Page 16 of A Pirate's Pleasure

I shrugged, because I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. I didn’t fight. Not as a rule. That’s what the knife was for. There was no quicker way to bring a fight to a halt than to scare them off with the threat of using it. I’d just proved that. Once they’d seen I was armed, not one bully had stuck around. They didn’t need to know that using it would only be as a last resort. Did my mother know I carried it? Of course not. I wasn’t stupid. If she knew, she would probably ground me for the rest of my life and make me do nothing but laundry. But I didn’t have a gang to back me up, or a scary father that would step in, so I needed something to act as a deterrent.

The boy blinked up at me for a few seconds before holding his hand out, the smile still on his lips. “Zephyr.”

I eyed his hand. Now would be a good time to walk away. Just because I’d saved him from bullies didn’t mean we had to be friends. It just meant I wasn’t callous enough to turn my back on someone outnumbered. I took his hand. Thankfully, it wasn’t the same one he’d used to mop up the blood from his nose. “Lief.”

Still holding onto my hand, he frowned. “Like on a tree?”

He had a name like Zephyr, and he was questioning mine. “It’s spelt different. L-I-E-F, not L-E-A-F.”

His grin grew wider. “That’s alright then.” Zephyr patted the empty patch of ground next to him in invitation.

“I can’t,” I said, “I need to—”

“No, you don’t.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

He shrugged. “Don’t need to. You were gonna lie. I can tell stuff like that. People get this look in their eye before they do it.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and stared him down, sizing up the feral boy who fought like he could win an impossible fight, smiled like an angel, and could apparently pinpoint a lie within seconds of meeting someone. Oh, and not to forget that, according to my mother, he also had magic.

He gave the ground another pat and against my better judgment, I joined him, taking up the same stance with my back leaned against the wall and my knees drawn up to provide a comfortable resting place for my chin. We stared out over the docks to the sea beyond in silent contemplation until Zephyr broke it. “Why do you speak all posh?”

I rolled my eyes. It wasn’t the first time someone had asked me that question, and I doubted it would be the last. “My mum didn’t grow up here. I guess I speak like her.”

“Hmm.” If Zephyr had any other thoughts about my accent, he didn’t share them. “I’m going to be a pirate.”

I snorted. “Who in their right mind would want to be a pirate?”

He turned his head my way, his gray eyes gleaming. “Who wouldn’t want to be a pirate? All that freedom and adventure. Not to mention the treasure. I can think of nothing better than having the sea under your feet, the sky above your head, and nothing else around for miles.” His eyes narrowed on me. “What about you? What are you gonna do?”

I traced patterns in the dirt by my feet. “Probably keep helping my mum with the laundry.” Put like that, it sounded pathetic. Zephyr’s dream might be outlandish and my idea of hell, but at least he had one. I shrugged. “Or… I don’t know… something else.”

“You can be my quartermaster,” Zephyr said.

I rolled my eyes. “No, thank you. I’d rather carve pieces off my body and feed them to the sharks.” I jerked my head to the scuffed-up dirt a few feet away where the altercation had taken place. “Why didn’t you just give them what they wanted?” Zephyr reached into his pocket and drew out a single bronze coin and placed it in front of him. “That’s it?” I said, making no effort to keep the disbelief out of my voice. “You took a beating for that?”

“It’s mine,” Zephyr said. “It’s not theirs. How am I ever going to own a pirate ship if I let someone else take it just because they think they can?”

“Going to take a lot more than that to buy a ship,” I said.

Zephyr laughed. “I know.”

My gaze strayed to his hair, to the white stripe that ran through it. I’d seen it before, but not up close. “What happened to your hair?”

Zephyr lifted his hand to it. “I was born with it.”

“Is it a magic thing?”

I realized my mistake as soon as his jaw stiffened and his shoulders went rigid. I’d hit a nerve. “Probably.”

Don’t ask about the magic. Don’t ask about the magic. “What can you do?”

Zephyr stretched his legs out in front of him. “Why do you wanna know? Wanna know just how much of a freak I am? Is that it?”

“Is it something really boring? Is that why you don’t want to say? It can’t be anything useful.”

Zephyr narrowed his eyes. “Why do you say that?”