“Garrett,” Ethan said, his voice cutting through the acoustic sixty-cycle vibration of the rotor gearbox:
“Arthur Vance spent forty years using the Reed family to execute an illegal factoring foreclosure on Olivia’s land.”
Garrett’s jaw set into pure, immovable granite:
“Arthur Vance is an offshore factoring parasite who built an empire on stolen sovereign paper, Ethan.”
“He calculated every legal loophole, but he forgot the fundamental law of the bedrock:”
Garrett leaned forward, his dark eyes burning with that absolute, unyielding devotion:
“A bride’s honor cannot be audited.”
***
23:48 EST.
The squall over the Newport cliffs had turned into a blinding, horizontal ice storm—a freezing gale that slickened the granite ramparts and rusted rail spurs along the deep testing berths of **Parcel Ten // The Narragansett Command Aperture**.
Ahead of us, rising against the black night sky, blazed the lower boundary of the **Mercer Sovereign Marine Reserve**—the historic five-hundred-acre maritime tract surveyed by Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer Senior eighty years ago.
