Unbroken, p.1
Unbroken, page 1
UNBROKEN
THE PIRATE & HER PRINCESS
BOOK TWO
ALLI TEMPLE
CONTENTS
Content Warnings
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part II
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part III
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
About the Author
LGBTQ+ Fantasy By Alli Temple
Contemporary Romances By Allison Temple
Copyright © 2022 by Alli Temple
Unbroken
All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-7772451-9-1
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover Design: Cate Ashwood Designs
Developmental Editing: Jen Greybeal, Jen Greybeal Author Services
Copy Editing: Adam Mongaya, Tessera Editorial
Proofreading: Lori Parks, LesCourt Author Services
Created with Vellum
For you, the reader.
Uncharted felt like such a huge risk when I released it and not only did you read it, you’re back for a second adventure. Thank you for making me brave.
For news on future releases, join the A-List, my monthly newsletter.
Content warnings: This book is a fantasy pirate adventure that takes place in a fictional world resembling a historical Earth. It contains the usual levels of piratical violence, consistent with that depicted in Uncharted. For additional information, visit the Content Warnings page.
PART I
Watching the woman I love marry someone else is an excellent way to spoil my day.
Being forced to officiate the very same wedding leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
And getting stabbed for my trouble is the perfect ending to an already rotten experience. Not the outcome I would recommend to anyone.
It should be a relief when the doors behind me blow open and the crew I recently left behind charges in, ready to defend and save me.
But all I can see is George.
I press a hand to my bleeding guts and struggle to stand. The prince has a hand in her hair and he’s dragging her from the room. I have to go after them, but already my limbs are slow to respond, and the pain is spreading.
The widening terror on George’s face is all the warning I get before a shout sounds above me, and I turn in time to see one of Kiril’s soldiers bring the blade down toward my neck.
I’ve faced death so many times I don’t flinch, even though I’m unarmed and defenseless.
At the last second, a second blade appears, knocking the descending one away. Maro stands above me, sword held high, mouth arranged in a snarl. And I know everything will be all right, even as I start to shiver from a cold no one else feels.
“George,” I say, as the room shudders. “The prince, he took her.”
“We have to leave,” Maro says, hooking a hand under my arm and hauling me to my feet. I groan with the pain of it, feeling my insides shift, trying to escape through the opening the prince’s dagger has left in me. I press tighter, wondering which organ I’m touching.
A second shudder.
“Are you tearing the building down?” I ask.
“We rowed one of the guns up the river.”
That’s a sensible solution. How many times have I dreamed of blasting this entire wretched fortress into the sky?
“Cinder,” a voice rasps behind us. “You gave me your word.” Kiril’s face, usually so ashen, has turned a mottled purple.
“Did I?” I say, and the effort of speaking leaves me breathless.
“You know what happens to those who go back on their promises to me.”
“She didn’t.” Maro steps between us. “I broke it for her.” Their approach toward Kiril is a thing of beauty. That walk, the set of their shoulders, is the final thing so many people have ever witnessed. Does Kiril know it’s his last?
But the edges of my vision darken, so I don’t get to see the outcome, only hear it. Steel rings out, then the swish of an unmet blade, and then the soft gurgle of a man with his throat slit.
The pain when Maro pulls me to my feet a second time is white-hot, and for a while, it’s all I know.
“George.” I bob on delirium, and water splashes around me. “We have to go after her.”
“You’re done making decisions for today.”
“No. George.” I struggle, or try to, though I’m not sure my arms and legs are working together.
“Stop.” Maro’s hand on my forehead is ice when the rest of me feels like it’s on fire. “You’ll tear more, and the doctor won’t be able to patch you up. Your princess will be disappointed to hear it.”
We find her. Or Maro does. I’m too weak by then to do anything but lie in bed. Not a very impressive sort of pirate. We sail on, and later I hear how my brave princess killed the prince herself. She never needed my help in the first place.
The doctor forces me to stay in bed longer than I want. He says there might be a touch of infection and makes me swallow cups of his foul brews and smears a yellowy paste on the wound. The skin around the crooked stitches is hot and tender, so he might be right. Once, I sneak out of the cabin, if only so I can feel the breeze on my face and smell the salt ocean for a moment, and the effort leaves me so exhausted I have to lean on the rail for support. George finally helps me back to the sofa in my cabin, where she leaves me to get food from Rosie like I’m a helpless child who needs to be fed.
This is how Maro finds me.
