Unable to use my eyes, my limbs, or my voice, I held the worst of it inside. The edges of my mind withered. My belly filled with liquid fire. My muscles moved with the speed of molten lead as my bones and joints crumbled like crushed stone.

Three dead women lay in the hole only a few feet away with ungodly bruises covering their thighs. I now knew exactly how they’d acquired those injuries. With every agonizing second, I felt the skin, tendons, and vessels in my own legs smash and break against the barrel.

He’d hurt those women here. Just like this. He’d hurt them until they’d died.

Every moment beneath him devastated more flesh, thrusting me deeper, further into a place where the spirit stopped living. The pain was of the lowest, most wretched kind, the anguish so constant and complete it became the only thing that existed.

I took a breath. Breathed again. It was all I could do, and so it was all I focused on. I breathed through intervals of him finishing and starting again. Each inhale was a grapple for sanity, each exhale a stumble to retain it.

My tears gradually dried, my body too exhausted to produce them. But I didn’t stop breathing.

I was a pirate captain. The ferocious daughter of Edric Sharp. If my tormentor meant to break me, he would need a sharper, stronger, more significant weapon than his body.

That was what I told myself.

Amid the pain, time moved at an agonizing pace. Sometimes it didn’t move at all. But eventually, he gave a final heave and walked away, his footsteps retreating up the ladder and beyond the hatchway.

If there was any relief to be had, I didn’t feel it. He’d left me on the barrel, drenched in his sweat and other fluids. I couldn’t move, couldn’t see, the rag in my mouth softened by spit and tears.

I lay there for an infinite eternity, forced to think about every inch of flesh he’d touched, every muscle he’d bruised, every opening he’d stretched and bled. Time became a torture on its own, until I lost track of it, sinking in and out of consciousness.

At some point, the two lieutenants returned.

They removed the gag and blindfold and pushed me to my knees on the planks. Eatables were offered. Salt fish and water.

Nausea rose at the sight of it, my stomach refusing to accept sustenance. But I didn’t know if or when the offer would come again. So I choked down the food and drank the fluid without tasting it.

Then they returned me to the black hole, locked my chain to the wall, and left me with the rotting, nidorous corpses of my predecessors.

I curled up on my side as much as the shackles allowed, shaking in the rancid heat. And I slept.

Until they came again.

36