Her turn was done and his was starting.
31
RAFE
Dex planted the leak at the tavern during the post-storm crowd, when the freight runners were drinking off the adrenaline and the room was loud enough that careful words could travel without looking planted. The story was simple: the Ashvane was departing at first light. Rafe had loaded the last of his salvaged cargo that afternoon, including a replacement shipment for the Vanewright account that he'd sourced through a private supplier in town.
None of it was true. The Vanewright replacement didn't exist. The departure was fiction. The cargo hold was empty except for what had survived the original storm damage, and Rafe had no intention of casting off at dawn.
But Malrick didn't know that. And Malrick, who built his plays on timing and information, would not let the Ashvane leave Hollow Oak intact if he believed it was carrying a contract worth stealing.
"Garren heard it," Dex reported, coming back to the ship at eight. "He was at the bar. Tried not to react, which means he reacted. He left ten minutes after I dropped the details and headed north on the ridge road. Straight to wherever Malrickis holed up now." Dex sat on the dock rail. The evening was dark, the earlier storm having cleared the sky for about two hours before the second front began building off the lake. This one was bigger. Isla had told him that morning, the mountain system behind the first front was the real threat, heavier, slower, carrying more charge. This was the storm Malrick had been waiting for.
"Orick and Pell?" Rafe asked.
"Below deck. Armed with the good sense God gave them and a couple of lengths of chain."
"Emmett's people?"
"Two on the ridge road. One at the dock approach. They know to hold and watch."
Rafe stood at the Ashvane's bow looking at the lake. The water was dark, the second front visible as a wall of cloud building to the northwest, its base lit from within by the kind of internal lightning that meant the system was still feeding. Two hours, maybe less, before it hit the valley.
Isla was at her cottage. She'd been tired. Deeply tired, the kind that showed in her hands and her posture as she walked home to wait for the next part of the trap.
Emmett had told him that she would be ready at the shoreline when the second front comes.
Rafe was ready as well, and he didn’t have to wait long.
The first sign came at quarter to ten. A scrape on the dock pilings below the waterline, metal on wood, the sound carrying up through the hull into the deck where Rafe stood in the dark. He went still. Listened. A second scrape, further aft, near the rudder assembly. Someone was underneath the Ashvane.
He gave it thirty seconds. Let them commit to whatever they were doing. Then he walked to the stern rail, leaned over, and looked down.
Two men in dark clothing, knee-deep in the shallows, working a pry bar against the rudder mounting bracket. One of them had a satchel slung over his shoulder. The other was holding a lantern with the shutter mostly closed, a thin blade of light aimed at the hull.
"Orick," Rafe said quietly.
The big man appeared at the stern hatch. Rafe pointed down. Orick looked. Then he dropped over the rail into the water with a splash that sounded like a boulder hitting a pond.
What followed was brief. One man ran. Orick caught the other by the jacket collar before he'd taken two steps through the shallows and hauled him back toward the dock pilings as if he were moving a piece of furniture. Pell came down the gangway and cut off the runner at the bank. Dex materialized from somewhere along the dock, and suddenly both men were on the dock planks, wet, restrained, and looking at Rafe with the expressions of people whose evening had gone very differently than planned.
The satchel contained a hand drill, three iron spikes, and a jar of something dark that smelled like pitch mixed with a chemical accelerant. They'd been planning to drill into the rudder mount and pack it with the compound. One spark from the storm's lightning and the stern would catch fire.
"Who sent you?" Rafe asked the one Orick was holding.
The man said nothing.
"I'm going to ask one more time and then I'm going to let Orick ask, and he doesn't use words."
"Sloane." The man's voice was thin. "He paid us this afternoon. Said the ship was leaving at dawn and we needed to make sure it didn't."
"Where is he?"
"I don't know. He gave us the job through the big man. Garren. We were supposed to meet him at the north mooring when it was done."
Rafe looked at Dex. "Get Emmett's people to the north mooring. Now."
Dex disappeared up the bank. Rafe turned back to the dock, the two men restrained, Pell standing over them with his arms crossed. The second storm front was closer now, the wind picking up off the lake, the first drops of rain starting to fall.
