Chapter 52
Tia Cameron
Call sign: Thimble
Tia saw Rylan too late, his mouth ajar, pupils dilated. He’d seen her. She looked at the spot Nico had occupied seconds before.
She looked at her mother who had come up beside Rylan, even though she had said she wouldn’t wake him. She looked down at
the sea which heaved, unmarred by the man it had consumed.
Tia stood still amid the storm, drenched and anchored only by the steel shroud clenched in her fists and her brother across
the deck, screaming her name in silence. The ocean seemed to have no laws in the way it moved, bucking and writhing and sending
them in every direction. The black duffel bag was nowhere to be seen. If Tia had been any less pumped with adrenaline, she
would have sobbed with terror.
At the helm, her father smiled.
The storm seemed to mute. Rylan had looked at Tia once before in the way he did now, like she was a monster.
It was after she’d pushed their father overboard.
No one in the family had ever viewed her the same since.
Tia hadn’t given a second thought to what happens to people when you push them into the ocean, even in calm waters in broad daylight, to the fact that she might have killed her father.
She’d just wanted to hurt him. Her face had been aching from where he’d hit her, and she needed her father to know that she would always strike back.
“I—I think I know what your call sign is, Tia,” Rylan had said as they knelt on the floor of their room after Francis had
been pulled from the sea coughing up water. “Shield. You’re my shield.”
Tia had shaken her head. “I’m not big enough.”
She thought of her father’s look of terror as he crashed into the water. The image filled her with adrenaline. And pride.
“Maybe I’m more of a sword.”
Rylan frowned. “No. No.” He said it like he wanted to convince himself. “You were on defense. Not offense.”
Tia wondered if that was true. She wondered if Rylan believed that. She looked around at The Old Eileen, the flash of Atlantic through the portholes, and then at her brother and his bandaged hands.
“How about something else unbreakable?” Rylan had said. He thought for a minute, touching a bubble of blood that seeped from
underneath the gauze around one thumb. “Thimble.”
Tia looped her pinkie with his, careful not to brush up against any of his wounded fingers.
“Thimble,” she echoed.
Francis was laughing now, openmouthed against the rain as he gripped the helm.
Tia found herself in front of him, the wheel between them. Rylan and Lila had retreated to midships, maybe to take shelter.
Alejandro was gone, and now so was Nico.
Francis turned them portside, but the waves didn’t let up. The ship was ready to splinter into shards, ceramic pieces to be ground into sand.
“You know, Tia, you really should be wearing a life jacket up here. It isn’t safe.”
Tia seized the wheel, her fists against his. Rain slashed his face into fractions, a series of broken glass.
Francis wrenched it back, and she stumbled away. “You’re not a captain yet, kiddo. Your day will come. Although, it was a
night like this thirty years ago when I started my own path. A storm like this.”
Water broke over the bowsprit and rushed across the deck. It surged around Tia’s ankles. Overhead, stars swung like crystals
in a falling chandelier. This ocean would eat them all alive.
“What did you do to make the feds come after you?”
Francis turned the helm. “Look at the life you’ve had, Tia. I didn’t have that, but why should that mean I didn’t deserve
it? I wanted the kind of life most people never get, so I had to be willing to do things most people wouldn’t do. Building
an empire isn’t pretty.”
“By pretty, you mean legal?”
He didn’t answer, just looked smug as he steered his ship. Tia wanted to rip his yacht right out from under his feet.
She moved closer again. Some things still weren’t adding up. “Why would you hire MJ if you knew she was working against you?”
“That’s exactly why I hired her.”
He had always planned on killing her. Tia’s hands trembled at her sides.
“And what about Mom and Alejandro?” Did Lila really kill him? Did she push him into the storm like Tia had Nico?
Francis showed his teeth in a garish grin. “Too much love, I guess.”
“Well, good.” She stopped within arm’s length of him and bared a smile right back, unsure if the noise in her eardrums was battering thunder or the blood that beat in her veins. “I don’t have that problem.”
She knocked back a fist and caught him right in his perfect teeth. Pain exploded up her hand, but God it felt good to hit
him hard in the face like he had hit her. Francis howled and staggered away from the wheel, which she snatched control of.
She searched in vain for a marker in the sky to find her heading, but The Old Eileen might as well have been a stray sock in a washing machine.
That’s why she couldn’t be sure if the thing that ripped her from the helm was the storm or her father. Either way, Tia toppled
backward and smacked painfully into the cockpit bench. She strained to right herself, but Francis was there, and he swept
her legs out from under her.
She hit the deck, and her right hand shot bolts of pain through her arm once more, mimicking the lightning that fragmented
the night. Francis lunged to reach the wheel, but she caught his ankle and yanked him backward. It was her turn to take control.
They weren’t going to his island.
“All this trouble to captain a ship you’re about to sink?” she screamed.
Francis faced her, eyes burned out like cigarettes in the dark.
“What?” he called, and she claimed the opportunity to army-crawl past him and heave herself up on the wheel.
She scanned the deck for the black duffel bag, praying it had been swept overboard. Instead she saw Rylan and Lila, arguing
from the looks of their gesturing hands. There was something on the deck between them, but between the chart house and the
downpour, she couldn’t make it out. It wasn’t the bag. It was bright orange with reflective strips of silver that shone under
the mast lights.
The life raft.
“You think you can steer us through a storm, Tia?” Behind her, Francis was propped against the cockpit bench. “Aren’t you
afraid? That sea will tear this ship in two if you let it.”
He was wrong. She tightened her grip on The Old Eileen’s helm. She was made for this.
Francis didn’t let up. He had made it to his feet once more, balanced by one hand on the bench. The rain made it hard to hear
anything, but he raised his voice above it. “Being a captain means everyone’s lives are in your hands. It’s already too late
for some.”
MJ. Alejandro. Nico.
He was behind her now, but she couldn’t leave the helm. “Not for Rylan, though. Do you really trust yourself with his life?”
Rylan betrayed me, she thought.
But what if he went overboard like Nico? Tia’s breath caught when she imagined her brother in the water, struggling to get
air, living his final moments riddled with the panic he’d felt most of his life.
She wanted him to be brave, not dead.
Tia remembered the crash jibe she had almost caused a few days ago. She had never seen Alejandro look scared. Maybe she didn’t
have what it took to captain this ship.
“Just let me get us through another storm,” Francis urged.
Tia loosened her grasp on the helm. Francis reached for it. And for a moment, her father’s eyes were that of the storm, a
breath of temporary calm.
Then The Old Eileen hit a wall of water, and Tia careered backward, sliding over the deck and the angled railing. She spiraled down, down, down.
Right into the ocean’s open mouth.