The stench of salt and blood still lingered on James Delaney’s coat when he stepped off the schooner in the New World. The Atlantic had not tamed him; if anything, it had made him hungrier. America was no promised land—it was a different kind of battlefield, just as rotten with secrets and power. The Company of the Damned, reborn in exile, moved like shadows through the wharves of Boston, trading ink for iron, whispers for blood. The war might have ended for Britain and the colonies, but for Delaney, it had only begun. His enemies had changed their accents, not their hunger.
Word of Delaney’s return traveled faster than he did. In London, the East India Company was a wounded beast gnashing at ghosts, still reeling from the wreckage he'd left behind. Sir Stuart Strange was dead, but the power vacuum he left had been filled by men even less restrained—men who considered honor an inconvenience. They sent agents across the sea, faceless men in fine coats, tasked with either reclaiming the stolen leverage Delaney held… or silencing him forever. But Delaney was no longer just a rogue with a grudge. He was a myth walking, and myths don’t die by bullet or coin.
Haunted by visions—his mother wreathed in fire, his half-sister Zilpha whispering through the mist—Delaney struggled to tell whether his war was still about revenge or something darker. His grip on reality frayed as alliances deepened: an exiled French diplomat with a taste for poison, a Mohawk tracker who spoke of spirits in the soil, and a freed slave turned saboteur who knew more about British secrets than she let on. Together, they plotted something unthinkable: a private trade empire born not of flags but fire. A nation within no nation. A rebellion not of muskets, but of minds.
In the end, Delaney stood on a cliff above the roaring sea, the wind tearing at his coat, ships burning behind him in Boston Harbor. His eyes, black with purpose, stared at the horizon—not toward England, but deeper west. Beyond borders, beyond kings, beyond gods. “We are the reckoning,” he whispered. The Company of the Damned would not be remembered in textbooks or ledgers. But they would be felt—in every failed treaty, in every toppled empire, in every silence where once there was order. The age of colonizers was ending. And Delaney was its funeral bell.
