"Okay," he said. "But I'm coming with you."
"You don't have to?—"
"I'm coming with you." His voice left no room for debate. "You're not doing this alone."
She could have fought him. Could have insisted she was fine, that she didn't need a babysitter, that she'd been handling her own shit long before Trent Mallor had come into her life.
But the truth was, she didn't want to do this alone. The thought of walking into that morgue by herself, looking down at her uncle's body with no one beside her—it made the cold knot in her stomach tighten until she could barely breathe.
"Okay," she said quietly.
They drifted through the motions of getting ready in silence. Clothes. Shoes. Teeth brushed, faces washed, and hair pulled back—the small rituals of preparing to face a day that had already broken before it began. Outside the window, the sky had lightened to a pale gray, the sun still hidden below the horizon but making its presence known.
Downstairs, Trent headed for the kitchen. "I'll make coffee. Something to eat for the road. You need to put something in your stomach before we drive an hour and a half."
Dove nodded. Her appetite was nonexistent—the thought of food made her vaguely nauseous—but she knew he was right. Operating on empty never ended well.
"I'll go start the truck," she said, grabbing the keys from the hook by the door.
She stepped out onto the porch, and the humidity wrapped around her like a wet blanket. The air was thick and heavy, the kind that settled into your lungs and stayed there. The moat had come alive with tails thrashing about. Damn things knew it was close to feeding time.
She crossed the bridge as quickly as she could, ignoring the water rippling beneath her, and headed for her truck parked near the equipment shed.
That's when she saw it.
At first, her brain didn't register what she was looking at. The shape was wrong. Too big. Too twisted. Something massive on the ground near the fence line, on the wrong side of the moat. An area that should have been empty.
She stopped walking.
Squinted through the gray light.
Then it moved.
Coils. Thick as a man's thigh. Mottled brown and tan, patterned like dead leaves, like camouflage designed by something ancient and patient and hungry. The body shifted, muscles rippling beneath the scales, and Dove's stomach dropped as she finally understood what she was seeing.
A python. Massive. Easily fifteen feet, maybe more. A Burmese, from the markings—one of the invasive giants that had been strangling the Everglades for decades, eating everything in their path, breeding faster than wildlife officials could cull them.
And wrapped in its coils, thrashing weakly, desperately, was one of Trent's smaller gators.
Three feet long. Maybe four. Still young. Still vulnerable. Its jaws snapped at the air, tail whipping uselessly, stubby legs scrabbling for purchase that didn't exist. The python's coils tightened with each exhale, patient and relentless, squeezing the life out of its prey one breath at a time.
Dove had seen death before. Had caused it, more times than she could count. But there was something about this—the slow, inexorable crush of it, the way the gator's struggles were growing weaker with each passing second—that made her throat close up.
"Trent!" Her voice cut through the quiet morning like a gunshot. “Get out here, now!”
Chapter Eleven
Trent reached for the coffee filters when Dove's voice split the morning wide open.
Not a scream. Worse than a scream. A command. The kind of sound that came from a woman who'd spent years on battlefields and knew the difference between panic and a problem that needed solving right now.
He flew out the side door, bare feet hitting the porch boards, the screen door banging behind him. The humid air slammed into him like a wall, thick and wet and already warm despite the sun not even hitting the horizon yet.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Snake. Fucking goddamned snake. Python.”
"Where?" His gaze swept the property.
