Chapter 1 - The Salt of the Docks and the Call of the Blood
The biting wind off the Atlantic whipped across the frost-covered wooden planks of the Portland, Maine fish docks, carrying the sharp, familiar scent of brine, diesel, and freshly hauled cod.
Twenty-four-year-old Harper Reed did not feel the cold. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with veteran fishermen twice her age, her hands moved with a blur of lethal, practiced precision. Her fingers—wrapped in heavy canvas tape to protect against knife slips—guided a six-inch fillet blade through the spine of a massive twenty-pound salmon with a single, fluid stroke.
“Clean cut, Harper,” muttered old man Barnaby, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the dark water below. “You’ve got sharper eyes than half the deckhands on this coast.”
“You survive on these docks by keeping your eyes open, Barnaby,” Harper replied, her voice low, raspy, and hard as granite.
Raised by a gruff, tight-lipped foster grandfather who had pulled her out of a burning orphanage in Boston when she was three, Harper knew nothing about pedigree, luxury, or high society. She knew the weight of a heavy ice crate, the sting of saltwater in an open wound, and how to drop a six-foot-two dock brawler with a single twist of his elbow if he forgot his manners. The Maine docks taught you one absolute law: the weak are eaten, and the strong survive.
That was before the sleek, matte-black town car pulled up beside the cannery shed.
Two men in impeccably tailored charcoal suits stepped out onto the slimy, fish-scale-covered concrete, looking entirely out of place like exotic birds dropped into a slaughterhouse. The taller of the two—a graying man with cold, aristocratic eyes named Julian Sterling—approached Harper slowly, holding an open leather folder.
“Harper Reed?” he asked, his voice clipped and dry.
Harper didn't stop working. She sliced through another fish spine before looking up, wiping a stray drop of blood from her cheek with the back of her forearm. “Depends who’s asking. If you’re selling insurance, save your breath. If you’re looking for trouble, step back.”
Julian opened the folder, revealing a certified birth certificate, a pair of matching DNA test results, and a vintage emerald-and-diamond pendant that matched a faded photograph her grandfather had kept hidden under floorboards for decades.
“You aren't a dockworker, Miss Reed,” Julian said quietly. “You are the primary surviving granddaughter of industrialist Cornelius Sterling. The lost heiress to the Sterling dynasty of New York. Your father passed away three months ago, leaving his entire multi-billion-dollar estate to you.”
Harper stared at the paper. For years, she had wondered why her grandfather had fled Boston in the middle of the night. Now, the ghosts of her past had caught up.
May you like
She looked down at her bloody fillet knife, then out across the freezing Maine horizon. The docks had raised her to be tough, but a new kind of jungle was calling her name. And a Maine fish-cutting queen was about to show New York what a true predator looked like.
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