The scent of carbolic acid and despair clung to the air in St. Luke’s Hospital, a sterile odor so alien to the salt-and-sawdust perfume of Nell’s shipyard it made her feel like a trespasser in a foreign land.
She sat on a hard wooden chair beside the bed, her gloved hands clenched in her lap.
The man lying amidst the stark white linens was a ghost of the formidable Pinkerton agent she had hired. Silas Croft’s face was a ruin of purple and yellow bruises, one eye swollen completely shut.
A thick bandage was wrapped around his head, and his arm was bound in a sling.
Yet, when he spoke, his voice was a low, gravelly rasp of pure, undiluted fury. “They were waiting for me,” he grated, the words costing him a visible effort. “They knew where I’d be. The leak isn’t just in your shipyard, Mrs. Davies. It’s somewhere closer.”
Nell’s heart, already a cold, dense stone in her chest, seemed to grow heavier.
After the article broke, after she had thrown Ronan out, after the world had collapsed, this was the first news she’d had of Silas. To see him like this—broken because of her—was a guilt that settled deeper than any public humiliation.
“The lead… was it good?” she asked, her own voice tight and quiet.
Silas shifted, wincing as the movement pulled at his injuries. “Better than good. It was everything.”
He gestured with his good hand toward a small leather satchel on the bedside table. “My case notes. Pulled them from the wreckage of my office before they could find them. There’s a manifest inside. From Vanderbilt’s main shipping office.”
Nell leaned forward and carefully retrieved the satchel, the worn leather cool beneath her fingers. Inside, amongst a sheaf of papers, was a heavily creased shipping manifest.
Her eyes, accustomed to scanning such documents for profit margins and logistical snags, now scanned them for a lifeline. It was a log of short-haul deliveries for the past two months, detailing the movements of Vanderbilt’s smaller vessels around the harbor.
“Look at the dates,” Silas rasped, his breathing growing shallow. “And the locations. A supply barge moored near your warehouse the night of the fire. A tugboat conducting ‘engine tests’ a hundred yards from Pier Four the morning the crane cable snapped. He was sloppy. Arrogant. He used his own assets, hiding in plain sight.”
Nell traced the spidery ink with her fingertip.
It was here.
A pattern of proximity, a dance of malicious intent just on the edge of her domain. The proof was circumstantial, a shadow’s outline without the body to cast it, but it was more than she’d had yesterday.
Yesterday, she had nothing but ashes.
“It’s not enough to convict him in a courtroom,” she murmured, her mind already calculating, weighing. “But in the court of the naval committee…”
“It plants the seed of doubt,” Silas finished for her, a grim flicker of his old self in his one good eye. “It’s a start. But it’s not the whole weapon. You’re missing the bullet.” He coughed, a dry, rattling sound that shook his entire frame. “You’re missing the money.”
Nell folded the manifest and placed it carefully in her reticule. “Rest, Silas. You’ve done more than enough. I’ll see to it your expenses are covered, and your care.”
He tried to wave her off. “Just… bring him down, Mrs. Davies. For me.”
She stood, the rustle of her skirts the only sound in the room for a moment.
She looked at the man who had nearly died for her, and a cold, hard resolve began to crystallize where her heartbreak had been. “I will,” she promised. “I will burn his empire to the ground.”
Ronan Kent felt like a ghost haunting the edges of his own life.
Fired, disgraced, and barred from every reputable newsroom in New York, he was a man without a profession, without a purpose. Except one.
The air in the back room of The Groggy Anchor, a dockside tavern smelling of stale ale and desperation, was thick with tobacco smoke and whispered conspiracies.
This was the territory of Finn, a grizzled information broker with eyes that had seen too much and a palm that was perpetually open. Ronan’s last contact.
His last hope.
“You’re playing with fire, Kent,” Finn grunted, wiping the bar with a filthy rag. He hadn’t looked Ronan in the eye since he’d walked in.
Being associated with the man who’d been so publicly scooped and fired was bad for business. “Vanderbilt doesn’t just swat flies. He burns the whole house down.”
“I’m not a fly anymore, Finn. I’m just a man with a question,” Ronan said, his voice low and even. He slid a small, heavy pouch across the sticky wood of the bar.
It was the last of his savings, the money he’d put away for a small apartment in a better part of town, for a future that no longer existed. It landed with a soft, definitive clink.
Finn’s hand covered the pouch, his fingers assessing its weight. His gaze finally lifted to meet Ronan’s. “That’s a loud question.”
“I need a name. The man Vanderbilt paid to run his operation at the Davies shipyard,” Ronan said. “And I need proof of payment. A ledger, a bank draft, anything that connects Vanderbilt’s coin to the saboteur’s hand.”
Finn was silent for a long moment, his thumb rubbing the coarse fabric of the coin pouch. “The name is easy. A brute named ‘Hammer’ Jack Corrigan. The name fits. But the money… Vanderbilt’s not stupid. He uses shell corporations, cut-outs. A paper trail is a ghost story.”
“Every ghost leaves a trace,” Ronan pressed, leaning forward. The desperation he’d been swallowing down was beginning to claw at his throat. “There’s a clerk, a bookkeeper, someone who feels underpaid or overlooked. Someone you know. I’m not writing a story, Finn. I won’t print their name. This is for… justice.” The word felt hollow and grand, but it was the only one he had left.
