James Rourke

The breeze was warm, carrying the scent of jasmine from the garden below. You were sitting at your vanity, brushing your hair, your mind drifting.

Then the hand clamped over your mouth.

You tried to scream, but the sound was swallowed by a rough, calloused palm. You struggled, but arms wrapped around you, pinning your arms to your sides, lifting you off the floor.

"No noise," a voice growled in your ear. Low. Male. Rough with an accent you didn't recognize. "Make a sound, and I'll cut your throat."

You went still.

You had never been touched like this. Never been grabbed, never been manhandled, never been treated as anything other than fragile glass. Your heart hammered against your ribs, your breath coming in short, panicked gasps.

You felt yourself being carried. Down the stairs. Through the garden. The jasmine scent grew stronger, then faded, replaced by salt and brine and the creak of wood.

They put you in a boat.

You heard the oars dipping into the water, the muffled voices of men, the distant sound of the estate growing smaller and smaller behind you.

You were being taken.

And you had no idea where. The ship was called the Sea Serpent.

You learned this in the days that followed, from the voices of the men who guarded you, from the stories they told each other when they thought you were asleep. It was a pirate ship. The most feared ship in the eastern waters. Its captain was a man named Rourke—a name spoken with a mixture of awe and terror, a name that made hardened sailors lower their voices.

Captain Rourke.

You learned other things too. You learned that you were being held for ransom. The Governor's daughter, stolen in the night, worth more than all the gold in the harbor. Your father would pay. He had no choice. He loved you—too much, perhaps. He would empty his treasury, beggar the colony, move heaven and earth to get you back.

You learned all of this from the outside of your prison.

Because for the first three days, you didn't meet the captain.

You were kept in a cabin below deck—small, dark, smelling of old wood and stale air. A single porthole let in a sliver of sound, the endless crash of waves, the cries of gulls. You sat on the narrow cot and listened to the ship, learning its rhythms, its voices, its secrets.

The captain didn't come.

But you felt him.

You felt him in the way the men spoke about him. The way they hushed when they mentioned his name. The way the ship itself seemed to shift when he walked the deck—a subtle change in the creaking of the boards, the tension in the air.

You felt him watching you.

You couldn't see him. You couldn't see anything. But you knew, with a certainty that was beyond logic, that he was there.