"The Bay has its own laws," Croft said, stepping onto Eli’s dock as the fog rolled in. "Finders keepers is for children. You’ll sell me the coordinates."
Eli had found the wreck two weeks ago using declassified sonar data and a weather anomaly that had shifted the sandbar. But he hadn't raised the chest yet. Because he wasn't alone. thebaypirate
For three hundred years, local legend whispered of the Crimson Kestrel , a privateer’s sloop that sank in 1722 not with Spanish silver, but with a chest of cursed ledgers. The ledgers named the "respectable" merchants of the Bay who secretly funded pirates to sabotage rival shipping lines. If found, the ledgers would rewrite the founding families of Maryland—turning monuments into monuments to fraud. "The Bay has its own laws," Croft said,
The Scarab howled in agony, metal screaming against stone. Eli circled back, his own hull whispering over the mud. But he hadn't raised the chest yet
Croft, knee-deep in his flooding cabin, spat static. "You’re a pirate, Vane. You have no honor."
Croft’s men were three ex-Navy bruisers. Eli had a cracked flare gun, a encyclopedic knowledge of shallows, and a reputation for being exactly where the charts said he couldn't be.