Chapter 21: The Pirate's Gamble
The scent of Neptune’s apartment always hit in layers. First, the acrid ghost of cheap scented candles—ocean breeze, a cloying attempt to mask deeper smells. Underneath, the dry, dusty paper scent of countless unbound rulebooks and maps. Finally, the faint, salty-sour tang of old takeout containers and stagnant aquarium water from the large, poorly maintained fish tank bubbling in the corner. It was the smell of curated chaos, of effort applied in the wrong places.
Jaune shouldered his gaming bag and pushed the door open. The usual raucous noise washed over him: Neptune’s booming laugh, the clatter of dice in a hardwood tray, the thrum of bass-heavy fantasy music from a speaker. Tonight, it felt like walking onto a brightly lit stage after existing in a dim, soundproofed room for days. His skin felt tuned to a different frequency.
“Arc! You’re late! The Sea Witch doesn’t wait for landlubbers!” Neptune bellowed from the head of the sprawling, ship’s-wheel-shaped table. He wore an absurd tricorne hat adorned with a ragged plume. The usual, comfortable performative nonsense.
“Traffic,” Jaune mumbled, dropping his bag by an empty chair. His usual seat was between Emerald and Penny, directly across from Cinder. He forced himself to look up, to settle into the character of Tuesday Jaune.
The sight stalled his breath for a half-second.
Cinder was leaning back in her throne-like chair, one thigh-high boot propped on the edge of the treasure chest coffee table. The boot was black leather, polished to a dull shine. Above it, the skin of her thigh was pale and exposed, disappearing under the frayed hem of tiny black shorts. And just beneath that hem, a flash of intricate black lace. A garter, detailed and deliberate. Her other leg was bent, her chin resting on her knee, her smirk a slow-burning fuse. She watched him look. She didn’t adjust her posture.
To her right, Emerald was fussing with a stack of spell cards. She wore a billowy white poet’s shirt, unlaced nearly to her navel, the fabric sheer enough to hint at the shape beneath. Her legs were draped over the arm of her chair, slender and disappearing into stockings of a smoky, semi-sheer grey. They were held up not by elastic, but by thin, crimson ribbons tied in precise bows just above her knees. The ends trailed down her calves. It was an aesthetic ripped from a fantasy illustration, a carefully constructed carelessness.
Penny, by contrast, was in bright pink leggings and an oversized t-shirt with a cartoon kraken on it. She waved energetically. “Hi Jaune! I leveled my bard! I took Vicious Mockery! Do you want to hear my new insult? It involves a kobold and a soup spoon!”
“Maybe later,” Jaune said, his voice tighter than he intended. He slid into his chair. The space felt alien. The laughter was too loud. The colors were too garish. Neptune’s skull-and-crossbones wallpaper seemed juvenile, a parody of danger.
His phone, face-down on the table next to his character sheet, was a cold, flat weight.
“Alright you scallywags,” Neptune announced, scooping up a handful of dice. “Last we left off, you’d just infiltrated the Pirate-King’s pleasure barge. The scent of exotic oils and cheap perfume fills the air. Music from unseen instruments drifts over the water. What do you do?”
The session unfolded. Jaune moved his swashbuckler, Captain Valerius, through the motions. He made quippy remarks. He rolled acrobatics checks to swing from rigging. He dueled a first mate with a parrot familiar. It was fine. It was fun, in a hollow, brightly-colored way. The mechanics were satisfying. Neptune’s descriptions were grandiose.
But his awareness was split, a miserable schism.
Every time Emerald reached for a d8, the crimson ribbon on her knee wobbled. A fragile bow holding up a sheer façade. He thought of knots. Of silk. Of a different kind of restraint, one that wasn’t decorative.
Cinder barely touched her character sheet. She played a silent, brooding warlock. She spent most of the session watching. Her gaze was a physical pressure on the side of Jaune’s face. When he succeeded on a risky disarming maneuver, Neptune whooped. Cinder simply let her booted foot slide off the table with a soft thump. The sound was deliberate. It dragged his eyes back to the lace garter, now fully visible in the gap between boot and shorts. A branding of a different sort. A public secret.
It was a test. A drawn-out, multi-hour examination.
He drank the cheap beer Neptune provided. The taste was tinny and insubstantial. He laughed at Penny’s absurd insults. The sound felt ripped from a different person.
During a break, as Neptune rummaged in the kitchen for more snacks, Emerald sidled up to him. She refilled his beer from the bottle, her shoulder brushing his arm. The scent of her was vanilla and chai.
“You’re quiet tonight,” she murmured, her green eyes flicking up to his. “Everything okay at the other campaign?” The question was light, but the emphasis on ‘other’ was a tiny, probing needle.
“Just planning my next move,” Jaune said, taking a long swallow. The beer was too cold.
