Chapter 1

      The Gulf of Mexico

      Screams rolled across the waves.

      On the deck of a fishing scow, a blond-haired woman was being dragged backward by her hair. She was shrieking and struggling as a pale-skinned man with tattoos down his exposed right arm yanked her across the decking against her will. A snatch of blond curls tore from her scalp as she tripped, and she slammed against the wooden deck with an agonized moan, tears streaming down her flushed face. Another man stepped before her as the one with the tattooed arm cursed. This one had dark eyes the color of midnight, a mop of black hair on his head and dark stubble along his jaw.

      “Hold ’er down!” he snarled at his partner.

      The man wore leather trousers and an open shirt, and where his chest was exposed the blonde woman could see dark chest hair tufting from his weather-tanned skin alongside a puckering of scars where he had been burned many years before. At his belt, the man had a holster in which he had jammed a long-barreled Colt revolver, its chrome finish marred from overpolishing. His name was “Black” John Jefferson and he was a pirate.

      Fern Salt, his colleague with the tattooed arm, obeyed with a nod, grasping the blonde by her wrists and slapping at her breasts to hold her down, stretching her taut as she tried to kick away. Salt pawed roughly at her left breast for a moment, laughing cruelly as he squeezed it. The woman was twenty-two, with apple-red cheeks and a belly already round with child. She screamed again, tears washing down her face.

      All around them aboard the listing scow, the sounds of violence played out in a cacophonous symphony, gunshots and screams rolling over the waves. The sea was calm, and it seemed to urge the violence to hush with the sound of every softly lapping wave against the side of the boat.

      One of the crew, a cousin to the blonde woman, scrambled across the deck to help her, alerted by her screams and followed by another of the pirates. Glancing over his shoulder, Black John snatched the Colt from its holster and squeezed the trigger, holding it upside down and blasting a single 9 mm bullet behind him. With the boom of discharge, the bullet cut into the sailor’s right leg just below the knee, and he let loose a bloodcurdling scream as his leg exploded in a burst of blood and splintered bone. Another of Black John’s crew, the man following the sailor across the deck, finished the job swiftly with a single bullet to the man’s head.

      Black John turned back to his task at hand. Unbuckling his belt and loosening his pants, he reached out for the screaming blonde. His fingernails had been painted as black as his nickname, and they glistened in the sunlight like the shells of insects.

      “Quit shoutin’, girl,” he hissed, his eyes narrowed with fury. “Makes no diff’rence to me if you’re alive or dead, just so long as you’re still warm.”

      With that, Black John grasped the woman’s skirts with one of his beautifully manicured hands, ripping away the bottom half of her dress to expose her crotch. Then, he got about his business as Fern Salt held her down with one tattooed arm. Salt’s other arm was scrubbed clean and hairless, unnaturally pale where another tat had been removed. All around them, Black John’s shipmates were rushing through the scow, sacking her and dispatching the last of her crew with cold professionalism as the ruined engine spit black smoke into the morning sky.

      Beside the scow was a larger boat, and from a distance the pair seemed restful as they floated on the clear waters of the Bay of Campeche, far enough out from the coast that they couldn’t be seen from the shore by the naked eye. The larger of the boats was a sleek sixty-foot cutter, its sides painted the same blue-green as the waves. The cutter was shaped like a dart in the water, flared at the aft with a long body that tapered to a brutal point like a stiletto blade at the front. The cutter’s name was La Discordia, although papers filed in El Cuyo still had her listed by her original name, La Vara de la Esperanza, or The Wand of Hope. La Discordia loomed beside the smaller vessel like an older sibling, her dark shadow cast over the other’s slanted deck.

      La Segunda Montaña, the smaller vessel, was listing to one side where it had been wounded. The screams and shouts that had emanated from the scow as the crew of the larger vessel boarded her were dwindling now, the sounds as brief and sudden as bird calls, and, like those bird calls, they were ignored or unheard by anyone who might have intervened.

      Aboard La Segunda Montaña all was pandemonium. Harpoons had been used to attach the two boats, trapping the smaller vessel as her captain tried to get out of the larger one’s path. The scow had come all the way from the north, seeking freedom and a new life. Instead, one of those hooks had gone straight through the first mate’s torso, gouging a hole through his chest even before the ships locked together. Now he was wedged upright, his body splayed against the safety rails that lined the scow’s deck, screaming as the harpoon point held him in place, his ruined guts spilling down his legs.

      Belowdecks, two pirates called Six and Xia were standing in the fishing scow’s tiny hold. Xia held the sharp edge of his blade across a girl’s throat while Six looked around the shabby little room. The girl had dark hair and pleading eyes, and Xia had already had his way with her.

      “What is that?” Six asked, jabbing his outstretched finger at a box in the corner of the living quarters. The box had wooden sides and was open at the top, its lid propped against the wall. The box was half-full of stones, not one of which was more than an inch across; they looked like shale that had washed up on the beach.

      The girl shook her head. “I don’t know,” she admitted, the glistening tears still drying on her pretty face. “It was here when we boarded. Belongs to the captain, I think.”

      “Belongs to us now, hermanita,” Xia growled, and he drew the blade closer to the girl’s throat, six inches of knife glistening in the light cast by the round portholes. Xia was a large man, broad-shouldered and with a suggestion of Malaysian or Polynesian to his appearance, especially around the eyes and the golden tint of his skin. He wore an undershirt and cutoffs, and a long white scar ran almost the entire length of his left leg, from groin to well past the knee. He had gotten the scar in a knife fight on a plantation that had almost ended with the authorities hanging him. But only almost.

      The girl struggled in his grip, trembling with fear.

      “Floater this size don’t need ballast,” Six said as he nudged at the stones with the tip of his blaster. Six was broad-shouldered, too, with a gold hoop depending from his left earlobe. He wore his hair in a topknot on his otherwise shaved head, a gunslinger’s mustache drooping down over his top lip. He licked the bristles absentmindedly as he spoke, eyes narrowing as he looked at the strange contents of the crate.

      “Something in it, mebbe?” Xia suggested, gripping the girl tighter as she struggled. “You, keep fucking still.”

      Six rummaged through the stones with his free hand, turning them over as he plunged deeper into the crate. It was just a little deeper than a foot, and the broad-shouldered pirate reached down until he could distinctly feel the crate’s bottom. “Nothing in there,” he said. “Nothing but stones.”

      “Worth something, you think?” Xia asked.

      As he spoke, the girl finally pulled herself free, wrenching out of his grip before Xia knew what was happening. Still pressed against her throat, Xia’s blade cut through her flesh as she yanked