Read Chapter 7: The Powder Room

The storm had scrubbed the sky clean. Two days of hard blue, a following sea, and the *Sea Wyvern* running before the trades like a hound on a scent. Aidan had spent the daylight hours with the crew, splicing rope, sorting shot, making himself useful. His hands were raw again. It felt like a beginning.

Near dusk, as the watch changed and the galley fire was banked, Redman caught his elbow by the mainmast. The man's eyes darted like fish in a barrel.

"Cap'n wants you," Redman said, jerking a thumb toward the quarterdeck. "In his cabin. Alone."

Aidan's gut tightened. Not fear. Caution. The last time he'd been summoned to Darrow's cabin, he'd walked out a gunner with a debt around his neck like a lead collar. What did the man want now?

"Did he say what for?"

Redman shrugged, already backing away. "Didn't say. Just sent for you. Right now." He disappeared toward the forepeak, and Aidan was left with the weight of the locket against his breastbone, hidden beneath his shirt.

He crossed the deck, feeling the eyes of the crew on him. The gossip had spread—*gunner's mate, promoted in a fight, might be next to cross the captain or next to end up on the board.* Half of them probably had coin on which.

The cabin door was a slab of dark wood banded with iron. He knocked.

"Enter."

The cabin was lit by a single lantern swinging from a beam, the light pitching shadows across the bulkheads. Darrow sat at his table—charts scattered, a brass compass held open by a lead weight. The woman stood near the stern windows, her back to them, looking out at the dying sun.

"You wanted me, Captain."

Darrow looked up, and there was something almost like approval in his eyes. It sat uneasily on a face built for suspicion.

"You've proven yourself useful, O'Malley. More than useful." He wiped a streak of ink from his fingers. "I've decided to trust you with something. A precaution, given what's ahead."

"What's ahead, Captain?"

Darrow pushed himself to his feet. He crossed to a section of the cabin's aft bulkhead that Aidan had taken for plain oak paneling. Darrow pressed a knot in the wood, and a section slid aside with a whisper of hidden hinges. Beyond it, a narrow companionway slanted downward, the air spilling out warm and close.

The smell hit Aidan first. Powder. Oil. Iron.

"After you, Gunner."

Aidan went. The ladder was steep, the space tight, and the treads were worn slick. Lantern light from above painted his way down. At the bottom, the ship's true heart lay open.

It was a low-ceilinged compartment, barely tall enough to stand in, packed from sole to beam with custom racks. Powder casks, neatly marked. Wooden cases filled with canvas powder bags. And along the aft wall, a rack of shells unlike any he'd seen in the King's service.

They were iron, shorter than a man's arm, with a threaded nose plug and a fitted collar of copper wire. The black powder in his vial—he'd never worked out what the burn had done to it, only that it had left two men raving for hours. These shells were built for something worse.

Rumored. Never documented. He'd heard stories from old gunners in the navy about shells that could bloom fire, others that could fill a deck with smoke dark as ink.

A table stood at the center of the room. A map was laid across it, rolled at the edges, weighted by a pistol. Aidan stepped closer before his brain caught up with his feet.

The coastline was familiar. Jamaica. Spread flat with its harbors and leeward gaps. A hand-drawn circle marked a cove not far east of Port Royal, the land broken by a river delta and a chain of hills running down to the shore. A second mark, cramped and red, sat over the town itself—some building drawn in with scratchy ink. Beside it, a notation in Darrow's hand: *Governor's vault. Pressure plates in the great hall. Tides favor the second hour after full dark.*

Aidan's blood chilled.

"So you understand," said the woman's voice.

He hadn't heard her descend. He turned. She stood at the foot of the ladder, framed by the light above, her face half-shadowed. She'd shed her dark cloak for a man's shirt and breeches, practical and severe. In the gloom of the powder room, with the shifting lantern light, she could have been carved from the same iron as the shells around them.

Aidan forced his voice level. "Understand what?"

"You're not a fool, Gunner." She stepped past him, moving to the map, and her fingers brushed the circle above Port Royal. "The Colony's treasury is not a Spanish treasure ship. It's guarded, built into stone, with timed pressure plates in the approach hall—the sort that release a discharge of the powder you carry." She looked up at him. "We need someone who understands ordnance. Not a pirate who can load a cannon blind."

"You mean someone who can disarm a trap."

Darrow's voice came from the ladder. "I mean someone who can build us a way in."

Aidan turned. Darrow descended into the compartment, a lantern in hand, casting long shadows.

"The vault was designed by a military engineer who studied under the same doctrine as your navy, O'Malley. Traps driven by black powder. Plates that must be loaded, balanced, defused. The captain has a map, but maps don't spring shut and kill a man." Darrow set the lantern beside the map. "You've handled powder. You've shown you can think under fire. I need you to think."

"Rob the colonial governor's treasury." Marcus would have called it piracy of the highest order. Except they were pirates. 'The governor's vault'—if Darrow had his way, they'd set off a blast the governor's men could hear for miles.

"Take it," the woman said softly. "Not rob it. It is not his. It was my husband's family's gold before the Crown stole it."

Darrow gave her a hooded look but said nothing.

Aidan looked from the woman to Darrow, then down at the map. The entrance to the vault. The layout of the great hall. The governor's vault was about as well-protected as a place could be.

"Why are you showing me this?" Aidan asked. "You've kept this close. You wouldn't trust a man with a map unless you trusted him with your life."

"I've survived this long by not trusting men," Darrow said, and the edge in his voice was iron. "I trust usefulness. Your usefulness earns you access. But it does not earn you questions." He reached out and rolled the map closed—a firm, deliberate gesture. "We reach Tortuga in two days. There, we take on the last of what we need. Then we're done with the sea and the waiting and the sailing for gold we can already taste."

Aidan tried to read the bastard's face. The captain was outnumbered—that was clear. If the governor's vault was a well-guarded fortress, they needed someone who could get them in, and the woman had made plain she had her own plan. But he didn't know if the plan was Darrow's or hers.

The woman met his eyes for an instant. There was something in them. A warning, he thought. Or a plea.

"Return to your duties," Darrow said. "You'll have your instructions when we raise Tortuga."

Dismissed. Not asked. Told. Aidan climbed back toward the deck and the cool night air, hands sour with sweat.

Then, as he reached the deck, he realized: Darrow hadn't pinned him down about the vials—didn't ask directly if any had survived the captain's order to destroy them all. The old man suspected something, but he was keeping it close until he chose his moment. And the woman had known what landfall meant. Her words in the powder room had not been meant for Darrow. They had been pitched to him.

A warning, or a test.

Either way, he'd need to decide which side of this vault he meant to walk on.

And he was running out of sea.