Alexei scowled. “Did fighting it do me any good the last two times?”
Yuri scowled right back at him. “That doesn’t mean you should stop fighting altogether. This is ridiculous.”
“I agree, but making a spectacle of myself for all the town to see will only make it more ridiculous.” Never mind that every inch of his body longed to storm down the stairs and square off with the governor.
“Oh. So you don’t want...” A fresh redness filled Yuri’s cheeks, and Alexei suspected it had little to do with the cold.
“What did you do?” Sacha muttered.
“Ah, I may have called the governor a toad. But don’t worry. I left before Marshal Hibbs caught me.”
Alexei pressed a hand to his temple. “So help me, Yuri. If I have to bail you out of jail for disorderly conduct, I’ll?—”
“You won’t. I stopped before Governor Caldwell got angry, and the moment I saw Marshal Hibbs weaving through the crowd, I decided to leave.”
“Forgive me if I don’t sound all that impressed,” he growled.
Yuri ran a hand through his already ruffled hair, the motion brisk and uneven. “People are starting to talk.”
Alexei narrowed his eyes at the brother who was eleven years younger than him, the youngest of his full-blooded siblings. “Are they saying we’re doing something illegal?”
“It depends.” Yuri started pacing in front of the windows overlooking the harbor. “A few people think we must be hiding something if the governor keeps ordering these searches, but most of the town is saying the new governor has lost his mind, that having all of our ships searched while no other ships are being searched should be illegal.”
It should be, but it wasn’t. The RCS was perfectly within their rights to search any vessel that came into port, but in all his years of shipping, Alexei had never seen the law misapplied so egregiously.
Yuri kept pacing back and forth in front of the windows. Eleven or twelve steps one direction, a turn, and eleven or twelve steps in the other direction. “Did you hear what Governor Caldwell’s doing to Henry Evans?”
“The blacksmith?” Alexei ran a hand over his jaw. “No.”
“Rumor is that the governor wanted a lower rate for the ironwork Evans does for the RCS ships, but Evans refused to give it to him.”
“And...” Alexei drew out the word.
“And now the governor is bringing a new blacksmith up here from California, and he’s refusing to renew Evans’s business license for next year.”
He pressed his lips together. That sounded exactly like something a Caldwell would do.
“He’s going to find something on one of our ships eventually.” Sacha rubbed a hand over the light brown stubble coating his jaw. “Just like the Revenue Cutter Service did when I was captaining two years ago.”
Yuri threw his hands into the air. “That was a ridiculous charge. It never would have stuck had Preston Caldwell not been behind it.”
“Well, now we have two Caldwells pushing for these searches, and one of them is the blasted governor.” Alexei shoved his hand toward the harbor, where Governor Caldwell himself was likely still presiding over the search of theAurora.
Preston Caldwell had arrived in Alaska nearly four years ago with his daughter, Rosalind. The Caldwell family owned the Alaska Commercial Company, and they had wanted someone living in Alaska to manage it. It made sense from a business perspective. The trouble was, Preston Caldwell thought nothing of using the power that his wealth gave him to trample others and sway government officials.
Alexei was of the firm opinion that government officials should make decisions based on what was good for Alaska itself, not what was good for the Alaska Commercial Company.
And that had set him and Preston Caldwell at odds from the beginning.
Still, he couldn’t help but think that some of their current predicament was his fault. Over the summer, the secretary of the interior and two senators had visited Alaska. They’d asked him about becoming the next governor, but it had come with conditions—conditions he wasn’t willing to agree to. So he’d refused the offer, even going so far as to walk out of the meeting with the secretary of the interior and the two senators.
But had he realized just who Secretary Gray had in mind as the next governor of Alaska, he would have rethought everything, would have tried to find a way to...
What?The ultimatum Secretary Gray had given him seemed impossible.
He never could have agreed to such a thing.
“The question isn’t whether Governor Caldwell will find something he claims is illegal,” Sacha said, turning away from the window. “It’s how long it will take and what he’ll try to do once he’s found it.”
