16. Mal
I really miss cigarettes.
Even without the sex.
And the Mary Gloucester is owned by the CEO of a local waste disposal firm—Couch-It Waste LTD. It’s a plaything for his two sons and has nothing to do with fucking fishing.
Which means they’re coming at Sol for a different reason. One that seems a mystery to him until I dig a little deeper and realise he’s been collecting their sea trash and dumping it back on their doorstep for the last four years . Even after they torched his bigger vessel six months ago.
“You could’ve told me this when I asked you the first time.”
Sol keeps his gaze on the horizon, squinting into the chop, dusk barely smudging the sky.
We’re on a solo voyage to the mackerel nets Oscar dropped yesterday.
It’s cold and windy, and even from where I’m grumbling at Sol from inside the cabin, sea damp clings to my skin.
Quiet clings to me, and not the good kind I find with Skylar sometimes.
I toss a scrap of old rope at Sol’s head. He dodges, letting me know he hasn’t zoned out. That he’s ignoring me on purpose, relying on the fact I have to stay hidden in the cabin for protection.
What he doesn’t know is that I predicted this, and I have plenty more projectiles to chuck his way, and three days of insomnia to fuel my tenacity. “Don’t make me come out there.”
Sol’s lips twitch. “You can’t come out here. That’s the point, isn’t it? Why we spent all night wrapping the windows in the fiddly fucking film?”
“We didn’t have to do it at night.”
“I didn’t want Jack to see.”
“You don’t think he wondered why you weren’t in bed?”
“Jack doesn’t pay attention to my bed.”
“He’s always paid attention to your bed.”
Sol grunts, in a mood. I roll my eyes and long for a cigarette as the Sirona rides the steady swell, taking us past the headland and out to sea to where Oscar shot the nets.
It takes us a while to get there. Sol doesn’t say much, just keeps his eyes on the water, searching for the marker buoys Oscar left behind.
He doesn’t say when he spots them. Just throttles down and abandons the tiller to let the boat drift.
I watch him haul rope, hand over hand, working in a rhythm I found mesmerising when I was younger and not puking over the side of his dad’s bigger boat. Sol’s how I knew I liked boys more than girls. How I realised my brother didn’t. That for him, Sol was the only lad who ever turned his head.
It makes no fucking sense to me that they’re not together.
And out here, with Sol uncharacteristically silent, I have plenty of time to think about it.
To remember how they used to look at each other when we were young.
How Jack gazed at Sol as if he’d fallen from the sun he was named after.
How Sol forgot anyone else was in the room when Jack was there.
That much doesn’t seem to have changed, but a deeper part of me knows everything has.
Sol keeps working. The rope in his practised hands becomes something else. Nets rise from the frothy sea, but I’m too penned in to see if they’re glinting and gleaming with fish. And I don’t give much of a fuck. I’m not here for the mackerel.
I’m here for what might happen next.
Sol does whatever he’s come out here to do, and the wind picks up before he’s done, slapping waves against the hull.
He resets the nets and returns to the tiller.
Starts an engine that sounds like it’s had better days, the outboard catching with a sputtering growl.
Then he points us towards home and I snap to, paying closer attention to any lights on the horizon that aren’t on dry land.
The Couch vessel has come at Sol fast before, and I’m ready, though it’s been a while since I last went to war on a fucking fishing boat.
Might not come to that .
And for a while, it doesn’t. Sol begins to relax, tension easing from his shoulders. He cracks a beer and offers me one, but instinct has me waving it away.
Not yet.
Shore lights start to twinkle in the distance. I check my boots are tied and pull a shemagh I’ve had since I was a teenager higher on my face, no longer using it to shield me from the wind. I scan the tools I’ve amassed for defensive manoeuvres.
Hooks. Gaffs. Poles. Weighted ropes.
No munitions. I shouldn’t need them. I can’t need them, not in this life.
