"It was terrifying."
"It was a greeting."
"Sounded more like a threat."
"Dolly likes you. She just has a weird way of showing it." Trent missed these back-and-forth exchanges with Dove.
Dove stared at him like he'd grown a second head. "You're insane."
"Probably." He drained the last of his warm beer, grimacing at the taste. "But I'm insane in a place where the gators know me, and I know them. That's worth something." Trent set the empty bottle down and pulled a twenty from his wallet. "I should head out."
Dove's eyes went to the door, then back to him. "It's early."
"Early for you. Late for me. I've got feeding time at dawn, and Dolly gets cranky when I'm behind schedule."
"Crankier than the bellowing?"
"Much." He leaned in and kissed her cheek, letting his lips linger a moment longer than strictly necessary. "I appreciate you checking up on me. I really do. But I’m hanging tough."
"I know." She didn't move out of his path. "Call me. Tomorrow. Or the next day. Just... let me know you're okay."
He hesitated. There were a dozen reasons not to promise her anything. They'd agreed to keep a distance between them. They'd agreed that whatever they'd been was over after he'd gotten shot. Then again, after his mother took ill. And again, after the funeral.
“I will.” He walked away before Dove could say anything else, or he suggested she follow him home.
The parking lot was half-empty, his truck sitting alone under a light that flickered every few seconds, moths throwing themselves against it in suicidal spirals.
He stood on the wooden porch for a moment, letting his eyes adjust. Letting the noise of the bar fade behind him. Letting the silence of Calusa Cove settle into his bones the way it always did, familiar and strange at the same time.
His mother had loved this town. Loved the water, the birds, the way the sunset turned the sky into fire. She'd spent her whole life here, raised him here, buried his father here.
And now she was buried here, too.
His father had died trying to do the right thing. He'd fought for what was right and lost everything. Now, some faceless corporation wanted to take what was left—the land Jack Mallor had loved, the home he'd built, the legacy he'd left behind.
Trent wasn't his father. He wasn't noble or brave or willing to sacrifice himself for abstract principles.
But he was stubborn as hell, and he'd be damned if he let anyone destroy the Everglades without a fight.
Chapter Four
The road to Mallor's Landing curved through the Everglades like a scar.
On either side, sawgrass stretched toward the horizon, silver-tipped under a moon that hung fat and low over the wetlands. The sky was enormous here, unpolluted by town lights, thick with stars that most people never saw anymore.
Trent let the night air wash over him. It smelled like water and mud and rotting vegetation—the perfume of the swamp, his mother had called it. She'd loved that smell. Said it reminded her she was alive. His throat tightened like it always did when he thought about these things.
The river appeared on his left, black as oil, its surface broken by the occasional ripple of something moving beneath. Gators. Fish. Snakes. The usual residents.
His headlights cut tunnels through the darkness, illuminating the road ten feet at a time as he moved further away from civilization and deeper into the swamp. Trees closed in, cypress and mangrove crowding the edges, their branches reaching over the pavement like fingers.
The gate to Mallor's Landing appeared out of the dark.
Trent slowed, his headlights washing over the chain-link fence, the rusted padlock, the hand-painted sign that had been there since his father put it up thirty years ago.
Mallor's Landing. Private Property. Trespassers Will Be Eaten.
His father's sense of humor. The gators didn't actually eat trespassers.
