he wears so scrupulously. Does he have a soft woman’s breast? Is that what he traded away to this Starcatcher’s Captain?”

This time Christopher paled, his blotchy redness bleeding away, “Pardon? You think—that is, you presume he…?” Words failed, guttering to a halt on his tongue.

“It is only a speculation. He is so small, so graceful, a frail little doll, bird-boned and all,” The ink in Sorbello’s forearms flexed as he distractedly cracked one knuckle at a time, one hollow crick after another, “Of course, his disguise is a sensible one. Bad luck to have a woman on board. And there are many on this ship that would leap at a chance to find him out.”

Christopher only stared, wide-eyed.

“And I’ve heard you in the night, bedding him oh-so-sweetly. Are we to have a babe Captain heir playing at the crewmen’s heels soon?”

Christopher’s stomach roiled and the air tasted bitter.

“Blonde, like you, with pretty Spanish eyes—or is he Romani? Polish? Shall we build a nursery in the cargo hold? Tend his labors as his midwives as well as his officers?” A merry smile cracked his face until crooked teeth showed beneath the soot black of his mustache, “Shall the babe suckle at the Captain’s teat whilst he commands from the helm?”

“I see your point. You have garnered a piece of incriminating information there, Sorbello—though I will do you the courtesy of ignoring your speculation, since you and I are friends,” Christopher composed himself. He was painfully aware of how much he stood to lose, should he drop one misplaced word, “But be cognizant of how you speak of our Captain.”

Sorbello raised his hands in a silent Alright, then, leaning back from the table and earning another creak from the chair beneath him. He swigged from his own tankard and cleared his throat, “Clearly I don’t contest his right as Captain. Woman or not, he is as fearsome as a viper, clever as a fox, and I will use ‘he’ or ‘she’ as he likes; It makes no difference to me.”

The implicit But it might make a difference to others hangs unsaid in the air.

“I have my own life to think of, and the lives of our men, you understand. And today we were nearly crushed by a Kraken,” The beetle-black shine of his eyes returned, “So just swear me this: if you learn the Captain traded the Marauder, or put the men in danger to save his own hide, you’ll tell me so we can act. I will not serve this new, pompous idiot of a Captain, with his deep sea pet,” He spat.

Act. Again, he didn’t need to clarify his meaning.

Christopher did what he knew he must, if only to delay the truth a while longer: He nodded and clinked his tin tankard against his Second Officer’s. They both drank deeply, sealing their tentative alliance. But Christopher felt a deep uneasiness settle into his bones.

There was silence between the two, with nothing but the creaking of the pendulous lantern on its hook and the satisfied slurps echoing hollowly from the bottom of Sorbello’s cup. Then he set it down with a metallic thud, emptied and yawning. The jarring baby-pinkness of his tongue came forth to tidy the froth from the forefront of his mustache. The beetle eyes stared.

“I’m glad we agree,” He nodded, “Because there was more than one sorcerer on this ship when the Kraken surfaced—luckily one who fought on our side.”

“Whatever do you mean?” Christopher’s eyes narrowed, teeth gritting.

“The viper himself. Who do you think started the fire on the deck and chased off the beast?” Sorbello murmured softly now, almost as though he was afraid to speak the words into reality, “Why do you think this Red Raider fellow so closely resembles our Captain? Same height, same weight, same skin and eyes. It is evident that they are of the same blood—and the same magic.”

“First you speculate on the matter of his sex and then you accuse him of sorcery. Jacob is not of that man’s blood,” Christopher reasoned gruffly, “It is a trick of these hellish waters—a doppelgänger or a shapeshifter sent to muddle up our minds.”

“Oh a shapeshifter,” Sorbello chuffed like a horse.

“Hell, I don’t know!” He ran a sweating hand through his flossy hair, “We were attacked by a vile creature of lore already, is it so hard to imagine two?”

“But I ask again: Who do you think called the lightning bolt? I saw Marauder point and shout his command.”

“I saw nothing of the kind.”

“You had already fallen. And I was at the helm, taking charge as you so gallantly tripped over your feet.”

An anger lit a fire beneath him, heating his blood and striking him mute. But he could not contest the fact that he’d fought about as valiantly as a wagging daisy. The shock of the doppelgänger’s face had been enough to disrupt his thoughts and disarm him so completely.

How could he strike the face of the man he loved? The man whose smooth amber body he’d kissed and caressed, sucked and bitten countless times? How could he behold that face without the memories of sweat sodden nights and slow, gentle mornings?

Another long creak came from the man’s broad center of gravity shifting forward, forward, until he braced both hands on either edge of the table, “I am simply relaying what I saw while you were in need of your smelling salts. Believe it or don’t—You are responsible for your own foolishness.”

Finally, Christopher’s eyes fell, catching on the candle on the tabletop, the wooden planks below them, the tattooed meat of Sorbello’s arms—anywhere that wasn’t those scarab thorax eyes. His shoulder ached terribly as his heart thumped in his ears.

“A storm stirred up when there was nothing on the horizon. And I saw him command lightning,” He insisted solemnly, “Pay attention. Our Captain has been keeping secrets. And he is much more powerful than we know.”

***

He strained again uselessly as he tried to free himself, to contort in an attempt to survey his wounds, but the effort rewarded him only with a deep, nauseating throb across his chest, the heat of fresh blood spreading beneath his shirt fabric. He let his head fall back against worn shiplap, breathing heavily through clenched teeth. Somewhere above a line snapped in the wind. The ship groaned, and the sails whispered like spirits floating on the wind. He closed his eyes, succumbing to his fatigue, and eventually found himself counting the waves as they crashed against the Marauder’s sturdy hull. Three, then four, then, five - his wound almost seemed to throb in time with the count.

Bootsteps cut through his quiet dysphoria. Slow. Measured. Deliberate.

The captain’s shadow fell over him before the man himself came into view. His expression was mostly unreadable, but his eyes held a flicker of something Christopher couldn’t quite place. The boots stopped beside him, and for a moment, neither man spoke.

“What a mess,” Jacob finally said quietly.

Christopher tried to straighten and failed before uttering, “You should see the other man.”

That earned him the faintest curl of a smile before Jacob crouched beside him.

“You disobeyed me,” he said, abandoning the air of fondness and remnants of his smile for sternness.

Christopher let out a faint, humorless laugh that was cut short by a wince of pain. “Would have been a rather short battle if you had gone down in my stead.”

“That was not your call to make.”

“I made it anyway.”

Jacob’s jaw flexed once before he looked away.

“You think too damn much with your heart,” he muttered angrily, reaching out to carefully press his hand against the bloodied fabric clinging to Christopher's shoulder and chest.

Christopher let out a gruff groan. The touch was slight, but even that was enough to set a fire ablaze under his skin.

“And you don’t think with yours at all,” he replied finally.

Jacob’s gaze flicked upward at that.

“Thinking with hearts is often enough to get men killed,” he said, stone-faced.

Christopher’s lips twisted into a weak smile. “Then I suppose I’m already halfway there.”

