She always imagined it differently. She had played over the scene in her head over and over so many times over the years. In each of them she was triumphant, in each of them she was in control. Though she had a million scenarios she had played out to varying levels of satisfaction she had never in her wildest dreams played out the one that came to her without thinking, the one that came to her naturally. Much to her shame.

She was standing besides Jax, disarmed, enchanted by his whispers and the way the breath danced across her skin. Delighted by his ferreting out of secret tales and imaginings about their fellow guests. Disarmed and open, that seemed to be Monsieur Jax’s effect on her though she would not admit to being open. He spoke of her name, of his want to say it only once and though it thrilled her in ways she couldn’t have predicted, it saddened her too. Just once, only once. He only wanted it, her, once. 

Before she could reply their missing crewmate arrived in a swirl of skirts and scents that made Nicolette dizzy with remembering. She had been that form before, skirted and corseted, polished and pretty. A flower to be plucked. Though she knew the lookout was much more than that it was still hard to focus, to form the proper words of response. Words that should have been second nature. But that Nicki was dead, long gone. Nicki was terrible at this spying business as she had so clearly said. 

Then the Captain came and he spoke as well adding to the play she must find a part in. He able and skilled in this dance of words and entendres and she felt lost and superfluous and absurd all at once. She closed her eyes, pulling herself together, trying unsuccessfully, to close herself off. Her lashes cast a deep arc of shadow across her face in the candlelight of the room, but the shadows were not enough to hide the letter carved into her flesh, the unmistakable word written to tell all of what she was. She hadn’t forgotten, Jax certainly had read it right. 

Despite her efforts she was still open when she opened her eyes. Open and mistaken in her orientation. She had thought she was turning to face the Captain but she had misjudged. Beyond his shoulder stood the man of the house, Commander Robert Murry. She knew him from out and about though not personally. She had seen him but never spoken with him and understood the connection with the skate and the friendship, or something like it, that had been between him and the Captain. 

But it was the man approaching to his right that drew her eyes and made them widen in mute horror and fear. This was where she failed, this was where all that she had imagined the scene would be, all that she had pictured flew right out the window. 

He was tall and softening to paunch though by no means was he fully soft, with a large blade of a nose and small black eyes that glittered like obsidian and were just as hard, just as sharp. He wore the dress uniform of a French Naval officer like it was a second skin. He inclined his head to speak to Commander Murry and his eyes caught sight of her but a moment after she had seen him. He froze, his expression did not change though his eyes hardened as they swept over her, condemnation in them as they took her in. 

Blind fear filled her, animal fear that took her over to such a degree that she couldn’t have imagined it. In all her pretend scenarios she had, she’d never even considered this one. She made a quiet choking sound as all color paled from her face leaving the letter a stark lurid red in her whey-colored flesh. Then without conscious thought, she ran.

Into the night with a thousand demons chasing her, touching her, hurting her and humiliating her. She relived the whole thing as she ran as real as when it happened. The nightmare called up by all the fractures to her control that she’d been enduring and begun by the sight of that face. The face that had watched and seen it all, the face of the man who had commanded for it to happen. 

Capitaine Rene Pouteau had won, again.