“Give me the details,” he says, and I give it to him—ship, time, last ping, the reason this isn’t a police call, the price I am willingto write in, favors I don’t hand out, and a bargain I’ll never regret.
He listens without interrupting. When I’m done, he says, “You’re lucky, Maverick. Our people are in the water for a different problem that I’ve discovered is related to yours. I can give you one retrieval unit, two fast boats, and a medical lead with a SANE nurse.”
“What’s a sane nurse?” I ask.
He hesitates. “A nurse with expertise in sexual assault.”
My throat tightens. “Oh. I hadn’t…” I stop and clear my throat. “Yes. That’s a good idea. And thank you.”
“Hey. Even powerful men need goodwill,” he says. “Maybe more so than regular men, when the occasion calls. This is one of those occasions. Four powerful men owing us a favor is a currency we’ll use later.”
“Put it on my tab,” I say. “And understand that I will absolutely pay with interest.”
“We do,” he says, and the line goes quiet long enough to feel like a handshake. “Text comes in five. Be ready in thirty.”
I end the call and look up. Storm is in the doorway, phone in one hand, a black duffel in the other. He’s been moving since the second I asked about possible safe house locations earlier, figuring out the best possible place to bring Phoenix back to.
The only thing that’s certain is that we’re not bringing her back to the hotel.
He reads my face.
“Blackvine’s in,” I tell him.
“What else? You have a look…”
I can’t hide anything from him. “He’s sending a sexual assault nurse with his crew. Just in case.”
Storm’s jaw works, then he turns and walks out of the room.
“Wait.”
Storm pauses. “Dude…I can’t.”
“I know. But we can’t fix on that right now. Can’t stop moving on the chance that she—” I break off, re-center. “We keep moving. Keep preparing for her. Did you get a line on a safe house?”
He gives a jerky nod. “A property my father owns, actually, on the marsh side of Tybee Island. My mother doesn’t know about it, which means no one in our circle will know about it, either. He’s already arranged for a security team, and it’ll be ready by the time we get there.”
I reach out, squeeze his shoulder. “That sounds perfect.”
I drive; Storm rides shotgun; Atticus rides in the back with a case that looks like an instrument and apparently contains every way there is to talk to a satellite.
Conrad sits next to him and not in the front because he’s too on edge for me to focus on driving. He stares straight ahead and talks to the vet, hangs up, calls the harbor master, hangs up, calls someone I don’t like and says please.
We peel off the highway and into a world that looks the same as it did fifty years ago. Tybee at night glows soft—porch lights, sea air, live oaks that move like they know you. The house that belongs to Storm’s father exists off a road that doesn’t announce itself on a double lot behind a gate with a guard who doesn’t lookat our faces so much as the shape of our bone structure on some kind of monitor. He looks at us, looks at his list, and opens the gate.
The place is modern lowcountry coastal without the pretension—long low lines, sandy paths and weather-worn decking, steps that float over a shallow reflection pool. The porch wraps around the multi-story structure like an arm, and the front door is a plane of cypress with a handle you could row a boat with. If a magazine wanted to shoot “wealth, relaxed,” they’d stand out here and tell a couple to laugh into each other’s necks.
Tonight it’s a fortress with exquisite manners.
“Your father seems to have done all right for himself,” I say, because someone needs to address it.
“He never needed her money,” Storm says, and unlocks the panel behind the lock with something that’s not a key.
Inside, the place smells like cedar and salt. Atticus kills the Wi-Fi the second our phones recognize the network, then replaces it with some sort of shadow platform that belongs to him. He moves through rooms like he’s drawing a circle of salt. I count bedrooms—four up, two down—and mark sight lines.
Storm moves faster than both of us, opening cabinets, counting plates without looking at them, checking window locks by touch, mapping the route from bed to bathroom to kitchen to door by steps, not feet.
I take the job no one asks me to take: make it feel like a place a woman will want to stand and live in, and recover from the pain of what she’s going to go through.
