Chapter One
Laurel Ashby had spent nine years refusing to enter her father’s office, and six minutes standing outside it after his funeral.
Rain slipped from the copper gutters of Ashby Marine Recovery and struck the pier in silver threads. Beyond the windows, cranes rose over the shipyard like long-necked birds, their cables swaying above the black water. The entire property smelled of diesel, wet rope, and the harbor mud that used to cling to Laurel’s shoes when she was a child. She had once loved that smell. Today it sat at the back of her throat like something spoiled.
The brass plate beside the door still read CONRAD ASHBY, FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT. No one had covered it or turned it over. Apparently, death had not persuaded anyone at the company that Conrad might finally surrender his title. Laurel opened the door and found a stranger behind her father’s desk.
He was standing rather than sitting, one hand braced beside an open laptop and his attention fixed on the security monitors mounted inside a walnut cabinet. Black hair, cut short at the sides and left slightly longer on top, caught the cold light from the screens. His suit jacket hung over the back of Conrad’s chair. The shoulder holster beneath his white shirt was not quite concealed, which Laurel suspected was intentional.
He looked up before the latch clicked shut. His eyes were green, startlingly so against the dark severity of his face, and they moved over her with the speed of a man checking for wounds.
“You are late,” he said.
Laurel shut the door behind her. “You are in my father’s office.”
“I am aware of both facts.”
His voice carried the faint remains of an English accent, worn down by years elsewhere. He was not handsome in the polished, harmless way her father’s lawyers tended to be handsome. His nose had been broken at least once, and a pale line crossed his left eyebrow. He looked like a man who had learned patience because impatience had once cost him blood.
Laurel set her damp umbrella against a cabinet. “Most people begin with their name.”
“Kieran Dacre. I ran security for your father.”
“My father had security?”
“For the last eighteen months.”
That was long enough to make the omission deliberate. Conrad had sent her articles about shipwreck discoveries, clipped announcements from the company newsletter, and one spectacularly inappropriate birthday gift every year. He had never mentioned needing a man with a gun.
“And now that he is dead, you have promoted yourself to president?”
“No.” Kieran closed the laptop, but his hand remained on it. “I was checking the cameras because one went down twelve minutes ago.”
“Perhaps it is mourning him. Everyone else seems to be.”
Something changed in his expression, although she could not name it. He had probably attended the funeral. The chapel had been crowded with employees, competitors, politicians, divers, and men whose expensive coats could not disguise the fact that they had made their money somewhere people got hurt. Laurel had stood in the front pew beside an empty space meant for family and tried not to feel like the final exhibit in Conrad Ashby’s grand public life.
“The service ended almost an hour ago,” Kieran said. “Where did you go?”
“That is not your concern.”
“At the moment, nearly everything you do is my concern.”
The words should have sounded arrogant. Instead, he delivered them with the flat certainty of a weather report, which made her dislike him more efficiently than arrogance would have. Laurel pulled off her black coat and laid it over a leather chair. Rain had darkened the ends of her strawberry-blonde hair, turning the loose waves copper against the charcoal wool of her dress. She could feel Kieran registering the distance between her and both exits. He had placed himself where he could reach the windows, the desk, and her in seconds.
“Your employment ended when my father died,” she said.
“It did not.”
“Then whoever inherits this place can deal with you. I am here for a will reading, not a hostile takeover.”
“Those may prove to be the same thing.”
Before Laurel could answer, the office door opened and Martin Bell entered without knocking. Conrad’s attorney had aged badly during the three years since Laurel last saw him. His silver hair had thinned, and the skin beneath his eyes sagged with exhaustion. He carried a document case against his chest as though someone might snatch it.
“Laurel.” He glanced from her to Kieran and seemed relieved to find them both alive. “Thank you for coming.”
“You threatened to obtain a court order if I did not.”
“I said the probate court could compel your presence under unusual circumstances.”
“You put it in bold.”
Martin placed the case on the low table between the chairs. “Your father knew subtlety was wasted on you.”
“My father thought subtlety was a character defect.”
Kieran moved away from the desk at last. He did not join them, choosing a position near the windows where he could watch the shipyard without appearing to do so. Laurel sat across from Martin and noticed that her father’s attorney kept glancing toward the monitors.
