Son of the Sea

By N. K. Mook

"The pirates put my hands in ropes." Was it merely bad luck that returned this man to confinement so soon after his escape? Or was he fated to meet this pirate ship, these sailors? This Captain?

"He was only a man." But a man cannot stand against the sea. A man cannot hold the whole of the sky, endless and brilliant, in only the curls of his hair. A man should not have the ability to make someone feel so wonderfully powerless.

"He commanded me." Across the deck. Against his better judgement. To his knees. All without a word, leaving the Captain standing at the helm, the Sailor kneeling at his feet, and them both wondering...

"What had I done?"

So begins SON OF THE SEA, the first book in a romance series so great it moves the very ocean. Two men are cast together by fate and find that their souls are wonderfully, unmistakably known to one another. But will they take the chance that they have been given? Or will they let fear cast them apart?

• Language: English
• Publisher: N. K. Mook
• Release date: Jul 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781075002724

N. K. Mook

Nakamook is a gay, trans creator. They have a growing indoor garden and dream of being able to break ground on their own outdoor garden one day soon.

Book preview

Son Of the Sea

Book One of the Pirate King Romance Series

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2019 N. K. Mook

License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form and credit given to the author. If you enjoyed this book, please return to your favorite ebook retailer to discover other works by this author. Long live the King.

A NOTE

This series contains depictions of violence, BDSM themes, and explicit sex. Themes of domestic violence and CSA are explored, but never depicted. Alcoholism is depicted. It is a journey of healing; the easy, the rough, and everything in between. If you would rather not engage with these topics, please skip this series, or come back to it another time. If you have any further questions about the content of the series or individual books, feel free to contact me at [e-mail] or on twitter (@nakamookwrites).

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

The pirates put my hands in ropes.

I had been out of confinement for two weeks. Two weeks of freedom, of ocean breezes and remembering what it was to reach outward with my soul and feel only the horizon. Two short weeks to spread my arms as wide as they could and see that even my body, even the width of my massive frame could not begin to contain the whole of my possibilities.

Still, this was only a distraction. Ropes could not hold me. Metal was what I hated, what I had come to fear. It had been metal when they trapped me in the mines. It had been metal in the bowels of the bounty ship that had pulled me, empty and broken, from my salty grave. And it had been metal used to bind my arms and legs when I had been drug under my own ship, when salt water had invaded my lungs, when barnacles had ripped blood from my back. When I had been killed. Metal is of the earth. It does not give. It scarred even my rough skin. I had expected it to be difficult to explain these marks away, but the captain of this merchant vessel had never asked. I was able to work; he needed bodies. His was a dangerous route with not many willing workers. But his ship was the only one that came close enough to where I needed to be, and besides, I knew I could keep us from the worst of the sea's danger.

I did not see the pirates as a danger. What could catch me? Who could hurt me? I felt the call of the ocean loud against my soul, and forgot to worry about men.

Our captain surrendered immediately upon seeing the black flag. He was a mediocre captain, and even on his best day he could not outrun the quicker, smarter pirate ship. Nor did he want to invoke the pirate’s ire by firing first. He was a child of the earth and a coward. And so I found myself again constrained. I flexed my arms against the ropes, feeling the knots catch and hold as I watched the pirates do their work. It is important to recognize skill when you saw it, and I saw it here. They moved fast. They moved smart. I had been working with a ragged band of individuals for the past two weeks, and to see a crew, a family, work so well together made my soul ache for my home. A home that had been stolen from me.

Storms gathered in my chest. The sea beat in my ears. My crewmates stood around me, eyes on the deck, unaware of the danger they hid in their midst. I was the ocean itself, endless, uncaring. If I so wished I could strike these ships to pieces, scatter the wood out on my surface for seabirds and small fish to enjoy. I could kill these men as I had killed the ones that kept me in the mines, my soul reaching for the ocean and finding dust, finding stone, finding silver for men who had bought my body for the ways it could break apart rocks and nothing else. Soon, I would kill the men who had trapped me in their ship. Soon, I whispered to the ocean, I would kill the one who had killed me.

