And there it was, the deep, sucking hole inside me, trying to drag me into its misery. I missed my parents with soul-bleeding agony. If only they were here now. I needed their counsel, their strength, their love.

“I made a promise to my father.” I blinked back the tears before they formed and raised my chin. “If I ever married—”

“You promised him I would be a man of his fortitude and spirit. A man who loves you above all else. Only you. And we shall be blinded by our love for life and beyond the ends of the sea.”

I snapped my mouth shut and stared at him in shock.

He remembered? How? It’d been so long since I’d whispered that promise into the warmth of our post-coital cuddle.

“You said those words the night Murphy finished your bed.” He directed his gaze across the cabin, studying the ornate box bed that had been built into the wall.

Under Priest’s orders, the carpenter, Murphy, spent weeks constructing and engraving a bed large enough to sleep a pirate captain and her lover.

The ubiquitous structure stood like a separate chamber in the wall, with its fanciful wood carvings, lavish trim, and rich, heavy curtains that fell over the opening, enclosing the massive bed on all sides. Woven straps supported a mattress that was generously stuffed with down and topped by linen sheets and wool blankets.

I would’ve never commissioned such a haughty luxury for myself. Murphy had better things to do than chisel decorative frippery. But it had been a gift from Priest, one he’d worked on right alongside the carpenter.

It had been our first night in the new bed. We had thoroughly broken in the mattress and fallen into a happy, sated embrace when I voiced the promise I’d made to my father.

The man who had held me so sweetly that night—the notoriously mercurial, hot-tempered Feral Priest—now watched me through a cloud of stormy thoughts. I knew an accusation was coming before his eyes narrowed into a condemning stare, causing my heart to catch.

“How many men have you taken to that bed?” The promise of brutality roughened his voice and altered his breathing.

I debated the best response, and my silence made it worse, further enraging him. Reddening his face. Whitening his knuckles. Visibly shaking him.

He was scared, if such a thing were possible.

As much as I wanted to crush him with claims of orgies and passionate affairs, I couldn’t lie to him. It wouldn’t get my compass back, and I refused to sink to that level of vindictiveness.

But the truth made me feel small and beaten.