Free Queen Of My Nightmare (Uncharted Secrets, Book 2): Endless Horizon Pirate Stories by Cristi Taijeron Page B

This friendship is unfair as they come.”
    My heart sank in my gut. Frozen stiff where I sat, I listened as Mason thanked his one-armed friend for the whores. From the sound of things I imagined the men sitting down at the table with the women draped all over their laps. Someone started playing a fiddle, tobacco smoke drifted down the hall. I was certain cards were being played, and it was also dreadfully apparent that clothes were coming off of the whores. There was talk about tits, there were jokes about cocks, but there was nothing funny about the hellish fire brewing in my blood.
    Standing up, I began to pace, wondering what I should do. Just as I opened my mouth to talk to Feather, I heard a glass get knocked off the table. It broke. Like my heart.
    “Let me get that,” one of the sluts purred.
    When Mason said, “Why don’t you just stay down there,” I imagined the terrible reasons he’d want to keep her under the table. Her slutty giggles only intensified the boiling rise of my hatred.
    My first reflex was to bust through the door like I did at La Vie en Rose, but I thought better of it. Mason promised me that night that he would never hurt me again, and if he was not going to stay true to his promise, I would. I would never let him hurt me again.
    After having that dream about Thomas, the meaning of true love was ringing clear in my mind, and this wasn’t it. Thomas never would have stayed in a room with half naked women prancing about. Then my memories of the quick, dirty sex Mason had with me flashed through my mind. Feeling like nothing more than one of his tramps, I shook my head in disgust. “You know what, Feather? I don’t need this shit. I am a strong, confident woman, and I have a skill to offer. I am not just Mason Bentley’s bitch, I am a sea artist, and I am rich. I can make it on my own in this world.”
    I tightened the band around my breasts. I darkened the kohl under my eyes. Beyond just wrapping my hair in the black fabric, I also donned my black cloak. Topping my dark and foreboding disguise with my feathered tricorn hat, I gathered as much gold as I could fit in my duffle, and then wrote Mason a letter. Six of them, to be exact. With the giggling whores annoying me in the background, I messed up my words so many times that I finally settled on something painfully simple. Something that made the letter to my mother come across as detailed and significant.
     
              Mason,
    Thank you for everything. I will never forget you.
    Midnight
     
    After drawing my new signature at the bottom, I rolled up the parchment and left it on my pillow. Instead of finding the lost young girl whose heart he thought he could break a hundred times, he would find that shitty little letter. Slipping into the hall, I braved the nerve to peek into his cabin. What I saw assured me that I was doing the right thing. Two topless sluts were dancing together, and I saw two men with tramps on their laps. One looked completely naked. Though I could not see Mason, I could hear him laughing. And as one of the dancing sluts swayed in his direction, I tucked Feather inside my bag and we ran away.
    Slipping down the gangway without being noticed, I hurried across the deck and made my way down the ill-lit dock alone. Tortuga. This was my start. I had noticed how terrible this place was on my last visit here, but facing it alone was quite a different story. I was brave now. Certain that I could not encounter anything worse than the hell I had seen during that god-awful invasion, I wandered through the smelly crowd towards the lights of town.
    The scenery was as nasty as ever, but the clashing of various crews set an even higher level of tension. It felt as if an explosion could ignite if anyone bumped into each other too hard. And with that thought, someone bumped into me.
    Drunkenly, he sloppily growled, “Get out of my way.”
    I growled right back at him. Under my hood and hat I was certain he only saw my