Chapter Two
The sun wasn't even up yet, and Tess Mahoney was already losing.
She spotted it the moment she pulled into the lot—her rental skiff sitting wrong in the water, bow high and stern dragging low like a drunk trying to stand.
Third boat this month. Third hole punched below the waterline while she slept in the apartment upstairs, dreaming about balance sheets that didn't bleed red.
"Son of a bitch."
Tess was out of her truck before the engine finished dying, boots hitting gravel as she sprinted for the dock.
Cold air burned her lungs—April in Chicago, when the calendar lied about spring and the lake still remembered winter.
She could see water pooling in the skiff's hull, rising slow and steady through whatever damage they'd done this time.
The ladder was slick with morning dew. She went down anyway, dropping into knee-deep water that hit her like a fist to the chest. Forty-something degrees, maybe colder. The kind of cold that stopped your breath and made your bones ache.
She didn't stop.
Her hands found the hull by feel, running along fiberglass until her fingers caught the edge of the hole—jagged, deliberate, punched through with something heavy and sharp.
Not an accident. Not wear and tear. Someone had taken a crowbar or a pike to her boat in the dark, then walked away while it slowly filled with Lake Michigan.
"Okay." She said it out loud because the sound of her own voice was better than the slap of water against her thighs. "Okay, we can fix this."
The bilge pump was in the storage shed. Tess hauled herself back up the ladder, soaked from the waist down and already shivering, and ran for the equipment she'd need. Extension cord. Pump. Patch kit, even though the fiberglass work would take days she didn't have.
Her phone buzzed while she was rigging the pump: voicemail from Great Lakes Insurance, the third message this week she'd been avoiding. She already knew what it said. Claim denied. Pattern of damage suggests inadequate security measures. Policy under review.
Pattern of damage.
Like she was doing this to herself. Like she was punching holes in her own boats for the insurance money, instead of fighting every day to keep her father's shop from drowning.
The pump coughed to life, and Tess stood on the dock watching dirty water pour back into the lake. Her jeans were soaked through, clinging to her legs like a second skin made of ice. She should go inside. Change into dry clothes. Drink coffee until her hands stopped shaking.
Instead, she watched the truck.
It was parked at the far end of her lot, same spot as yesterday and the day before. Dark blue F-150, tinted windows, two men inside who made no effort to hide what they were doing. Watching. Waiting. Making sure she understood that every moment of her life now belonged to someone else's schedule.
Gregor Petrovic's men.
She'd never met Gregor himself—just his representatives, showing up six weeks ago with an offer that wasn't really an offer.
He wanted to rent her dock. Wanted access to her boat slips after hours, her storage shed, her private stretch of waterfront that sat far enough from the main harbors that nobody paid attention to what came and went.
Tess had said no.
She'd said it politely at first, then firmly, then with language her father would have grounded her for using.
No, she didn't want to rent her dock to strangers.
No, she didn't care how much they were offering.
No, she wasn't interested in becoming part of whatever operation needed a private marina badly enough to send men in suits to a bait shop.
That was six weeks ago.
Since then, three boats had sprouted holes.
Her main engine had developed a fuel line problem that turned out to be a cut hose.
Her charter bookings had dropped by half because word was spreading—Mahoney's fleet wasn't safe, Mahoney's equipment kept failing, better to book with someone whose boats actually stayed afloat.
The pump worked steadily, water level dropping inch by inch. Tess wrapped her arms around herself and watched the truck watch her, and thought about her father.
Thirty years, he'd run this shop.
Thirty years of Chicago winters and summer crowds, of teaching her to bait a hook and read the weather on the water, of building something that mattered out of nothing but stubbornness and a love for the lake.
He'd survived recessions and competition and the slow death of the neighborhood around them, and he'd never once thought about selling.
Then the stroke came, and suddenly he couldn't remember her name on bad days, and the shop that was his whole life sat empty until Tess walked away from her marketing job downtown and took over.
She hadn't saved him. Couldn't save him—the doctors made that clear, with their careful language about brain damage and realistic expectations. But she could save this. His legacy, his life's work, the only piece of him that still functioned the way it was supposed to.
Losing the shop meant losing the last part of her father that worked.
The water level hit the pump's intake and the motor whined, sucking air.
Tess killed the power and climbed back down to inspect the damage in better light.
The hole was bad—six inches across, edges torn outward like something had been driven through and then yanked back.
Professional sabotage. The kind of damage that said we can do this forever.
