My diaphragm convulsed, shoving a sob past my lips. A series of choking, wheezing, wet hiccups followed, and I tried to swallow them. Tried to muffle my cries. But I couldn’t. I doubled over and wailed like a pathetic child.

As those wretched sounds met my ears, I clamped my mouth shut.

This wasn’t the ferocious daughter Edric Sharp had raised.

This wasn’t me.

I slapped at the tears on my face and staggered to the balcony. There, I transformed my cries into rage. Snarling and roaring into the wind, I let the ocean snatch away my heartache and bury it beneath the pounding waves.

For the past seven years, I’d lived among men, fighting tirelessly for every inch of respect in a man’s world. I never let their prejudices weaken me. I never swooned, cowered, or submitted in the shadow of masculine strength. I never allowed anyone to see me as anything but a hardened, ruthless pirate captain.

With the exception of two.

I’d let two men inside my very vulnerable, very feminine heart. And they chewed it up, one behind the other.

Hadn’t I always wanted to be just like my father? Well, I was as it turned out.

I’d fallen into impossible love.

Twice.

The hardest lessons left invisible scars. At the rate I was going, that was all my heart would be. Just a twisted, hideous, unfeeling knot of tissue in my chest.

But it wouldn’t kill me.

At age fourteen, I survived the deaths of my parents. At age eighteen, I survived the thrust of a sword in my belly. At age nineteen, I survived the worst pain of all—the betrayal of the man I loved more than all else in the world.

Now, at twenty-one, I would survive this, too.

Somehow, someway, I would escape the madness of this ship, with or without the arsehole who commanded it. But first, I needed medicine. A healthy dose of rum to heal the pain. There was a whole chest of it in the dining cabin.

Grabbing a linen coverlet, I draped it over my shoulders and lit a lantern. Then I trudged through the chambers, past the desk, around the table, and veered toward the coffer of liquor. As I bent to open it, a shadow moved in my periphery.

My blood chilled.

Near the exit, the darkness seemed murkier. I narrowed my eyes. My vision adjusted. My breath stopped short, and my heart took off.

A silhouette sat on the floor, its broad back against the door and head hanging in the clutch of hands.

He hadn’t left.

An eruption of doubt, relief, and distrust ran riot through me. Why was he here? On the floor?

Without his shoes and frock, he wasn’t armored to walk among his men. Perhaps he was too shaken to maintain the elegant veneer he wore beyond that door.

Was he wearing a mask now?