The Ocean Dark

1

Just after one o’clock in the afternoon on a pristine June day, Tori Austin stepped out onto the deck of the Antoinette, dying for a shower. The wind came up off the Caribbean, salty and warm, and pulled her clothes taut across her body. She breathed deeply as she walked to the railing, invigorated by the crisp, clean air. Then the wind shifted slightly and she caught the scent of rust that always lingered on board the freighter, and her nose wrinkled in distaste.

Back on land, some people drove BMWs and some drove run-down pickup trucks. Out on the ocean, the Antoinette was the equivalent of a long-haul trucker, with a cab full of fast-food wrappers and empty beer cans, and a trailer full of anonymous cargo. The broad expanse of the Antoinette’s deck carried one hundred and eighty-eight massive metal containers, each one the size of a big rig’s trailer, but the principle was the same. This had been Tori’s first voyage aboard the Antoinette—hell, aboard anything larger than the sightseeing ships that ran tours on Biscayne Bay — but in her time working for the vessel’s owner, Viscaya Shipping, she’d learned all sorts of things about the cargo business and the ships in Viscaya’s fleet.

To her left, the view might as well have been of some harbor dockyard. Containers were stacked six high, some of them covered in rust and graffiti, others gleaming and new. On the ship’s bow, a crane of dull gray steel towered over them. Tori went to the right, walking back to the aft railing. The accommodations block — a white tower of crew cabins, showers, and common rooms topped by the captain’s bridge — was just as modular in appearance as the containers. It looked like a Fort Lauderdale beachfront apartment building had been dropped down onto the deck, right at the stern.

Some container ships had the accommodations block more toward the center, but Tori appreciated its placement on the Antoinette. Standing at the back railing, she could take in the breathless, vivid blue of the Caribbean without having to look at the cargo. She’d enjoyed the voyage so far, and surprised herself with how much she liked the work. But the sameness of those stacks of metal blocks had begun to get to her.

The wind kicked up again — no rust this time — and she relished it. She really did need to get inside and shower. Her skin felt coated with grease from the two hours she’d spent in the galley. Josh always prepared something simple at lunch — today it had been blackened chicken sandwiches — but every couple of days he added a special on the side. This afternoon, the twenty-four members of the crew had been treated to scallops wrapped in bacon.

Tori wondered if Viscaya Shipping, the owners of the Antoinette, knew how well the crew was being fed. She’d seen the ship’s ledger, and either the captain was hiding the cost or he was paying for the extras out of his own pocket. It was the sort of thing Tori ought to be looking out for. Technically she’d been sent along on this trip for quality control — to evaluate efficiency and expenditures, to look over the manifests, and to help out in any way she could.

The Rio brothers — Gabe, the captain, and Miguel, the first mate — weren’t happy about it, but since nobody else acted like she had the plague, she presumed they had kept it from the crew. Which was fine with Tori. She hadn’t asked for the assignment. All she’d wanted was to crew one of the Viscaya container ships, just once. She would have swabbed the deck or polished the railings if they’d asked.

As a girl, she had loved to read classic stories of adventure — Jack London and Jules Verne foremost among them — the sort of books that caused her teachers to mutter in disapproval and attempt to interest her in the Brontë sisters, or even Nancy Drew. The teachers at St. Catherine’s had rigid opinions about which books were and were not proper for girls. But reading offered her an escape from the poisoned air of her home, and dreams of someday having her own adventures.

By her sophomore year of high school, she had ceased to believe in escapes or in dreams, and had stopped reading almost entirely. Yet she’d never forgotten those stories. They’d had a deep impact upon her, and filled her mind with powerful presumptions — not the least of which was that rough men could be honorable creatures. Her father’s cruelty, far from disabusing her of that notion, had only reinforced it. If men like him existed — brutal bastards who took pleasure from the pain of others — then the world must also contain his opposite: a rugged hero who would be better with his hands than his words, kind to friends and lovers, but fearsome and merciless to those who crossed him.

Rough men didn’t have to be bad men. Books had taught her that. But all too often, life had given her a different lesson.

For Tori, this voyage marked the completion of one journey, as well as the beginning of a new one. She’d sailed thousands of miles and seen the beauty and the industry of five Central and South American ports. She had found her adventure. Now she could pause, take a breath, and make a new beginning at last. Until then, she would enjoy the time she had left on the open ocean.

It wasn’t complicated work. A container ship, like any cargo freighter, was loaded at one end of the journey and unloaded at the other, and during the voyage the work was about keeping the vessel clean, staying on course, and making sure the crew got fed. People paid to have their lives packed up in one of those big metal sheds and shipped overseas, and corporations paid to load their products the same way, but they didn’t pay to keep the big boxes shiny. As long as the inside stayed dry and nobody damaged Mr. Hodgson’s Georgian chairs — or his new Mercedes, or the 175,000 superhero action figures being shipped to coincide with the release of a late summer blockbuster — nobody cared.

