The Captain (Dominion Hall #9)

Chapter 1

CAMILLE

T he tide lapped at my calves, warm and insistent, as if it meant to pull me farther out than I was willing to go.

My rubber boots filled with seawater, anyway, a pointless effort at staying dry, but I didn’t care. I had bigger things to worry about than sand in my socks.

The dolphin lay just ahead, half-submerged in the foam line, its slick gray skin glinting under the early-morning sun.

Young—maybe two years, no older than three.

Still small enough that I could cradle its head if I needed to, but big enough that the wrong kind of stress would kill it before rescue transport even arrived.

“Easy, sweetheart,” I whispered, my accent still thick after all these years. France lingered on my tongue, vowels lilting in ways Charleston never quite managed to erase. “Stay with me.”

The animal’s sides rose and fell too fast. Panic. Disorientation. I knew the signs.

Behind me, a handful of onlookers gathered at the edge of the dunes, phones raised, their chatter a grating soundtrack.

I didn’t turn. I’d learned long ago that you can’t stop people from gawking, only from interfering.

My job wasn’t to manage their spectacle—it was to keep this dolphin breathing until the stranding network truck arrived.

I adjusted the damp towel I’d draped over its back to keep the skin from burning.

The dolphin twitched, spraying me with a weak puff of brine through its blowhole.

My shirt clung instantly, transparent, nipples peaking against the wet fabric.

I cursed under my breath. Fieldwork was never glamorous, but somehow the ocean always found ways to strip me bare.

“Camille! You need hands?” Becca Clarke’s voice carried on the wind, bright and breathless. She was my newest intern—sharp mind, long legs, always running late.

“Gloves first,” I called without looking up. “And saline. Eyes every two minutes.”

I slid my palm lower along the dolphin’s flank, feeling for tone, for the subtle, trembling resilience that meant the body hadn’t given up yet. Warmth bled into my skin— alive, alive, alive —and the tight coil in my chest loosened by a hair.

A wave sloshed over my knees, then my thighs. Sand sucked at my heels. The sea had a way of making everything intimate. It licked and pressed and insisted. It coated you in salt until even the inside of your mouth tasted like a kiss you couldn’t get rid of.

Becca splashed to my side, cheeks flushed, blonde ponytail dark with spray. She knelt and fumbled with the bottle. “Sorry, there was a crowd by the access path.”

“We’ll deal with that later.” I took the bottle and blinked saline across the dolphin’s eye, careful, steady. “For now, we keep him calm.”

“What do you think caused it?” she asked. “Boat strike?”

“Not this one.” The skin was clean. No prop gouges, no sharp trauma. “Acoustic disorientation is my bet.”

Becca grimaced. “Sonar?”

“Don’t say it like a question,” I murmured. A gull wheeled overhead and screamed. “Say it like an indictment.”

She swallowed. “Sonar.”

I let the word settle in my bones.

A man from the dune line shouted, “Shouldn’t you push it back in the water?” Another chimed in, “It’s drowning out here!”

I didn’t turn. “He’s not drowning,” I said, loud enough to carry, soft enough to soothe the animal beneath my hands.

“He’s a mammal. He breathes air. If we push him out while he’s disoriented, he’ll panic and aspirate seawater.

Or beach again, harder.” I stroked the smooth skin behind the pectoral fin.

The dolphin’s heartbeat thrummed against my palm, desperate and electric. “Help is on the way.”

“Ma’am, do you have a permit to touch it?” someone else hollered, faux-concern wrapped in the nasally tone of a man who wanted to be right more than kind.

I finally glanced up, lips tight. “Yes.”

Becca snorted, then smoothed her face when I cut her a look. Her hands moved with more confidence now, saline, towel, whisper, repeat. She kept her voice low and sweet, the way I taught her, and it calmed the tiny muscles around the dolphin’s eye.

“Transport is ten out,” she said, checking the text that buzzed in her pocket. “Traffic at the Folly bridge.”

I exhaled through my nose. Ten minutes was fine—an eternity, but fine. “When they get here, we’ll roll him on the stretcher from the surf side. Minimal torsion. I want a blood gas and a quick stat lactate before they move.”

“Copy.”

I could feel the stare from the dunes, the collective attention that prickled across skin like sunburn.

People loved a rescue if it fit in a vertical video with a hopeful soundtrack.

They didn’t love the parts where, days later, the animal turned septic and slipped away while you were changing out a catheter.

They didn’t love the necropsy, how you cut and measured and weighed and traced insult through tissue with your gloved fingers, cataloging the way a human agenda could echo in an animal’s bones.

I did. I loved all of it. The messy honesty. The intimacy of knowing a body to the point of reverence.

Another wave broke, stronger, foamy tongues licking up my thighs to the hem of my shorts. My shirt dragged over my nipples when I leaned forward. I let myself feel it—the rawness of it, the heat—and then harnessed it like I always did, feeding it into focus.

There were uses for hunger. I had built a career on alchemizing mine.

A low thrumming reached me from far offshore. Not the steady bass of a tanker. Smaller. Closer. I tilted my head, angling one ear to the horizon, the other to the breath at my knee.

“Do you hear that?” Becca asked.

“I do.” I didn’t say what I thought it was.

I didn’t have to. The rhythm vibrated in my marrow, a tune I’d learned to hate and parse in equal measure.