I needed only to be patient a bit longer. It was only ropes that held me now - nothing but a temporary annoyance. I repeated this to myself until it was true.

And true it became. The pirates looked as if they were finishing their work. There was a man speaking to our captain giving instruction for how long to wait after they had left, what direction to sail it. He was small and bald and wore a smile like water wears an oil slick. He held little interest to me and so I ignored him. Out of curiosity or perhaps from a need to distract myself from the memories of my confinement, I scanned the rest of the ship. It was well cared for. I could find no fault in the mending of the sails, the tacking of ropes. The placement of men, both for defense and in preparation for a quick sail away. But the men were of no interest; they were land boys. Attuned to the sea, yes, their eyes quick and their hands true, but their souls were covered in dust and they held no threat to me. And as for the captain...

I had not yet seen the man. No matter; he was sure to be more of the same. I was just setting my disinterest in my soul when onto the deck spilled a sunrise.

Curls whipped around his face in the brisk breeze, mirrored by his black cloak, by the flapping sails above. He was an extension of the ship, and the ship an extension of the sea. I watched, enraptured, as sunlight crawled into his hair and made itself a nest; as storm walls gathered and broke beneath furrowed brows of a concentrated face; as lightning sang and danced beneath the black of his cloak. And when he turned and looked across the deck, and I caught his gaze for the briefest of moments, I swear to all the gods that I was not looking into the eyes of a man but up into the eternal darkness of the night sky.

And then I blinked. The captain - it had to be the captain, who else could it be but the captain - stood on the deck of the ship. His black cloak caught the sea breeze, and his dark curls whipped, but he was not the sky. He was nothing but a man.

It must have been an illusion. Only a man, I told myself, but I did not quite believe it to be true as he swung his black cloak around and disappeared from view onto a lower deck.

All the parts of me that had been aching for home were suddenly quiet, the kind of quiet that comes before a great storm. The sudden drop of pressure that makes a person nervous.

I was not nervous. I was confused. He is nothing to me, I thought. A good sailor, perhaps. A pirate, yes. But I had sailed with many pirates, all of them good sailors. None of them had affected me so.

And yet there I stood. My soul quivering. My eyes unable to stop their search for his form.

My confinement was now not merely a nuisance, but untenable. Try as I might, I could not see him from where I stood. Fine; then I would move. I had to see him again. I wanted - needed - his storm to come crashing into my soul and found, for the first time in my life, that I was not in complete control of my world. How had I let this brief glimpse of a man - of a land boy, no less - take such hold of my actions? I found I did not have time for such questions, my body already moving forward across our deck.

The oily man was in front of me - he was short and not important, and I ignored him still. I could not quite see the deck yet. The pirate was in my way and so I moved him, physically placed him to my side so that I could have a better view and maybe catch a glimpse of - there.

It was the briefest glimpse. His mess of hair crested the deck, like salvation, like the sun, and I shielded my eyes out of habit. In the midst of these southerners, surrounded by people I didn't spare a second glance, he demanded my attention. He looked like a pirate. He looked like a commander. A commander of men, a commander of fleets.

He commanded me.

What the fuck - the a bald head said, but he was not my goal. The knife he held in my face only served to block my view and so I took it from him, paying no attention to the noise he made. That moment of obstruction was all it took to lose track of the captain again. The deck was again filled with distractions and nobodies.

I needed to see him.

These men had not yet learned that ropes could not keep me, that knots were useless against my fingers. They were good knots, sailor's knots, but they were no match for me. These men might have learned to be sailors, but I had been born one. And so I left them in my wake.

I heard them coming after me. They were shouting, the fear in their voice making the noise sharp but I was sharper, my movements unstoppable. I did not question the way I turned but instead allowed my soul to take its course. It was not so much a journey as it was a fall, a current racing. The turning of a tide. It would have been useless to try and stop my bulk.

Try these men did. I felt them cling to me like seaweed, then like anchors, my limbs weighed down with their forms as I stumbled across the deck.

As I stumbled to him.

He turned just as I approached and oh, oh what a sight, spread out across the whole of the universe. But no - for he was only a man. And a man cannot hold the whole of the sky. Many had tried. All had failed.

