Chapter 2 - Beneath the Rotten Piers
The cable snapped with a sharp metallic ping that vibrated through my breastbone. The release mechanism clicked, and the belt whipped back into the pillar, leaving me gasping as my brother’s massive hands caught my shoulders and pulled me upward out of the freezing seat. The water was already touching the ceiling liner, leaving only a six-inch pocket of stale, trapped air near the rear dome light. My mind spun in wild, disorienting circles. My brother—the brother whose legs I had massaged with wintergreen oil every evening, the brother who had required custom hand controls on his desk, the brother whom our family doctors had declared permanently severed from nerve function below the lumbar spine after the crash that took our parents on the coastal highway—was standing upright in three feet of swirling river water, his shoulders braced against the roof to stabilize us against the river’s drag. "Tobias..." I gasped, coughing as the muddy tide splashed across my lips. "You can walk. You... you can stand." "Take this," he ordered, cutting off my hysterical disbelief with military brevity. He reached into the waterproof lining of his hunting jacket and produced two cylindrical black canisters no larger than flare cartridges, each fitted with an ergonomic silicone mouthpiece. Mini emergency scuba lungs—the kind used by naval divers for rapid submarine egress, providing three minutes of compressed air. He shoved one between my lips, his fingers pressing my nose shut until my survival instincts kicked in, forcing me to draw a cold, metallic lungful of dry air through the regulator. "Listen to me, Rosalind," he commanded, his eyes gleaming like polished flint in the dark. "When that rear glass blows, the current will drag us toward the main channel. Garrett and Penelope are watching from the old survey road. If Garrett sees so much as a bubble break the surface in the center of the creek, he will walk down with his hunting rifle and finish what the water started. You kick toward the muddy bottom. You follow my hand. Do not surface until we clear the timber line." Before I could nod, Tobias turned, gathered his strength, and delivered a devastating mule kick to the latch of the hydraulic tailgate. The impact shuddered through the entire chassis. On the third strike, the reinforced lock failed, the rear door swung upward against the immense hydrostatic pressure, and the river rushed into the SUV with the concussive force of a bursting dam. The world turned upside down. The water tore me from the roofline, dragging me into a blind, churning vortex of silt, torn upholstery, and rotting river grass. Panic clamped around my throat like an iron band; my vision went completely black as the current slammed my shoulder against the rear bumper. But Tobias’s grip on my left wrist was unbreakable, an anchor of living sinew and bone. He kicked with powerful, practiced dolphin strokes, pulling me downward through the freezing murk, skimming along the riverbed where the current ran slower beneath the fallen cypress roots. Overhead, through the churning ceiling of water, the dull yellow flashes of lightning illuminated the silhouette of the riverbank. We moved like ghosts through the black silt, sliding beneath the ancient, moss-draped pilings of the abandoned naval timber piers that had rotted along Savannah Creek since the Second World War. Only when we reached the hollow interior of an old concrete water-intake caisson—hidden beneath fifty feet of overgrown sawgrass and rusted rebar—did Tobias pull my head above the surface. I spat out the regulator and collapsed onto a slime-covered concrete shelf, retching brackish water and bile, shivering so violently my teeth clacked together like dice. My chest burned with an agony that had nothing to do with the river. My body felt leaden, hollowed out, as if every organ had been dipped in liquid ice. Tobias hauled himself onto the ledge beside me, his movements methodical and silent. He wiped the muddy water from his face, revealing the hard, razor-sharp jawline that had been hidden behind fifteen years of slumped, wheelchair-bound defeat. "Breathe through your nose, Rose," he said, using my childhood nickname, his voice steady and calm despite the bitter cold. "Slow breaths. Your body is going into shock." "How?" I sobbed, clutching my knees to my chest, staring at him through the gloom. "How can you be standing here? You sat in that chair for fifteen years! I fed you! I carried you to the bath when you were sick! I watched you cry when you looked at father’s old blueprints! You let me believe you were broken!" Tobias bowed his head, the shadow of an ancient, terrible sorrow crossing his features. "If I had stood up fifteen years ago, Rosalind, they would have finished the job in the ICU." I froze, the breath catching in my throat. "What are you talking about?" Tobias looked out through the rusted grate of the caisson toward the distant road where the headlights of Garrett’s getaway truck were just beginning to sweep across the treetops. "The truck that hit Mom and Dad’s sedan on Highway 17 wasn't a drunk driver who lost control in the rain," Tobias said, his voice dropping to a low, lethal whisper. "The steering arm on our car had been scored with an oxy-acetylene torch until it snapped at sixty miles an hour. I woke up in the county hospital three days after the crash with three fractured ribs and a concussion, but my spinal cord was intact. The doctors told me I was bruised, that I’d be walking in six weeks." He paused, his hands balling into fists on his knees. "And on the fourth night, while I was pretending to sleep, I heard Arthur Thorne—Garrett’s father—talking to the hospital administrator in the hallway. Arthur paid fifty thousand dollars in cash to alter my neurological charts to state complete lower-limb paraplegia. He told the doctor that if Tobias Sullivan ever walked out of that hospital, neither the doctor nor his family would survive the winter." "Arthur Thorne?" I gasped, the name sending a wave of nausea through my stomach. Arthur was the patriarchal rival who had spent forty years trying to buy out our grandfather’s deep-water shipyard. "Our parents had just secured the twenty-year naval maintenance drydock contract," Tobias continued, his jaw tightening until the muscle jumped beneath the skin. "The Sullivan Shipyard was worth fifty million dollars on the open market, but with Dad alive, Arthur couldn't touch an inch of the shoreline. So Arthur killed them. And he left me alive as a cripple because a broken, wheelchair-bound boy couldn't run a commercial dockyard. But they didn't count on you." "Me?" "You were nineteen, Rose. You took over the front office. You learned the maritime codes, you balanced the ledgers, and you kept the cranes running with your bare hands. For twelve years, you kept the Thorne family at bay. So Arthur changed tactics. He sent in his golden boy." The world seemed to stop spinning. The pieces of the last three years began falling into place with sickening, mathematical precision. "Garrett didn't meet me by accident at the maritime charity gala," I whispered, the realization tasting like ashes on my tongue. "He spent six months studying your routes, your suppliers, and your loneliness," Tobias said, his eyes drilling into mine with devastating pity. "He married you to get his signature on the operating deeds. But you still held fifty-one percent of the voting trust, and under our parents' will, if you died without an heir, your shares transferred to me. If I died, they transferred to Penelope, our father's daughter from his first marriage." "And Penelope was already sleeping with him," I choked out, remembering the rounded curve of her belly beneath her cream coat. "She's carrying his child. If Tobias and I both drown in Savannah Creek tonight, Penelope inherits the entire Sullivan waterfront tomorrow morning as the sole surviving heir. And Garrett becomes the managing trustee of the entire estate through his unborn child." Tobias reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, amber glass vial wrapped in plastic, holding it up between us. "Tell me, Rose... did Garrett bring you your warm milk tonight before we left the house?"
