Deep Waters

waterfront."
    "You got it."
    A few minutes later, Charity stood at the end of one of the tourist-oriented piers that jutted out from Seattle's busy waterfront. The breeze off ElliottBay churned her red silk skirts and filled her lungs. She could breathe freely at last. At least for a while.
    She stood there clutching the railing for a long time. When the sun finally sank behind the Olympic Mountains, briefly painting the sky with the color of fire, Charity forced herself to face reality.
    She was burned out at the age of twenty-nine.
    At a time in life when others were just getting their careers into high gear, she was going down in flames. She had nothing left to give to the family business.
    She could not go back to the presidential suite of the Truitt department store chain. She hated the very thought of ever stepping foot into her own office.
    Wearily she closed her eyes against the guilt and shame that seized her. It was almost unbearable. For five long years, ever since her mother and stepfather had died in an avalanche while skiing in Switzerland, she had tried to fulfill the demanding responsibilities she had inherited.
    She had done her best to salvage her step-siblings' legacy and preserve it for them. But today she had reached the limits of whatever internal resources had brought her this far.
    She could not go back to Truitt, the corporation that she had never wanted to run in the first place. She could not go back to Brett Loftus, whose bearlike embrace induced panic.
    She had to escape or she would go crazy.
    Crazy.
    Charity gazed down into the dark waters of the bay and wondered if this was how it felt to be on the edge of what an earlier generation would have called a nervous breakdown.

Prologue: Elias

    Revenge and deep water have much in common. A man may get sucked down into either and drown before he understands the true danger.

    - "On the Way of Water," from the journal of Hayden Stone

    Elias Winters looked into the face of the man he in tended to destroy and saw the truth at last. With a shock of devastating clarity, he understood that he had wasted several years of his life plotting a vengeance that would bring him no satisfaction.
    "Well, Winters?" Garrick Keyworth's heavy features congealed with irritation and impatience. "You demanded this meeting. Said you had something to discuss concerning my company's business operations in the Pacific."
    "Yes."
    "Let's hear it. You may have all day to sit around and shoot the breeze, but I've got a corporation to run."
    "This won't take long." Elias glanced at the deceptively thin envelope he had brought with him.
    Inside the slim white packet was the information that could cripple, perhaps even fatally wound, Key-worth International. The contents represented the culmination of three years of careful planning, endless nights spent studying the host of variables involved, countless hours of cautious maneuvering and manipulation.
    Everything was at last in place.
    In the next few weeks the big freight-forwarding firm known throughout the Pacific Rim as Keyworth International could be brought to its knees because of the information contained in the envelope. The company would likely never recover from the conflagration Elias was ready to ignite.
    Elias had studied his opponent with a trained patience and discipline that had been inculcated in him since his sixteenth year. He knew that Keyworth Inter national was the most important thing in Garrick Keyworth's life.
    Keyworth's wife had left him years ago. He had never bothered to remarry. He was estranged from his son, Justin, who was struggling to build a rival freight-handling company here in Seattle. What friends Key-worth had were the type who would disappear the moment they heard that he was in financial trouble. He could not even take satisfaction in his renowned collection of PacificIslands wood carvings. Elias knew that Keyworth had collected them because of the status they afforded, rather than because of any intrinsic interest they held for him.
    The company was Keyworth's sole creation. With the monumental arrogance of an ancient pharaoh, he had built his own version of a modern-day pyramid, a storehouse of treasure on which he sat alone.
    But Elias had loosened several of the support stones that sustained the massive weight of the Keyworth pyramid. All he had to do now to ensure that the dark waters of vengeance flowed was to keep the contents of the little envelope secret for a few more