Chapter 13: The Captain's Due
The journey back to the Sea Wolf was made in a thick, wordless silence. The Sentinel’s Gulch had yielded nothing but rotten timber, the splintered remains of a long-decayed longboat, and animal bones. No journal. No silver cross. No ghost of Thomas Drake. Just the jungle, swallowing history whole.
Drake’s mood was a storm contained in flesh. Every line of his body was taut with frustrated purpose. The trap, if it was a trap, remained sprung, leaving him staggering in the void of no enemy to fight. Sera felt his fury radiating from him like heat from a deck in noon sun. She kept a few paces behind, her own body a catalog of fresh aches—the delicious soreness between her thighs from the lagoon, the scrapes on her back from the rock, the deeper, invisible bruise on her spirit from his withdrawal.
By the time the longboat was hauled aboard and the ship was cutting through the twilight waves away from The Teeth, the tension was a live thing, coiling in the ropes, humming in the rigging. The crew gave their captain a wide berth.
He didn’t speak to her until they were in his quarters, the door shut with a definitive thud that made the candle flame gutter. The quiet luxury of the room felt like a mockery.
“Strip,” he said, his back to her as he poured a hefty measure of rum from a crystal decanter.
The word was so devoid of the heat from the lagoon, so coldly administrative, that it took her a moment to comprehend.
“What?”
He turned, his eye dark in the shadowed room. He took a long swallow, the muscles in his throat working. “You heard me. Take off your clothes. All of them. Now.”
A tremor of fear, sharp and clean, went through her. This wasn’t the desperate passion of the water. This was something calculated. “Why?”
He set the glass down with a sharp click. “You disobeyed a direct order on that cay. You waded into unknown water. You compromised my focus. On my ship, defiance has a price.” He took a step toward her. “You don’t get to play at being a woman one moment and ignore the chain of command the next. The price is paid on your back. So strip, or I’ll have Stiles and Corbin do it for you.”
Shame burned her cheeks, but a hotter, more defiant flame ignited beneath it. She was not a crewman to be disciplined. She lifted her chin, holding his gaze as her fingers went to the laces of her salt-stiffened bodice. She made it slow, her movements deliberate, letting the worn fabric fall to the floor. The shift followed, a pool of linen at her feet. She stood naked before him in the swaying candlelight, the cool air raising gooseflesh on her skin. She didn’t cover herself.
He looked his fill, his expression unreadable. Then he nodded toward the four-poster bed. “On your back. In the center.”
She obeyed, the sheets cool against her heated skin. The bed smelled of him—salt, leather, rum.
From a drawer by his desk, he produced two lengths of supple, oiled leather. He came to the bedside, his movements precise, a captain securing his lines. He took her right wrist, looped the leather around it in a swift, expert knot, and tethered it to the carved wooden post. He did the same with her left, pulling her arms wide until they were stretched taut. The bindings were firm, not cruel, but utterly unyielding.
Helplessness washed over her, a dizzying tide. She was completely exposed, spread-eagled for his appraisal, his use.
He stood at the foot of the bed, drinking her in. “Look at you,” he murmured, a dark appreciation finally entering his voice. “All that holy innocence, trussed up and waiting for the devil.” He placed a hand on her ankle, his thumb stroking the delicate bone. Then he pushed, spreading her legs wide, holding them open. The vulnerable heart of her was on full display. “This is where you belong when you’re being a brat. Open. Ready. Mine to do with as I please.”
He let go of her legs, but they remained splayed, held by his will and her own thrumming tension. He unbuckled his belt, the leather slithering free. He didn’t undress. He merely opened his breeches, freeing his cock, which was already thick and heavy with intent. He fisted himself slowly, watching her watch him.
“You want adventure, Sera?” he asked, his voice a low rasp. “This is it. This is the real fucking thing. Not pretty lagoons. It’s being tied down and used because you stepped out of line. It’s learning your place.”
He climbed onto the bed, kneeling between her thighs. He didn’t touch her anywhere else. He didn’t kiss her. He just guided the broad, blunt head of his cock through her folds, already slick from fear and a treacherous, gathering heat. He pressed against her entrance.
“This tight little cunt,” he said, almost conversationally. “I felt it clench around me in the lagoon. Felt it try to suck me dry. You think it’s yours? It’s not. It’s my property. A warm, wet hole I fill when I please.” He pushed in an inch, a slow, burning invasion. “And I please to fill it now.”
With that, he slammed home.
The air left her lungs in a shocked gasp. He was larger than she remembered, the angle deeper, the stretch more intense for her bound helplessness. He didn’t wait. He set a ruthless, driving pace, each withdrawal a taunt, each downward thrust a punishment that jarred her whole body up the bed. The ropes creaked.
He leaned forward, bracing one hand by her head, his face inches from hers. His breath smelled of rum and fury. “You like that? Being my tied-down fucktoy? Your holy sisters ever tell you about this part of a man’s world?”
She couldn’t answer. Sensation was a whirlpool—the ache in her shoulders, the brutal fullness between her legs, the coarse fabric of his breeches scraping her inner thighs. He was a cage of muscle and intent around her.
