Two days after my father-in-law died, my husband brought his mistress into our kitchen, / Chapter 55 / 80

Chapter 55 - The Eleanor V

The steel gangway of the tug slammed down onto the timber pier with an ear-splitting crash.

A massive man in a grease-stained wool peacoat and an oilskin cap stood at the rail, racking the bolt of an ancient 12-gauge Remington shotgun. Thomas Vance. Silas's son. He didn't look like an executive; he looked like the lake itself—broad-shouldered, weathered like driftwood, with hands the size of iron skillets.

"Up the plank! Go, go, go!" Thomas roared over the shriek of the blizzard.

Marilyn reached the gangway first, scrambling up the steel rungs with an agility that defied her years. I followed half a second later, planting my boots on the diamond-plate steel deck just as a second burst of submachine gun fire chewed through the wooden bulwark near the stern.

Thomas raised the Remington and fired three deafening blasts into the swirling blizzard toward the G-Wagon. The heavy deer slugs punched through the Mercedes’s engine block and shattered the windshield, forcing the remaining mercenary to dive behind the burning tire for cover.

On the pier below, Julian was dragging Chloe by the collar of her sweater. She had lost both shoes in the slush, her bare feet bleeding against the splintered wood.

"Julian!" I screamed over the wind. "Jump!"

Julian lunged forward, throwing Chloe onto the steel gangplank. Thomas reached down with one massive arm, grabbed her by the scruff of her sweater, and hoisted her bodily onto the deck like a sack of grain.

Julian scrambled after her, clawing at the icy rungs. Just as his fingers closed around the top rail, a single rifle round cracked through the storm from high up on the coal trestle.

Julian gasped. His eyes went wide and vacant as he looked up at me, a sudden, bright bloom of arterial red soaking through the shoulder of his sodden wool coat.

His grip slipped.

I didn't think. I dropped Donald’s pistol to the deck, reached down over the rail with my free hand, and caught Julian by the wrist.

The weight of him nearly dragged me over the gunwale. The cold metal of his gold wedding band—the ring I had placed on his finger seven years ago in a sunlit chapel in St. Paul—bit savagely into my knuckles.

"Amanda..." he choked, blood bubbling at the corner of his lips. "Don't let go..."

Beneath us, the massive bronze screw of the *Eleanor V* began to churn the icy water of Lake Superior into a frothing, black vortex. The diesel engine let out a deafening, earth-shaking roar as Thomas kicked the throttles forward, surging the heavy iron tug away from the dock.

Fifty yards away, emerging from the burning wreckage of the G-Wagon and descending from the coal trestle, three more figures in gray winter camouflage leveled high-caliber rifles directly at our wheelhouse.

"Amanda!" Marilyn screamed from the hatch. "Pull him or drop him! We're entering the channel!"

I looked down into Julian's terrified, bleeding face. The wind ripped his hair across his forehead. Behind him, the black, freezing water of Lake Superior surged like an open grave between the iron hull and the granite dock.

My fingers held his wrist. But the weight was pulling the sling—and Ruby—hard against the iron railing.