“Page twelve,” Nikos answered. He was already holding out a pen.
It took another hour to complete the handover. Nikos handled the logistics with the efficient ruthlessness that made himindispensable. I stood in the terminal director’s office and watched through the window as the Poseidon livery was covered with neutral tarps. Below, dockworkers stood in small clusters, watching the change of authority happen in real time. Some of them had worked here for decades. None of them had been asked.
The terminal was mine. Orion Maris had just lost his first piece of dry ground.
“There’s one more thing.” I turned from the window. Galatas sat behind his desk with his hands flat on the surface, the posture of a man holding himself together through discipline. “I need you to make a call.”
“To Lord Maris.”
“Tell him everything that happened tonight. Every detail. Who came, what we filed, how it ended.”
Now that I wasn’t actively using my aura, Galatas faced me without flinching. In his eyes, I saw the grudging recognition of someone who understood and appreciated the workings of power, even if it was being wielded against him.
“And is there a message, Lord Stormwright?”
I straightened my cuffs. “Tell him I very much look forward to seeing him again.”
Galatas held my stare for a long moment. Then he picked up the phone.
We were halfway to the airstrip before Nikos broke the silence.
“That was cleaner than I expected.”
“It won’t stay clean,” I replied. “That was the first one. He has operations in every major port from Marseille to Istanbul. By the time he understands what’s happening, I want half of them under review.”
Nikos pulled a tablet from his bag and began typing. “Marseille, Genoa, Piraeus, Izmir, and the Adriatic corridor. I can have filings ready for all five by morning.”
“Do it.”
Julian had told me that the only way Andromeda would come back was if she chose to. He was right. I couldn’t force her, couldn’t fight my way across Poseidon’s water, couldn’t drag her home the way my instincts screamed at me to do. But I could make sure that the man who’d taken her understood exactly what it was going to cost him. And then we’d see how long patience lasted when the tide was going out.
23
The Original Design
Orion
The barracuda arrived at dawn with news from Genoa.
I was on the foredeck, barefoot, watching the sunrise turn the Strait bronze. The fish surfaced twenty meters off the port bow, its silver body cutting through the glare like a blade.
“Strangers,”the water told me. Not in words. In the displacement of currents that had been mine for generations. Through the knowledge the barracuda had brought. “Strangers at the docks. The ships are still.”
“How many?”
“Many. Like Catania. Like Marseille.”
Genoa made the fifth in three weeks. Stormwright was dismantling my land-based operations with the methodical patience of a man pulling bricks from a wall.
“The fish are agitated,”the Strait added.“Too many unfamiliar vessels in the shipping lanes. The vibrations are wrong.”
I dismissed the barracuda with a pulse of intention, and it vanished beneath the surface. A pod of dolphins followed it down, their sonar clicking through the deep water in patterns I’d known since childhood.
“I know,” I told them. “I know.”
I could survive on the ocean indefinitely. House Poseidon’s real wealth was in the deep water. No land-based authority could touch the vast network of underwater infrastructure. But the ports were the interface, the places where the ocean’s wealth converted into currency the rest of the world accepted. Without them, all my avenues of income were cut off.
Stormwright was forcing my hand. He knew it, and I knew it. The knowledge sat between us across thirty miles of open water like a chess piece neither of us had touched yet.