Read Chapter 5: A Stranger's Locket

The Spanish merchantman rode low in the water, her decks still slick with blood and salt spray. Aidan worked alongside the other men, stripping her of anything worth coin—rope, canvas, nails, the brass fittings from her helm. The Sea Wyvern’s crew moved with practiced greed, but Aidan’s hands found their own rhythm, sorting through the dead officer’s quarters with a detachment he’d learned in the navy.

The cabin smelled of gunpowder and fear. A Spanish lieutenant lay sprawled across his cot, throat cut clean. Aidan had seen enough death to spare the man a second glance. He pulled open a sea chest, rifling through folded shirts and a worn Bible, looking for anything the captain’s men might have missed.

His fingers brushed against something cold and smooth.

A gold locket, small and unassuming, tucked into a false seam at the bottom of the chest. Aidan lifted it, feeling the weight of it in his palm. The case was finely worked, a filigree of vines and tiny flowers etched around the rim. He pressed the catch and the lid sprang open.

Inside sat a miniature portrait of a woman. Dark hair, dark eyes, a sharpness to her jaw that suggested defiance rather than beauty alone. She wore a deep blue gown with a lace collar, and there was something familiar in the set of her mouth.

Aidan’s breath caught.

He’d seen that face before.

Three nights past, in the shadowed passage outside Darrow’s cabin, he’d glimpsed a woman slipping through the door. She’d been hooded, half-hidden, but the candlelight had caught her profile for just a moment. The same dark hair. The same stubborn chin.

Now she stared up at him from a dead Spaniard’s locket.

A shout echoed from the deck above—someone hauling a cask of wine. Aidan closed the locket and slipped it into his pocket, his heart hammering a steady, guilty rhythm. He told himself it was nothing. A coincidence. A Spanish officer’s sweetheart who happened to share a passing resemblance to a woman Darrow had stowed below.

But his hand stayed pressed against his thigh, guarding the weight of the gold.

---

They finished stripping the prize by nightfall. Darrow ordered the merchantman scuttled, her hull opened below the waterline, and the crew watched her settle into the dark as if she’d never existed. Aidan kept his face empty, but his mind churned.

The locket burned against his skin all evening.

He helped furl the sails, oiled the swivel guns, and pretended not to notice Vincente watching him from the rail. The man had a way of seeing too much. Aidan had learned to keep his own counsel under navy discipline, but pirates were a different breed—they read silence as secrecy, and secrecy as a threat.

He was still awake when the crew turned in, lying in his hammock in the crowded berth, the locket clutched in his fist beneath the blanket. The portrait’s painted eyes seemed to follow him even in the dark.

A hand shook his shoulder.

Aidan came up swinging, but the man caught his wrist—Redman, one of the deckhands, his face a pale moon in the lamplight.

“Easy, gunner,” Redman hissed. “Come see.”

“See what?”

Redman’s grin was crooked, half-drunk. “The captain’s lady. She’s on the move again.”

Aidan hesitated. The locket was warm in his palm. He tucked it into his shirt and followed Redman through the narrow passage toward the stern.

They crouched in the shadow of a water cask, peering through a gap in the bulkhead toward the captain’s cabin. The door stood ajar, lamplight spilling across the deck.

And there she was.

The woman from the portrait. The woman from the passage. She moved with the quiet purpose of someone who knew every creak and groan of the ship, wearing a plain grey gown now, her dark hair loose about her shoulders. She paused at the door, glanced back over her shoulder, and Aidan saw her face full in the light.

It was her. No doubt now.

“Spanish captain’s widow,” Redman whispered, his breath sour with rum. “Word is Darrow pulled her from the wreck of her husband’s ship off Hispaniola. Kept her hidden ever since.”

Aidan watched her slip inside the cabin and close the door.

“Her husband’s ship,” he repeated. “What was its name?”

Redman shrugged. “Something grand, I don’t recall. She’s got gold, though—that’s what I heard. Darrow’s waiting for her to lead him to it.”

Gold. Aidan thought of the locket in his shirt, of the Spanish lieutenant in his cabin with his throat cut. The man had been an officer, not a captain. But war had a way of blurring such distinctions.

He returned to his hammock, but sleep would not come.

The locket seemed to pulse against his ribs, and in the dark he pulled it out again, tracing the portrait with his thumb. The woman had a husband, a dead officer who’d carried her likeness into battle. Now she was closeted with a pirate captain in the middle of the night, and Darrow had a reputation for collecting debts.

Aidan had heard the whispers about Landon, the former captain whose name had been scratched from the board. Killed as a traitor, Jonas had said, though his voice had carried a note of doubt.

What had Darrow promised this widow?

And what would he do to her once the promise was no longer convenient?

---

He slept eventually, fitfully, and woke to grey dawn and the cry of gulls. Tortuga lay two days off the bow, a smudge of green on the horizon. The crew moved with new energy, talking of rum and women and the freedom of the shore.

Aidan found Jonas at the galley fire, stirring a pot of salted fish.

“The woman,” Aidan said, keeping his voice low. “The one the captain keeps below. She’s the widow of a Spanish captain?”

Jonas’s spoon paused. He looked at Aidan with wary eyes.

“Who told you that?”

“Redman.”

Jonas grunted. “Redman talks too much.” He stirred the pot again. “She’s more than a widow, lad. She’s a key. Darrow’s been chasing a prize for months—a treasure that belongs to the governor of Trinidad. She knows where it’s hidden. Her husband was the only man trusted with the secret.”

Aidan felt the locket grow heavy against his chest.

“Her husband died defending it,” Jonas went on, his voice dropping to a murmur. “Darrow found her mourning on the beach, promised to help her avenge her loss. Promised her a share of the gold.” He laughed, a dry, bitter sound. “Promises from Darrow are worth less than spilt rum.”

“What happens when she tells him what he wants to know?”

Jonas’s eyes met his, dark and knowing. “Then her name goes on the board, same as Landon’s. Same as any man or woman who outlives their use to him.”

Aidan stood very still. The locket was cold against his skin, and he thought of the woman’s painted eyes, her defiant jaw. She didn’t know what waited for her. She thought Darrow was her salvation.

But Aidan knew better. He’d seen the board. He’d seen the names, scratched out one by one.

He slipped his hand inside his shirt, fingers closing around the locket. The Spanish officer had died with this against his heart. Whatever the woman was, whatever she knew, she was walking into the same trap.

“Gunner,” Jonas said softly, “whatever you’re thinking, unthink it. Darrow’s ears are everywhere on this ship.”

Aidan nodded, but he did not put the locket away.

He kept it close, a silent witness to a secret he didn’t yet understand. Tortuga was two days out. Two days to decide what a disgraced gunner owed to the widow of a man he’d never met.