She patched it with marine epoxy because that was all she could do, hands steady even though her whole body shook with cold. The repair would hold long enough to get the skiff out of the water, but the real fix needed a week in dry dock and money she didn't have.
The truck's engine started at seven-thirty. Tess looked up from her work to watch it pull out of the lot, slow and deliberate, making sure she saw them leave. Making sure she understood they'd be back tomorrow, and the day after, and every day until she gave Gregor Petrovic what he wanted.
Inside, she stripped out of her wet clothes behind the counter, changing into the spare jeans and flannel she kept in the back for exactly this kind of morning.
The shop was cold—she'd been keeping the heat low to save money—but at least it was dry.
At least the walls were still standing and the rod racks were still full and the door still said MAHONEY'S BAIT & TACKLE in her father's hand-painted letters.
She made coffee in the ancient pot that had been brewing bad sludge since Reagan was president, and drank it standing at the window, watching the empty parking lot.
Charter bookings: down fifty percent.
Insurance: denying claims.
Boats: three out of five damaged.
Cash reserves: maybe two months, if she didn't eat.
The numbers ran through her head like a countdown she couldn't stop. She'd run marketing campaigns for companies with nine-figure budgets, analyzed data sets that would make most people's eyes cross, built her career on finding patterns and solutions in impossible situations.
This wasn't an impossible situation. This was a siege.
Gregor Petrovic didn't need to burn her shop down or put her in the hospital. He just needed to wait. Let the water do its work, slow and patient, until she was so far underwater that his offer started looking like a lifeline instead of a trap.
She'd seen it before, in the neighborhood. Family businesses that held on for generations, suddenly gone. For sale signs in windows, equipment auctions in parking lots, people who'd spent their whole lives building something watching it disappear because they couldn't afford to fight back.
Tess opened the shop at eight, same as always.
The morning brought two customers—a regular who needed a new reel and a tourist who wanted directions to Navy Pier. She sold the reel, gave the directions, and spent the rest of the morning reorganizing inventory that didn't need reorganizing because sitting still made her want to scream.
At noon, she walked the dock and counted her remaining fleet.
Two rentals still seaworthy, if she used that term loosely. Three kayaks that hadn't been touched yet—probably because kayaks didn't suit whatever Gregor was running through the harbor. The charter boat, which was too expensive to sabotage casually but too valuable to leave unguarded.
She moved the charter boat to the most visible slip, where she could watch it from the shop window. Small victories. The only kind she had left.
The truck came back at four.
Different driver today, but the same dark windows and the same message: We're still here. We'll always be here. You can't wait us out.
Tess made herself watch them through the shop window, refusing to duck or hide or pretend she didn't see.
Her hands wanted to shake. She didn't let them.
Thirty years, her father had run this shop.
He'd earned every gray hair on his head and every line on his face, and he'd never backed down from anything in his life.
Neither would she.
The afternoon crawled past, one empty hour at a time. A few more customers trickled in—enough to keep the lights on, not enough to feel like victory. She rang up sales and answered questions and smiled until her face hurt, and every time she looked up, the truck was still there.
At six, she locked the front door and flipped the sign to CLOSED.
The sun was setting over the city behind her, throwing long shadows across the parking lot. The truck sat in its usual spot, engine idling, windows too dark to see through. Waiting.
She could call the cops. Had thought about it a hundred times, scrolled to 911 on her phone and let her thumb hover over the button.
But what would she say? There's a truck in my parking lot.
The same truck that's been there every day for two weeks.
No, they haven't done anything I can prove.
No, I can't connect them to the damage. No, I don't have evidence of any crime.
The cops would take a report and tell her to call back if anything happened. And then Gregor Petrovic would find out she'd talked to the police, and the holes in her boats would become holes in her windows, or her tires, or her.
The truck pulled away at six-fifteen, headlights sweeping across the empty lot as it turned toward the street.
Tess watched it go.
Tomorrow, she'd wake up early and check the boats again. Tomorrow, she'd smile at customers and pretend everything was fine and pray that the insurance company reversed their decision. Tomorrow, she'd fight the same battle she'd been fighting for six weeks, knowing she was losing inches at a time.
She climbed the stairs to the apartment above the shop, moving through darkness she knew by heart. The window in her bedroom faced the water—Lake Michigan, black and endless under the first stars.
Her father used to say the lake took care of its own.
Tess wasn't sure she believed that anymore.
She locked the door, checked it twice, and lay down in the dark listening to the water, knowing tomorrow would be exactly the same.