Hull And Hunger

Hunger is not the absence of food. It is the presence of a mouth that has learned to want the one thing it was never supposed to taste.

Willa Strauss is valuable cargo—just not the kind Brennan Locke usually carries. As the daughter of a powerful, ruthless human trafficker, she is fleeing an arranged marriage to a monster who buries his problems in concrete. Desperate and out of options, she slips into the rust-eaten hold of the Perdition, a fifty-four-foot steel trawler. She's betting her life on a rumor: that its quiet, hyper-vigilant captain once refused her father's dirty money.

Brennan lives by cold, mathematical discipline. To survive the deadly waters of the Georgia and Florida coast, he refuses to want anything. No attachments. No complications. No faces attached to his freight.

But when he discovers the brilliant, defiant stowaway hidden beneath his decks, his calculated world shatters.

Before Brennan can make a choice, a catastrophic Category 2 hurricane slams into the Gulf of Mexico. The access to the mainland is severed. The world outside becomes a swirling void of black water and violent waves, trapping them together inside a flooding, suffocating cabin.

In six hundred square feet of absolute isolation, the currency of control changes. Brennan owns the rations, the fuel, and the keys to her confinement. He claims he is keeping her alive, cutting his own water supply to save her as the heat rises. But in the pitch-black heart of the storm, the boundary between captor and savior washes away entirely.

She was supposed to be a transaction he never made. Now, locked in the dark with a dangerously possessive smuggler, Willa finds an anchor she can't break—and a dark, consuming hunger she cannot outrun.