The Pirate Queen

Prologue

*Twenty Years Ago*

Wood splinters and stone rained down from overhead as the figure darted through the streets. Cannonballs assaulted the coastline and any building unfortunate enough to have been built upon its rocky coast. Ten dark-hulled ships in the water were responsible for the onslaught and carnage, for delivering the men that ran pillaging and shouting in the streets.

The figure jumped when someone grabbed his arm, yanking him away just as a wooden beam fell from above their heads.

"We have to hurry!"

Edward glared at the figure that had saved him from a crushing death. "Why did you think I was running? To lose weight?" he snapped.

The figure stepped from the shadows, pulling him back up the hill towards the castle glittering on the cliffs despite the violence that raged around it. The woman, wrapped in deep black leather with a hood pinned over her head, dragged him faster. The five daggers strapped to her thighs bounced as she ran, dodging unseen dangers before Edward had even thought to look for them.

"Are you prepared for this?" She asked, vaulting herself over the lower edge of the ruined castle gate. Its purpose had been to keep out the vagabonds now raiding their streets. Now look how well that served them.

Edward glided after her, wincing as he landed too hard on his bad knee. "Of course I'm prepared. You didn't give me much of a choice Sel."

Wicked red lips gleamed in the light as they scampered across the lawn, aiming not for the front doors but the sidewall and a lone, dangling rope hanging from a high window. Edward, Captain to the mastership in the bay below, had been approached by this woman only two weeks ago with a suicide mission to retrieve, as she said, "a treasure beyond your wildest imagination."

Edward Nott hadn't become a pirate for the salty sea air. He'd become a pirate for many secret, guarded reasons, but the highest of them being freedom. Closely following that was treasure. Treasure in the forms of gold, jewels, silks, books, even food.

If Sel said the treasure was here in this castle, then he would get it. She'd said it was worth it. Said there were factors in play he couldn't imagine and that the only way he would ever get the closure he'd been seeking since he ran from home, was to do what she said. It was both blackmail and adventure, how could he refuse?

So he took his ten best ships and set sail for this tiny fortress that had never been breached by pirates in a hundred years. And he destroyed it to climb up a rope.

"Are you shitting me?" He snapped, running the rope over his hands. It was thickly braided enough to hold his height and weight, but he hadn't expected to put in such work.

Sel just waved her hand for him to climb. "I will be right behind you," she drawled in an accent he still had yet to place. Like the breeze rustling through the palm trees right before a hurricane, and the waves crashing against the shore. It modeled her looks perfectly: beautiful, with a haunting cruelty underneath.

"Don't we need to look for guards?" He asked, hesitating.

She tilted her shadowed head to the side in response. Of course he wouldn't have to worry about guards. Somehow, she'd taken care of them.

"I don't know why I agreed to this." He grumbled, but grabbed the rope and started to haul himself up the five stories of the sheer rock wall.

It was grueling work, and he kept getting distracted by the explosions and shouting and screaming coming from the town below. Sel had said to create a distraction, an event so massive all of the attention would be on the town and not on the castle. The order had gone out to all his seconds manning the ships in the bay: the castle goes untouched. The castle was his.