“Is someone going to explain why the building feels like an embassy after a coup?” she asked.
Martin removed three thick folders. “Conrad received threats before his death.”
“Conrad received threats for most of his adult life. He salvaged contested wrecks and humiliated people in court. Half the maritime industry threatened to kill him before lunch.”
“These were considered credible.”
Laurel looked toward Kieran. His face told her nothing, but his stillness had become more attentive.
“The police said his death was an accident,” she said. “He lost control of his car.”
“His brakes failed,” Kieran replied.
“On a road soaked with rain.”
“The rear brake line had been cut.”
For one disorienting second, the office seemed to tilt toward the water. Laurel pressed both feet into the floor until the sensation passed. She remembered Martin’s message saying Conrad’s car had gone through the barrier at Pier Nineteen. She remembered being irritated that even his death sounded theatrical.
“Why was that not in the police report?”
“Because someone replaced the damaged section before their mechanical inspection,” Kieran said. “I recovered the original line from the service bay.”
“You expect me to believe someone cut his brakes, waited for the crash, retrieved the car, repaired the brakes, and returned it to police custody?”
“No. The line was changed before the vehicle left the Ashby maintenance facility. The section I found had been discarded in a locked bin that should have been emptied the previous morning. Someone made a mistake.”
“Have you told the police?”
“I told a detective I trust. We are not yet treating the entire department as secure.”
Laurel hated the way the answer rearranged the room. The locked door no longer looked melodramatic. Kieran’s weapon no longer seemed like an affectation. Even Martin’s hands, resting too carefully on the top folder, made sense.
“Read the will,” she said.
Martin drew a breath. “The personal bequests are straightforward. The house, financial accounts, and nonbusiness property transfer to you without restriction. Ashby Marine Recovery is different.”
“Sell it and put the proceeds in a trust. That was always his threat.”
“Conrad left you his controlling interest, subject to one condition. You must assume temporary command of Project Bellwether and sail aboard the Resolute no later than September twenty-third. You must remain with the expedition until the target is recovered or Captain Baptiste declares continued operations impossible.”
Laurel stared at him. “No.”
“If you decline, fail to depart, or leave the expedition prematurely, your father’s shares transfer to a liquidation trust. The company will be divided into separate assets and sold.”
“To whom?”
“The trust must accept the highest qualified bids. Pelagos Maritime has already submitted preliminary offers for the Resolute, the recovery systems, and this property.”
That was not an inheritance. It was Conrad reaching out of his grave, closing his hand around the one thing Laurel had refused to give him while he lived. He had known she could abandon him. He had also known she would struggle to abandon the four hundred people whose jobs would disappear when Victor Sorrell carved the company apart.
“What is Project Bellwether?” she asked.
Martin looked at Kieran before answering. “A recovery your father spent thirty-one years preparing to complete.”
“That describes his relationship with every wreck that ever refused him.”
Kieran crossed to the table and placed a weathered blue file in front of her. Unlike Martin’s pristine folders, this one had swollen from damp and been dried again. A faint brown waterline crossed Conrad’s handwriting on the label. THE BELLWETHER Laurel did not touch it. “The survey vessel lost in Hurricane Hugo?”
“Officially,” Kieran said.
“There were twenty-two people aboard. The Coast Guard concluded she sank east of the Bahamas. No distress call, no debris field, no confirmed position.”
“Your father found her six weeks ago.”
Despite herself, Laurel opened the file. The first page held a sonar image of a vessel lying on its side beneath a dark underwater escarpment. Numbers had been written along the margin in Conrad’s sharp, forward-leaning hand. Depth. Current. Hull orientation. A second set of notations appeared underneath his in faded red pencil.
Laurel recognized them before she understood why that was impossible. Nathan had always written his sevens with a line through the stem. He had marked currents with small, backward arrows and circled every depth that would require mixed gas. Her older brother’s handwriting covered the image of a wreck Conrad claimed to have found six weeks ago.
Nathan had been dead for nine years.
“Where did he get this?” Laurel asked.
Neither man answered quickly enough. She lifted the page and found a date in the lower corner. It had been printed by the sonar system, not written by hand. August 28 of that year. Thirteen days earlier.
