Flint waited until they were alone before speaking.
It was the closest thing to courtesy either of them could still afford.
Outside, Nassau groaned beneath the weight of its own hunger: crews demanding pay, merchants demanding protection, cowards demanding certainty from people who had never been given any. The island had always been a living thing, half-paradise, half-wound, and now it seemed determined to bleed from every seam. Men whispered in corners. Alliances shifted with the tide. Every promise had begun to sound like a threat wearing better clothes.
Inside, there was only Eleanor Guthrie, him, and the terrible little truth that both of them had built too much together to pretend this was simple.
There had been a time when Flint would have trusted her with more than coin, more than cargo, more than strategy. He would have trusted her with the shape of Nassau’s future. Perhaps that was the cruelest part. Trust, once broken, did not vanish. It remained there, sharp as glass underfoot, making every step more careful than the last.
His gaze held on her, hard and tired, the kind of tired that came from fighting too many wars at once and realizing one of them had a familiar face.
“You and I both know this place does not survive on sentiment,” he said, voice low and controlled. “But I had hoped, foolishly perhaps, that there was still enough trust between us not to require knives at the table.”
He took a step closer, not threatening, but unmistakably present. Flint had never needed volume to fill a room. His silence did half the work for him.
“You know what they’ll do if they sense division between us. Not suspect it. Sense it. That will be enough.” His jaw tightened faintly, the only visible crack in the stone of him. “I have lost ships. Men. Fortunes. Causes that might have changed the world if the world had been less eager to rot.”
A faint, humorless smile touched his mouth, gone almost as soon as it appeared.
“But I find I have very little patience left for losing allies who know better.”
He let that settle between them, heavy as cannon smoke.
“So whatever quarrel you think you have with me,” Flint said, eyes sharpening on hers, “have it now.”