His free hand came up and roughly palmed her breast, his calloused thumb and forefinger finding her nipple. He pinched, hard, twisting slightly. A sharp cry of pain-pleasure burst from her lips.
“That’s it,” he growled, his hips pounding. “Make noise. Let the whole ship hear the nun getting what she asked for.” He switched to the other nipple, pinching and twisting again, the sharp sensation radiating straight to her groin, mixing unbearably with the deep, pounding rhythm. Her back arched off the bed, a silent plea for more, for less, for everything.
He was relentless. Sweat dripped from his chin onto her chest. The bedframe knocked a steady, obscene rhythm against the wall. He was chasing his own release, using her body as a vessel for his anger and his desperate, unspoken fear. Every thrust was a denial of the vulnerability he’d shown, a reassertion of absolute control.
“You come,” he commanded, his voice ragged. “You come on my cock, you understand? You don’t get to hold that back. You give it to me. Now.”
His words, the relentless stimulation, the sheer psychological force of him broke her. A climax detonated within her, violent and uncontrollable, a seizure of pleasure that ripped a broken scream from her throat. Her channel clenched around him in frantic, rhythmic pulses, milking him.
The feel of her internal convulsions shattered his own control. With a raw, guttural shout that held no triumph, only furious release, he drove deep and spent himself, his heat flooding her in powerful jets. He collapsed his weight onto her, his face buried in the hollow of her neck, his body shuddering through the last of it.
For a long time, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing, the groan of the ship, the whisper of the rope. The candle had burned low.
Slowly, the tension leached from his muscles. He shifted his weight off her, but didn’t move to untie her. He sat on the edge of the bed, his back to her, head in his hands. He looked defeated.
The cool air on her wet skin made her shiver. The reality of her bondage, now that the fever had passed, felt grotesque. “Untie me,” she said, her voice hoarse.
He didn’t move.
“Drake. Untie me.”
He stood, slowly, and went to the desk. He poured another rum, drained it. Then he returned to the bedside. His fingers, now gentle, worked at the knots. He freed her wrists, rubbing the faint red marks with a rough thumb.
She pulled her arms in, clutching them to her chest, turning on her side away from him. The emotional whiplash was nauseating. He had punished her, claimed her, abandoned her, all in the space of an hour.
She felt the dip of the mattress as he sat down behind her. He didn’t touch her.
“The longboat in the gulch,” he said to the darkness, his voice hollow. “It was his. Thomas’s. I recognized the broken figurehead. A wolf, like mine.”
Sera went still, listening.
“They didn’t disappear. They wrecked. Right there.” He was quiet for a moment. “The journal… it might have washed away. Or rotted. Or been taken. But someone knew to send me there. Someone who knew what I’d find. Or what I wouldn’t.”
He lay down behind her, not touching her, but his presence was a solid wall of heat. “The coordinates were a message. Not a trap of steel. A trap of memory. And I walked right into it. With you.”
His hand came up then, not in possession, but in something hesitant. His fingers brushed a strand of hair from her shoulder. The gesture was so unlike him it hurt more than the bindings had.
“Sleep,” he said, the word barely audible. “The next coordinates on the page… we sail for them at dawn.”
He blew out the candle, plunging them into a darkness so complete she could feel the vast, hungry sea all around them, and the more terrifying emptiness in the man beside her. The mystery of his brother was now a shared ghost, and its next beckoning finger was pointing them both into deeper, darker waters.
Sera did not sleep. She lay in the dark, the ghost of the leather on her wrists, the echo of his thrusts a dull ache inside her. His confession about the longboat hung in the air, a shared sorrow he’d immediately tried to bury under physical dominion. The fury in her curdled, settling into something cold and clear and purposeful. He thought he could exorcise his demons by claiming her body, by reducing her to a bound, willing thing. He was wrong.
She waited until his breathing deepened into the steady rhythm of exhaustion. The ship groaned around them, a symphony of hemp and wood. Slowly, carefully, she slid from the bed. Her bare feet were silent on the planks. Moonlight bled through the stern windows, painting silver bars across the floor and over the drawer where he’d gotten the ties.
She opened it. The oiled leather strips were there. So was a coil of stout, sisal rope. She took both.
Drake slept on his stomach, one arm flung out as if reaching for something in a dream. The sheet was low on his hips, exposing the formidable landscape of his back, the scars she’d raked her nails down just hours before. She moved with a focused calm she hadn’t known she possessed. She looped the sisal around his wrist, using a knot she’d seen the riggers tie a hundred times—complex, secure, born of necessity, not cruelty. She tethered it to the bedpost’s sturdy base.
He stirred as she captured his other wrist. A low mutter. “Sera…?”
“Shhh,” she whispered, her voice a soothing balm in the dark. She finished the second knot, pulling it tight. “Sleep.”
He subsided, trusting the voice, not the action. By the time he truly woke, understanding dawning, he was secured, arms pulled wide and anchored. He tested the bonds instantly, his muscles corded, his head snapping up. “What the fuck is this?”