“This is Nathan’s work.”
Martin’s face tightened. Kieran watched her rather than the document, as if he had been waiting to see whether she would notice.
“I know,” he said.
Laurel stood so abruptly that her knee struck the table. “My brother died in the Windward Passage. I watched the recovery team bring up his helmet. I identified him in Nassau. Do not stand there and tell me he produced a sonar analysis thirteen days ago.”
“I am not telling you that.”
“Then tell me something that makes sense.”
The window behind Kieran exploded. He reached Laurel before the sound registered as a gunshot. One arm locked around her waist, and his momentum drove them both behind Conrad’s desk. Glass swept across the carpet. Martin dropped beside the leather sofa as a second round punched through the walnut cabinet and shattered one of the security monitors.
Kieran covered Laurel with his body, one hand at the back of her head and the other drawing his weapon. His weight pinned her against the floor, hard and hot through the thin fabric of her dress. The physical fact of him was startlingly intimate in the middle of terror: his chest against her shoulders, his breath near her ear, his thigh braced between hers to shield her from the broken glass.
“Stay down,” he said.
“You are on top of me. Where exactly would I go?”
“Good. Keep being difficult. It tells me you are not in shock.”
A third shot struck the desk. Wood splintered above Laurel’s face, and Kieran shifted to take the debris across his back. He did not flinch. His gaze remained fixed on the narrow reflection visible in the dark screen of Conrad’s computer.
“Martin, crawl to the interior door,” he ordered. “Do not stand until you reach the corridor.”
“There is no interior door,” Laurel whispered.
“There is behind the bookcase.”
Of course there was. Conrad had apparently spent the end of his life installing secret exits and leaving impossible orders for his daughter. Laurel might have admired the thoroughness if someone had not been firing through his windows. Kieran waited through five seconds of silence. Then ten. His body remained taut over hers, but his voice was controlled when he spoke again.
“The shooter is repositioning. We have perhaps thirty seconds before he finds another angle.”
“How do you know it is a man?”
“I do not.”
“Then stop saying he.”
Kieran turned his head just enough for her to see one green eye. It held an incredulous flash that might have become laughter under different circumstances.
“You are correcting my language while someone is trying to kill you.”
“I am multitasking.”
“Can you run in those shoes?”
“Faster than you would expect.”
“That was not the question.”
“Yes.”
He rose into a crouch and pulled her with him. The abrupt loss of his weight left a strange cold space along her back, but there was no time to examine it. Kieran pressed a point beneath the lowest shelf of Conrad’s bookcase. A section of walnut released with a quiet mechanical click.
Martin slipped through first. Kieran held the opening and gestured for Laurel to follow, but she stopped beside the table.
“The file,” she said.
“Leave it.”
“Someone just fired three bullets into this room after I opened it. I am taking it.”
She seized the blue folder before he could stop her. A shadow moved beyond the broken window, distant and indistinct against the skeletal cranes. Kieran caught Laurel around the waist again and hauled her through the hidden doorway as a fourth shot tore into the wall. The panel closed behind them, sealing off the ruined office. They stood in a narrow concrete passage lit by red emergency lamps. Somewhere beyond the walls, an alarm began to pulse through the shipyard.
Kieran took Laurel’s face between his hands and turned it toward the light. His palms were rough, his touch brisk but unexpectedly careful. A thin cut burned along her cheek where flying glass had found her.
“Are you hurt anywhere else?”
“No.”
“Certain?”
“Take your hands off me.”
He did, although not immediately. His gaze dropped to the file clutched against her chest, then returned to her eyes.
“Someone murdered your father,” he said. “Someone has now tried to murder you, and it happened within minutes of your learning about the Bellwether. You can hate the terms of the will. You can hate Conrad, and you are welcome to hate me. But you are not walking away from my protection.”
Laurel looked down at Nathan’s impossible handwriting showing through the wet, translucent edge of the page. Nine years ago, the sea had taken her brother and her father had chosen the company over the truth. Now Conrad had left her a shipwreck, a stranger with a gun, and ten days to decide whether four hundred people would keep their jobs. She met Kieran’s eyes. “Get me to the Resolute.”
