Last spring, she pulled off the impossible. A treasure fleet—twelve Spanish galleons, heavy with silver—rounded Cape Horn. Every pirate lord in the Caribbean ran the other way. Pirate B. sailed straight into the wind.

Pirate B. didn’t want a throne. She didn’t want a pardon. What she wanted sat in a cage at the bottom of the Admiralty’s own dungeon: a pale, sharp-eyed girl they called “the Key.” The only person alive who knew where the real treasure was buried.

The wanted posters changed after that. No more “Pirate B.” Now it read: B. — Traitor to Every Throne — Reward: Anything You Dare Ask.

She didn’t fly the black Jolly Roger. Her flag was a tattered blue field with a single golden letter B , stitched crookedly by her own hand at fourteen, the night she burned her foster home to the waterline.

The B stands for Beginning.

But here’s the truth they never printed: