“Mrs. Digby, your apple cobbler has beckoned me back once again.”

“Miss Violet.” The woman’s eyes crinkled. “Welcome home.”

Hardly home. But the linens were always dry and hadn’t any bugs.

“For your trouble.” Viola pressed a dozen coins into the proprietress’s shaky palm and climbed the stairs to her room. She couldn’t afford extravagance, but Mrs. Digby kept her in reasonable comfort.

In her chamber she stripped off wool and linen thick with rain and salt and sweat. The serving girl came to make up the fire and Viola gave her a penny, then stood in a tin basin with a pot of hot water to wash. Before the hearth she dried her hair, finger combing out the knots, then fell into bed. She would sleep till Sunday if she didn’t have to rise early the following morning to see to the April’s cargo.

Before her eyelids fluttered closed, her gaze rested on a tiny statuette on the table beside her bed. Her most prized possession except for her ship.

Her father had traded a whole set of silver plate he’d taken off a Dutch merchantman for this treasure, her thirteenth birthday present. About the length of her forefinger, it was intricately carved and painted with graceful precision. Gold, red, blue, green, yellow. A tiny figure of an Egyptian king.

A pharaoh.

Years later, when she first heard of a pirate with that name-a sailor so brutally successful even Spanish buccaneers feared to cross him-she wanted to meet him, to see with her own eyes the man who was bigger than life. A real legend. Recently, when talk at dockside taverns said the Pharaoh had turned to wrecking pirate vessels exclusively, she wanted to meet him even more.

Now she had.

And because of her, a mere woman, the mighty Pharaoh was sleeping in a jail cell tonight. Also because of her, come the morning, he would be free. If he kept that gorgeous mouth shut.

She fell asleep smiling.

Jin awoke shivering.

He clamped down on his body’s reflexive reaction. Not to the cold. To the iron bars hovering before his eyes.

He shrugged up straighter against the wall, pulling in long, chest-deep breaths, willing away the crawling damp of his flesh and the throb of panic weakening his limbs. Dawn light filtered through the tiny square of a window just above a man’s head in the ten-by-ten cell. About him and in the adjoining cage his crew slept or slumped on the musty floor. The lot of them rested soundly anywhere. So could Jin. Usually.

He hadn’t been behind bars in twelve years, since he was seventeen. On that occasion, two men had paid for his liberty. At his hands. With their lives.

Eight years before that, with wrists in irons, he’d been dragged fighting onto an auctioneer’s block in the blaze of the Barbadian sun. That time a boy had paid for Jin’s freedom. With gold. A twelve-year-old boy to whom Jin owed his life. Each day of freedom since then still seemed like a stolen gift.

A steady, muted click turned his head. In a corner of the cell across the way, Little Billy knocked a battered wooden die against the wall. His neck craned up and he flashed a quick grin.

“Mornin’, Cap’n.” At sixteen, Billy had not yet outgrown his name; short, skinny, gangly, and grinning like a lad. “Ready for the judge?”

“There will be no judge, Bill.” Jin ran his gaze along the walls and bars of the port jail cell, searching for weakness in the structure. Out of habit. He needn’t. They would be released within hours. He had already heard it from the harbor officer the night before when the fellow delivered the rags Jin and his crew now wore in lieu of their own clothes. The April Storm’s master had lied to the port master about him and his ship.

She was mad. He would be taking a madwoman back to her respectable family in England.

Beside him Mattie expelled a great cavernous yawn. Lifting hands as big as hams, he rubbed them up and down his face and shook his heavy head, then set a glowering look on Jin.

“What’s the plan, Cap’n?”

“I am working on it.”

“Why don’t you just pays these fellas for her, Cap’n?” Little Billy scuttled toward them and gestured to the ceiling, apparently intending to indicate the coastal officials. “Take her off their hands, like?”

“You ain’t thinking straight.” Mattie slugged the lad on a bony shoulder. “That mort ain’t nobody’s property.”

“Didn’t matter with that gal he took up with back in Coruna.” Billy’s pale brow wrinkled.

“What’d you know ’bout that?” Matouba’s bass sounded from his barrel chest. Across the narrow cell, his round eyes were two spots of white in his ebony face. “You weren’t but a mite at the time.”

