By the time they reached the bow, the Venatrix was drawing to a halt. She bobbed into position touching The Morrigan’s port side, aft of all her sails to avoid getting tangled. From above, the three ships would have formed an imperfect U-shape.

Despite the tension thrumming through his body, there was no attack as he set foot on The Morrigan—all was as he’d observed.

Far too still.

Forming around him, the marines exchanged glances, too well-disciplined to air their concerns, but he could see it in their eyes.

They didn’t like this any more than he did.

“Search the ship. I want Vice and I want her alive.” If he captured her here, there’d be no need to deal with his contact. That would certainly be preferable—pirates made poor allies.

With a hand signal, he summoned the remaining marines. Two men at his side, he approached the two doors leading to rooms below the quarterdeck, one of them presumably the captain’s cabin. The marines checked one door, he the other. Garish decor with an excessive amount of gold decoration and a chandelier—Lords and Ladies!

But there was no one inside.

He kept his face expressionless—it wouldn’t do for the men to see him unsettled—but inside, the wrongness seethed.

As a child, he’d once seen a barrel of eels at the village market, their flesh twisting, slippery, dark. The sight of them in constant movement had haunted his nightmares for years. Now, it felt like those eels writhed under his skin.

“Ser,” a man called from the stairs that led belowdecks, and Knigh strode over, raising his eyebrows in question. “We thought you’d want to see this.”

Knigh glanced around—if he went down there … He narrowed his eyes. The pirates could have put something here to lure him and his men into the bowels of The Morrigan. Into a trap. “What is it?”

“The crew of the Veritas, ser. It looks like they’re bound and gagged in the hold, ser.”

“What? Here?” The Veritas’s men on The Morrigan? Then were The Morrigan’s crew—

Boom. Boom. Boom.

The unmistakable report of cannon.

On instinct, Knigh ducked, but The Morrigan rolled steadily with the ocean’s heave—nothing struck her. That meant—

He ran to the rail, rifle raised.

The Venatrix rocked, holes in her sails, the top of the mizzenmast creaking, falling, crashing. With a splash, it dropped into the sea, lines breaking and whipping.

Smoke rose from the Veritas’s starboard guns.

“To me,” he bellowed as the pieces fell into place. Vice, FitzRoy, and the rest of their crew were on the Veritas. From there, they’d fired a full broadside into the Venatrix, while she’d sat there presenting the largest possible target.

And they’d done it while his forces were divided between two ships.