Page 16 of A Captain So Callous and Cruel

Itake my precious time eating. Drawing out the moments because I know what might come next.

Not might, Hali. Will.

The thought makes me queasy. I turn my attention to the table, trying out the variety of dishes. There’s a plate filled with thin cuts of meat, and I go to it first. I’m all too aware that Captain Erickson is watching me, his gaze riveted to my every move.

“Do you like it?” he asks quietly as I chew on the meat.

I smile weakly at him. I know I’m supposed to be shy, but he watches me so intently, I’m afraid of changing my expression. I don’t want to try too hard. He might sense the shifts in my demeanor and figure out my ruse.

“I like it very much,” I say kindly. “Thank you.”

“There mustn’t be fatty cuts like that on Morda, I surmise.”

“None at all. A lot of chooks, some fish…”

What else do they eat on Morda?

I’d barely been on that shithole island for a couple of days before Kai and I had received word from a bootlegger of the ship’s path. We chased after it knowing it would dock at Morda, and so when we got there, we hid in an abandoned home on the edge of a forest. Kai had packed us a lot of dried fish and cheese; at night, Kai would slip out and scout the island, eavesdropping on conversations to gauge what was going on. He’d mentioned how gross the food was. How the majority of the residents were male fugitives that enjoyed fucking the whores and getting rowdy at the bar. We made sure not to surface during the day until news spread of the Captain’s arrival.

Kai and I spent so much time in the squalor that we were in. He’d kept me warm, fed, and doted on me with what he could find.

Goddess, I love him.

Not for the first time, I wonder what we are doing here. It’s hard to remember the goal, but then I look up and I’m here, in the flesh, sitting across from a notorious man who has left behind nothing but turmoil.

Maybe Kai had been right about leaving after all.

“What about you?” I question next, keeping my voice small. “What’s the food like where you live?”

The Captain leans back in his chair. “Elegant.”

I blink, unsure how to respond to that. “Oh?”

“Fancy,” he explains. “Do you understand what I mean?”

“Food that’s pretty to look at?”

“The whole kingdom is like that. Unblemished, beautiful, utterly obsessed with perfection…” He pauses, flexing his jaw as a look of disdain passes over him. “It’s better out here, in the sea.”

“You like the ocean?”

“It beckons me.”

Now I’m intrigued. These aren’t the villainous sort of answers I expect. Tilting my head to the side, I study him. “It beckons you how?”

Erickson grabs a fork and stabs it into a piece of meat. He raises it up to his face, spinning it around. “I like what it gives me, Red.”

The riches he pulls from its depths, he means.

Like the tails of sirens…

I don’t taste the food anymore. My eyes blur with emotion as I recall my ocean home pillaged and destroyed under his command.

It was most certainly a villainous answer, Hali.

“Is that why you don’t go home?” I wonder, unable to stop myself. “So they don’t see that look in your eye, Captain?”

Now his eyes shoot up to meet mine. “What look do you see?”

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