“He didn’t take up with that one,” Mattie grunted. “And she weren’t free. Master Jin bought her off that bloke as was beating her.” He turned his head to Jin. “Whatever happened to that little Spanish girl?”

Jin shrugged. But he remembered. He remembered every one of the people he freed, their faces, their names. He had found that girl a post as a domestic servant in an old spinster’s house. The woman was ancient but respectable. It was the best he could do in a foreign city. In ports he knew better, he had an easier time of it.

It didn’t matter. Every time he bought someone’s freedom, another chip of the hard, cold stone of rage and old despair inside him fell away. But they were, each one of them, tiny chips indeed, and the stone still quite large. He had a thousand more to go before the rock finally disappeared.

“I sez you buy yourself ’bout four ships, Cap’n, maybe five or six, and stock ’em with crews,” Matouba intoned. “Then you sneak up on that April Storm in open water, close her in, and ’scort her to England like that.”

“No.” Jin shook his head. “She must come willingly.” A woman like Violet la Vile would not come any other way, unless he tied her up and stuffed her in the bilge for the month’s journey. But Jin did not treat other human beings like that. Not any longer. “No,” he repeated. “I have another plan.”

When he first started searching for Viola Carlyle, he had harbored hope he would find her holed up in some little house ashore, anxious to return to England, merely lacking the resources or even the gumption. But after months of searching, when clues finally led him to the privateer captain Violet the Vile, he had been forced to reevaluate. Her real father, Fionn Daly, had been first a barely successful smuggler then an even less successful privateer. He probably only allowed her aboard for practical purposes-to see to the domestic tasks so he would not have to pay a sailor for it. No doubt she’d be glad to return to England and society, Jin guessed.

He’d guessed wrong. The captain of the April Storm-confident, brash, and nothing like a lady-quite obviously would not come easily. Jin must convince her. But he had spent a lifetime alternately lying and knifing his way to victory after victory. In the end, Miss Viola Carlyle would sail to England with him of her own accord and take up again the life she was born to live. He had no doubt of it whatsoever.

Neither did he have a choice.

Twenty years earlier Alex Savege had bought his freedom and saved his life. Nearly a decade after that, when Jin had been nothing but a thieving, scrapping ball of anger directed against the whole world, Alex again offered him another option. He had taken him aboard the Cavalier and shown him how to be a man. Alex’s new wife still believed her half sister to be alive. A lord now, Alex did not need Jin’s money or even his assistance with his ship any longer. All Alex cared about now was his wife’s happiness.

And so, unbeknownst to either Lord or Lady Savege, Jin had set out to find Viola Carlyle. To repay his debt. He would return her safely to the bosom of her family, or he would finally die trying.

The harbor constable pursed his lips, looked Jin up and down for the third time, and demanded gold.

Jin produced a vowel. The port master’s lips curved upward. He locked the office and went to the bank himself. Jin waited without concern. The Massachusetts Bank account of Mr. Julius Smythe, merchant, boasted a hefty balance.

In short order the port master returned, all smiles.

“Congratulations, Mr. Smythe.” He bowed as though Jin were actually the gentleman he pretended to be when he did business at the bank. “You and three of your men may go free.”

Back on the docks with the late-spring morning sun shining through masts and rigging onto worn planks, he told Matouba, Mattie, and Billy to take themselves off until he needed them. The boy and Matouba went off bickering as usual. Mattie cast Jin a dark look, then lumbered away as well.

He walked down the quay, scanning the scene already busy with the traffic of carts, sailors, and merchants, and found what he sought: a sparkling new vessel, the railings not yet even affixed. The sounds of hammers smacking at wood echoed from atop. A pair of boys sanded the main deck, still fresh wood without varnish or tar.

She was not the Cavalier. Nothing would ever be the Cavalier. But she was a beauty, small and fast, just as he’d heard she would be when he passed through Boston six months earlier and saw the plans for her. She would suit his needs perfectly.

But a man could not purchase a ship appearing as though he’d spent the night in jail. He turned and made his way toward his bank.

Two hours later, freshly shaved and clothed, Jin folded the letter that had awaited him at his bank these four months, and tucked it into his waistcoat. He nearly smiled. The Admiralty occasionally managed to send him correspondence via commanders in the field. This letter, however, had not come from the navy.