So Tori didn’t have to shine railings or wash the deck, but she had vowed to help out in any way she could. On the very first day at sea, she’d volunteered to assist in the galley. Granted, that had been partly due to Josh — a sexy mess of a man with several days’ stubble, sky blue eyes, and raggedly cut light brown hair. Since then she’d been Josh’s right hand for every meal, and had been surprised to find that she enjoyed the work.

As for the quality control assignment, she paid attention to the Antoinette’s heading and looked out for anything that seemed an obvious waste of Viscaya Shipping’s money. But when it came to the copious drinking, the occasional fistfight, and the long hours some of the crew spent lazing around, she turned a blind eye. As long as everyone did their jobs — a potential issue with five new hires this go-round — that sort of thing wasn’t doing any harm.

Still, the Rio brothers had been edgy around her throughout the trip. When she’d been working in the Viscaya offices and they would come to pick up their checks or the manifests for an upcoming voyage, she had always gotten on well with them. Both brothers had flirted with her, brought her coffee. But when Viscaya assigned her to the Antoinette, even though it was only for one trip, that had changed. They didn’t trust her anymore, and though she couldn’t really blame them, she hated it.

It wasn’t as though they had anything to hide. Tori knew more about Viscaya’s illegal operations than the Rio brothers ever would. And though half the crew of the Antoinette pretended blissful ignorance when it came to unscheduled ocean rendezvous with fishing boats or small Central American cargo ships, even the thickest among them had to know something shady was going on. The company chose its employees carefully. Most of the men who crewed the ship had their own secrets — little stints in jail, court-ordered alimony they wanted to avoid by being paid under the table — and they returned Viscaya’s loyalty with their own silence.

The other half of the crew took a more active role when it came to Viscaya’s side business. Viscaya Shipping frequently carried cargo into and out of the United States that would have landed dozens of people in prison. Drugs, guns, stolen goods, sometimes even banned animals. But they drew the line at chemicals, powders, and radioactive materials, and they damn sure weren’t going to bring in people. Frank Esper and Bobby Jewell ran illegal enterprises alongside their legitimate business, but they were Americans. Anything that had even a hint of terrorist connections, they stayed far, far away from.

The guys from Viscaya had their own code, and Tori respected that.

For herself, she had long since surrendered any thoughts of an ordinary life. Tori had spent her life in the orbit of dangerous men, trapped by their gravity. The worst of them had been Ted — an uptown guy with a taste for cocaine and hookers who had played at being an old school thug for so long that he’d become one. Of course she’d married him. It had taken courage and the hand of fate to free her, and now Ted lingered only in her nightmares.

Tori had escaped with her life, and for a long time she had waited for fate to catch up with her. New York had given way to Miami, where she’d promised herself a new start. In the three years since she had said good-bye to Ted in Penn Station, she felt sure she had learned to steer clear of truly bad men.

The people who ran Viscaya Shipping weren’t good guys by any stretch of the imagination, but they had rules. They might smuggle drugs, and even sample the product from time to time, but Frank and the others weren’t addicts. They might bring guns into America under cover of the night, but they made sure they knew who their customers were.

The management at Viscaya liked Tori, and they trusted her. In the time since they had first taken her into their confidence, she had adopted their approach. Business was business. As an office manager, she’d handled their legitimate and illegitimate endeavors with equal professionalism.

So the chill she’d been getting off the Rio brothers throughout this voyage — all the way from Miami to Brazil, and now more than halfway back again — both insulted and irritated her. And disappointed her on a personal level, because she genuinely liked them.

When she turned and started for the stairs that crisscrossed the outside of the accommodations block and saw Gabe Rio leaning on the railing one level above her, she decided that the time for a confrontation had come. He was staring out at the Caribbean with a cigarette in his hand, and glanced at her as she approached, taking a drag off his cigarette. He had an air of authority about him, of sheer confidence, that had nothing to do with him being captain of the ship.

Tori mustered a confidence she didn’t feel as she started up the stairs, the breeze whipping at her hair, tugging a dark strand loose from the ponytail she always wore in the galley.

“Hello, Captain,” she said when she reached the first level. “They won’t even let you smoke on your own bridge now, huh?”

Gabe Rio blinked, as though she’d woken him from a trance, and his sad, contemplative expression took on a sardonic edge.

“Wouldn’t want you to report me, Tori.”

She ought to have seen it coming, yet still she flinched.

“Come on, Gabe. Has it really been that terrible having me along? I don’t hear you complaining at mealtime.”

He gazed at her, his eyes flat, defensive shields up. With a flick of his finger he knocked the ash off the end of his cigarette and the wind took it, just as it did the smoke he exhaled.

“We’ve had this conversation. I just don’t like being spied on,” he said, in the light accent that came from his Mexican parents.

Tori sighed. “Gabe—”

“Out here it’s ‘Captain.’”

