The air over the Davies Naval Shipyard tasted of salt, coal, and ambition.
From the large plate-glass window of her office, perched high above the fray like a captain on her bridge, Cornelia “Nell” Davies surveyed her kingdom.
It was a sprawling, chaotic symphony of industry, and she was its conductor.
Below, hundreds of men swarmed over the steel skeletons of nascent ships, their shouts swallowed by the percussive clang of hammers on rivets, the groan of cranes hoisting impossible weights, and the volcanic hiss of the forges.
Her forges.
Her men.
Her empire, wrested from the mud of the East River and the condescension of a city that had expected her to fail.
Nell’s gaze drifted to Dry Dock Four, where the *Dauntless* waited. Not yet a ship, but the promise of one—a skeletal hull that represented the future.
Everything hinged on the *Dauntless* and the ships that would follow it.
The United States Navy was expanding, and the lucrative contract to build its new fleet of cruisers would not just make her wealthy; it would make her a dynasty.
It would silence the whispers that had followed her since her husband’s death, the murmurs that she was merely a widow keeping his chair warm.
This contract would prove the shipyard was hers by right of wit and will alone.
She was so close. The naval committee’s final inspection was less than a fortnight away. Every rivet had to be perfect, every deadline met.
The pressure was a physical weight, a constant companion that settled in her shoulders and tightened the muscles in her jaw.
But pressure, Nell had learned long ago, was simply the force that turned coal into diamonds.
A sharp rap on her door pulled her from her thoughts. “Enter,” she called, her voice clear and steady.
Her foreman, a burly man named Alistair Finch whose weathered face was a roadmap of his thirty years on the docks, stepped inside, twisting a greasy cap in his hands.
He didn’t meet her eyes, and that alone set every nerve in Nell’s body on edge. Alistair was not a man easily cowed.
“What is it?” she asked, her tone clipped.
“It’s the main winch on the east gantry, ma’am,” he began, his voice a low rumble of apology. “The primary gear shattered. Clean break. Just…gave out.”
Nell’s perfectly sculpted eyebrows drew together. “Gave out? Alistair, that gear was forged from crucible steel and replaced not six months ago. It was rated to lift twice the load it was carrying.”
She stepped away from the window, her silk dress rustling as she moved toward her desk.
The calm facade was a fortress she had built brick by brick, but behind its walls, her mind was racing.
A shattered gear meant a halt in lifting the primary boiler plates for the *Dauntless*. It meant a delay.
“I know, Mrs. Davies. Never seen anything like it. It’s a clean shear. Almost looks…cut.”
He finally looked up, his expression a mixture of confusion and concern. “Lucky we were at the end of a shift change. No one was under the load. Could’ve killed a half-dozen men.”
The relief that no one was hurt was a brief, sharp pang, quickly consumed by a cold tide of suspicion.
Clean break. Almost looks cut.
Accidents happened in a place this dangerous, but they were messy, born of fatigue or faulty iron. This sounded different. This sounded deliberate.
“Shut down the entire gantry,” she commanded, her voice leaving no room for argument. “I want the gear brought to my office. And I want a list of every man who had access to that winch housing in the past forty-eight hours.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Alistair nodded, already backing out of the room, relieved to have a direct order to follow.
Alone again, Nell walked back to the window.
The symphony below had faltered, a discordant note of stillness spreading from the east gantry. Men were gathering, their upturned faces anxious.
A delay of a few hours was manageable. But the feeling coiling in her gut was not about a broken piece of metal. It was a premonition.
A siege was not always announced by trumpets and banners. Sometimes, it began with a single, suspicious crack in the fortress wall.
She had enemies in this city—men like August Vanderbilt who saw her success as an affront to the natural order.
Men who would see her fail and call it justice.
She rested her palm against the cool glass, her reflection a pale, determined ghost against the backdrop of her sprawling creation.
They could try.
They could hurl their whispers and their sabotage at her gates. But Cornelia Davies had not built an empire only to watch it crumble.
She would find the source of this crack, and she would seal it with iron and fire.
***
Across town, in the smoke-choked, cacophonous newsroom of the New York Chronicle, Ronan Kent felt the familiar thrill of the hunt.
