The acrid smell of burnt metal still clung to the air in the shipyard, a phantom reminder of the chaos from the day before.
But in the pre-dawn quiet of his small apartment, the scent Ronan Kent couldn’t escape was that of cheap ink and his own hypocrisy.
The image of the snapped crane cable, the sickening lurch and groan of metal, the foreman’s body crumpling to the ground—it was seared into his memory.
More vivid still was the image of Cornelia Davies.
He had expected hysterics, or perhaps a cold, calculated performance for his benefit.
He had gotten neither. What he witnessed was a flash of raw, undiluted terror in her eyes, instantly eclipsed by a steel-hard mask of command.
She hadn’t hesitated.
She’d run toward the danger, her voice a clarion call cutting through the panic, her focus entirely on her fallen man.
She had knelt in the grime and grease, her gloved hand on the foreman’s shoulder, her words a low, fierce promise of aid. Ronan, the great chronicler of truth, had stood frozen, a useless observer.
He had come to expose a monster and had instead seen a queen defending her keep.
Now, the blank sheet of paper in his typewriter mocked him. His editor, McGraw, wanted blood.
The crane incident was a gift, a perfect, sensational climax to his narrative of the ruthless robber baroness whose negligence endangered her workers. Negligence Leads to Near-Fatal Accident at Davies Shipyard.
The headline wrote itself. It was the story he was assigned to write, the story that would cement his reputation.
He typed a sentence. Cornelia Davies’s relentless pursuit of profit finally claimed its price yesterday, as shoddy equipment…
He stopped, ripping the page from the roller with a sharp, angry tear.
He crumpled it in his fist. It was a lie.
He had seen the equipment. He’d seen the maintenance logs she’d so proudly, and foolishly, shown him. More importantly, he had seen her face.
That wasn’t the face of a woman cutting corners. It was the face of a woman under attack.
For an hour, he wrestled with the words, with the chasm between the story he was supposed to tell and the one he had witnessed.
His ambition warred with a nascent, inconvenient sense of integrity.
To destroy her now, using this incident, felt less like journalism and more like kicking a woman who was already fighting for her life. It felt… dishonorable.
Finally, a new path emerged, a subtle and far more dangerous one.
He could still write a sensational piece. He could still speak of the violence and danger of industry.
But he could shift the focus. Not a condemnation of a single person, but of a volatile system.
His fingers began to move, the clatter of the keys filling the quiet room.
He wrote of the simmering tensions between labor and capital, a powder keg waiting for a spark. He described the accident in brutal detail but framed it as a symptom of a larger disease.
He wrote of a shipyard under siege, of a leader grappling with forces that seemed to spring from the shadows.
“While the city’s industrialists build their empires of steel and steam,” he typed, “they often fail to see the fires they stoke in their own furnaces. The near-tragedy at the Davies Naval Shipyard is a stark reminder that the battle for New York’s future is not just being fought in boardrooms, but in the grime and shadow of the docks themselves, where violent unrest threatens to shatter the very foundations of progress. Mrs. Davies, a figure of formidable control, now finds herself battling an enemy she cannot see, an enemy that strikes not at her balance sheets, but at the lives of her men.”
It was a calculated retreat.
The article was still critical, still sensational enough to satisfy McGraw.
But it subtly recast Nell.
She was no longer the villain; she was a protagonist in a different, more violent story.
He had turned his pen from a scalpel into a shield, and he wasn’t entirely sure why. As he handed the copy to the runner, a knot of unease tightened in his gut.
He had just protected his target.
In his profession, that was a cardinal sin.
Nell stood in her office, the morning light cutting across the polished surface of her desk, illuminating a fine layer of dust.
The cleaning staff had been sent home early yesterday, another disruption in a cascade of them. She held the New York Chronicle, her knuckles white.
She’d been bracing for Ronan Kent’s final, killing blow all morning.
She expected her name to be synonymous with negligence, her photograph splashed across the page above a headline that would end her bid for the naval contract before the committee even convened.
She read his column once. Then, a second time. A deep, unnerving confusion settled over her.
The words were damning, but not of her. “Violent unrest.” “Enemy she cannot see.”
He had taken the event that should have been her public execution and twisted it into a narrative of her resilience.
He portrayed her as a commander holding a fortress against a shadowy insurgency. He made her sound… capable.
Besieged, yes, but unbroken.
Her first instinct was suspicion. What was his game?
This was too clever to be an act of kindness. It was a feint, a maneuver in a battle she didn’t yet understand.
