ANY DUKE IN A STORM

Fight night

A/N
Welcome to my third chapter!! That's right two chapters posted back to back! Also would like to thank the Jelsa Haven community for helping me. While you read please if you see any mistakes, errors, or something confusing, let me know so I can fix it, so you can have more enjoyable reading experience! With more to come please enjoy

FROM HIS VANTAGE POINT IN THE FOREMAST CROW'S nest, Jack peeled and bit into a juicy yellow mango, observing the crew milling about down below.

On his own vessels, everyone had their assigned roles for the most part, but this ship was a tightly run machine. Each sailor and boatswain knew their place. A flutter of admiration crossed his brain. Maybe there was something to be said for a female leader.

Though, he'd been wrong about the crew being largely female. Roughly half of the gunners and deckhands were male, and the surgeon was an enormous pale Englishman called Kai who was never too far from his mistress's side. Case in point...Kai lounged near the frigate's paddle wheel, a dark gaze fastened to Jack's position in the crow's-nest. He didn't begrudge the man his instincts; Jack was new, not that he meant the ship or its truculent captain any harm.

The woman was nothing like he'd imagined. In his head from the stories he'd heard over the past couple of years, Elsa Winters was a loud, brazen giantess who wore the tokens of her enemies ears, teeth, fingers all strung together in a gruesome necklace about her person to remind herself of those who had wronged her. Her reputation for cunning, ruthlessness, and violence preceded her by a mile, and most sailors with half a brain knew to steer clear of the Syren, which was a ship that fired cannons first and asked questions later. He was probably lucky. No one built a name like that without some grain of truth to it. Then again, most people underestimated him as well.

They thought him a bumbling, sotted fool. While the act worked well to get him into places he wanted or helped him go unnoticed when he needed to be, it wasn't him in the least. He had plans...ones he meant to see through no matter the cost. Jack took a huge bite of his mango, wiping the sweet juice from his chin with one sleeve. All he had to do was survive the rest of the way. Five fucking days. That would get him to Nassau at their current speed. He'd successfully charted a path for the Syren to the Port of Bridgetown in Barbados, where they would ensure they had extra provisions and armament for the remaining four-day journey to Nassau.

Strangely, the lethal captain had not argued with his suggestion, which made him wonder if she was evading something-or someone-as well. It would not do to find them in the middle of the Atlantic on the way to the island without some form of defense. Jack had taken a look at the Syren once the sun had started to rise on the horizon.

Much like some of his own, it was a ship built for invisibility and speed with its slate gray color, side-wheel steamer, two steam engines, and low hull. The forward deck right below him was built like a turtle's back to combat rough seas, and if he wasn't mistaken, the ship itself was constructed from a much lighter gauged but reinforced steel. Right now, her engines used normal coal as fuel, the plumes of dark smoke rising from its funnels visible as the sun rose.

The Syren was a beauty. Svelte, sharp, and most definitely deadly for a frigate. Much like her captain. His drifted back to the woman in question, who was standing on the quarterdeck and looking nothing like he'd been led
to expect. Stories had a way of doing that, he supposed. In the light of the budding dawn, tangled snow fallen hair blew in the wind, a sennit hat tarred with black fabric to make it waterproof keeping the longer tendrils out of
her face. She was deep in conversation with her quartermaster, her boots planted wide on the deck and one palm flicking over the pommel of a cutlass at her hip.