She stood at the foot of the bed, draped in the moonlight. “Turnabout,” she said, her voice quiet but utterly steady. “You taught me the price of defiance. I’m collecting payment.”
He yanked hard against the ropes, the bedframe shuddering. The knots held. A flicker of something like respect crossed his furious face. “You little bitch. Untie me.”
“No.” She climbed onto the bed, straddling his thighs. She could feel the powerful tension in his legs, the animal readiness to buck her off. She leaned down, her auburn hair a curtain around their faces. “You showed me what it is to be used. Now you’ll learn what it is to be taken.”
She kissed him then, not with softness, but with a consuming, probing hunger, her tongue claiming his mouth. He tried to twist away, but she held his jaw, drinking his growled protest. She kissed down the column of his throat, over the pounding pulse, down the hard plane of his chest. She took one of his nipples into her mouth, nipping with her teeth until he hissed.
“Stop this,” he demanded, but the command lacked its usual force.
Her mouth traveled lower, over the ridges of his abdomen. She nuzzled the coarse dark hair at his groin. He was already hard, his cock thick and full against his stomach, a traitorous response to the shock of his captivity. She blew a soft stream of air over the glistening tip. He jerked against his bonds.
“You want to fuck my mouth, Captain?” she murmured, her words a hot whisper against his skin. “You want to use this too? Beg for it.”
“Go to hell.”
She smiled, a slow, wicked thing he couldn’t see. Then she took him in, not with tentative curiosity, but with a deep, swallowing hunger that made his entire body bow off the bed. She worked him with her tongue, tracing the throbbing vein underneath, circling the sensitive head, sucking with a rhythm that was both tender and ruthless. She used her hands, cupping his heavy balls, rolling them gently, then applying a subtle, increasing pressure.
“Christ,” he choked out. His hips tried to buck up into the warm, wet heaven of her mouth, but the angle and his bindings frustrated him. He was utterly at the mercy of her pace, her whim. She was methodical, devastating, bringing him to the very edge with slick, slurping pulls, then slowing to kittenish licks that made him groan in agony. “Sera… fuck… don’t…”
She released him with a soft pop. “Don’t what?” She climbed over him, her body a pale shadow in the moonlight. She positioned herself above him, guiding him with her hand. “Don’t take what I want?”
She sank down onto him in one smooth, inexorable slide, taking him deeper in this position than he’d ever been. Her head fell back, a sigh of pure carnal pleasure escaping her. She began to move, a slow, rolling grind of her hips, riding him with a lazy, tormenting authority.
The view was maddening for him. The curve of her back in the silver light, the bounce of her breasts, the obscene, wet sound of their joining. She controlled everything—the depth, the speed, the angle. She found a rhythm that rubbed her clit against his pubic bone with every rise and fall, and her breath started coming in short, sharp gasps.
“You feel that?” she panted, driving down hard. “That’s my cunt. Using you. My perfect, tight cunt milking your cock because it pleases me.”
He was cursing, a steady, filthy stream of obscenities, his arms straining, the muscles in his shoulders standing out like granite. The helplessness, the sheer erotic shock of her dominance, was pushing him toward a climax he didn’t want to give her. “I’ll break these ropes,” he snarled. “And when I do—”
“You’ll what?” she interrupted, riding him faster now, her own climax building, coiling tight in her belly. “Fuck me harder? That’s all you know how to do.”
With a roar of pure feral rage, he gave one colossal, tearing heave. The sisal rope, strained beyond its limit, snapped with a sound like a pistol crack. In an instant, he was free. He flipped her beneath him with terrifying speed, his hands manacles on her hips. He slammed her onto her stomach, dragging her up onto her knees.
He drove into her from behind without a second’s hesitation, a brutal re-entry that punched the air from her lungs. This was not the calculated punishment from before. This was raw, unchained need, a reclaiming that was pure instinct. He fucked her with a desperate, pounding heat, each stroke a physical vow, each grunt a syllable of possession. The bed hammered against the wall.
One hand tangled in her hair, holding her in place. The other snaked around her hip, his fingers finding her swollen clit. He rubbed it in fierce, rapid circles, matching the tempo of his thrusts. The dual assault was too much, a sensory overload that shattered her. She came with a shattered cry, her vision dissolving into white sparks, her internal muscles clamping around him in wave after wave of blinding release.
As she pulsed around him, he buried himself to the hilt, his own climax roaring up from his gut. He pressed his thumb firmly, insistently, against the tight, forbidden pucker of her asshole, a primal claim of total ownership. He came deep inside her, his hot release flooding her core, his shouts muffled against her shoulder.
They collapsed together, a mess of sweat and spent passion, the world narrowing to the thunder of their hearts. In the utter, profound silence that followed, as the stars cleared from her vision, she knew. He had claimed far more than her body. He had, in his feral, broken way, stamped himself irrevocably upon her soul. The ghost of his brother still waited in the dark waters ahead, but a new, terrifying truth now anchored her in the storm: her heart was no longer her own.