“Planning is good,” Cinder’s voice came from behind him. She hadn’t moved from her chair. “But overthinking can ruin the spontaneity of a game. Don’t you think?” She wasn’t talking about dice.
He turned. Cinder was looking at Emerald, a slow smile on her lips. “Em, darling, your ribbon is coming loose.”
Emerald glanced down. The bow on her left knee had indeed slackened, one tail much longer than the other. “Oh. So it is.”
“Let me,” Cinder said. It wasn’t an offer.
Emerald hopped up onto the cleared edge of the gaming table, swinging her legs. Cinder rose with a predator’s grace. She didn’t kneel. She bent, one hand bracing herself on the table between Emerald’s thighs, the other expertly untying the loose crimson ribbon. Her fingers worked with deft, intimate familiarity. She retied it, pulling the silk tight, securing the bow with a sharp, final tug. Her knuckles grazed the inside of Emerald’s knee. Emerald sucked in a tiny, sharp breath.
The moment hung, thick as the humid air in Neptune’s apartment. Penny, oblivious, was across the room trying to teach Neptune’s parrot to swear. Neptune was banging cabinet doors.
Cinder straightened up, her eyes meeting Jaune’s over Emerald’s seated form. Her expression was one of cool, triumphant archaeology. She’d unearthed a nerve and was now examining the sediment around it.
The game resumed.
Jaune’s phone buzzed against the wood. A single, discreet vibration.
His gut clenched. He didn’t move. He kept his eyes on his character sheet, on the sprawling map of the pleasure barge.
It buzzed again. Then a third time.
It was the agreed-upon signal. Three vibrations. Not a call. A delivery.
Blake was upholding her side of the contract. The progress report.
The pirate king’s barge, the lurking shark-men, Neptune’s booming voice demanding to know what Captain Valerius did next—it all receded into a muffled, unimportant drone. The only real things in the universe were the cold phone against the table and the burning awareness of Cinder’s gaze, of Emerald’s ribbons, of the lace that pretended to be an accident.
He couldn’t look. Not here. To open that screen was to let the two worlds bleed into each other, to violate the very boundary he had promised to maintain. It would be a surrender. It would give Cinder exactly what she wanted.
But not looking was its own kind of failure. Blake was offering proof. She was in her silence, in her apartment, performing the contract. To ignore it was to devalue her currency, to break the terms before they’d truly begun.
“Arc!” Neptune snapped. “Your turn. The harpy is diving for Penny’s character. What do you do?”
Jaune dragged his focus back. “I… use my reaction. Interpose. I take the damage.”
He rolled the die without looking. It clattered, a hollow sound.
A miss. A failure.
Neptune cackled. “Oh, the harpy’s talons sink deep! Take… eight slashing damage.”
Penny groaned dramatically. “My hero!”
Jaune barely registered it. The damage was abstract, numbers on a page. The real sensation was the phantom memory of a different kind of sting, of skin heating under a precise, non-random strike. The game damage was an echo of a truer pain.
He lasted another twenty minutes. Through a tortured negotiation with a merfolk envoy, through a failed search for hidden treasure. His contributions were minimal, functional. The buzzing phone was a black hole under his palm.
Finally, he stood. The chair legs scraped loud against the floor. All conversation stopped.
“I have to go,” he said. His voice sounded scraped raw.
Neptune blinked. “Go? We’re mid-encounter! The treasure’s right there!”
“Something came up. Family thing.” The lie was ash in his mouth.
Cinder’s smile was a razor-cut in her face. “How unfortunate. The game’s just getting interesting.”
Emerald watched him, her head tilted, the re-tied ribbon a perfect crimson accent on her grey-stockinged leg. She said nothing.
Penny just looked disappointed. “Will you be here next week?”
“Yeah. Sure.” He was already shoving his unused dice into his bag, not looking at any of them. He slung it over his shoulder. The weight was wrong. It was just plastic and paper. It held no meaning.
He didn’t say goodbye. He just walked out, closing Neptune’s apartment door on the fog of candle scent and performative piracy.
The hallway was quiet, lit by a single flickering fluorescent. The music and laughter were instantly muffled, becoming a dull throb through the door.
He leaned against the wall, his heart hammering against his ribs. The cool plaster felt real against his back.
He pulled out his phone.
His thumb hovered over the screen. For a second, he saw his own reflection in the black glass—pale, eyes wide. He looked like a man who had just run from something.
He swiped it open.
There were three images. Sent five minutes apart.
The first was a close-up of her wrist. The delicate bones were prominent. Across the inside of her forearm, where the skin was palest, were two parallel, faint red lines. The ghost of a silk restraint from days before, lingering like a memory made visible. The lighting was stark, from her desk lamp. Clinical.
