He Married Me to Steal My Family’s Shipyard. My Brother Spent Fifteen Years in a Wheelchair Waiting to Prove It

Chapter 6 — The Empire Built on Our Dead

The name meant something to me, and Rhys watched it land.

Harlan Merrick had spent fifteen years building a logistics empire on contracts that had been stripped from our family in the wreckage after our parents died.

Years before the crash, my grandfather had refused to let Merrick run his cargo through our docks — because what Merrick wanted to move through them was not legal, and my grandfather was the kind of old shipbuilder who would sooner sink his own piers than dirty them.

The refusal was followed, over the next two years, by strange debts, by sabotage on the docks, and finally by the crash that orphaned Rhys and me and left the family reeling and ripe for the taking.