“You look like a rotten fish washed up on the beach,” they say with no hint of sympathy or humor.
“I feel about the same.” It’s hard to adjust my position without pulling at my stitches, and I wince when I try to sit up straighter.
“She makes you weak,” Maro says, and I don’t have to ask who they’re talking about. But they’re wrong. George makes me better.
“I love her.”
For a while, we don’t say anything. I sit there, sweating and forcing myself to breathe steadily so Maro can’t judge me any further, even though that’s all they ever do. They watch me with their steady, assessing gaze that says I can’t hide anything.
“We promised each other,” they say finally.
I sigh. “I know.”
“Never again.”
“I know.”
“We left Kiril, and we said we would never go back. We are stronger than his games, Cinder.”
Right now, I don’t feel very strong at all.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the plan.”
Now their mouth crooks up on one side. “I’d have tied you both to the mast if you had.”
“And that’s why I didn’t tell you.”
“The next time I hear of any of the brokers so much as breathing in our direction, it will be war. Do you understand? We don’t stop until they’re all dead. There’s no other way.”
I wave vaguely, my strength failing. Maro’s convictions are implacable, but we didn’t need a war. We’re no longer those people.
But I’ve wondered so many times how we can ever be anything else.
I hold out a hand, and we both pretend we don’t see the way I tremble from my fingertips all the way up to my shoulder. When Maro takes it in their firm grip and shakes gently, the knot in my gut under the rude stitches and rancid ointments relaxes ever so slightly.
“Never again,” I say.
CHAPTER 1
You would think, after several years of rescuing women desperate to escape various fathers, brothers, husbands, persecutors, and captors, that we would have had it down to a science. Find the woman, help her escape quietly under the cover of darkness, slip away before anyone notices, and bring her safely to a new life with minimal fuss and bother.
Yet, as the shot rang behind me and blew a clump of plaster from the wall past my ear, I had to admit that despite my best intentions, that was not always the case.
“I told you this was a bad idea,” Maro hissed in my ear.
“Yes,” I said through gritted teeth. “You can tell me all about my failings when we get to the ship.”
“Wait!” Lady Amelia, our erstwhile rescuee, said, tugging against the grip I had on her wrist. “My dogs. We have to go back for my dogs.”
“No one said anything about dogs.” Maro again. You’d never know they enjoyed their work.
“Madam,” I said, trying to gain some forward momentum. “We really don’t have time.” We’d already been forced to wait as she’d gathered an improbable number of possessions from her room and tied them all up in a bedsheet.
To prove my point about timin g, nearly ten guards rounded the corner of the hall we were currently racing down. We skidded to a halt and Maro cursed over the slither of steel as they pulled their sword from its sheath.
They glared at me. “This was supposed to be a quiet extraction.”
“But my puppies!” Lady Amelia wailed.
After a string of jobs where we had barely gotten out by the skin of our teeth—the fortress with a thirty-foot moat populated by ravenous fish with many rows of serrated teeth and a taste for human flesh had been particularly challenging—we had been promised that the rescue of Lady Amelia would be straightforward. A Paranese noblewoman unable to give her husband the son he wanted. She’d been subsequently shut up in the tallest tower of his country house with only a skeleton staff to attend to her. No one had seen her or asked after her in years. The husband had already moved his mistress into his house in town and she was expected to deliver his first child to great fanfare. The wife was an afterthought. No one would put up a fight.
The detail of the house being protected by half the nobleman’s personal guard had been conveniently left out until Maro and I had already scaled the tower under the cover of darkness and were trying to make our egress with the lady in tow. We were halfway clear when one of her tiny dogs had decided to pick a fight with its brother, and a sound like a mourner’s chorus had broken out, alerting not only the staff and guard, but no doubt half the county around them.
“Captain!” Maro stood in a narrow doorway, motioning me to follow.
“We have to leave the dogs behind,” I said, pulling Lady Amelia along. Her lower lip trembled, and her eyes filled with tears. “It’s either them or all of … this.” I gestured toward the bedsheet bundle she had slung over one shoulder. She glanced back up the hall, then to me again, and dipped her head once, an apparent capitulation. We continued on.
Maro was several steps ahead of us and threw all their weight against the closest door, forcing it open. Shouts echoed as they charged in, and I followed to find several startled servants in what appeared to be the kitchen.
More importantly, there was a door at the far side of the space, and the small window cut into it said that the outdoors lay beyond.