For another short moment, neither spoke and the sounds of the ship and the sea filled the silence. Jacob drew in a long breath and let it out slowly.

“You’re bleeding too much,” he said finally. “And haven’t the patience to wait for you to lose consciousness again.”

He reached for the knife at his belt. The blade glinted as he slid it beneath the ropes binding Christopher’s wrists. With a swift pull the cords gave way.

“Don’t move just yet,” he warned.

Christopher flexed his freed hands, grimacing as blood rushed back into them. “Didn’t plan to.”

Jacob sheathed the knife and shifted closer, slipping an arm behind Christopher’s back. The movement was matter-of-fact, but his grip lingered just long enough to betray his concern.

“Come on then,” he said. “You are of no use to me bleeding out on the main deck.”

Christopher tried to protest - something about being fine, about handling it himself - but the words died on his tongue as soon as Jacob pulled him upright. The world seemed to tilt on its axis, and he stumbled to find his footing. He caught himself on Jacob’s shoulder, breath coming in sharp gasps.

“Easy,” Jacob murmured, “I’ve got you.”

Christopher’s fingers bunched in the fabric of his coat. “Don’t suppose this is standard procedure for a first mate’s insubordination.”

Jacob gave a quiet snort that was half amusement, half exasperation. “You’re lucky that I don’t make you swab the deck with holystones before I piece you back together.”

They moved in slow, uneven steps. When they reached the captain’s quarters Jacob nudged the door open with his boot and guided Christopher inside.

The door closed behind them with a muted thump, shutting out the wind and the creak of rigging. The room was dim, its single porthole admitting only a muted shaft of afternoon light that did little to illuminate the space. Jacob guided Christopher to the edge of the bed and eased him down, his hands firm but careful. His gaze lingered on him a moment before he turned and fastened the door, the latch softly clicking into place. He crossed to his desk and lit the oil lantern there, adjusting the wick until adequate warm light spilled across the cabin.

The following change in his demeanor was immediate.

Jacob turned back to him, the barely upheld mask of stoicism fracturing under the new privacy of his quarters.

“You stupid, reckless bastard,” he said, low and furious, hands braced on either side of Christopher, continuing on before he could muster a response.

“Do you have any idea what it would have done to me had they chosen to end your life?”

His jaw was set hard, fury etched into every line of his face, but his eyes betrayed him - they were glassy and rimmed with wetness. The tears didn’t fall; they gathered instead, held in place by sheer force of will. An unmistakable fear lived within those coffee-brown irises, old and deeply ingrained, born of too many years spent watching everything he loved be claimed by an unforgiving seafaring life. Anger burned alongside it, not only at Christopher but at a cruel world that demanded more and more sacrifice until a man hardly knew what it meant to be whole. Beneath it all was a flash of relief twisted tightly with want.

The sight of him, of all the emotions reflected in his eyes, struck Christopher harder than the pain of the wound had, causing a tight, aching pull deep in his chest. He had never seen Jacob - always so steady and sure in his role - so close to breaking.

He knew with certainty in that moment that it was all for him, and he’d never felt so guilty in all his life.

He swallowed sharply, finding his throat to be suddenly dry. He drew a careful breath, wincing as his ribs protested, and tried to summon his usual playful words of defiance. “Jacob, I—”

Jacob shook his head and kissed him.

It was sudden and fierce, all of the captain’s performative restraint snapping at once. He moved swiftly forward and his mouth crashed into Christopher’s, cutting his words clean off, stealing breath and thought alike. Christopher startled, then melted into it instinctively, fingers clutching at Jacob’s coat. He felt Jacob’s hand come to rest at the back of his neck, a gentle, grounding touch, holding him there as he deepened their kiss. When Jacob finally pulled away, he did so slowly, reluctant to sever the connection. For a moment longer, neither man moved. Jacob’s thumb brushed once at Christopher’s jaw, a fleeting touch, and then the moment was over.

Christopher understood at once. Whatever had broken loose between them was already contained again, forced back under the rigid control that had become second nature between them. Jacob’s attention had moved away from his mouth, from him, and fixed itself instead his shoulder.

Jacob stepped back, allowing himself a practical amount of space to work. He reached for Christopher’s shirt.

“Arms up,” he said, and Christopher obeyed.

The fabric of the shirt was darkened and stiff with dried blood, which clung stubbornly to the wounds beneath. Jacob guided the movement with a steady hand, slowing when the fabric resisted, pausing when Christopher flinched despite himself. He worked it free inch by careful inch, easing the cloth away from torn skin until it finally gave. When the shirt came loose at last Jacob set it aside.

The wound was now clearly visible under the lantern’s glow. The long, ugly slash cut across Christopher’s shoulder and continued halfway across the smooth plane of his chest. The edges of it were ragged, the surrounding skin blooming with bruise-toned hues, the flesh beneath dark with blood that had slowed but not stopped flowing entirely. Jacob’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing.

Christopher glanced down at the wound and then quickly averted his eyes. His stomach churned at the brief glimpse, and he fixed his gaze on the wall ahead.

“I’ve had worse,” he managed meekly.

Jacob neither agreed nor corrected him. He simply cast him a sideways glance, and that was enough.

Jacob reached for his discarded shirt, tearing an unsoiled strip of fabric from it. He crossed to the desk, where a dark, amber bottle - likely of brandy, Christopher thought - sat. He uncorked it with a practiced ease, soaking the makeshift cloth.

“Best grit your teeth,” he warned, “This will sting.”

Jacob didn’t wait for a response before he pressed the cloth to the wound. Christopher sucked in a breath, knuckles whitening where his hands gripped the edge of the bed.

“Easy,” Jacob soothed.

He worked the cloth along the length of the cut, and the sharp sting eventually settled into a dull, relentless ache. When the wound was clean, Jacob set the cloth aside and retrieved a small leather case from the desk drawer. Inside lay a slightly curved needle and a spool of thread. He threaded the needle with practiced efficiency, his movements precise despite the slight tremor in his hands.

"Try not to move," Jacob said quietly, positioning himself closer. His knee pressed against Christopher's thigh as he leaned in, steadying himself against the ship's gentle sway.

The first pierce of the needle drew a sharp hiss from Christopher. His fingers dug harder into the bed frame.

"Tell me something," Christopher said through gritted teeth, desperate for a distraction. "Anything."

Jacob's brow furrowed in concentration as he drew the thread through. "Like what?"

"Like why you insist on doing this yourself." Another stitch. Christopher's breath came faster. "Surely the ship's doctor -"

"Is likely drunk below deck by now," Jacob finished, his voice tight. "And I trust no one else with this."

With you, the unspoken words hung heavily in the air.

The lantern light flickered as the Marauder rolled lazily over a larger wave. Jacob's free hand came to rest on Christopher's uninjured shoulder, steadying them both. His touch lingered there even as he continued his work.

"Almost done," he murmured.

Christopher watched Jacob's profile - the set of his jaw, the crease between his brows, the way his lips pressed into a thin line with each pull of the thread. There was something achingly tender in his focus, in the careful way he worked to minimize the pain even as he inflicted it.