Finn stared at him, his expression unreadable. He saw the fire in Ronan’s eyes, the haunted look of a man who had lost everything and had nothing more to lose.
That kind of man was either a fool or the most dangerous person in the room.
“Wait here,” Finn finally said, disappearing into a back room shrouded by a beaded curtain.
The minutes stretched into an eternity. Ronan stood at the bar, the low murmur of the tavern’s patrons a dull roar in his ears.
He thought of Nell, of the look of absolute betrayal in her eyes as she’d ordered him out of her home. “You used me. You used all of it.” Her words were a brand on his soul. This wouldn’t erase that pain, but it was the only penance he could offer.
Finn returned, carrying not a ledger book but a single, folded sheet of paper, smudged with grime.
He slid it across the bar. “A page torn from a private ledger. A junior clerk with a gambling problem owed me. This makes us even.”
Ronan’s hands trembled as he unfolded it. It was a simple accounting sheet, but the details on it made his heart hammer against his ribs.
There, in precise, elegant script, was a list of payments from the ‘Orion Trading Company’—a known Vanderbilt shell. And next to a series of dates that perfectly corresponded with the shipyard sabotage was the recipient: J. Corrigan. The final payment, dated the day after the crane incident, was the largest.
It was the bullet. Silas had the gun; Ronan now held the bullet.
“Thank you, Finn,” Ronan breathed, his voice thick with emotion.
“Don’t thank me,” the broker grunted, turning away. “Just don’t mention my name when Vanderbilt’s men put you in the river.”
Ronan didn’t wait to hear more.
Clutching the precious paper, he burst out of the tavern and into the gray afternoon, his mind racing. There was only one person who could use this.
One person who had to see it.
He just had to pray she would let him through the door.
Nell stood before the great window of her office, looking down at the silent shipyard. It was a graveyard of ambition, the skeletal frames of half-finished ships monuments to her imminent failure.
She held Silas’s manifest in one hand, a fragile shield against the tidal wave of defeat. It was something, but it wasn’t enough.
Vanderbilt had attacked her business, but he had destroyed her with a lie about her heart. A lie she now believed Ronan had crafted from their most intimate moments.
A commotion from the outer office broke the silence. Her secretary’s flustered voice, then the deeper tones of her security guards. “Sir, you cannot go in there! Mrs. Davies is not seeing anyone!”
“Nell!” The voice that crashed through the door was raw, frantic, and painfully familiar. “Nell, for God’s sake, you have to listen to me!”
The door flew open, and Ronan stumbled in, pushed forward by one of the guards.
He looked like a man who had been dragged through hell. His hair was disheveled, his coat was rumpled, and his eyes were wild with a desperate urgency.
“Get him out,” Nell said, her voice like arctic ice. She didn’t turn from the window. She couldn’t bear to look at him.
“No, wait!” Ronan pulled away from the guards, taking a step toward her desk. “Please. Just five minutes. Just look at this.”
“There is nothing you could possibly show me that I would ever want to see,” she said, each word a carefully shaped shard of glass.
“You’re wrong.” He reached her desk and slapped the grimy, folded paper down on the polished mahogany. “Look at it, Nell. Please. If you still want me gone after you see it, I’ll walk into the sea myself.”
The raw agony in his voice snagged on something inside her.
Against her better judgment, against every instinct screaming at her to protect what was left of her shattered heart, she turned. She looked from his desperate face to the paper on her desk.
Slowly, she walked over, picked it up, and unfolded it.
Her eyes scanned the columns. Orion Trading Company. J. Corrigan. The dates.
Her mind, a well-oiled machine of logic and finance, began to connect the pieces with terrifying speed. She walked back to her reticule, pulled out Silas’s manifest, and laid it on the desk beside the ledger page.
The manifest showed Vanderbilt’s barge near her warehouse on October 12th.
The ledger showed a payment to Corrigan on October 13th.
The manifest showed Vanderbilt’s tug near Pier Four on October 24th.
The ledger showed a larger payment to Corrigan on October 25th.
It was all there. The sabotage and the payment. The crime and the reward.
A perfect, damning echo. And this document, this missing piece, could not have come from a newspaper. It was stolen, illicit. The kind of evidence a man ruins himself to acquire.
She looked up at Ronan, truly looked at him for the first time. She saw not the cunning journalist who had betrayed her, but a man stripped bare of everything, his ambition burned away, leaving only a fierce, protective loyalty.
The lie she had believed for two agonizing days began to crumble.
“Vanderbilt leaked the story about your past,” he said, his voice quiet now, ragged with exhaustion. “He knew I was digging into it. He used my own research against both of us. He made you believe I was the source so you’d be alone when he delivered the killing blow. He needed you isolated. He needed you broken.”
Nell stared at the two pieces of paper, her world tilting on its axis. The weapon was forged. It was sitting on her desk.
One piece from the loyal man in the hospital bed, the other from the man who stood before her, the man she had loved and hated in equal, soul-tearing measure.
Ronan took a half-step closer, his expression pleading. “I did this for you, Nell. Not for a story. I don’t have a story left. I only have this.” He gestured to the papers. “He thinks he’s won. He thinks you’re finished. But we have him. If you’ll let me, we can destroy him with his own greed.”
He fell silent, leaving the choice, and the future, in her hands.
The silence in the office was absolute, filled only with the weight of betrayal, sacrifice, and the glimmer of a terrible, righteous vengeance.