The second was taken from above, looking down the length of her body as she lay on what he recognized as her own grey bedsheet. She was wearing only the black t-shirt he’d given her. It was rucked up to her ribs. Her hand was splayed across her lower abdomen, her fingers pressing into the soft skin just below her navel. A possessiveness of her own flesh. A self-inflicted claim.
The third was her face. Half in shadow. Her amber eyes looked directly into the lens. Her expression was utterly calm, but her lips were slightly parted. She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t teasing. It was a look of profound, unsettling readiness. It was the face of someone waiting in a quiet room for a storm they had invited inside.
There was no text. No caption. Just the three silent testimonies.
Just the three silent testimonies.
He was still staring at the last image, her unblinking amber gaze holding his through the screen, when the apartment door opened again.
The light from Neptune’s hall spilled out, jagged and yellow. He didn’t have time to lock his phone, to shove it away. The glow from the screen lit his face, a guilty flare in the dim corridor.
Two shadows detached themselves from the doorway and slid into the hall with him. The door snicked shut, muting the distant sounds of Neptune’s game, of Penny’s laughter. The silence they brought was different.
Cinder and Emerald moved with a coordinated grace that felt rehearsed. They didn’t walk toward him. They flowed into his space, flanking him against the cool plaster wall. The flickering fluorescent light caught the sheen of Cinder’s lace and the delicate tracing of Emerald’s ribs through her sheer shirt.
Their breaths hit his ears, two separate temperatures. Cinder’s was warm and slow, flavored with spiced wine. Emerald’s was quicker, shallower, smelling of mint and nervous energy. The combined heat was stifling.
“Leaving so soon?” Cinder murmured, her lips almost touching the shell of his ear. Her voice was a low vibration. “The night is young, Captain Valerius.”
One of her hands, cool and sure, settled on his belt buckle. The other traced a line up the inseam of his jeans, her palm flat against the denim, moving with deliberate leisure up his inner thigh. The pressure was firm, possessive. He could feel the chill of her rings through the fabric.
On his other side, Emerald’s smaller hand mirrored the motion. Her touch was lighter, more exploratory, her fingers skating along the same sensitive path. She pressed her body against his arm. The sheer material of her shirt offered no barrier; he felt the softness beneath, the rapid beat of her heart. She tilted her head up, her red eyes wide and gleaming in the bad light.
They both leaned in, their necks arcing, their cleavage ample and presented not as an accident but as a deliberate argument. The view was a staged tableau of available flesh, a stark, wordless contrast to the solitary, owned intimacy flashing from his phone screen.
Cinder’s chin rested on his shoulder. He could see the dark curve of her smile from the corner of his eye.
“Neptune’s busy with Penny tonight,” she said, the words a soft exhalation against his skin. Her hand on his inner thigh squeezed, a promise of a different kind of leverage. “That leaves you with us.”
Emerald made a small, affirmative sound. Her fingers toyed with the button of his jeans. “You seemed distracted in there.” Her voice was a feather-light scratch. “We thought you might need help… focusing.”
Jaune’s breath hitched. His phone was a burning brand in his hand, screen still lit with Blake’s surrendered gaze. The two sensations warred—the immediate, hungry warmth surrounding him, and the distant, cold fire of the contract. This was the Tuesday pleasure, offered gift-wrapped and without complication. It was the handshake. Pleasant. Inconsequential.
Cinder’s lips brushed his earlobe. “You don’t have to think so hard, Jaune. It’s just a game.” Her hand moved higher, her intent clear. “This part is simple.”
He closed his eyes. The image of Blake’s wrist, marked faintly with the ghost of his silk, floated behind his eyelids. He heard her thin, cracked voice in the quiet of his bedroom: “I want you to miss me. Even when I’m in the same room.”
This wasn’t missing her. This was obliterating her. It would be a betrayal of the new terms, a capitulation to the casual currency of Tuesday. It would make her proof, her haunting progress report, meaningless.
But his body reacted to the skilled, eager hands. Heat pooled low in his stomach, a treacherously simple biological answer to a complex emotional siege.
“See?” Emerald whispered, feeling the tension in his muscles. “Simple.”
He opened his eyes. He looked past Cinder’s smirking lips, past the fall of her dark hair, down at his own hand. His thumb moved. The screen went black, plunging the hallway into a deeper grey, broken only by the flickering light above.
The action was small. Final.
He carefully, deliberately, slid the phone into his jeans pocket.
He carefully, deliberately, slid the phone into his jeans pocket. The action severed the connection. The hallway air tasted of dust and damp plaster, entirely different from the perfumed heat of the two women surrounding him.
He didn’t push them away.
Instead, his hands came up. His left palm settled against the small of Cinder’s back, feeling the sleek material of her shorts, the firm muscle beneath. His right hand tangled in Emerald’s hair, his fingers tightening just enough to make her gasp softly into the hollow of his throat. It wasn't an embrace. It was an acceptance.
