Chapter 205: The Fish Finds Its Home

That made three men, and perhaps a great many more behind that name. Ox, Barrel and Anvil could haul rope and throw crates well enough between them, but nobody earned a name like the Bonebreakers with only three men strong.

James let himself hope there might be a dozen more with them. Then he shrugged the hope away when another voice caught his ear from the far side of the room.

Laughter, low and pointed, and with a different pitch from the common racket of the floor. It came from a section raised one step above everything else, warmer-lit, with couches and cushioned benches scattered about plain wooden stairs that climbed toward a row of curtains.

Courtesans moved through the place with ease, dropping onto laps here, bending over shoulders there. Whatever business was conducted behind those curtains, not a soul seemed troubled by what went on there.

James spotted Enzo near the middle of the whole affair, his coat still spotless, one hand pressed against his chest in the middle of some grand declaration and the other clutching the wrapped fish he’d carried across the city.

He hadn’t surrendered that damned fish once.

"Doll, I beg you."

Enzo held out the bundle as though he presented a crown to a queen. "I reckon a woman of your evident quality deserves nothing less than the finest catch this miserable city can provide. I would count myself honored, honored indeed, to see it prepared for your table by my own hand."

The woman he’d cornered was dark-haired and sharp-eyed, with a generous bosom that her bodice had been given the unenviable task of containing, and she looked first at the fish and then at Enzo.

Evidently, she had already heard every line this city possessed, and most of them twice.

"I don’t need a man cooking for me, love. Never have."

She wrinkled her nose at the parcel.

"And I wouldn’t take a gift with its dead eyes staring into my soul."

She gave her whole attention to a sailor three feet away before he could even draw breath to answer her. That left him standing there with the fish still extended and his sentence dangling unfinished in the air.

James put the back of his hand over his mouth.

Enzo recovered, and found his next victim in a freckled woman with enough ass behind her to make a man’s pelvis reconsider its life choices, which was probably half the reason she had no shortage of customers.

He proclaimed eloquently. "My dear Sukey, I have crossed an ocean and seen wonders enough to fill a book, and I confess I have found nothing among them half so fine as what stands before me now."

"I’ve heard finer poetry from a drunk parrot, Enzo, and the parrot didn’t smell of fish."

"A woman who wounds so well with words deserves an even finer effort."

He drew breath and tried again, comparing her to some vintage he claimed his father had kept locked away for kings.

Sukey let him carry on through the whole performance, and matched him volley for volley until he finally slipped his real question in sideways, asking about sailors newly ashore, men a captain might do worse than take notice of.

Her grin sharpened. "My time can be spent in any number of pleasant ways, but spreading rumors isn’t one of them."

She patted his cheek, not unkindly.

"Try the barkeep, hun. He’s the one who gets paid to talk."

Then she was off toward her next customer.

Enzo turned with the fish still in his hand, looking for a third attempt, when a stool scraped hard against the boards behind him.

A heavyset sailor, red-faced and smelling of rum from ten feet away, had one hand clamped around the wrist of a slim sandy-haired woman. He hauled her towards the foot of the stairs while she smiled up at him.

The smile stopped well short of her eyes.

Some hard grip on a courtesan working this floor was, by itself, nothing strange in the trade she’d chosen. Enzo took one step and stopped.

Then he noticed that smile which had never reached her eyes, and walked the remaining distance.

"Are you going with this man? Or would you rather not?" He asked plainly.

The smile vanished from her face.

"I’d rather not," she exhaled. "Not tonight, not with him."

Enzo’s hands remained exactly where they always were, loose at his sides.

His boot slammed into the sailor’s stomach hard enough to lift him half off his feet and fold him over the edge of the table, all the breath and dignity knocked out of him in the very instant.

Before he could even hit the boards, Enzo’s second kick caught him square in the mouth with a crack, sent his few remaining teeth skittering across the floor, and dropped him flat.

The entire affair was finished in less than three seconds.

Hardly anybody in the room bothered to stir, and only the couple mates of the fallen sailor hauled him up beneath the arms and dragged him toward the door, muttering apologies to nobody in particular.

The woman caught Enzo by the sleeve, breathing hard, and pulled him one step away from the crowd.

"Nell, and I owe you for that."

Enzo smiled widely. "You owe me nothing, signorina. My hands might be only for the pot, but my feet, it seems, are for men like him."

Nell laughed, genuinely, then lowered her voice so only he could hear.

James moved close enough to catch the words.

Her words were spicy with information. "I heard what you asked Sukey. There’s a crew of gunners near here, good number of them, more than I could rightly count. They broke their articles to mutiny against some captain cruel enough to deserve it, and lost the fight for their trouble."

She briefly glanced around, then continued. "Every one of them is a marked mutineer now, and there’s not any captain in this whole city willing to touch that, however right they may have been to try it."

Enzo’s whole face brightened at that.

He put the fish down properly this time, straight into her two hands. It was a gift, freely given, and Nell took it laughing, with nothing of that earlier smile about her.

James slipped back into the crowd, and neither of them knew he’d been standing there at all.

Three fools left to find, and every one of them was likely buried in some new trouble by now.