Wispy lace privacy curtains tangling around the butt of his weapon and getting pulled out after him. Glass crunched under Thomas’s boots as he set o...f after the felling suspect who was just clearing a brick fence at the rear of the property. Squad cars at the front of the house coming to life with lights and sirens as word went out over the radio of a runner.They caught up with Thomas and the suspect almost a mile down the road. The fugitive lying face down in the middle of a back alley.. ” “And we’re built on bullshit.” She chuckled. I chuckled with her, then glanced at her face. “What will you do now?” She shrugged. “Find a husband, pop out a few kids, grow old, and die. My ambition is gone. I just want to drink wine and get fat.” “Doesn’t sound too bad.” I laughed, “I think I’ll do some of that myself.” She laughed musically for a moment, then it waned in her throat. The mirth left her face, and she frowned to herself. “What?” I asked. “I always knew I was bad at playing. In London, gunnery, seamanship, navigation, Dutch, German, and English. But it was in Portugal, my birthplace, that I learned my most valuable lessons, Fair Bitch. There I learned deception, fraud, theft, and evil. There I faced those I should trust most and watched them destroy my innocence. There I met the end of blood family, and the beginning of Pirate family, by the Code! ‘The Portuguese authorities hanged my parents because they were poor. They took me to the house of our local priest,. As she disappeared from sight, all of his thoughts suddenly became clear and coherent. He had just finished singing the song that scared the hell out of him in front of a crowd of people. He sang it well, confidently, fully, and he sang it with Kairi. He sang it because of Kairi. Thoughts traveled everywhere. The bend of her body. The sound of her voice. His heart spend up a noticeable degree. All this time he had been trying to get her to open up, and she had managed to open him up in a way.