The final stitch pulled through. Jacob tied it off with deft fingers, then reached for another clean strip of linen from the discarded shirt. He wound it around Christopher's shoulder and chest, his hands brushing against bare skin with each pass. When he secured the bandage at last his palms flattened against Christopher's chest, just for a moment, feeling the steady beat of his heart beneath.

"There," Jacob said softly. "I think you'll live."

Christopher's eyes were beginning to grow heavy, the adrenaline that had sustained him finally fading away now that the worst had passed.

"Come on then," Jacob said, guiding him back against the bed. "You need rest."

Christopher allowed himself to be maneuvered, though he groaned softly as his back met the mattress. Jacob adjusted the pillows behind him carefully, propping him up at an angle that would put the least strain on his wound. His fingers lingered at Christopher's temple, brushing back a strand of golden, sweat-dampened hair.

"The Kraken," Christopher said suddenly, his voice thick with exhaustion. His eyes struggled to focus on Jacob's face. "How did he...the Red Raider, he was controlling it. I saw him, plain as day."

Jacob's hand stilled for just a fraction of a second before resuming its gentle motion through Christopher's hair. "You took a hard blow to the head," he said carefully. "The mind often plays tricks in battle."

"No." Christopher's brow furrowed, fighting against the pull of sleep. "I know what I saw. The beast responded to him. To his cry. Like it was...bound to his will somehow." His words were beginning to slur at the edges. "How is such a thing possible?"

Jacob's jaw tightened. He reached for Christopher's hand, threading their fingers together - a distraction, an anchor, a deflection all at once.

"The Red Raider has many tricks," he said. "Smoke and mirrors to frighten his enemies. You know how superstitious sailors can be."

"But the Kraken - "

"Is a revered creature of the deep," Jacob interrupted, his thumb tracing circles against Christopher's knuckles. "Wild and unpredictable. Perhaps it was simply drawn to the noise. Perhaps the Red Raider is skilled at reading the signs of its presence."

Christopher's eyes searched his face knowingly, even as they grew heavier.

“What do you know, Captain?”

"Rest," Jacob responded curtly. "We can further discuss the Red Raider's theatrics when you’ve had proper time to recover.”

Christopher tried to protest, but the post-battle exhaustion was finally beginning to claim him. In that final moment before he was pulled under, a fleeting thought surfaced. An unbidden image of the Red Raider's face as he’d been slashed. The resemblance to Jacob had been uncanny.

The observation dissolved before it could fully take root, lost to the pull of sleep.

-

“What do you know, Captain?”

Jacob felt the weight of his secret press against his ribs like a physical barrier. He thought of the way that the lightning had answered his desperate call, the feeling of the electric charge building in the storm clouds like an extension of his own will, the power that had thrummed beneath his skin. He thought of his forced meeting with Raider and the truths he'd revealed with such casual certainty. They had chilled Jacob to his very core. He attempted to push those thoughts away, but they clawed at the edges of his mind like a caged animal desperate to make its escape.

Christopher deserved the truth. Christopher, who had thrown himself into harm's way without hesitation, who had kissed him back with equal fervor, who trusted him completely.

But the truth was dangerous. The truth could get them both killed.

Jacob remained there, perched on the edge of the bed, watching the steady rise and fall of Christopher's chest. His thumb continued its absent pattern against the sleeping man’s palm. In the low light, with the ship rocking gently beneath them, Jacob allowed himself this moment of quiet guilt.

He had lied. Not outright, perhaps, but through omission, and that felt worse somehow.

He wanted to tell him. Ached to, but the world had proven time and time again its unkindness to those who wielded power beyond its understanding. And Jacob had seen too many good men burned, drowned, or hanged for far less than what had been stirred within his blood.

He squeezed Christopher's hand once, gently, then settled himself more comfortably beside him on the bed. He wouldn't leave. Not while Christopher's breathing was still shallow with pain, not while the memory of a narrowly avoided loss was still fresh.

Jacob closed his eyes and listened to the sea beyond the hull, feeling its familiar pull. When Christopher woke there would be more questions. When he woke, Jacob would deflect again.

But for now, he would simply keep watch.

***

Fear clutched at Jacob’s throat. Cold, unrelenting fear, sliding like ice through his blood. His palm turned clammy and slick against his sword hilt, as though the leather grip itself had also sprung a nervous sweat. Hair at the nape of his neck flattened against his skin. He was too conscious of the borders of the scarf across his brow, the snug fit of his hat around his skull, the hollow, tinny drum of rain against his leather crown.

Time seemed to hold steady as Jacob took account of each factor in its turn. The drunken tilt of the deck beneath his feet. The raindrops falling in a conflicting slant, setting Jacob off-balance as the whole world became crooked. Horizon, deck, human, rain, they all were a jumble of mismatched angles.

Jacob leaned with the natural balance intrinsic to his body, drawn back into himself. On instinct he let the Ghost Boy—his childhood persona—take over, retreating again to his mind. Back to his lookout perch in a world of black tar rope and netting, crosstrees and swaying yards—the skeletal wooden arms that held sails the way a bird’s bones held its feathers. Balance ran deeper than the wrongness of these angles, after all. It was there in the center of his head, in his off-hand as it poised, waiting, palm down, sensing the pressure shifts in the air. In the balls of his feet as he sank into a fighting stance.

The man lunged, his blade nothing but a flash of steel the same stormy blue as the sky above.

Jacob reacted with equal speed, instinct honing into a needle point as his adrenaline quieted the noisy places in his mind. He batted the blade away with a flick of his wrist, a harsh and abrupt clash of metal.

Then stillness. Watching, waiting.

The Red Raider’s eyes were still an otherworldly milky white behind the scarlet ribbon of his mask. His pupils were gone and his bone-chilling stare was fixed steadfastly on his opponent—though Jacob wondered if he could see at all with that horrific blankness, that empty barren snowfield.

Then he stepped forward with startling speed, another jab aimed straight for Jacob’s heart.

He reacted in turn, a parry and a slash through the air the Raider had been standing in only a moment before. He’d sidestepped with a dancer’s grace, in boots so dainty they might be more fit for an opera than the deck of an enemy vessel.

So he can see. Jacob adjusted his hold on his sword, lest his sweaty grip betray him. He’d been holding back, watching, studying, observing the manner in which this enigma of a man would fight. But then he retaliated, reflecting the same lightning-fast strikes and aiming for the open flaps of the stranger’s long embroidered coat. Anywhere soft and vulnerable, where his blade could meet flesh and blood.

But Red Raider responded in kind, dodging every blow and matching his advances with a vicious accuracy. It was like a dance, as though the two were learning the steps of an elaborate choreography—although they had no teacher, and could only learn it by guessing at the other’s footwork. Matching paces. Forward, forward, back, sidestep, jump as if over a deadly steel skipping rope.

Though Jacob suspected no dance had been performed on as crooked a stage as this, or as disorienting of a playing field.

Those white eyes stared, unblinkingly. The shoes he wore seemed to have earned their merit as perfectly sensible now, given the swordplay style he adapted. The boots were dainty because he was dainty, his movements nimble and almost beautiful in their deadliness.