“Out of the way!” Maro shouted, brandishing their sword. They wouldn’t hurt anyone with it—the people here were all frightened and unarmed—but the kitchen staff all scattered, clearing a path as the footsteps clattered in the hall.
Someone shouted orders. But they would be too late.
“Take me with you!”
Maro had the door open when the voice called behind us. A man laughed, but I turned to find a young woman standing ahead of the rest of the cowering servants.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Take me with you,” she said breathlessly. She was skinny, with limp hair that hung in a ragged braid on one shoulder, but she squared her posture and clenched her fists.
“And where do you think we’re going?” I asked.
“Captain,” Maro warned.
“Anywhere is better than here.” She couldn’t be more than fourteen.
Lady Amelia hissed. “What are you doing?”
“Captain!”
“Please.” The girl rocked on her feet. “My mother died last winter, and if I don’t have to serve Lady Amelia anymore, I won’t have anything to do. They’ll turn me out, and I have nowhere to go.”
“Cinder.” Maro had come back and grabbed at me, tugging me toward the door. The girl stumbled after us, and while I didn’t tell her not to come, I didn’t stop her either. Maro shot me a glance that I ignored. One of us was captain and one was not.
We bolted across a dark stable yard. Lady Amelia’s husband must have been confident in the power of the enforcers he had inside the home to repel any invaders, because the property had no gate or wall around it for protection.
For a moment, it seemed as if we were free. I expected the kitchen door to fly open again as we raced toward the trees, but the soldiers didn’t come.
At least not on foot.
A few moments later, about halfway to the tree line, hooves thudded behind us. The soldiers had managed to wrangle a few horses and were coming after us.
Maro muttered something that sounded like “This is the last time I—” but the rest was cut off by the pounding of blood in my ears.
“I need you to run faster,” I said, pulling Lady Amelia along. She protested, but at least she wore no skirts that would impede her. Sensible boots and trousers. The country of Paranne was archaic enough they still punished women who couldn’t provide male heirs, but at least they let them live out their punishment in comfort.
The kitchen girl kept pace with us at least. I was sympathetic to the story she had painted, but we’d been paid to retrieve the lady, not the maid. If she fell behind, I wouldn’t stop for her. Maro would have opinions if I did.
Maro disappeared into the trees first, and we were only a few paces behind them. The soldiers called out, but we kept running. The trees thickened around us quickly. I hadn’t thought about the possibility of evading riders as we’d come through here earlier in the day, but now I was grateful for the cover. A rider could come through, but not quickly, and since there was no moon to filter light down through the branches, the uneven path would be treacherous.
“Where are we going?” Lady Amelia hissed as we picked our way along a path that only Maro could see. Their years of creeping through the halls and courts of those they’d been paid to kill had left them with certain skills that I would never understand fully but would always appreciate. One of them was their ability to find their way with only the fewest of landmarks to guide them.
“We’re headed to safety,” I whispered.
“Unless the guards hear that we’ve stopped for a chat and decide to circle around us,” Maro grumbled.
Lady Amelia’s hand tightened on my shoulder, but she didn’t speak again.
A thin whistle sailed over the air to us. Maro replied with the echoing call, and the whistle came again, a little stronger this time, and my heart relaxed into its usual rhythm. All clear.
Maro moved on.
“This way,” I said, and Amelia and the maid followed. Ahead of us, running water babbled a welcome, growing louder as we approached the river that would take us out to safety.
A figure emerged from behind a tree, long and lean like the trunk she’d stood behind. Someone—either Amelia or the maid—gasped in fright.
“She’s a friend,” I said softly.
So much more than friend. Even if I couldn’t see her face right now, my whole being tugged toward her, as it had from the moment she’d been pulled aboard my ship and back into my life after too many years apart.
Maro would have even further opinions about the many soft feelings that floated through me at the sight of George, even if she was barely more than a shadow. Honestly, I had opinions, but the self-preserving instincts to fling myself as far away from George as possible had been silenced over the past many months. Now I only wanted to keep her as close as possible.
“This way,” George whispered. “My lady, nice to meet you.”
Lady Amelia made a genteel sound, apparently pleased to find someone who accorded her some respect instead of hauling her around like a sack of grain. Manners were not my strong suit, especially when I was being shot at. George had spent far more time in polite company than I had, and six months at sea was not enough to tarnish her polished way of addressing people. She was beautiful light amid the dark world.
“And another friend for you,” I said, trying to draw myself away from those thoughts. Now was not the time. Instead, I prodded the girl in George’s direction.
