VANGUARD OF THE BAY

CHAPTER 1: Cold Harbor, Burning Blood

"You are nothing without this city, and this city is done with you!" Uncle Marcus shouted, his words cutting through the freezing rain as two heavy enforcers shoved me onto the slippery wooden planks of the harbor dock.

"This is my father's harbor, Marcus!" I screamed back, wiping bitter seawater and blood from my mouth. "You can't just take everything my family built!"

"I just did, Leo," Marcus sneered, adjusting his expensive wool coat while staying dry under his black umbrella. "Your parents are dead. Their empire belongs to someone who actually knows how to run it. You're an eighteen-year-old with a famous last name, nothing more. Now get on that boat before I have my men toss you into the bay with anchor chains around your boots."

The two enforcers kicked my meager canvas bag onto the deck of a rusted, aging fishing transport. I stumbled forward, my boots sliding on the wet cedar. The engine of the old vessel groaned as Captain Thomas, a broad-shouldered man with a wild gray beard, reached down from the gunwale to grab my arm and haul me up before I fell into the churning dark water between the ship and the pier.

"Easy, son." Thomas held me steady. "Keep your head down. Don't give that snake the satisfaction of watching you crawl."

I looked back at the dock. Marcus was already walking toward his sedan, guarded by four men in dark suits. Behind him, the city lights of Aethelgard Bay glittered, high-rise towers glowing like gems in the storm. Down here the air smelled of diesel, rot, and salt water. Six months ago I'd been sleeping under my father's roof, learning the shipping ledgers at his desk. Now I owned the clothes on my back and a bruise blooming along my jaw, and that was the whole of it.

"He took everything, Thomas." My teeth chattered from the rain soaking through my jacket. "He forged the board signatures. He wiped the estate accounts clean. There's nothing left to fight him with."

Thomas didn't answer right away, just kept his eyes on the black water ahead, jaw working like he was chewing on something he didn't want to say in front of the crew.

"I know." Thomas ushered me into the cramped wheelhouse, where eight other crew members sat in silence around a small oil stove. "Your father was a good man. He kept this harbor safe from the syndicates for twenty years. Marcus brought the shadow back the second your father's heart stopped beating."

The deckhands looked up at me with tired, weathered eyes. Men who'd worked the sea for decades, whose families depended on the harbor for their daily bread. Under Marcus's new regime their wages had been cut in half, and armed thugs walked the docks collecting illegal taxes off every haul. Nobody said much to me. A couple of them nodded, the way you'd nod at a stray dog that had wandered in out of the rain, not unkind, just unsure what to do with me yet.

"Drink this." An old fisherman named Hank handed me a metal mug of hot tea, his knuckles swollen and cracked from decades of rope work. "Won't fix your legacy, kid, but it'll keep your lungs from freezing tonight."

"Thanks, Hank." I took the mug with shaking hands and sat on a crate near the stove, staring out the salt-stained window at the dark bay. The tea tasted like it had been steeped in the same pot for a week, bitter and over-boiled, and I drank every drop of it anyway.

For twelve hours our small fleet worked the outer waters, pulling in heavy nets of silver fish while the storm raged around us. Work was the only thing that kept my mind off the fury burning in my chest. I hauled rope until my palms were raw, learned to read the tilt of the deck under my boots, learned which knots held and which slipped when they got wet. Nobody explained anything twice. If I didn't catch it the first time, I did the job wrong and Hank cursed at me and showed me once more, faster. By the third hour my hands were bleeding through a pair of borrowed gloves two sizes too big, and I didn't stop.

By four in the morning the deck was stacked with ice crates of fresh catch, and the crew gathered in the wheelhouse to share hard bread before heading back toward the harbor gates. My whole body ached in ways I hadn't known it could. I sat with my back against the warm metal of the stove and let my eyes close for a few seconds at a time, jolting awake each time my head dipped.

"Good haul tonight, boys." Thomas checked the radar screen, tapping the glass out of habit more than need. "Enough here to cover the harbor fees for the month. We dock in twenty minutes."

The radar let out a sharp, continuous beep. The red light flickered wildly.

"What is that?" I asked, stepping closer to the console, suddenly awake again.

"Don't know." Thomas's eyebrows knit together as he adjusted the frequency knob, leaning in so close his beard nearly brushed the glass. "Massive signal off the blind side of the southern reef. Moving too fast for a cargo ship. Moving too fast for anything I've got a name for."

Before he could pull the throttle back, a horn blasted directly out of the fog, low and long, more felt than heard. The sea erupted into violent swells as a massive black iron vessel cut through the waves and slammed into our starboard side, tearing metal with a sickening crunch that I felt in my back teeth.

The blow threw all of us onto the floorboards. Tea spilled across the deck, the oil lantern shattered, and the wheelhouse dropped into dim red emergency light. Somewhere below us the hull groaned like something dying.

"We're being rammed!" Hank yelled, clutching his shoulder where he'd caught the edge of the stove on the way down.

"Get up!" Thomas scrambled for the wheel, boots skidding on spilled tea. "That's no legal vessel. That's an Iron Syndicate raider."

Blinding searchlights snapped on outside, bathing our boat in harsh white light bright enough to see the rain as individual silver threads. Grappling hooks tore through the hull like gunshots. Heavy footsteps thundered on the deck above, more of them than I could count from the sound alone.

"All crew out on the main deck now!" a mechanical voice bellowed over a loudspeaker. "Leave your cargo and lie flat on your faces, or we sink this bucket right now!"

I looked at Thomas. His face had gone pale in the red light, older than I'd ever seen it. "They aren't here to rob us, Leo," he said quietly, almost too quiet to hear over the rain hammering the roof. "Marcus sold the harbor access codes to the syndicate. They're here to burn the independent fleet so he gets his monopoly. Every boat that doesn't fly his colors goes to the bottom tonight."

Something cold in me turned to fire, fast, the way a struck match catches. I wasn't going to hide like a victim anymore. I'd spent six months learning how to disappear into a crowd, how to keep my head down and my mouth shut, and I was done with all of it in the space of one breath.

"No," I said, and my voice didn't shake even though the rest of me did. "We fight for what's ours."

I grabbed an iron gaff hook off the wall, the same one Hank had used an hour earlier to haul in a net, and kicked open the wheelhouse door, stepping into the blinding light of the syndicate raiders.