Blade And Blister. Undertow Sins, #24

"I learned to love him the way you learn to walk on a boat: by falling until the floor stopped being solid and started being home."Coralie Dunn is a machine. A field agent for an asset enforcement firm, she is trained to walk into strangers' spaces and strip them of everything they own without flinching. Her latest target is a meticulously maintained, floating wooden workshop hidden deep within the Atchafalaya Basin, belonging to a stoic wood sculptor with a lethal set of hand tools: Viggo Strand.
Armed with a court-ordered seizure notice, Coralie expects a routine asset liquidation. Viggo claims the debt is a fraudulent trap. Their dynamic is instantly adversarial, clinical, and sharp. Then, the water turns to poison. An extreme Louisiana heatwave triggers a massive cyanobacterial bloom, transforming the stagnant bayou channel into a toxic, fluorescent green soup that burns skin on contact and chokes boat motors.
Cut off from the road and completely isolated, Coralie and Viggo are trapped together in a suffocating cage of humid heat, dead infrastructure, and rapidly depleting water rations. To survive, they must drop their perimeters. Coralie tears up her own clothes to build an improvised gravity filter with Viggo's charcoal, splicing their lives together as the invisible line between bitter hatred and raw desire begins to dissolve.
But as the bloom thickens, secrets float to the surface. Hidden inside a hollowed-out wooden sculpture on the workbench, Coralie uncovers a cache of Cayman Island wire transfer receipts and a desperate note from Viggo's missing brother, Ren, who vanished eighteen months ago. The shattering truth reconfigures everything: the seizure is an intentional hit designed by Coralie's own corrupt firm to demolish the platform and destroy the evidence keeping Ren alive.
Now, with a criminal operation closing in on the bayou, Coralie faces a devastating choice. She can remain the flawless weapon for the system that raised her, or burn her entire career to protect the man who holds her jaw in the dark and the floating home she was sent to destroy.