She rolled to her side, snagging the cell. Dove's stomach tightened into a cold knot.
Once could be a wrong number. Once could be a drunk dial or a telemarketer with no sense of time zones, or a scammer trying their luck at an hour when people were too groggy to think straight.
Twice was something else.
Twice was intentional.
She tapped the green button and hit speaker. "Hello?"
"Is this Dovelynn Quinn?" The voice filled the dark room—male, professional, carrying a weight that came from years of delivering news nobody wanted to hear. Dove knew that voice. Not the specific person, but the type.
Trent sat up beside her, instantly alert. She felt him go still, felt his attention sharpen in the darkness.
"Speaking."
"Miss Quinn, this is Deputy Director Ethan Corrick with the U.S. Marshals Service. I'm your uncle's supervisor."
The cold knot in her stomach turned to ice.
Trent's hand found her back, warm and solid.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
Silence. One second. Two. Three.
Each one stretched out like taffy, pulled thin and wrong, the kind of silence that said everything and nothing at the same time. The kind of silence that gave you just enough time to imagine every worst-case scenario before the words came to confirm one of them.
"I'm so sorry to have to tell you this." Corrick's voice softened, and the sound of it—that careful gentleness—made Dove's chest seize. "Your uncle was found a little after midnight. In his vehicle. In a parking lot in Okeechobee."
Trent's hand pressed harder against her back. She could feel the tension coiling through his body, could feel him holding his breath.
"He was murdered. Two gunshot wounds. One to the head. One to the chest."
The words landed like physical blows.
She felt them hit. Felt the impact somewhere deep in her chest, a dull thud that radiated outward like ripples in still water. Her uncle. Aaron Slade. The man who'd taught her to shoot when she was twelve years old, setting up cans on a fence post and patiently correcting her stance until she could hit the center every time. The man who'd shown up at her apartment a month after her team died, when she was drowning in a bottle and didn't care if she ever came up for air, and told her about the Aegis Network. Told her there was still a place in the world for people like them. People who were too broken to go back to normal life but too stubborn to give up entirely.
He was dead.
Murdered.
In a parking lot in Okeechobee, of all goddamn places.
Something inside her shifted. Like a door slamming shut. Like a switch being flipped. One second she was Dove—niece, friend, woman who'd had dinner with him three days ago and laughed at his terrible jokes and promised to call more often. The next second she was someone else. Something else.
Sergeant Quinn. The sniper who could lie perfectly still for eighteen hours waiting for a shot. The soldier who'd watched her team die through a scope and kept breathing anyway. The machine wrapped in skin, running on autopilot because the alternative was falling apart, and falling apart wasn't an option.
It was never an option.
Trent had pulled her against him, his arms wrapping around her from behind, his chin resting on her shoulder. She let him. But she didn't lean into it. Couldn't afford to.
"Do you have any leads?" Her voice came out flat. Controlled. Like it belonged to someone else entirely. "Witnesses?"
"Nothing yet," Corrick said. "The parking lot had minimal security coverage—just one camera at the entrance that caught his vehicle arriving at approximately eleven forty-five PM, but nothing that shows the incident itself. We're canvassing the area, talking to businesses, checking traffic cams on the surrounding streets. But so far..." He trailed off. The silence said what he couldn't.
"Your uncle was two months from retirement," Corrick continued. "He had no major cases on his desk. Nothing active that would've put a target on his back. Truthfully, we're at a loss. This doesn't fit any pattern we can identify."
Dove's mind was already turning over possibilities, examining them from every angle the way she'd been trained to examine a target zone before taking a shot. Random robbery gone wrong? Possible, but two shots—head and chest—spoke of execution, not panic. Someone from an old case with a grudge? Maybe, but Slade had been careful, always careful, and he'd survived thirty years in the marshals service by knowing which threats were real and which were just noise.
