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“But you can’t, can you?”
He didn’t bother shifting on his cot, more interested in the progression of the bloody fingers of dawn reaching across his cell. After almost a year in this stinking pit, he was almost glad that it was finally ending.
Instead of a final meal, they sent her.
“No,” he admitted. “Do you hate me, Eleanor?”
“No.”
He glanced over at her, swallowing hard and pretending he wasn’t moved. She didn’t look like Eleanor. Her hair was coiffed and pinned, her dress pristine, her laces knotted tight. She looked like a admiral’s lady, a woman who'd spent her youth in finishing schools learning how to speak Latin and cross stitch, not the queen of thieves, who'd stared down men twice her size with nothing more than a sneer of her lips and the absolutely surety that she could make them bow.
“I’m surprised your husband let you come.”
“He doesn’t own me.”
“Doesn’t he?”
The diamonds on her wrist clanked loudly against the metal bars of his cell, a perfect harmony of the chasm of their differences. It was hard to believe they had been similar souls once. Five short years had wrought such change.
“Charles,” Eleanor said. Her voice sounded like heartbreak. He’d only heard it once before, when she closed a door in his face and locked him out of her life. He had recognized it as prophecy.
He turned away. “Don’t watch,” he said, sending one small thankful prayer to a God he had never believed in that his voice still sounded strong. “Today in the gallows. Don’t watch.”
He’d be brave when they hanged him. He’d show no remorse for the bloody triumph of his history. He’d offer no witness, no apologies, no words. He would say nothing and take his pride with him to his grave, and in the end Charles Vane would win–his legacy would not be striped from him. They would not make him weep and beg. See the feared pirate beg! See the pirate king kneel! Civilization returned at last to this godless land.
But he’d be afraid. Deep down, in the pit of his stomach, he’d be afraid and she still knew him well enough to know each minute twitch of his body. She’d know how scared he was. He didn’t want her to know.
Five years stood between them. He’d grown an island of resentment for himself, and she’d caught a stony--faced husband–and a child, he thought; he thought there was a child. Four years? Five? He couldn’t remember, except that she had a lad-–but there were still parts of the people they had been, once, that recognized and knew.
“No,” Eleanor agreed. “I won’t.”
“Thank you.” It was the last thing he ever said to her. It carried the most meaning.