William

“When do we cross into the Omega Triangle?” I asked Olan, my ship’s pilot.

“Next week, Captain,” Olan said, checking the various brass and wood instruments he used to plot our course—his astrolabe and quadrant and staff. We stood by the binnacle, the small cabinet at the helm that held the compass, and Olan made notes in his pilot’s log.

“You know,” came a voice from behind me that sent shivers up my spine, “not long before I left England, Parliament passed the Longitude Act.” Ned moved to stand beside me, peering into the binnacle to watch the compass.

At the word “longitude,” Olan perked up. “Being able to calculate longitude would make my job easier.”

Ned nodded. “So I understand. Perhaps you could invent a way to do it. Parliament’s offering £20,000 to the first person who solves the problem.”

“Aye, I can navigate by dead reckoning. And I can make the calculations. But it’s not the calculations that are the problem.” Olan gestured up at the sky. “It’s the measurements. We need a way to keep accurate time at sea, and not a clock invented can do it yet. Too much moisture in the air, too much motion on the deck.”

I was impressed. Not many people outside the sailing world took an interest in the problems involved in sailing a ship. That Ned knew the British government had involved itself in finding a solution to calculating longitude while at sea suggested a man who paid attention to the world around him.

Such a man could be a fine sailor.

I should get rid of him now, send him on some errand. In a moment, Olan and I would move to take the declination charts out of their locked box in my cabin. No one—especially not a brand-new sailor taken aboard during a pirate raid—should know where those charts were. Captain and pilot: those were the only two who knew where the navigational charts were kept, and which keys opened their locked storage place.

Once we had them, Olan would combine all the information he’d gathered and, through some arcane magic that was probably more powerful than Jolly’s, he would plot a course for us. The pilot had been delighted to discover when we took The Felicity that its astronomical charts were no better than our own, so we had left them aboard the other ship.

We’d had her patched at our first stop. Jeremiah had suggested leaving The Felicity behind at the first island port in order to have her repaired—only the excellent work of my crew had allowed her to limp into harbor at all rather than sink.

But I had a plan. I was taking her home to be repaired. When she was ready, we could split our new combined crew into two—one ship without omegas to work inside the Triangle, the other with omegas to work outside the Triangle. And I would need the piratical equivalent of officers aboard both ships—ones who were loyal to me, in order to avoid a mutiny.

Could Ned be officer material? He was certainly educated and smart enough.

But was he trustworthy?

I needed to find out.

And so, I decided, I would take him into my cabin and let him see where I kept our most important information—the logs and the charts.

It wasn’t the first test I’d put him through. Nor the first I’d put his shipmates through. Really, this whole trip was a test for The Felicity’s crew.

We had hopped from island to island all along the perimeter of the Triangle, making port as we went, returning stolen goods and trading and selling the rest of the cargo we held. We hadn’t taken any other ships since The Felicity. This was her crew’s time to acclimate to the Neptune’s Jewel, and my chance to see all of that crew in action without having to worry about how they would respond to another ship’s crew’s resistance. Most of them, I suspected, would be fine, even as part of a pirate ship crew. Over the years I had discovered that most sailors make fine pirates.

But even after he passed the test of knowing where the charts were, I still wasn’t certain about my little lordling, even though we spent more and more time together over the next week, simply talking.

He was still deeply conflicted.

For all that he had run away from home to avoid the marriage his father had arranged for him, he was still convinced of the value of the rule of law.

He did not yet understand how often the law failed to protect the truly weak and vulnerable.

But he did have it in him to need to care for others. And he had an innate sense of logical justice. I saw the way he watched the recipients of the returned goods on island after island. When he saw me looking, he turned away and dashed the water from his eyes, but I had seen the tears standing there. He was touched.

And oh, if I had my way, he would be touched even more. Often, and thoroughly.

Just as I had taken to touching myself every night in my bunk, my cabin door shut tightly and latched.

When I blew out the candle after dark, I took hold of my own cock, imagining my hand was his and that the wetness I slicked around the tip came from his tongue.

Every night I edged myself closer and closer to orgasm, holding it off longer and longer.  But every night, an image came to me of Ned looking up at me from where he knelt between my knees, his green eyes drawing me in like the ocean itself, his beard coming to rest against my balls as he took me deep in his throat. Inevitably, that was the thought that did me in, that caused my dick to jerk and dance in my hand until it exploded.

If had become so common, so much part of my nightly routine, that I was almost embarrassed to meet the eyes of the crewmen who cleaned up my cabin after me every day. Most mornings, he replaced my linens with new ones that had been boiled in water donated by Cook, and then bleached by the sun.

I didn’t know if actually having the lordling in my bed would cure this craving that seemed to have sunk itself into my very bones. But he never came to me. And I would not prove the conventional ideas of how a pirate behaved. I would not even seduce him. much less try to force him.

No, if Ned wanted me, he would have to tell me so of his own accord.

But right now, we were headed home for a time.

Before we tested our new crew members by taking another ship, we were going to the Republic of Piratical Islands, on the Island of Barbadua, in the Port of New Hope Town, to test how well they integrated with pirate society.

Luckily for them, pirates were basically rambunctious sailors. At least, the pirates we allowed to live with us.

Oh, there were fights. People died by the sword. But we took care of our own, and that included making certain that most of our pirates behaved in port.

If they didn’t they weren’t allowed back. Jolly had ways of making sure that happened.

My foster-omega-father was getting on in age, it occurred to me. Not that I knew how old he really was. As far as I could tell, he looked exactly as he had when he first took me in as a child. Nonetheless, it would be good for him to train someone to share the load, if only he could find an apprentice.

I shook off the thoughts of Jolly. I needed to focus on what we were going to do when we got back to port.

Some of it actually would involve Jolly. He was excellent at contriving tests for new crew members.

And I knew a number of the alphas on board were eager to get home to their omegas. Jeremiah had barely looked me in the eye in all the time we’d been back out to sea. Since we’d left the omegas behind in port, he had taken to sneering every time I walked past, and often, he hid in the darkest the corners of the ship, muttering and scowling. I feared I might have to replace him. I didn’t like to have that bad blood in between us.

But more than that, I was unwilling to risk having omegas on my ship. Jeremiah might not admit it, but his mate was safer where he was now than aboard the Neptune’s Jewel with us.

We’re better off without omegas aboard.