“It is simple,” he agreed, his voice a low rasp he barely recognized.
Cinder’s smirk deepened into something victorious and sharp. She understood the symbolism of the pocketed phone. This was a choice she could taste. She pressed closer, her thigh slotting between his. “Good.”
She kissed him first.
Her mouth was demanding, all calculated pressure and slick heat. She didn’t tease. She claimed the space, her tongue pushing past his lips, the taste of her sharp and acidic, like over-steeped tea. Her hand, still on his belt, worked the buckle open with practiced, metallic clicks that echoed in the quiet hall.
Before he could even process that, Emerald rose on her toes and found his mouth from the other side.
Where Cinder was fire and dominance, Emerald was a flutter of frantic need. Her kiss was less sure, all soft lips and quick, searching breaths. She tasted minty and sweet. Her hands framed his face, her thumbs stroking his jawline as if memorizing its shape, her body vibrating against him like a plucked string.
For a dizzying moment, he was caught between two temperatures, two opposing forces of want. It was overwhelming. It was logistical. A part of his mind, the cold Dungeon Master part, observed the mechanics: Cinder’s hand now inside his open jeans, her cool fingers wrapping around him; Emerald’s mouth traveling down his neck, her teeth scraping his pulse point. This was the Tuesday reward, the casual handshake made manifest. It was supposed to feel like a victory.
It felt like static.
He pushed back into the kiss with Cinder, matching her force, his hand sliding from her back to grip her hip, fingers digging into the bone. She moaned approval into his mouth. He turned his head and caught Emerald’s lips again, swallowing her little gasp, his other hand dragging her closer by the hair. The physical feedback was immediate, intense. Their bodies were warm and willing, a symphony of wanting sounds and eager hands.
But beneath his skin, under the rush of blood, a hollow silence yawned.
He saw, behind his closed eyelids, the third image Blake had sent. The calm, waiting gaze. The silent apartment. The progress report he was now defiling. The contract, not even a week old, crumbling to ash in a Neptune hallway that smelled of mildew and cheap candles.
Cinder broke the kiss, breathing hard. Her eyes were dark pools of satisfaction. “My place is closer,” she stated, not asked.
“Why go anywhere?” Emerald breathed against his collarbone, her fingers working the button of his shirt.
“The floor is disgusting, Em,” Cinder said with a withering chuckle, never taking her eyes off Jaune’s face. She squeezed him, a ruthless, glorious pressure. “And I have a bed. Among other things.”
Jaune nodded, the motion feeling jerky. “Fine.”
The walk to Cinder’s apartment was a blur of tangled limbs and hurried steps through silent, carpeted corridors. He didn’t remember the door opening. He was just suddenly inside her space, which smelled of sandalwood and clean linen, a stark contrast to Neptune’s curated chaos.
It was neat, almost severe. Dark furniture, a single framed abstract painting, books arranged by color.
Cinder didn’t turn on the main light. A lamp by the bed spilled a low, amber glow that cut sharp shadows. She turned to face him, finally pulling her hand free from his jeans. She leaned back against her kitchen counter, crossing her arms under her chest. “Well?”
It was a challenge. An invitation to take the lead he’d always followed in here.
He looked at Emerald, who stood by the door, looking suddenly younger, her wide eyes flicking between him and Cinder. He reached for her, pulling her to him by the wrist. He kissed her hard, bending her back over his arm, and she melted into it with a whimper. He could feel Cinder watching, a spectator turned curator.
He walked Emerald backward toward the bed, their mouths still connected. When the backs of her knees hit the mattress, she broke away, tumbling onto the dark duvet with a bounce. She looked up at him, her chest heaving, the sheer shirt gaping open.
Jaune turned back to Cinder. He didn’t speak. He just looked at her, at the arrogant tilt of her chin, the promise in her half-lidded eyes.
He chose.
He closed the distance in two strides, his hands gripping her waist, lifting her onto the cold granite countertop beside the sink with a grunt of effort. A mug clattered into the basin. She let out a short, surprised laugh that quickly morphed into a hungry sound as he pushed her legs apart and stepped between them. Her boots, with their ridiculous sly lace, dug into the backs of his thighs.
He kissed her like it was a fight he intended to win, all teeth and bruising force. She gave as good as she got, her nails scoring lines down his back through his shirt. From the bed, he heard Emerald shift, a rustle of fabric followed by a soft, damp sound. He knew without looking she was touching herself, watching them, lost in the spectacle.
Cinder’s hands pushed his shirt off his shoulders. Her mouth left his to trail down his chest. He let his head fall back, his eyes sliding shut. He tried to lose himself in the sensation, in the sharp scrape of her teeth, the skilled pressure of her mouth moving lower, following the trail his open zipper made.
It felt good. Of course it felt good. It was designed to.