Salt on my Tongue

CHAPTER 1 ~ Sedna

The sea is wrong.

I feel it the way another woman might feel a hand sliding over her throat in the dark: sudden, intimate, impossible to ignore.

I’m standing on the quarterdeck of the UMA Resilient at dawn watch, coat buttoned to the chin against the wind, when the ocean beneath us forgets how to behave. The swell flattens as if someone has pressed a hot iron across it. The wind dies mid-breath. White caps disappear as quick as an exhale.

Every sailor on deck freezes with me. We have all learned to listen for that silence.

Lieutenant Margrave is the first to speak, voice low. “Captain?”

I don’t answer.

Pressure answers instantly, surging against my ribs like a second heartbeat. Mine, and yet not. It is vast and hungry and it knows something I do not.

I push it aside. Down.

As I have for my whole life.

But it doesn’t answer right away. Not like it used to. It fights back.

I suck in a breath and exhale slowly.

Then I feel him.

Not a ship. Not yet. Just the shape of a current that shouldn’t be there, moving across the water like a shark’s fin.

Hadryan Cartalin.

Three years of chasing the infamous Pirate Captain, of waking with salt on my tongue and his name in my teeth, and now the ocean itself is pointing.

“Captain?” Margrave tries again.

I sweep my eyes over the horizon. Looks empty. But I can feel his ship, The Covenant, out there—the way I once felt storms in my chest as a child. A warning written in the bones.

“New course,” I say, and my voice sounds like someone else’s—harder, colder, inevitable. “Come around ten degrees. North-northwest. All sail she can carry. Crowd her until the spars crack if you have to.”

Margrave hesitates only long enough to see that I am not joking.

The drum beats. Feet thunder across the deck. Canvas blooms overhead like sudden wings.

I grip the rail and stare into the pale fog that has begun to gather ahead of us, thick and deliberate.

He hides, waiting. For me? For prey?

Doesn’t matter.

This time, he’s mine.