I did not think he was trying. I did not think anything. I knew, to the bottom of my soul, that he was wondrous.

His hair dripped the sun, gathering light in its curls until the brilliance was so heavy and thick it fell like liquid onto his shoulders, across his face. And oh, oh his face, the way his heavy eyebrows drew together and pinned frustration in place like a specimen to study, the lines of his cheekbones that channeled the dripping light soft and sharp down to his lips (his lips, his lips, how could such a small bit of a stranger mean so much to me) and staring out from it all, controlling all of this wonderful, mystifying thing were his eyes. They were endless, those eyes. Dark and eternal and demanding. Gods, I wanted him to demand of me. I wanted to be able to do anything this man asked. The weight of everything - the men, his gaze, the fall - it bore me down. I landed on my knees at his feet.

What is this, he asked. I drug my gaze down, shaking. I asked the same answer of myself. He is only a man, I reminded myself angrily. What was I doing? What was a man to the sea?

He came across, untied his hands. The voice held fear.

Attacked me. I recognized the voice of the oily man, angry and out of breath. Stole my fucking knife.

The knife was still in my hands. Would he find a threat in my grip? I could not bear the thought, and let the tool spill out onto the deck. The sun pooling at this man's feet caught on its blade and made everything sharp.

The Captain crouched down to pick up the blade. As he did he took my chin in his hand, pulling my face up slightly to meet his eyes. I fell into his endless gaze, and never wanted to fall back out.

Should we kill him?

I was already dead. If that's what it took to stay here. I would kill anyone who laid a hand on me. These things were all true and I thought them all at once, my racing mind unable to pick one thread to follow.

The Captain's eyes narrowed and he searched my face. He's here now. We might as well find out what he wants. When he stood, my body shook with release.

Bring him to dinner, I heard him command above me. And then he swept away.

I knelt on the deck, shaking. I do not know how much time passed. I know men came and left. I knew the sun could no longer be in the sky, because I had seen it in the soul of a man.

And yet, somehow, when I managed to raise my gaze the world was as it had been. We were separated from the merchant ship. The sun shone above; a good wind pushed us northwest.

The opposite of the direction I had wanted to go.

Come on. A large man stood at my side. We gotta take you down.

Dinner with the Captain. That was from a small blonde boy. He had mischief in his eyes. Good fucking luck.

I looked out to where the merchant ship raced away towards my home. What had I done?

CHAPTER TWO

They tied me up for dinner.

They again used rope, perhaps thinking that adding knots would be enough to hold me. That the two men standing behind me could stop me from leaving. They could not, but I wasn't going anywhere. I sat in my chair and waited for the man they called the Captain to arrive.

My heart raced as I watched the door. I found myself worried that I was not dressed appropriately. What was happening to me? I had navigated winter squalls in nothing but river rowboats; I had killed any man who had wanted to kill me, and many who had not. I'd faced down mermaids and harpies, I'd killed a sea god and drank his blood, I had survived the mines and their guards and two years on land. I was the sea, and this was my home. No captain - no land boy - could frighten me.

Then he walked through the door, and my heart leapt into my throat.

He no longer wore the black cloak, the one I had thought might house the very storms my soul threatened to call. What this meant was his shirt was exposed, a white linen garment that he wore completely unlaced, showing the dark skin of his chest. This was unremarkable - what is a chest to me? His pants fit well, very well, and they showed off his hips, were tight through his ass, but I'd seen hips before, had seen men naked, so what was his ass to me?

Well then, he started, rolling up his sleeves, and his forearms were muscled and scarred and I wanted to keep him from learning what pain felt like on his skin, I wanted to gather those arms around my chest but I was not one who needed to be held and what were forearms to me and I tried to look away, I truly did. He took me in, frowning. What were lips that swept to me. What were eyes that demanded.

You tied him again.

I felt a strange thrill at the way he said that, at the way his eyes caught on my bindings. He took longer than perhaps was necessary to look me over before raising his gaze to the man to my left, his eyebrow raised in question.

He's dangerous, was the explanation. The Captain made some sort of a face at that.

He took down like, twelve of us, Cap.

The Captain waved away the words (what is a movement