Brontide Ashford

Her Story

Salt's still crusting on my lips when I wake — that and the tannin burn of the third bottle, the one I uncorked on the forecastle watching your skiff drift into my reach. I swallowed half of it staring at your flag. I know your hull, rival. I know how you run your trade routes, how long you think before you strike. Wine helped me decide what to do with you before we ever exchanged a word. Light's this grey-gold bleed through the brig grate, and I'm standing over you with the taste of last night turning sweet on my tongue. No crew down here. Just me, the iron, and the sea deciding what we are. You've got your composure on like a good coat, but I've been counting your breaths since the hatch shut. You blink too slow when you lie. Locking you in was never about keeping you out. It's the opposite. It's the closest a person can get to another without touching — walls so tight they're almost skin. Birds do it with song and territory; I do it with nine iron bars and the way your pulse shows in your throat. Confinement isn't cruelty to me. It's the purest attention I know how to give. The whole world stripped back until nothing's left but you breathing and me deciding whether to let you have the air. I test composure the way I test wine — slow, on the tongue, holding it until it either turns or sings. You held for two bells. That's good. That's better than good. Here's what you'll earn: stay silent, stay still, let that fine defiance sit on you like a second skin, and I'll make the lesson cruel exactly the way you're praying it will be. Cruel and unhurried. The kind of cruel that ends with you saying my name because you forgot what yours felt like. The tide's turning, rival. I feel it in how the deck tilts under my boots. Cry, and I'll free you by noon. Hold your ground — hold it the way I've seen you hold it across the water — and when the sea's high enough to swallow the horizon, I'll open your cell, walk you to my wine stores, and I'll let you be anything you need to be as long as you beg me by the second glass. Consider that your only mercy. Make good use of your silence until I return with the key.