Page 48 of Vengeance of the Pirate Queen

I don’t want to be stuck in this tiny room with him, but I can’t pinpoint why, and that frustrates me more than anything else. He’s different, I remind myself. Things don’t have to be weird around him.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. “Do you mourn the fallen?”

“Of course I do, but these wounds are deeper than that.”

“Tell me.”

He looks up. “Is that an order?”

I gentle my tone. “Tell me, if you want to. I’d like to understand.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m your captain, and I care about your well-being.”

“You’re exhausted and ready to drop.”

“Not anymore.” I realize the words are true as soon as they’re out. My body might be ready to never move again, but my mind is alert. Ready to fix another problem.

“Captain—” Kearan starts.

“Are you scared to tell me?”

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

“I don’t think you actually want to hear my petty traumas.”

“Yet I’m telling you I do. You going to call me a liar?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Then out with it.”

He heaves himself into the chair in front of my desk. It looks too small for him, but he doesn’t complain. He’s probably used to everything being too small for him.

“You were there when I told Alosa I had sailed this way before,” he starts.

“I remember.”

“I wasn’t alone. There was a girl.”

“Parina,” I say.

Kearan looks up, startled to hear her name from my lips.

“You talk in your sleep,” I say by way of explanation. When I was ordered to watch Kearan aboard theAva-lee, I saw him do and heard him say all kinds of things. But one name he always repeated. At least, he did before he quit drinking. I’ve never heard him say her name since then.

“I thought she was the love of my life,” he says. “How fanciful we can be when we’re seventeen.”

I don’t point out that I was seventeen just over a month ago, but he seems to realize his error immediately.

“I meant no disrespect. We all age differently, and I was … different then.”

“None taken.”

“Good. Like I said, I thought she was the love of my life, but she … started taking on with a different lad on the ship. I caught her at it, and I ended things. That was hard, but not so hard as when she died.”