The thunder rolled above them, as though the heavens were a cavernous box and a colossal marble was rolling within it, picking up speed, crashing against its walls. A metallic scent rose, stirred up by the briny wind. So the storm had been obeying him, then, the winds following the command of his downturned palm. Of his darkened eyes.

Because he knew, just as this stranger’s eyes were milky white, that his were inky black, pupil-less, a void. His eyes were the inverse of the Raider’s. Raider was snow and absence, while Jacob was fathomless dark. An abyss.

He might’ve wondered at their similarities deeper, had he not been pulled back to the fight as the Raider gave a howl and a lunge.

Jacob guarded the blow. The Marauder pitched, sending crewmen and bottles and debris across the deck to collide with the railing.

The beast. It obeyed the Raider’s voice.

There was a waft of death, heavy and pungent, as though the air was made of it. It rolled across them like a mist, saturating clothes, clinging to skin. Then a tentacle as big around as The Marauder’s mast groped blindly along the deck.

The fear raced in earnest, Jacob’s heart like a hammer in his ears. The creature held the hull of the ship like a mother holding a babe, its meaty wet limbs slowly encircling it from all sides. The tentacle flesh was soft, pliant, and the color of a beached whale, decomposing and expanding, exploding its entrails onto the sandy bank. It smelled the same—of something long-dead.

Perhaps the monster had feasted on something beached and rotting and this stench was its breath. Perhaps it had swallowed a whale whole, snatching it from where it floated under a cloud of hungry gulls. Perhaps it had encircled it first, the way its limbs wreathed their vessel now, and dragged it to the depths. Any moment, now, and the Thing would feast again. It would pull them under, crush the ship into pieces as though they were no stronger than an eggshell.

There was screaming all around him, grown men giving up shrieks like abandoned children. Someone was vomiting over the rail. The weight of the tentacle tipped the nose of the ship seaward, raising its hindquarters above the water line.

The Raider advanced again, and in Jacob’s moment of terror, his focus had been pulled away. He was too slow to react this time, and he only deflected the blow enough to redirect it away from an artery. Instead it skimmed his thigh, biting into flesh and opening a white-hot, searing line.

Jacob cried out, a sharp, short bark of shock. But he didn’t have time to acknowledge the warmth and coppery scent of fresh blood on his pant leg, so he returned his concentration to the foe at hand. He couldn’t stop the Kraken from feasting unless the storm built enough to dissuade it. And he couldn’t build a storm if he died mid-tempest.

Christopher was somewhere on the bridge deck, likely holding on to the wheel for dear life. Jacob wouldn’t let this stranger win—not when so many relied on him for their very lives. Not when Christopher watched.

Renewed, Jacob joined the dance, another flurry of movement, of clashing blades and complementary steps. They were matched, adapting to one another’s style and exchanging strikes in rapid-fire. But Jacob was higher, his stance aided by the tilt of The Marauder and granting him leverage. He managed to land a stripe of scarlet across the sleeve of the stranger’s coat.

Then, in a movement so graceful he seemed to walk on air, Raider leapt onto the rail, crouched low for balance, and raced along the banister. He was like a tightrope walker. An acrobat in his fancy, dainty boots.

“No!” Jacob growled, alight with anger as he realized he would lose his advantage. He slashed at the passing ankles, but only met air as the masked man dodged him.

Then there was a hand on his shoulder, using him as leverage as the acrobat cartwheeled over his head and landed softly behind him. Suddenly there was a palm across his jaw and his tricorn fell, clumsily forced off as the back of his skull met an embroidered shoulder. Cold steel flashed toward his throat, which he barely intercepted with his own weapon before it could lacerate him open and bleed him dry. Both swords paused, forming a crucifix, an ‘X,’ locked in a stalemate above Jacob’s pulsating carotid.

“You look familiar. Have we met?” The stranger’s narrow body pressed against his own, his wiry strength trapping him close. There was a laugh in the Red Raider’s voice. Some kind of sweet fruit on his breath. A musical chuckle bubbling up from his throat, “Or haven’t you noticed, yet?”

“Would I know? You don’t even have the honor to show your face,” He panted heavily, taking this short pause in the fight to regain his breath.

“I’ll show you my face if you ask nicely,” He pulled at Jacob’s jaw, exposing more throat, more bare, tender skin for the cutting, “The least you can do is wine and dine me first.”

Another giggle, fruity and fragrant. Childish. Insulting.

Jacob reached back, took the man by the back of the neck, and pulled. He engaged his core, squatted low, and forced the full wiry weight of his opponent off his feet.

The stranger made an undignified yelp as he was thrown, bucked as if by an angry mule, to land flat on his back in a mess of feathers and coattails. His air escaped with an “Oof,” hat dislodged and boots pointing skyward.

Jacob swept up his own hat from where it had spun, abandoned on the deck, then seated it firmly back into place. Dignity restored, he flicked the water from his blade and untied the knot of the scarf around his neck.

He would have to bring out his own fancy tricks.

His opponent was on the floor for a mere moment, but it was enough for Jacob to re-establish the advantage of the high ground, to align a corner of his scarf with the grip of his sword and hold it between leather and palm. Its tail hung long and limp, taking on rainwater and gaining weight. But Jacob didn’t need it for long.

Again, the pair clashed, blades crossing and blazing and feet dancing. But this time Jacob’s scarf flashed white, following his movements in a dizzying halo.

A smile lifted the corner of Jacob’s lips. He could feel Red faltering, losing focus, distracted by the disorienting whirls of fabric. To him, the fabric was just a flapping sail in his periphery. To the Ghost, the sails were friends—something to hide behind, up above the world.

But to an outsider Jacob’s scarf was like a threatened bird bristling its plumage, an animal raising its hackles to appear bigger. Jacob called on nature to come to his aid and became the stinging scorpion tail behind the claws, the big cat behind the reeds. And he could feel it turning the tide in this battle.

“I can crush you right now!” The Raider roared, “I can just say the word and you’ll be nothing but splinters!”

So why didn’t he?

The creature’s tentacle was encircling the mast now, its groping tapered point curling around a bundle of rope, suckers flaring in grotesque symmetry.

“Pull up the mainsails!” Christopher’s powerful voice cut through the stormy din. It sounded far away, a mere echo in the chamber of Jacob’s skull. He was standing at the helm, still commanding in Jacob’s stead, his blonde hair rain-darkened and plastered against his skull, “The storm will ruin them!”

Men were scattering to the ropes, working hard at the rigging. Some were slashing feebly at the slimy meat of the kraken’s limbs. Some others were cowering, waiting for their untimely doom.

The entire vessel groaned at the strain of it all.

“You can save them, Jacob,” The masked man guarded, jabbed, parried, “I don’t have to kill them.”

He used my name, Jacob startled, alarmed. Who was this man, to board an enemy ship alone and attempt to slit its captain’s throat, only to plead armistice when the battle turned unfavorable?

Why wouldn’t he just crush The Marauder and have it over with? He could ride his pet homeward once the damage was done—another conquest to add to his glittering belt.

