Chapter 233: Tit for Tat
Esperanza’s face closed up quick as a shutter dropped against a storm. The softness she’d shown her sister folded away, replaced by the flat, sharp look she must have worn over every business discussion.
Arms crossed, weight on one hip. A woman waiting to be paid.
Milagros drifted between them, unable to find a place to put herself, her eyes drifting from her sister to James and back again, as though one of them might kindly hand her a side to stand on.
Across the wall, Bert, Edmund, and Wesley Thorne went rigid all at once.
These were the same three giants who, not a quarter hour earlier, had been debating the ventilation of a leaking roof like connoisseurs judging wine. Now they stood with their hands folded and their mouths shut, doing their best to pass for furniture.
James spread his good hand toward the whole fat fleet beyond those walls. "My blockade can’t swallow one more prize without bustin’ clean open, and I figure we might as well strike our colors and sail home if we can’t keep takin’ ships."
Esperanza raised a brow. "So you need somewhere to put it all."
He grinned despite the ache still buried in his shoulder. "Aye, you. And whatever ships and hands you’ve got that know how to move goods discreetly through these waters."
She turned the thought over slowly, like a coin checked on both sides before it was spent. "The harbor you’ve had sitting under your guns happens to be the one that feeds me, señor. Every merchant too frightened to sail is a merchant who doesn’t pay me either."
She tipped her head, sharp as a blade finding a gap between ribs. "And more than one of those fat tubs you stripped so proudly already carried a piece of my trade, goods never meant to see Havana accounts. Now they’re sitting wherever you’ve stuffed the rest of your plunder."
James spread his good hand again, easy as you please.
"Aye, well. That’s the trade, lass."
He shrugged, and the sling made the motion awkward. "One man’s treasure is another man’s ruin. You’ve been skimmin’ off Spain’s hide for years and callin’ it fair work, can’t fault me none for skimmin’ off yours the one time our nets happened to cross."
Milagros unfolded her arms and waved a hand between them, hoping to smooth the whole business flat before it grew teeth. "Both of you have a point, is all I’m saying. Nobody made him sail into your goods on purpose, hermana, and nobody made you keep smuggling past a blockade that wasn’t even there when you send out the ships."
She heard herself a half breath too late. The words had landed nearer James’s side than she’d meant them to.
Esperanza’s eyes cut sideways to her sister and stayed there a moment longer than the sentence deserved, one eyebrow climbing slowly.
She left it alone for now and turned the conversation back to the matter at hand.
"Even if I wanted it."
She crossed her arms tighter. "How exactly do you picture me sailing a flotilla of merchantmen from the harbor without every soul on those forts knowing what they’re looking at? Some smugglers caught keeping company with a pirate blockade doesn’t get asked polite questions after."
James’s grin only widened. "Funny thing to hear from a woman who’s spent years movin’ goods past that exact harbor without any soul the wiser. Go on, then. Tell me straight you’ve never once kept a skiff waitin’ somewhere in this coast that Havana doesn’t know the first thing about."
Esperanza eyes flicked toward the corner of the shack, and her lips parted open on some answer about the cliffs, or the tide, anything that wasn’t the question in front of her.
"She’s got one."
Milagros said it clear. She’d thought better of it too late, and her own sister had no chance to stop her.
"A little cove further down the coast, nothing on any chart worth the paper. She’s had it years."
Esperanza’s tongue clicked against her teeth. Her hand came down lightly across her sister’s knuckles, more warning than blow, though the secret was already in the middle of the room for everyone to see.
She sighed, resigned now that the cat had escaped. "Just one cove, señor, nothing grand. The place my boys can make the cargo official before it ever answers to a customs man. Since you are this insistent, here’s how it’ll go, then."
She’d clearly worked it out before she ever walked through that door. "My boys bring the merchantmen close enough to Havana, then one of your ships breaks off the blockade at a time, meets my people away from the fort’s eyes, takes what needs selling, and falls back into the cove before our friends on the ramparts finish counting masts."
"Same numbers as before?" James asked.
"Thirty-seven in the hundred, aye."
She shot Milagros a look with more warmth buried in it than either sister would ever admit.
"I won’t haggle a coin off it, not after what you did bringing her home."
She spat into her palm and held it out.
James did the same, the sling turning the simple business clumsy. They shook on it, the way bargains had been sealed on every dock from here to Nassau since before either of them was born.
"Sooner’s better than later to start."
Esperanza thought on it for only a moment. "Late afternoon, once my boys had the whole day to carry word down the coast and back. Any sooner and you’ll be waiting on ghosts."
"Tomorrow, then."
With the business done, Esperanza leaned back against the wall, and the sharp, professional look in her eye transformed into a good deal more dangerous.
Her gaze slid from James to her sister and stayed there, slow and knowing.
"So."
She let the word hang by itself.
"Is there something going on between you two that nobody’s bothered telling me about?"
Milagros went rigid as a bowsprit, her mouth opening and without words.
James reached for an easy explanation, or at the very least a warm way to inform Esperanza that her little sister might have wandered into his little harem after she had been rescued.
"If I may."
Bert’s voice cut clean across the moment.
Whether he meant to save his captain or had simply picked the worst possible instant to speak his mind, not even James could have sworn to it. "I could not help but recall, during this most productive exchange, that Don Ambrosio Quintanilla still resides within these very walls."
Bert folded his hands with all the gravity necessary. "It occurs to me that a night such as this, with every soldier in the city fixed upon the water and not a soul expecting a second visit so soon after the first, might well be the finest occasion to pay the gentleman a call he shan’t see coming."
Edmund nodded along, considering it with genuine interest.
Wesley, by the door, said nothing at all, which somehow managed to sound like agreement regardless.
James looked between the three of them, then at Esperanza, then at Milagros.
He was caught between mortified and curious, and the whole rest of the night appeared before him like a hand of cards he hadn’t known he was holding.
His grin spread slow and wide and entirely without shame.