A/N: This is rated...T+ to M? Pfft *tosses rating out the window* Who has time for that. XD

Rila was the barmaid to the esteemed Pirate King of Skull's Bay, Rolfe, and so she'd damn well seen enough oddities pass through her bar and up the stairs to speak in murmured tones to the wolf-eyed, sharp-tongued pirate lord.

So when two Fae warriors prowled into the dusty, dirty little abode she called her workplace, she didn't even cock an eyebrow. She simply jerked her delicate chin at the stairwell and told them to be on their way, and oh, the pretty one with the silver hair did not like that. Not one bit.

He'd asked her why Rolfe wanted to see them, which struck her as a stupid question when the answer lay within reach, so she'd lifted a glass, cleaned a gray smudge from its fogged surface, and told him not to keep the pirate king waiting.

It was a fairly regular occurrence at this particular tavern. Thieves, murderers, assassins, courtesans, golddiggers, and all manner of desperate, vicious people visited Rolfe. Most were dragged out by the cuffs of their shirts, and Rila had long since stopped fearing for her own safety. No one paid attention to the slender, brown-haired, dark-skinned barmaid with the gray eyes and the stormy sea serpent tattoo when there was a pirate, a trickster, a king upstairs. Which didn't mean the long knife she had stashed under the countertop was removed from its place, but her slim, tattooed arms hardly ever reached for it anymore.

Another regular occurrence, this one a little more recent, happened when the dying sun cast great shafts of orange light over her body and bathed her workplace in powdered gold speckled with roused dust. Rolfe, when he didn't have any scum off the street to attend to, would lean against the doorway until she (the scum from downstairs) was finished her duties. At first, it had just been to banter. And then to flirt. And then to get far too close. And then, one day, he'd approached on silent feet, those jade eyes darkening the longer they traveled over her lithe body, bronzed by the sun and by her birth.

Every time, electricity would shoot up the length of her form, but every time, she raised her steel-gray eyes and met his head-on. Like the fact that he pulled her into darkened corners didn't affect her heart as much as her body, or when he kissed her that she forgot her name and her breath and her being, but that she somehow remembered his name. Like when he claimed her mouth and pressed her up against the wall and snaked his hands along her skin, enticing every sound from her that he could, she was only there for just that.

At first, Rolfe backing her into his room and stripping her bare had been all that it was, or so she thought. The things he made her feel and think didn't strike her as out of the ordinary...until things began to change, and not for the better.

They changed when she realized his presence wanted to draw a smile from her, not just an accelerated pulse.

They changed when they talked, when he confided in her, when he traced the gray sea dragons snaking up her arms and asked her why she had tattooed his symbol on her skin when she was no relation of the ancient Mycenians. She'd told him to mind his own business, and he'd laughed.

They changed when she mounted the stairs after a particularly volatile meeting with a client and found him in a pool of his own blood, when she bullied and blackmailed anyone she thought could be vital to healing him into doing just that, when she lost her mind because she realized with all the force of a lightning strike that her life had become Before Rolfe and After Rolfe. And there was no life if Rolfe vanished from it.

He sweated and murmured and twisted himself in his sheets to the point where Rila stayed by his bedside to make sure he didn't strangle himself in his own bedding by mistake. She dug in her heels when the healers told her to leave, and they learned not to complain about the nobody sitting in the chair beside the king, with her gray eyes very far away. When the fever induced by infection at last broke, and she knew for sure that he would be alright, Rila cleared the room of all trace of herself and left. She didn't go back, and she didn't wait to see if he remembered who had cared for him.

He recovered, and he made no mention of her care, which allowed Rila to breathe again.

Though everything had changed, swirling up a storm of chaos within Rila that she had never wanted to deal with, nothing had really changed after all.

Because she was his barmaid, his spy, his bedmate. And he wasn't her anything, other than her everything, and that just wasn't a bridge that would be allowed to be built between a sharp-eyed woman from the slums and the quick-witted pirate from the world upstairs. Just because everything had changed for Rila didn't mean anything would change other than her, because the world she lived in was not kind enough to let her see it through, nor was she foolish enough or romantic enough to try.

Everything had changed, except that nothing really changed at all.

A/N: I have always thought there was something between Rolfe and that barmaid. Just the way that she's described is more in-depth than Maas usually goes into for NPCs, so I'm hoping with crossed fingers that she and Rolfe take a bigger role in the last book, and... Ahh, I know, it's a stretch, BUT I THINK THERE'S SOMETHING THERE, OKAY.