And how does he know my name?

“Does she whisper to you too, Jacob?” There was a note of desperation there now, as though Raider was throwing this information out in a frantic bid to regain some ground in this fight, “Does the ocean speak to you?”

As intended, Jacob’s heart fluttered as his organs seemed to flip inside him. He hadn’t even told Christopher of this, and now some stranger was dangling it like bait.

Raider saw an opportunity and took it, using the gap in Jacob’s focus to strike. He lunged past the silken scarf, past the grip of Jacob’s sword, and closed in on the center of his bare chest.

Jacob ducked back, tilting the alignment of his shoulders until he became too narrow of a target, steel whispering past his chin. Scarf gone, his shirt left an open ‘V,’ where a smooth triangle of hairless amber skin exposed him from neck to xiphoid. And there, across one peaked pectoral, bloomed another bleeding seam.

It dripped slowly. A shallow gash, then, but it burned mightily. His pant leg was soaked, but it was impossible to tell if it was blood or rain without breaking his gaze on the white-eyed monster before him. And he couldn’t take that chance. He could assess his wounds later, if he made it out of this alive.

The Red Man smiled, pert pink lips parting to show a perfectly neat row of teeth. Around them was a crop of brown facial hair—A combed mustache, a patch beneath his lip, a short groomed beard at the very point of his chin. His skin was amber and without blemish, his lashes long and dark.

Then the white of his irises cleared. For a moment they were only brown, as plain and human as Jacob’s own.

“You really haven’t noticed, yet?”

He did look jarringly familiar. The mask obscured his features, but the wide-set mouth, the eyes that seemed too large for his face, the deep brown pigment in his irises…

Then he blinked and the eyes turned milky again as a defiant roar came from their left. Another sword joined the fray, its owner a protective and furious First Mate.

No, Jacob gasped. Christopher was a fierce fighter, and a formidable foe on any other day. But now Jacob knew how lightning-fast, how dizzyingly dexterous this Red Raider could be. If he himself had already come so close to losing, surely Christopher was no competition.

But if the odds were now two against one, maybe…

It was over before the hope could even quell the sinking feeling in his gut.

Christopher met his blade once, then jolted as he beheld the face of his enemy. For a moment he was suspended there in time, crystalline eyes wide in terror and confusion, sword faltering. His color paled, his shock leeching it away as he made the connection at the same moment Jacob did:

This stranger’s face was a perfect duplicate—A mirror image of Jacob himself.

Raider easily broke Christopher’s guard and struck. Blood sprayed in a macabrely beautiful arc.

Jacob reached for him, an anguished scream tearing through his throat. His fingertips snapped with static. The great marble rolled. The sky darkened. The rain seemed to stop, the droplets hanging, frozen in midair.

Then a crack of lightning split the world before him, his vision going white.

***

His vision returned in spots, then in a telescope wreathed with silver. His hearing was reduced to a chorus of wheeling notes like cicada season in his head, their insect rattle clacking as if exoskeletons and brittle wings were crashing inside his skull. Jacob tugged helplessly at his ear and winced against the constant surging song.

Raider stood there before him, his stance blasé, seemingly unphased by the lightning crack. Perhaps he’d shielded his eyes at the same moment it came, or perhaps he’d simply been protected by the snowy whiteness drowning out the pigment in his irises. Because they’d stayed as glossy and impassive as cut quartz as they scrutinized Jacob’s identical features.

Then that striking mouth twisted into a wry smile, an expression that erased all traces of Jacob’s likeness and replaced it with something sinister.

“I knew it,” The lips formed words in the telescope of Jacob’s vision, but the cicadas drowned out the sound.

Fire burned somewhere behind the Red Devil, illuminating the underside of his jaw and the starched felt underbelly of his cavalier hat. The feathers on his crown seemed to burn as they, too, were haloed in flickering orange light.

Why doesn’t he strike?

Raider could plunge cold steel through Jacob’s gut. He’d fall to his knees then, a mighty Captain brought low as he watched his entrails slither out all over the polished wood of his precious Marauder. The storm would turn docile and die alongside him. Then his crew, each man reduced to a lump of flesh—A feast for a hellish monster.

He’d so terribly failed.

Raider pulled Christopher up by his shirt collar, primly avoiding the blood blooming there across the meat of the First Mate’s shoulder. Jacob’s eyes locked on the vibrant scarlet that flowed with gravity across Christopher’s breast, staining his white linen shirt the color of rose blossoms. It hadn’t been a death blow, then. But no matter—Raider’s sword met the pale skin of his throat.

No.

His only relief was that Christopher was limp and vacant with unconsciousness, head lolling, and wouldn’t feel the pain of his death. He must’ve been knocked back by the force of the lightning strike, having cracked his head against the deck like a heavy bucket being set down too abruptly. Good. Let him die in his sleep, and I awake to watch it. Let it be my penance for my failures.

Jacob fell to his knees, sword clattering hollowly amongst the wing-chatters of the incessant insects in his head. The wind caught his scarf and stole it away. His eyes turned coffee brown again, his defenses stripped. There was nothing to defend anymore.

“Now, since you couldn’t speak civilly without a threat to sweeten the pot,” Raider still smiled, still stared, still spoke in a smug, bright tone, “Allow me to make you a deal.”

Jacob frowned. He’d seen enough on Raider’s lips to piece together his sentence. A deal? When the battle is so clearly lost? He can take what he wants, now.

“I’ll call off my pretty pet. Your man escapes my sword. And all I ask for in return is an audience with the Great Marauder, aye? What say ye?”

He blinked, erasing some of the silver halo in his vision. The words didn’t make sense.

“Just an audience aboard my humble sailboat,” He giggled in that ugly childish way, then gestured to the beast of a ship with all its guns and majesty, bobbing there with the faltering storm, “You and me. Captain to Captain. It’s fated that we should meet.”

As if in accordance with its master, the tentacles of the creature below them poised for his reply. Death caressed the deck as the monster breathed, waiting, ready to crush them like so many cicada husks, should Raider only ask.

Jacob nodded tensely, then hung his head in defeat.

It was over now. What else could he do?

***

Jacob didn’t need to see the approaching ship’s flag to know what it was. He didn’t need a spyglass to know that the flag was stark black, in pristine condition, with a cruciform long sword printed in white in the center. The crossguard bent downward toward the blade in a slight “v”, drawing the eye to the eight-pointed star near the center of the blade, the star’s bottom point extending down its length. Jacob didn’t know the name of the three-masted ship, but he knew in his bones that the symbol proudly taunting him from the masthead would be that damned sword, piercing through the crimson sunrise. The same symbol that had been chasing him, dogging him for weeks. Pursuing him across the vast waters with what could only be nefarious intent.

The ship crackled with unsteady energy, the tendons of its masts and rigging creaking softly as the entire crew tensed. There was nary a sound save the murmurs of the crew, the lapping of the waves against the hull, and the rhythmic tap, tap, tapping of Jacob’s fingers against steel. Beside him, Jacob knew that his loyal first mate was watching him. Studying him. Patiently waiting for his Captain, as he always did. Christopher was on edge, but there was an innate trust hanging in the tension between them. Jacob knew instinctively that if he turned to look into Christopher’s eyes, he’d find those crystalline blues gazing back, as ever present as the sea. Jacob also knew that clouds of worry would be forming in those eyes, just as he could feel the morning air shift before the sky changed her colors.

Jacob had always found the term “calm before the storm” to be a misnomer. The air may be still before a storm but it is anything but calm. It’s heavy and stale and thick with unnatural silence. But Jacob could feel the static charge in the sea air, sense the imperceptible ocean mist that rose to the clouds. The sea itself seemed to hold its breath, swaying gently with the crew. Restless. Waiting. Holding for orders.

Jacob… The waters whispered.

He shifted on the balls of his feet, feeling the sway of the sea. Below the glassy surface, the angry depths were begging to be released. To be unleashed.

Jacob forced a huff of frustration through clenched teeth and the graying clouds matched with a low rumble.

Jacob…

The enemy ship was picking up speed.

Jacob…

His crew was counting on him.

Jacob…

He couldn’t let them down. Couldn’t lose control. Couldn’t…

“Jacob?” A new voice broke through the whispers on the wind, low and gentle. Quiet enough that only he and Christopher could hear it. It grounded him, pulling him from his stormy thoughts, anchoring him to the present.

Christopher cleared his throat and spoke again, “Captain?” His tone was a little less soft this time, more formal. “Your orders, sir?”

Jacob closed his eyes and took a deep breath, shoving his fear and anger so deep that he hoped not even his eagle-eyed first mate would be able to spot it.

“We’re going to run.” He turned to meet Christopher’s patient gaze. “We’ll be outgunned and outmanned if we face a ship that size head on. But we have the wind and speed on our side.” He gestured to the horizon, forming his hand like a rudder to indicate their heading. “We’ll cut to the northeast just before we pass them. By the time they’ve turned around, we’ll have a headstart.”

Christopher gave a tense nod and began to move past Jacob, patting his shoulder as he passed and letting his hand rest just a breath longer than a first mate typically would when touching his captain’s shoulder.

“Steady as she goes and wait for more orders!” Christopher barked to the crew as he walked along the deck, checking that everyone was in position.

The sun had crested over the horizon, kissing the sea and spreading a ruby blush across the waters. The mist grew thicker, the encroaching storm at odds with the vibrant sunrise. A scarlet haze settled around the ship, the mist diffusing the light and washing the crewmen with splashes of color.

Jacob glanced down at his hands, tinged red by the angry mist. For a split second, his nightmares broke through the haze and his hands were drenched in blood. Screams echoed in his ears and fire crackled around the ship, the glow of the flames taunting him. He snapped his eyes shut quickly, blocking out the unwelcome images. Sucked in a breath. Clenched his fists so tight he thought his fingernails may actually draw blood. When he opened his eyes again, they were black and bottomless. Anger and determination hardened his smooth features.

“No blood will be spilled this day.” He whispered into the mist, his dark gaze focused on the approaching ship. Grabbing hold of some nearby rigging, Jacob hoisted himself up the ropes, climbing the ratlines with the speed and grace of a spider traversing its web. He paused halfway up, leaning out over the waves.

The larger ship loomed ahead. Closer every second. So close that Jacob could make out a hull of sturdy, dark oak beneath the crimson fog. So close that he could spot a pop of bright colors atop a pretentious cavalier hat.

So close that behind him on the ship, some of the crew gasped and murmured and fidgeted nervously at their posts.

“Hold…” Christopher commanded the anxious crew, his voice thick with warning.

Jacob paid them no mind. He trusted Christopher to handle the crew. His focus was not on the enclosing ship nor on his own crew. It certainly wasn’t on whatever self-important mercenary was captaining the sturdy oak ship.

Jacob’s focus was pulled to the sea. He watched it, his eyes black as pitch and endless as the waters. He hovered one hand over the waves below, his fingers gently gliding through the breeze as though plucking invisible strings on some grand instrument. He knew the distance between the two ships without anyone yelling out how many knots they were traveling. He could sense them cutting a relentless path toward each other through the waters.

Then he felt it. The hint of a pulse beneath his fingertips. A current just ahead to the left. Just where he knew it would be.

Jacob twisted his lithe form toward the deck and nodded pointedly at Christopher. Immediately, his first mate called out: "Hard to port!”

The ship pitched sharply to the left, narrowly missing their opponent. The dual vessels groaned in protest as they passed impossibly close. The Maurader took to the current just as Jacob had intended, her slight form slipping into position and riding the momentum.

The smaller ship rushed past the brute beside her. A devilish smirk spread across Jacob’s face as he watched his opponent’s crew scrambling to adjust their course, looking frazzled and likely cursing their flea-infested heads off.

A flash of colors caught Jacob’s eye. A flurry of movement. A figure soared through the air between the two vessels, stirring the fog, the tail of a long black coat fluttering behind them. The intruder landed against the web of rigging opposite Jacob, snatching hold of the ratline rungs and quickly finding footholds to steady himself. A stray bit of rope whipped through the mist and swung back toward the passing enemy ship, a loose piece of rigging used as a pendulum swing to launch the stranger onto his ship.

Clouds roiled in the heavens as rage flashed through Jacob’s body like lightning. His free hand sprang to the hilt of his sword on instinct. The man looked up, matching his gaze, and the two stared each other down from diametrically opposing shrouds, Jacob on the port side and the invader on starboard. The sky was a clash of day and night, the storm stubbornly fighting against the sunrise.

A fluffy, scarlet ostrich plume danced tauntingly atop his foe’s cavalier hat, surrounded by a rainbow assortment of smaller feathers and sparkling jewelry. Intricate golden stitchwork adorned the wide brim, wrapping around from the slouched side of the hat and curving along the pinned up side to disappear under the mass of feathers. Swaths of dark curls peeked from beneath the elaborate hat. A blood red mask wrapped around the top half of the man’s face. The stranger flashed a wicked, toothy grin and began to scurry down the ratlines. He had landed further down the opposing shroud, much closer to the ground than Jacob.

Jacob quickly maneuvered to the edge of the shroud’s webbing, deftly positioning his hands and feet around the outer rope. He loosened his grip enough to slide down, abseiling quickly toward the deck. He grit his teeth as the friction from the rough hemp fibers bit his palms. His feet burned inside his boots where they squeezed together against the rope, controlling his descent. He increased his grip just before reaching the bottom, stopping short and finding a quick foothold on the rungs.

Jacob watched as his opposite reached the bottom rung of the ratline he was climbing and hopped down. Knee-high, leather boots hit the deck with a soft thud. The man strode toward Jacob with unhurried steps. He wore trousers the rusty color of dried blood, a dark red that matched the mask obscuring his features. A velvety black coat swished around his knees, the same intricate gold stitching lining its edges as his matching hat.

“Well, I must say,” the masked man approached with his arms raised casually at the elbows and his palms facing up. “This game of cat and mouse has certainly been entertaining.”

