“See you over there, ladies and gent,” she called to her team, surging forward with a fierce grin. Either they were with her, or they weren’t—she was going. She returned that pistol to its holster and in one movement drew the second pistol with her left hand and her sabre with her right.

Muscles springing, she leapt to the bowsprit, across the water, and onto the Veritas.

Scanning the deck, she spotted a thick knot of men and, at its centre, the captain and presumably his first mate. The way the men closest to them lifted their sabres higher with glances over their shoulders said they were the ones behind the attempt to resist The Morrigan.

Take them down, and the battle would be over.

With steel clashing, a shot from her second pistol, and her team at her side, it didn’t take long to work her way towards them. Where she could, she clubbed heads with the butt of a pistol or the hilt of her sword, but by the time she reached the last row of men, her blade wasn’t clean.

“Stand down, gents,” she cried, voice ringing as clear as her blade as she parried a clumsy attack, “and you’ll live to tell the tale of facing Lady Vice.”

Shared glances, wide eyes—they hadn’t realised what ship they faced.

“Come on, lads,” Saba huffed, “surrender.”

“Don’t listen to the she-devils,” the captain growled, “they seek to tempt you with their wicked bodies, their wicked tongues, their wicked wiles.”

“That’s a lot of wicked.” Kicking a short man in the belly, Vice scoffed. “I’d be more worried about our sabres than any of that.”

Lip lifted in a sneer, the captain shoved the poor man forward. “Kill the bitch.”

“Fine.” Vice sidestepped, and Aedan slammed his tattooed fist into the man’s face, dropping him to the deck, groaning. “How about I kill the bitch?” She drew her third and final pistol, levelled it, and shot the captain clean between the eyes.

He blinked, red trickling down his face before his features slackened and he fell.

The breath heaved in Vice’s chest. Enough blood for today. She surveyed the men still ringed around the first mate, some staring at her, others at their late captain.

Just give in.

Mingled cries of dismay, relief, and celebration rose—the latter not only from The Morrigan’s crew.

She swallowed, meeting the blue gaze of the Veritas’s first mate. Please. End this.

He bared his teeth with a yellow gleam.

Steel clanged on the deck as a young man near her team, little more than a boy, dropped his sabre. “I surrender.” He stared up at her, fear, hope, desperation in his dark eyes.

Her heart twisted—the poor kid, had he been press-ganged into this? She’d heard it sometimes happened outside the Navy. Giving him a half-smile, she nodded. Good lad.