Chapter Two
The hole in her hull was the size of a fist, punched through fiberglass just above the waterline on the port side.
Tess stood on the Essex marina dock, coffee going cold in her hand, and stared at the damage to the only thing she had left in the world.
The Rourke's Pride had survived thirty years on the Chesapeake, had carried her father through a thousand hangovers and ten thousand charter runs, had been held together by duct tape and stubbornness since before she was born.
Now there was a hole in her side and a dead cat on her deck.
The cat was a tabby. Someone's pet, probably, snatched from a neighborhood porch. It lay on the stern with its throat cut, blood dried to rust on the white fiberglass she'd scrubbed clean just yesterday.
Tess climbed aboard and picked up the body with hands that didn't shake. Couldn't afford to shake. Shaking was for women who had someone else to handle things, and she'd been the only adult on this boat since she was sixteen years old.
She wrapped the cat in an old towel and set it aside. Later, she'd bury it properly. Somebody's pet deserved that much, even if it died as a message meant for her.
The message was clear enough.
Three weeks ago, she'd been running a sunrise charter when something fouled her propeller south of Hart-Miller Island.
She'd cut the engine, leaned over the stern with a knife, and found a plastic-wrapped package tangled in the blades.
Thirty pounds of something she didn't want to know about, waterproofed and weighted to float just below the surface where it could be picked up by anyone who knew where to look.
She'd cut it free and watched it sink.
Didn't open it. Didn't keep it. Just let the bay take back whatever poison someone had tried to float through her waters.
That had been her first mistake.
Her second mistake was telling Marco Serrano's men exactly what she thought of their offer when they showed up at her slip last week.
Two of them, dressed like marina rats but carrying themselves like muscle, offering her five thousand dollars a month to "adjust her charter schedule" and "look the other way" when certain boats needed to use certain routes.
She'd told them where they could shove their money. Used language that would've made her drunk father proud and her dead mother spin in her grave.
Now her boat had a hole in it and her deck had a dead cat, and the message was as subtle as a sledgehammer: Play along or this is just the beginning.
Tess pulled out her phone and scrolled to her booking calendar. Three cancellations this morning alone, all from clients who'd been on the books for weeks. She called the first one back.
"Mr. Patterson, this is Tess Rourke returning your—"
"Look, I don't want any trouble." His voice was tight, nervous. "Someone called and said there might be... safety issues with your charter service. I've got kids, Ms. Rourke. I can't take that risk."
"Who called you?"
"I don't know. Some guy. Said your boat wasn't safe, said people who use your service have accidents. I'm sorry, but I need to cancel."
The line went dead.
Tess stared at her phone for a long moment, then shoved it in her pocket and went below for her repair kit.
The hull damage was bad but not fatal. They'd used something blunt—a hammer or a crowbar—and they'd aimed above the waterline on purpose. A warning shot. If they'd wanted to sink her, they would have put the hole lower where it would take on water the moment she launched.
They wanted her scared. Compliant. Ready to take their money and follow their rules.
They didn't know her very well.
She mixed the fiberglass resin in a bucket and tried not to think about the repair bill she couldn't afford.
The marina fees were already two months late.
Her fuel account was running on fumes and promises.
Last month she'd eaten ramen for three weeks straight because the charter bookings had dried up even before Serrano's people started making calls.
Rourke Charter Services was dying. Had been dying for years, ever since her father drank himself into the grave and left her with a boat, a debt, and a reputation for being the daughter of a drunk who couldn't keep his schedule straight.
She'd rebuilt that reputation one charter at a time. Early mornings, sober captaining, knowing the bay so well she could run it blindfolded. Tourists wanted sunset cruises; she gave them sunsets that made them cry. Fishermen wanted rockfish; she put them on schools that filled their coolers.
Ten years of clawing her way back from her father's wreckage, and now some smuggler with a marina and a crew of thugs thought he could take it all away because she wouldn't play his game.
The resin went on smooth. She worked it into the hole with practiced hands, building up layers the way her father had taught her before the drinking got bad. He'd been a good teacher when he was sober. A good captain. A good man, maybe, underneath all the bourbon and broken promises.
The bay had killed him as surely as the bottle.
Killed his dreams, his marriage, his health.
Regulations strangling the fishing industry while the real polluters paid fines that amounted to pocket change.
Corporate boats taking the catches while independent operators like her father scraped for scraps.
He'd loved this water his whole life, and it had ground him down to nothing.
Tess understood why he drank. She just refused to follow him down that hole.
The patch dried in the afternoon sun while she scrubbed the blood off her deck.
The marina was quiet—a Tuesday in early April, too cold for most recreational boaters, too early in the season for the tourist rush.
A few other captains worked on their boats down the dock, but none of them met her eyes.
Word traveled fast on the water.
They knew someone had hit her boat. They probably knew why.
And not one of them was going to get involved, because the men who'd put this hole in her hull were the same men who controlled the fuel prices and the slip fees and the quiet understanding about who got to work these waters without problems.
Fine.
She'd been alone on this boat since she was sixteen.
Alone when her father passed out drunk in the cabin while clients waited on the dock.
Alone when handsy tourists thought a female captain was part of the charter package.
Alone when the bank called about the mortgage and the marina called about the fees and everyone with a hand out expected her to fold.
She hadn't folded then. She wasn't going to fold now.
The sun was setting by the time she finished, painting the bay in oranges and reds that would've made her tourist clients weep. She sat on the stern with a beer she couldn't really afford and watched the light fade over the water she'd known her entire life.
Serrano thought she was some desperate charter captain who'd cave at the first sign of pressure. Thought he could scare her with dead animals and threatening phone calls and holes in her boat.
He didn't understand what it meant to grow up on this water. To survive a drunk father and a dying industry and a bay that killed careless people without apology. To be the adult in every room since she was a child, making hard choices while everyone else fell apart around her.
The men who killed that cat had picked the wrong captain.
Tess finished her beer and went below to dig out her father's old service pistol from the lockbox under her bunk. She checked the magazine, chambered a round, and set it on the chart table where she could reach it.
Tomorrow, she'd start asking questions. The Chesapeake was a small world—somebody knew somebody who knew how to push back against men like Serrano. Watermen, bikers, anyone who worked outside the system that had failed her father and was failing her now.
She wasn't going to run. Wasn't going to hide. Wasn't going to take their money and look the other way while they used her boat and her routes to move their poison through waters her family had worked for generations.
She was going to fight.
And when she found the right people to fight beside, Marco Serrano was going to learn exactly what happened to men who threatened a Rourke on her own water.