“You speak as though you are the cat.” Jacob dropped gracefully to the floorboards. Raindrops speckled the wood at his feet, then quickly spread to encompass the whole ship. “But it is you who are trapped on my ship.”

“Well, well…” the stranger grinned. “It appears this kitten has claws.”

Jacob drew his sword and pointed it menacingly at the stranger. “It appears so. And it appears I’ve cornered a rat.”

“You misunderstand, boy.” The masked intruder widened his stance, one leg sweeping back to put him in a fighting position. His leather-gloved hand rested on his sword hilt in warning. “This is my ocean. My game. And you’ll play by my rules.”

“I have no desire to play frivolous games with you!” Jacob roared, spittle flying from his mouth and blending with the quickening rain. Thunder cracked in the blackened clouds overhead. “I don’t know why you’ve been hunting my ship, but the chase ends today. You can try your luck in the ocean and swim back to your own vessel. Or you can submit to capture and remain in the brig until we make port. It’s your choice.”

Derisive laughter bubbled forth from the man in red and black, the plumes of bright feathers shaking and shifting as his head tipped back in glee. When he leveled his gaze at Jacob once again, his eyes were void of color. The glassy orbs that stared back from the eye holes in the mask appeared almost white, as though his eyes had rolled backward into his skull when he’d tipped his head back.

In a slow, fluid motion, the invader drew his sword. “Such a lack of hospitality.” He began circling to Jacob's left. “You haven’t so much as asked my name and already you’re ordering me to leave.”

“The brig is also an option.” Jacob countered, matching the man’s movements and circling to his right. They held their swords low, ready to charge and swing at a moment’s notice. “Or if you’d prefer, I can toss your corpse in the sea for your crew to find. Let them know what they can expect from threatening The Marauder."

The man chuckled, his disconcerting milky eyes trained on Jacob as the pair moved equidistantly. They circled slowly, the weathered boards beneath them creaking under their boots. The challenger paused when he reached the spot where Jacob had been seconds ago, the port side of the ship now at his back and the starboard side behind Jacob.

“The Red Raider doesn’t surrender.” A malicious grin spread across his lips, highlighting the ominous nature of those otherworldly eyes. “And as I said before, I make my own rules.”

With that, the Raider raised his sword to the sky and opened his mouth wide in a resonant, high-pitched yell that was as musical and mesmerizing as it was jarring. He held the sound in a chilling falsetto, his voice trilling through the briny air.

What in the nine hells? Jacob took a half step forward — ready to charge ahead and slash the man’s vocal chords — then froze. The ship was rocking more than it should. He held a hand out toward the water, under the guise of steadying himself. There was a strange sensation beneath the surface. Something dark. Something that filled his senses with dread.

“Captain?!” Footsteps pounded on the steps to Jacob’s left and a harried first mate appeared in his periphery.

Jacob held a hand out toward Christopher, a visual command to halt, but he kept his eyes trained on the Raider. The high-pitched wail faded, but in its place a low rumbling reached up through the depths and wound icy tendrils of dread around Jacob’s heart.

One heartbeat…

Two…

Three.

The ship pitched sharply as something burst through the water on the port side. Jacob leaned forward to compensate for the sudden shift in gravity, his non-dominant hand reaching out to brace against the floorboards. He righted himself quickly, his stance low, legs instinctively adapting to the rocking of the ship. His head snapped to the side, searching for Christopher, who was holding tightly onto the railing of the stairs. Jacob breathed a tiny sigh of relief, which quickly dissipated when he turned his attention back to the port side of the ship.

The Red Raider clung the rigging with his free hand, waiting out the rocking of the ship with gleeful laughter. Behind him, twisting and writhing out of the depths, was a massive, monster-sized tentacle.

“I told you, Marauder.” The enemy drew out Jacob’s moniker, triumph coating his voice like honey. “This is my ocean. And you’ll play by my rules.”

***

Taglist (click here to join!): @vanfleeter @dazeebean @jake-whatthefisgoingon-kiszka

It was one thing to see the wide expanse of water, stretching as smooth and black as a dyed pane of glass. It was another to hear the relentless watery pull in his head.

The ocean called to him always, whispering his name in the froth. It was in the air. In the metallic, salty tang on his tongue. It was like a mother’s croon. A lullaby sang in a language none but him could decipher. It was usually a comfort to him.

But tonight it made his skin crawl. It reminded him that he was trapped on a lonely vessel, surrounded by fathomless empty space, with only the wood of his ship and the will of his men to keep him afloat.

“Another episode?” A low, silken voice cut the vibration in his head.

Jacob released his breath in a rush of air through his teeth, “I’m well.”

The shape in the corner shifted closer, but its silence spoke like the lullaby—a knowing, calling plea. Jacob.

“I’m well.” He insisted, pulling himself from the floor by his bed, “I do not need your pity, nor do I need your advice, Christopher.”

“Then why does your shirt cling to your back?” Christopher entered the guttering light of the single candle, the flossy, fair tones in his hair mussed into a straw nest, “You’re sweating in the night again.”

Jacob only hunched and tugged his linen smock over his head, exposing his amber skin to the salty air and the wavering candlelight. He shot a dark, warning glance and used the wadded fabric to sponge at his sun-baked chest.

Christopher raised his hands, placating, “I only fear for your constitution, Jacob. We’ve been at sea for our third fortnight and the monotony wears on us all.”

“I’m acutely aware of our progress,” He crossed, naked to the charter table, where weathered maps and tomes lay scattered on its surface, “And keep your fear; I merely become restless.”

“I see,” Christopher wandered nearer. Then his fingertips grazed the slope of one narrow shoulder.

Jacob inwardly cursed as his ensuing shiver betrayed his tension, which was knotted as tightly as the rigging on this groaning, creaking vessel.

“You’re shaking,” He said softly, “For one so stoic and steady, it must mean your dreams are horrors to behold.”

Finally, Jacob wavered. He let his first mate touch him, those wise, leathery fingers kneading the rigid lines of his taut muscles. It pained him to be witnessed in this moment of weakness. He felt unsteady, like a plaster bust shaken from its pedestal—a composed and regal persona so easily crushed.

But Christopher’s calm silence seemed to ease the pain. The constant, windy rhythm of his breaths overtook the humming lullabies in his head. The rumble of a wooden hull tearing through water faded until there was just this—an intake of breath, a whisper of fingertips on skin, an exhale, warm on Jacob’s neck.

“Thank you,” He conceded.

He could almost hear the smile cross Christopher’s face.

“Yes. My dreams are horrors,” He leaned heavily on the table and let his eyes lose focus as the fingertips passed lower and lower down his spine, “And the nights give voice to my darkest thoughts. I cannot rest without them plaguing me.”

Christopher didn’t speak. His silence welcomed Jacob and influenced him to fill it.

So he numbly continued, “Sleep eludes me this night. For hours I tried, but I was only able to obtain a half-sleep, where the lucid nightmares…Where the sounds—they’re around me, relentless. I cannot—” His voice broke into splinters.

“Hush, now,” Christopher laid a palm flat against Jacob’s lower back. Then warm lips touched the flat of his shoulder blade.

