Anatole Ryker

A tense jury sequestration. A looming deadline. For a professional translator isolated with a group of strangers, hearing too much is an occupational hazard. But when someone inside the closed room starts manipulating the outcome, silence is the only thing keeping the translator's hidden past safe. Decoding the growing danger means drawing closer to the threat—a risk that could expose the very secret they have been guarding their entire life. As the days tick down to a fatal verdict, survival hinges on outsmarting a calculating adversary without ever showing their hand to the rest of the jury.

Reese is the kind of professional who calculates extraction routes while everyone else is drinking. Hired to protect a mid-level fish-broker on the coastal city's docks, she expected union disputes and bruised egos. Instead, a returning trawler drifts in short-crewed, carrying cargo that shouldn't exist and a silence that infects the local authorities. The crew isn't just missing; they were removed, and the remaining men are terrified of something in their own hold. When Reese realizes her client is tied up in the exact smuggling route the trawler used, she has to step past her mandate to keep her target breathing. Someone is dredging up the city's old, buried founding crime, and they are using the fishing fleet to bring it ashore. With the body count rising among the port's insiders and the suspect list tightening around the people she thought she was working with, Reese must decide how much blood she is willing to ignore in the name of a paycheck.