But it feels weird to prepare for a fight without a loaded weapon, even a fight I can’t be sure is coming.
Without Vinnie heckling my choices. Without Raven frowning at the mess Moth and Orion have left on purpose to wind him up.
I’ve never been a one-man show before and I don’t fucking like it. Who knew?
I did.
Fuck off, Vin.
I flip a bird to my dead friend, but I still feel his weight pressed against me, his fat head lolling on my shoulder for a nap in the sun before that last jump. I hear the gunfire. The explosion. I smell his blood as the rescue aircraft roars above?—
Engine noise rips me back to reality. I blink away an unseeing haze and turn my head towards it, keeping low as I creep out of the cabin.
A dark-hulled boat speeds towards us, cutting through the choppy water fast and wide, bearing down on Sol’s smaller vessel at an angle that tells me it’s no fucking accident.
Sol sees it too, and tightens his grip on the tiller as the approaching boat swerves, aiming a broadside hit to the hull of the Sirona .
“Hold steady,” I warn Sol, cold focus descending.
There’s no other choice as the vessels collide, a ram that jolts me sideways, and sends Sol careening backwards into the same rail he bashed his ribs on before.
He swears.
Don’t blame him. It’s a hard hit, but not a full ram. That’s coming if I can’t dissuade the other boat in time, and I’m fucking here for it.
The other boat swings around, circling back for another try.
I surge into motion, grabbing a hook and the flare gun with sure hands, adrenaline barely flowing yet.
“Hold steady ,” I tell Sol again.
He nods, mouth set in a grim line, but he eyes the hook in my hand. “What the fuck are you going to do with that?”
I grin. “Dunno yet.”
There’s no time for him to respond. The other boat bears down and I tighten my grip on the boat hook. It’s short-handled, double-pronged, and I’ve spent the last hour sharpening it enough to do serious damage to whatever it hits.
The other boat surges. I move with intent. Fast. No hesitation. I pick my target of the two men piloting the vessel. I throw , and the boat hook soars through the night air, grazing the first man’s head before it embeds in the wooden door behind him.
A clean hit I made dirty on purpose. The boat veers, its wake crashing into us, but Sol holds the Sirona steady, gripping the tiller with the stoicism of a man who’s faced bigger waves and survived.
We take the impact. The Sirona rocks with wild force. But I don’t stumble. I’m ready for round two as the other boat skates to a standstill close enough that I see the faces of the men who want to dance.
One of them, the older Couch brother, maybe, is bleeding, claret oozing from his grazed temple.
Through his fingers as he presses a hand to the wound, eyes wide with shock.
The other smick is either jacked on adrenaline or too dense to realise what just happened.
What could’ve happened if I’d truly chosen violence today.
Or maybe he just doesn’t see me.
But I see him. I track him. Stalk him as he reaches for a coil of rope and a baseball bat with every intention of boarding the Sirona .
To do what, we’ll never know. I grip the flare gun and fire before he sets a hand to his own gunnel, and I don’t aim for the fucking sky.
A crack sounds as I pull the trigger. A microsecond of nothing. Then the flare explodes from the barrel, screaming for freedom in a blaze of savage light, tearing through the night air towards the face of a man whose shit-eating grin is fading fast.
Spitting sparks mark the flare’s trajectory. A warning hiss sounds, ignited phosphorous tainting the sky, and the man has nowhere to go. Like Sol when they came at him like budget brand demons from hell.
Fuck them.
The flare whips past the man’s head, heat licking his skin, his bare arm.
He recoils as if he’s been shot, stumbling back onto his stupid arse.
A split second later, the flare bursts in the sky, slicing the gloom with a violent flash, fire blooming to stain the clouds, drenching us all in the colours of a real fucking war.
Blood in the water.
Ash in the sky.
I lower the gun.
The vessels draw level and I let them see me through the smoke and carnage. Let them hear me as I give them the flat truth of their miserable lives.
“Next time, I won’t fucking miss.”