The air, thick with the smell of cheap cigars, hot lead, and desperation, was the scent of victory to him.
He leaned back in his chair, feet propped on a desk overflowing with discarded copy and half-empty coffee mugs, and read his latest triumph one more time.
His series on the tenement slumlord, Silas Blackwood, had resulted in a public inquiry and Blackwood’s indictment.
It was the kind of journalism Ronan believed in: a battering ram against the gilded gates of the corrupt.
“Kent! My office. Now.”
The bellow belonged to Harrison Griswold, the paper’s editor-in-chief, a man whose disposition was as gray and unforgiving as the city’s winter sky.
Ronan swung his feet to the floor and grabbed his notepad. A summons from Griswold meant one of two things: a blistering reprimand or a new, bigger dragon to slay.
Griswold’s office was an island of grim order in the surrounding chaos. He sat behind a massive oak desk, a half-chewed cigar clamped between his teeth.
He didn’t waste time on pleasantries.
“Good work on Blackwood,” he grunted, gesturing for Ronan to sit. “The councilman is squirming, and the public is eating it up. Circulation is up three percent.”
“Glad to hear it,” Ronan said, unable to keep the pride from his voice.
“Don’t get comfortable,” Griswold shot back, his eyes narrowing. “You plucked a rotten apple from the barrel. I’m about to send you after the whole damn orchard.”
He slid a file across the desk. It was thin, almost insultingly so. The name on the tab read: DAVIES, CORNELIA.
Ronan frowned. “The shipping magnate? Her husband died a few years back. She took over the company.”
“She didn’t just take it over, Kent. She transformed it. Turned a respectable but sleepy shipyard into a monster that’s swallowing the waterfront whole. They say she’s on the verge of landing that new naval contract.” Griswold leaned forward, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial growl.
“And I want to know how. A woman like that, in a world like this? She doesn’t get that kind of power by being a saint.”
Ronan opened the file. It contained little more than a few financial clippings and a society-page portrait of a woman with high cheekbones, intelligent eyes, and a mouth that seemed to hold a dozen secrets.
She was beautiful, but it was a severe, untouchable kind of beauty, like a statue carved from ice.
“What’s the angle?” Ronan asked, his journalistic instincts already kicking in.
“The angle is that she’s a predator,” Griswold said, stabbing the air with his cigar.
“I’ve had whispers from the dock unions. Unsafe conditions, sixty-hour work weeks, men fired for speaking out. They call her the ‘Iron Widow.’ She’s squeezing every last drop of sweat from her workers to underbid her competition for that navy contract” he explained.
“She’s no better than Carnegie or Rockefeller—a robber baron in a corset. I want you to expose her. Get me the story of the exploited men who built her throne of steel.”
A slow, predatory smile spread across Ronan’s face. This was it. This was the story that would make his name.
Taking down a back-alley slumlord was one thing; toppling one of the city’s newest and most powerful tycoons was a ticket to the top.
He saw the headlines already, the public outrage, the satisfaction of speaking truth to power.
He pictured Cornelia Davies, with her icy beauty and her stolen empire, and felt a surge of righteous purpose.
She was just another corrupt capitalist, hiding her greed behind a pretty face and a widow’s weeds.
“She’s famously private,” Ronan mused, already plotting his approach. “She doesn’t grant interviews to journalists, only to fawning business publications.”
“Then you’ll be a fawning business journalist,” Griswold countered. “Tell her you’re doing a profile for *Manhattan Commerce Monthly* on the city’s industrial titans. Flatter her. Get inside her fortress. And once you’re in, you find the rot,” he ordered.
“Talk to the workers. Find the accidents she’s covered up, the families she’s ruined. I want it all, Kent. I want the takedown.”
Ronan stood, the file clutched in his hand like a weapon. “You’ll get it.”
He walked back to his desk, the newsroom’s chaotic energy now buzzing in his own veins.
The image of Cornelia Davies’s portrait was seared into his mind. She looked formidable, intelligent, and utterly in control. All the better.
The higher they built their towers, the more satisfying it was to watch them fall.
Ronan Kent was about to light a match, and he had no doubt that the Iron Widow’s empire would burn beautifully.