The silence returned, and with it the taunting liquid tickle of the ocean in his head, like rain and rushing rivers and deep voids full of dark mysteries. Jacob, it said, Come to me.

“Would you like a kindred soul to warm your bed tonight?” The tender hands coaxed Jacob’s long chocolate hair over one shoulder, opening a new slot of skin to Christopher’s wandering lips.

He let a long pause swallow them both until it felt like a tangible weight.

“I know why you hide your innermost thoughts,” The voice at Jacob’s nape mused.

A foreboding jolt like arctic ice slid down his throat and his mind scrambled for excuses and explanations. But then,

“It’s a heavy load for a Captain to keep a guise of inhuman strength for the benefit of his crew. Your strength steadies all of us, bolsters the faith that you will lead us well,” Another kiss touched the overwarm triangle of skin behind Jacob’s ear, “It’s noble of you.”

He almost audibly scoffed at the word Noble. If only Christopher truly knew the depths in the pit of his soul.

“But you need not hide from me.”

If only.

Jacob leaned into the kisses, but kept his tumultuous silence.

*

In the night Jacob’s eyes had been black. As inky and dark as the ocean under the moon. His hair had been charcoal against the sheets and his skin had been bronzed and smoothed by the dying candle. And as the pair had made love beneath the wavering glass of the Captain’s quarters window, those eyes had been as endless as an abyss.

He’d ached to know what kinds of horrors lived behind those wells of pigment. What secrets Jacob had kept hidden behind the iron wall around his heart. And he’d fucked him then as he’d always fucked him—as though he could crack him open with tenderness and passion alone.

But no. There’d been only a strangled, desperate, “Christopher,” as he’d cum. Then sleep had finally taken his secretive, sacred Jacob far, far away.

Now, those eyes caught the daylight like a pool of spiced rum or a cache of the rarest honey as they scanned a distant horizon. His hair was a sun-lightened and windswept brown, tucked securely beneath a supple leather tri-cornered hat. His billowy shirt and trousers hid the slight, narrow form beneath them—the delicate body which Christopher alone had witnessed—and a scarf sensibly hid the window to his breast, now scattered with love bites.

“We’re making good time,” Jacob said quietly, as though to himself, “The winds are with us.”

His body, having been a trembling and vulnerable husk only hours ago, stood straight as the mast now, resuming its impenetrable front. He was as stoic as a statue, his every thought unreadable.

Well, almost unreadable. Over time Christopher had learned to read his gestures more than his face. He’d learned that an absent scratch at his chin meant Jacob was searching for words. He’d learned that a shift of balance on the balls of his feet meant he was sizing up an enemy and calculating how to strike. Each fidget meant something different. Each motion like a code, were one only wise enough to see it.

Jacob scratched at his chin, “Christopher, I…”

He half-turned, following the line of his captain’s sight.

“What happened last night…”

Christopher leaned against the banister and inhaled the scent of sea spray on the wind. He only waited, knowing that his companionable silence would be enough to coax out the words.

Jacob twisted the signet ring on his finger.

A private half-smile lifted the First Mate’s lips.

The signet ring was an heirloom, its crest so worn and weathered that it was unrecognizable. But it was a physical link to something deep in Jacob’s hidden self, and when he touched it, a crack in his guise would inevitably follow.

“I did not intend to wake you. And I did not intend to be seen,” His face was a wall, but that ring kept circling round and round and round… “But I am glad you were there. It might've been a much darker night had you not come to my aid.”

The ocean seemed to sigh around them and a gust of wind plucked at their clothes. Fine. He preferred to be without clothes anyway. And if fate worked according to his own design, had the two of them been alone on these polished decks, he might’ve made love to this beautiful creature right here against the mast.

But instead he only traced a fingernail along the wood grain of the banister, powerless against the tightening in his gut and the warmth within his trousers. He dared a glance.

Jacob was staggering to behold. Those honey brown pools seemed to swirl with coffee tones and sugary warmth, despite their pensive stoicism. Pert lips and an arrow-straight nose decorated a rounded, paradoxically youthful face, as though his beauty had persisted in defiance of the elements. His complexion had been spared by the sun and disease, by the freckles and burns and peeling skin that befell them all one day or another. He was tan and smooth, unblemished and unwrinkled. Even with the sleepless nights, the harrowing toil on the high seas with all its storms and tantrums, and the long stretches with measly rations, Jacob’s back remained straight where others’ may have bent and broken.

“Child Pirate,”they’d called him in ages past. Then as the years progressed, so had the names. And the mysteries. “Ghost Boy,” after his flighty nature and his tendency to climb the rigging with the dexterity of a spider. “Bonny Mackey,” after the fabled prostitute turned disguised buccaneer, once a legend, then only a campfire tale, and then finally a forgotten children’s story. Coincidentally Jacob’s soft features, high cheekbones, and endless, pained eyes had lent themselves to the legends. But no matter—Christopher let all of them lie and die in their own time.

But the newest and fiercest of names fit him the closest: The Marauder. The name of the ship beneath their feet.

Like her master, she was a majestic vessel, impeccably crafted and dynamically sculpted to cut water and weather any storm. Her decks gleamed, her sails stretched like a blouse over the solid bones of her masts, and her rigging was organized and coordinated like tendons. She’d become like a living being to Christopher, as dependable and strong, yet nimble and graceful as the man who stood before him.

“I was glad to be there,” He finally said, when it became evident that Jacob’s words were spent (I will always be there, he said in his heart).

But Jacob did not seem to hear. His expression soured into a frown and the sun cast lines across his face. His eyes appeared to turn black again as he tipped his face downward, using the brim of his hat to shield his gaze from the golden morning glare. He shifted on the balls of his feet.

“Ship on the horizon!” Scab’s sandy voice roared from the lookout above.

“They came from the East,” Jacob spat bitterly, “They thought to hide in the sunrise.”

“To your posts!” Christopher snapped back into his role as First Mate as naturally as one slips into well-worn boots, “At your stations and await orders!”

There was a scuffle of motion on the lower decks as bleary, half-awake seamen roused one another to Christopher’s order.

“Captain?” He waited, poised for action. The familiar cold clutch of adrenaline began to stir his blood.

“What flag does she fly?” Jacob spoke gently and squinted at the distant speck. His palm ground against the pommel of the cutlass on his belt and his slender fingers drummed against the steel handle—another gesture that meant something in the library of codes in Christopher’s head. It meant he was gathering his wits for a bloody and terrible battle.

“What flag does she fly?” Christopher repeated, raising his voice toward Scab in the crow’s nest, “Can you see it, man?”

“Nay, it is beyond my sight!”

But the lookout needn’t have said anything, because Jacob’s fingers continued to drum. As though he already knew what ship crested the horizon now. His lips moved steadily, with an eerily calm, even cadence, “Does she have two masts or three?”

Christopher swallowed, “Does she have two masts or three?!”

“Three, my Captain!”

“Hell’s Gate,” Jacob cursed, and his fingers locked around the leather grip on his blade.

***