Perhaps he was trying to lull her into a false sense of security, to gain her trust before delivering the truly fatal strike. A predator toying with its prey.
The thought sent a chill down her spine. Men like Kent didn’t have a conscience; they had angles.
Yet, a small, traitorous part of her felt a flicker of something else.
He had been there. He had seen her terror, her rage, her fierce, protective love for her men and her work.
He had seen the truth of the moment, and for some inexplicable reason, he had chosen to print a version of it.
It wasn’t absolution, but it wasn’t condemnation either. It was… complex. And that complexity was more disarming than any outright attack.
She tossed the paper onto her desk, the rustle of the page loud in the tense silence.
She couldn’t afford to be disarmed. She couldn’t afford to analyze the motives of a viper.
He was still the enemy.
This article was just a different kind of poison, one that worked its way into the system more slowly.
Across town, in an office paneled with dark mahogany and clouded with cigar smoke, August Vanderbilt slammed the same newspaper down on his desk.
The crystal ashtray rattled, spilling grey flakes onto a stack of shipping manifests.
“‘Grappling with an enemy she cannot see’?” he snarled to the empty room. He had paid for a public hanging, and Ronan Kent had handed Cornelia Davies a martyr’s crown.
The crane incident was supposed to be the final nail in her coffin. It was meant to be the undeniable proof of her incompetence, the bloody exclamation point on the story of her over-extended ambition.
Vanderbilt had envisioned headlines screaming of her negligence, of her putting workers’ lives at risk.
He’d imagined the naval committee recoiling in horror, the contract falling easily into his waiting hands.
Instead, this muckraking journalist had spun it into a tale of labor strife, making Nell a victim of the very chaos Vanderbilt himself had orchestrated.
Kent had deflected the blame, painting a picture of a broader industrial conflict that made Davies look less like a villain and more like a beleaguered general.
It was a masterful piece of writing, and it infuriated him.
“Find out everything there is to know about this Ronan Kent,” he barked as his assistant entered the room. “Who he talks to, where he drinks, who he owes. I want to know his price. If he can’t be bought, he will be broken. This takedown is not going to be derailed by some self-righteous scribbler.”
The journalist had become a problem. And August Vanderbilt was a man who solved his problems, permanently.
Late that afternoon, Silas Croft appeared at Nell’s office door, a ghost in a grey suit.
He entered without a word, his presence sucking the residual warmth from the room. He was a man of few words and fewer expressions, which was precisely why Nell had hired him.
“Mrs. Davies,” he began, his voice a low, gravelly hum. He placed a small, heavy object wrapped in oilcloth on her desk.
Nell looked at it, then back at him. “What did you find, Mr. Croft?”
He unwrapped the object to reveal a section of thick, steel cable.
Even to her untrained eye, the end was unnervingly clean. There were no frayed wires, no signs of wear or metal fatigue. It was a slice, not a break.
“I examined the primary winch assembly and the remnants of the cable,” Croft said, his gaze fixed on the piece of metal. “This wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t equipment failure.” He tapped the severed end with his finger.
“The cable was cut. Sawn nearly clean through, about three-quarters of the way. It was done by someone who knew what they were doing. They left just enough intact for it to hold under a light load, but ensured it would snap the moment it was put under serious strain. Like, for instance, lifting a half-ton steel girder.”
The air in the office grew cold and thin.
Nell sank into her chair, her hands gripping the armrests. Sabotage was one thing. A fire, a broken machine—those were messages.
This was different.
“They intended for that girder to fall on someone,” she whispered, the horror of it settling deep in her bones. Thomas, the foreman, had a wife and three small children.
“They intended to kill someone,” Croft corrected her, his voice devoid of emotion. “To create panic. To halt your work in the most brutal way possible. This is no longer disgruntled workers or union agitators, Mrs. Davies. A line has been crossed. This was professional. Coordinated. And well-funded.”
Nell stared at the severed cable, the clean, vicious cut a symbol of the true nature of her enemy.
It wasn’t just her business they wanted to destroy; it was her people they were willing to sacrifice. Her confusion over Ronan Kent’s article evaporated, replaced by a cold, hard certainty. She was at war.
A war with a faceless enemy who used murder as a business tactic.
She looked up at Croft, her eyes hard as diamonds.
The fear was still there, a knot of ice in her stomach, but it was now overlaid with a layer of pure, unadulterated fury.
“Find them, Mr. Croft,” she said, her voice low and steady. “I don’t care what it takes or what it costs. Find the man who gave the order.”