“Shall I help you clean up?” Reynolds rehung a Caribbee chart tapestry on the wall and rubbed his forehead. “Or continue the search topside?”

“It can wait until sunrise. All of it. Get some sleep.”

“Will you?” He opened the door and glanced back at me.

Would I sleep? With my husband shackled just a few levels beneath me?

I gave a wan smile. “I’ll try.”

Sleep, as it turned out, proved as challenging as staying away. Priest was the flame to my moth-addled head. Every thought, every emotion, fluttered toward him, incessant. Restless. Destined to die a disgraceful death.

I waited five eternal hours before I emerged from my cabin.

In the faint light of dawn, I ordered a ship-wide search for the compass. As Jade sailed farther away from Jamaica, the crew scrambled to locate the prize, motivated by the extra ration of food I promised to the man who found it.

Leaving them to it, I descended below, beneath the galley, crew’s quarters, lower deck, and deeper still, through the hatch of the bilge.

At the bottom of the ladder, his voice—deep, self-assured, elongating the vowels of his Welsh accent—greeted me from the shadows. “I’ve been expecting you.”

I lit the lantern on the wall, squared my shoulders, and turned to face him. “Tell me about the scars.”

His head tilted, his expression momentarily unguarded and decisively mean. Just as quickly, his features blanked. A blatant refusal to talk.

The iron shackle at his ankle connected to the wall by a heavy chain. He didn’t bother rising from his sprawl in the corner, knowing I wouldn’t step within his reach.

“Were you tortured by someone?” I pulled an empty cask from the stores of water and used it as a stool to sit. “Or were you caught in a battle? A fire at sea?”

His jaw flexed, and he looked away, presenting a distinguished, angular profile the likes of a man born to the upper class. But an aristocrat he was not.

He ate with the same knife he killed with. Kissed noble ladies with the same mouth that spat on their respectability. And conquered his enemies with a brutality that would never be found among echelons of the British government. He was proud to be a commoner and wielded it well, like my father.

Except my father hadn’t been a lying, cheating husband.

The wound on Priest’s head looked clean. No bandages or stitches needed. Perhaps I should have hit him harder.

His eyes shifted back to mine, and his mouth twisted, sensually, cruelly, provoking memories of its ruthlessness. I had an unnerving suspicion he was aware of the barest lift of my breasts, the slightest shift in my shoulders, every minuscule twitch I made to compensate muscle fatigue and discomfort.

Yet he spoke with cold, unflappable indifference. “You’re still angry.”

“You’re still an arsehole.”

“You didn’t sleep a wink last night.”

“I certainly—”