I checked my watch. The exercise window wasn’t supposed to open until next week, but the calendar was a living document, like the coast itself—subject to tides, wind, and men in crisp uniforms who spoke in acronyms.

The dolphin shivered, jaw quivering, and brayed a thin, heartbreaking sound that wasn’t quite a whistle. My throat went tight. “Je sais, je sais, mon c?ur. Reste. Respire. Respire.” I let the French pour out of me like heat. It always did when I needed softness. When I needed home.

Home. What a treacherous word.

When I was twelve, home had been Paris rooftops and métro stairs and my mother’s lipstick on a porcelain teacup.

My father came home in his dark suit, smelling faintly of diesel and cedar, and told us about a city across an ocean with streets that oozed like honey in summer and a harbor full of hulking ships.

A contract, he said. A project too good to refuse.

The Americans wanted him. Needed him. We moved to Charleston and it welcomed us with palms and humidity that licked every inch of the body like a lover with no sense of boundaries.

I became fluent in salt and heat and what it meant to be watched.

Now, the watching was my job. I read currents and tides and the micro-twitches that telegraphed panic through cetacean muscle. I logged numbers with ink that bled when it got wet, data points spaced like freckles across a page I never seemed to fill.

“Truck is five,” Becca said. “They’re bringing the big sling.”

“Good.” I pressed two fingers gently behind the jaw. The pulse was still too fast. “We’ll need to keep his blowhole clear when they shift him. You on that?”

“Yes.”

“And Becca?”

She looked up. “Yeah?”

“Breathe.”

She laughed, short and startled. The sound hiccupped into the wind and made a man at the dunes lower his phone. My intern tucked loose hair under her cap and breathed. Good girl.

“Dr. Allard!” A voice I knew too well. I turned to see Tamika James jogging down from the access path, radio bouncing against her chest, the network’s battered old umbrella under one arm.

“We got calls about two more reports south of here. Could be the same animal, could be different. You good if I peel to check?”

“Go.” I nodded toward the umbrella. “Leave that.”

She stabbed the post into the sand, popped the canopy, and shade kissed the dolphin’s skin. Tamika squeezed my shoulder before she peeled away, her palm leaving a warm print I felt through cotton.

The horizon shimmered. Far out, beyond the last sandbar, a solitary head bobbed in the chop where a swimmer cut a clean line. Bold. Too far even for most surfers on a good day. He moved like he belonged there, each stroke slicing the glare the way a blade parts water.

I dragged my gaze back down. Not now. I wasn’t here to meet men who looked like trouble. I was here because the ocean kept dropping broken things at my feet and expecting me to fix them.

The rumble off the coast deepened. My jaw ached from clenching. I spoke softly to the dolphin to keep from cursing. “You hear it, too, hm? You want to go to deep water away from the headache and the screaming, and the whole world is shallow here.”

Becca’s timer chimed and she re-lubed the eye. “When the Navy liaison called yesterday, did you answer?”

“I let it go to voicemail.” I adjusted the towel. “He can wait.”

She chewed her lip. “He said it was urgent. That they were cooperating in good faith.”

“They always are,” I said, and poured a bucket of water over the towel, letting the overflow run down my wrists and into my boots.

The coolness shocked me even though the day was already hot.

I felt awake and irritated in the particular way I only felt in Charleston—like this city had a hand down the front of my shirt, pawing at me without asking, assuming I’d take it because that’s what a good girl did.

I wasn’t a good girl.

A cluster of teenagers crept closer, barefoot and sticky with sunscreen, whispering about how soft the dolphin looked. One reached out. I fixed him with a gaze so flat I watched the impulse die on his face.

“Back behind the flags, please,” I said, turning the flat into a smile. “He needs calm.”

“Is it a boy?” the youngest asked, squinting as if he could tell.

“Today we’ll call him whatever he needs to get through.” The kid nodded in the serious way children do when they’re taking your words like medicine. He tugged his friends back to the dune line.

The truck appeared at last, grinding to a stop on the firmer sand, hazard lights strobing. Miguel Ruiz jumped down from the passenger side with the sling and a gurney, his forearms already wet. “Morning, Doc.”

“Morning.” I sketched the details in quick strokes—approximate age, respiration rate trend, response to tactile stimulus, the unidentified thrumming from offshore—and Miguel looked toward the horizon like he could squint it into confession.

“Let’s do it,” he said, and we did.

The move was a choreography of inches. The ocean tried to steal our footing, and the sand tried to swallow us, but we kept the dolphin’s blowhole clear and his spinal axis straight.

My body and Miguel’s and Becca’s moved in an accidental intimacy that was all breath and muscle memory.

At one point, Miguel’s hip pressed into mine as we shifted the weight and I let it, borrowing his stability, giving him mine.

The sling slid beneath slick skin with a sound like a secret whispered against a throat.

“On three,” I said, and we lifted. The dolphin’s body sagged against the canvas, heavy as grief. He thrashed once, a shock of power, and I caught the fluke with a firm, calm hand, absorbing the fight until it shifted back into fear.

“Shh,” I told him. “I know. I know.”

On the gurney at last, we wheeled him across the sand. The crowd gave way, a murmur opening in front of us. People wanted to feel part of something good.

I would take it.