Chapter One
***
ELODIE LIFTED HER HEADoff her knees when the doors split open across the way. Bright light from the hallway flooded her vision and she flinched as it pushed back the gloom of the brig.
“Ely, wake up.”
“I’m awake,” she whispered, throat tight. Trying to blink away the forced dilation of her eyes, she glanced from her dad to the men now entering.
Their eyes roved across all the cells, hers included. Her captors’ dark gazes looking for something—something she refused to give—and she shriveled into herself.
“They may be recruiting again,” he muttered, hopeful.
“Shhh...” someone shushed from down the line.
Ely scooted closer to her father. He was being held in the cell next to hers, closer to the entryway door.
“Dad. Don’t,” she pleaded for the hundredth time. “Please...”
His face hardened and his lips flattened into a straight line. It was the only reaction she got from him now when it came to the pirates that held them.
Several weeks before, their mining ship had been attacked suddenly and without cause by a fleet they couldn’t withstand. In a matter of hours her life had gone from monotony to hell.
“They killed your friends,” Elodie reminded him. “They nearly killedus.”
But he wasn’t having any of it. Her words entered one ear and flew out the other, and even with her cheek pressed up against her knee, she could see how ineffective her pleas were.
I’m not ready to say goodbye.
She never would be. Even when she thought she was, when the time came, she always chickened out and stayed. Because she knew once her father, Chesnik, left her, or when she left him, that would be it. The likelihood of ever seeing each other again was unlikely. Her dad had been a worker-bee his entire life, moving them from one ship to the next, taking her with him wherever he went, no matter how dangerous it was for her.
When she was old enough to cut ties and find her own way, she chose to stay with him.
Days turned into weeks, weeks into entire jobs, and jobs turned into years, and here she was. She had followed him straight into the slaving units of a pirate ship.
And nowhewas leavingher.
“Please... Dad...”
“Don’t you fucking start! Man the fuck up, boy,” he spat.
“I have manned up,” Elodie hissed. “This has nothing to do with me—”
“It has everything to do with you.”
She stiffened and made sure the guards weren’t paying attention. “Risking yourself to join them isn’t something we agreed on. Just,” she took a heavy breath, hoping it would calm her nerves, “think about what you’re doing. You have no idea what happens once you leave this room. No one has returned from recruitment. No one has come back.”
“That’s because they’re not dumb enough to put recent prisoners in charge of the flesh stock.”
“Shut the fuck up!” Kallan sneered on the other side of her. “You keep talking and you’re gonna get us all killed.”
Her dad scooted away, distancing himself. From her. Elodie knew why he was doing it. He was trying to protect her by sacrificing himself. He was guarding her secret. She understood his reasoning, but that didn’t stop it from hurting.
He was making a big mistake and she couldn’t convince him. She had tried to since he first brought up joining the pirate’s crew. Helplessness wasn’t something she often felt, but at the moment, the sensation drowned her.
If she only had more time to convince him, they could come up with a better plan. Elodie eyed the locking mechanisms on her cell.
The guards did a full walkthrough of the brig, eyeing her and everyone else like choice pieces of meat.
