Ruthless Devotion

*"I should have let the Mariana sink."* Corbin Maren says it out loud to nobody, standing on Pier 7 in the grey October dawn. The boat looks fine. The boat always looks fine. Then he steps aboard and finds the starboard mooring line cut clean through, the severed end coiled on the deck. Not chafed. Knife work. Below the outer dock, in thirty feet of water where nobody fishes and nobody moors, lies the Cordelia, a coastal freighter that went down in a storm forty years ago. Corbin has been down twice, mapping her. He knows every inch of her, which is why the light coming from her cargo hold is wrong. The woman kneeling in the silt has a patched wetsuit, a knife strapped to her thigh, and a state permit. Her name is Rory Sinclair, and her father went to prison for falsifying salvage records and died there. *"Was innocent,"* she says, flat, like she has said it a thousand times. What they pry out of the false compartment behind a fallen beam is not treasure. It is an old pistol wrapped in oilcloth and a swollen leather ledger stamped with the name of a small Portland shipping company. *"This isn't salvage. This is evidence."* Corbin has his own reason for wanting the wreck. His sister Lena was taken four years ago, and the ransom note demanded the return of company property from a salvage operation. It was marked with a crescent moon. Rory has a crescent-shaped scar at the base of her thumb, cut into her with a knife as a warning. On the dock as they surface, a stocky man with a slicked-back haircut and an expensive diver's watch stands watching them. Todd Iverson. Corbin's partner. The one person he told about the Cordelia. What follows runs through a harbour town in coastal Oregon: a library search, a burned page, a wire, a shed, a safe house on the south coast, and a woman named Harper Wu who does not send warnings. A closed-door dark romance built on salvage law, a cold case, and two people who each came to the wreck to clear the name of a parent, ending in a lit office with stale coffee, a deed on the desk, and an orange cat neither of them asked for.