“Fine. Captain. It can’t be spying if you know I’m here. Look it up in the dictionary. I’m not trying to get anyone into trouble. I begged Frank to let me come along on this trip because I was sick of sitting in an office. I practically blackmailed him into it. It’s what I’ve wanted since the day he first asked me to work at Viscaya — to be on a ship, just once.”

Gabe puffed on his cigarette, then he turned to look at her, studying her as though seeing her for the first time. He had deep brown eyes, a long nose, and a perpetually sad face, but the gray in his neatly groomed goatee added a certain charm, and at least the illusion of wisdom. For a woman who’d grown up with a little girl’s romantic fantasies, the brooding and mysterious Gabe Rio cut an intriguing figure. The circumstances of his employment at Viscaya only added to that allure.

According to the whispers — which Frank Esper had more or less confirmed when Tori had asked him — Gabe had quit Viscaya when he’d first learned of their illegal operations. Loyalty had brought him back, but not loyalty to the company. Miguel Rio had a temper and a history of letting it, and his fists, get him in trouble. He had spent seven months in prison for aggravated assault. If Viscaya fired him, he would have a hell of a time finding a company that would bring him on, especially as an officer. He’d have been lucky to get work as a deckhand. But Frank had been left with little choice when Miguel had gotten into a bloody fistfight with Gabe’s predecessor. Gabe had gone to Frank and asked him to give Miguel another chance, and Frank had agreed on the condition that Gabe come back to Viscaya and take over as captain of the Antoinette. If Gabe would hold the leash, Miguel could keep his job.

Which was how Gabe Rio became a smuggler.

“I don’t get it,” the captain said, studying Tori’s eyes. “Why not just take a cruise? Have people wait on you? Who the hell wants this job?”

A ripple of anger went through her. “You do. You love it. Maybe you don’t love Viscaya, but you love the job. And maybe you’re so used to seeing me behind a desk that you never really paid much attention, but do I seem like the kind of woman who wants to go lay in the sun with the shiny, happy people on a cruise ship?”

The captain chuckled softly, a grin appearing. “Now that you mention it, no. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want to see you in one of those teeny bikinis the American girls wear out here in the islands, where their parents won’t see.”

Tori smiled. They were three-quarters of the way through a round-trip intercontinental voyage, and the ice had finally broken.

“Maya would cut your eyes out if you looked at me too long,” Tori said.

Gabe’s smile vanished, defensive shields clanging into place again. “Once, maybe. Not anymore.”

The awkward moment stretched. Tori had no idea what to say. Maya Rio seemed perpetually pissed with her husband, but that didn’t mean she wanted him sleeping around. Whatever was going on with them, it was none of Tori’s business. Yet she felt a wave of understanding and relief wash over her. If Gabe’s marriage had fallen apart, his cold, distant behavior took on new dimensions.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Forget it,” Gabe said, waving at the air with his cigarette.

The tension between them grew. Tori still felt as though she had a layer of grease on her clothes and skin, and the Caribbean sun would fry her if she stayed out here too long. She squinted and peered out across the ocean, comforted by the absence of any land at all. The ship cut the water with a constant shushing that normally combined with the thrum of the engines to set her at ease. But at the moment, a lullaby wouldn’t have soothed her.

“It’s about trust,” Gabe said.

Tori turned to him. “I’ve never given you any reason not to trust me. I told you the first day, I’m here to learn, maybe make some suggestions about the business when I get back, not to talk about who drinks too much or who’s fucking whom.”

Standing up straight, he flicked his cigarette out across the undulating water.

“Not everything’s about you, Tori.”

“Captain, listen—”

“I worked for Viscaya for five years before I quit, and seven years since. Farzan might be the shipping manager now, but when I started at the company there was no such job title. I got my orders from Frank Esper directly — no bullshit, no middlemen, and for sure no ‘quality control manager.’ Okay, I had my issues with them, which is why I left, but in the time since I’ve been back I figured I’d earned their trust. Makes this hard to swallow, that’s all.”

Tori glanced around to be sure they were alone. Then she reached out and put a hand on Gabe’s arm. He gave her a surprised look, squinting against the sun.

“Captain,” she said, voice low, “they know I’m loyal. And maybe I dropped out after a year of college, but they also know I’m smart. They trust me. That’s a hard choice for people in this kind of business to make, but they trust me. Now they’re just trying to figure out how they can use me down the line. They want me to learn how it’s all done.”

He stared at her, unmoved.

“And they trust you, Gabe. Don’t be a dumbass. You know they do.”

He threw up his hands. “How do I know? I’ve got a fucking babysitter now.”

When Tori looked at the captain this time, she kept her gaze as grim and unflinching as his own. “If they didn’t trust you, you’d be dead by now.”

He flinched, staring at her, but she saw in his eyes that he knew the truth. Gabe let out a breath, a little grunt of air.

“Damn, girl, when did you get so hard?”

“In another life, before I came to Miami. But I’m not a hard woman. I’ve just got a little perspective, that’s all. If you spend enough time lying to yourself, then one day all you ever want from anyone is the truth, and it doesn’t matter anymore how ugly it is.”