SALT

Laila Pryce never liked the water. Not since the night it took their mother. But the docks were where the bodies kept surfacing lately, and every one of them carried Malik’s name somewhere in the background — a witness statement, a burner number, a whisper.

He was her older brother once. Now, he was a suspect.

The first time she’d tried to arrest him, she’d been fresh out of the academy, full of sermons about justice and redemption. He’d kissed her forehead and said, “You still think the badge saves people. You’ll learn.”

She had. The hard way.

So when the anonymous tip came through—shipment hitting Dock 9, midnight, Malik Pryce in charge—she didn’t call it in. She went alone.

The docks were a mess of fog and sodium light. Freight containers stacked like tombstones, gulls shrieking in the dark. Laila moved quiet, her gun drawn but her heart louder. She caught the smell first—burnt rubber and salt. Then the sound—a man coughing.

Malik.

He was crouched beside a truck, bleeding from the side, a pistol in one hand and a flash drive in the other. “Took you long enough,” he said, voice half a laugh.

“What did you do?”

“What I had to. The people I ran for—they’re moving bodies now. Real ones. Thought I could steal proof, shut it down. Guess I’m not as slick as I thought.”

Behind him, the truck’s doors were open—barrels lined up inside, filled with acid thick enough to eat through bone. A woman’s shoe floated near the edge of one.

Laila froze. “Tell me you didn’t—”

“Not me,” he said. “Them.” He slid the flash drive across the ground. “Names, accounts, everything. Take it. End it.”

A siren wailed in the distance. Blue light flickered over the water. He looked at her then—not like a criminal, but like the boy who used to guard her from the world.

“Go,” she said. “Now.”

“You’ll take the heat.”

“I’ll live with it.”

He hesitated only a second before limping toward the pier. The sirens got louder. She turned back to the truck, yanked the brake loose, and shoved it toward the water. The barrels rattled, tilted, and splashed into the black.

By the time the first patrol car hit the dock, the truck was gone, the evidence half-sinking, half-burning.

Laila stood at the water’s edge, the flash drive still in her hand. She opened the small tin around her neck — her mother’s ashes — and scattered the rest into the churning sea.

The tide caught her wrist, cold and stinging. Salt and smoke blurred together.

She didn’t look back when Malik’s boat engine coughed to life somewhere beyond the fog.

Later, the department ruled it a bust gone wrong. The news called it “the Dockside Fire.” No arrests. No leads.

But somewhere out there, her brother was free. And for the first time since childhood, Laila finally breathed deep — salt air, clean enough to burn.