He didn't need Dove to answer. He saw it.
Near the fence line, maybe forty feet from the equipment shed, on the wrong side of the moat. A mass of coils wrapped around one of his younger gators like a fist squeezing the life out of something it had no right to touch. The gator's tail whipped weakly, its jaws snapping at nothing, its stubby legs clawing at dirt that offered no purchase.
His stomach dropped.
"Dove." He kept his voice even. Controlled. The same voice he used when he was working with an agitated animal and couldn't afford to telegraph fear. "Go inside. My handgun is on the top shelf of the bedroom closet. Bring it to the porch. But do not—" He looked at her. "Do not open the screen door."
She stared at him. "What?—"
"The gators in the moat are riled. You hear that?"
“I noticed them thrashing about, but they’re always active in the morning.”
“It’s not just that. It’s the noises.” A chorus of low hisses and guttural bellows echoed across the air. They were the kind of sounds that vibrated in his chest and told him something primal had been triggered. The big ones were agitated, pushing toward the far bank, clawing at the sloped concrete on the side they couldn't normally scale. Normally, being the keyword. A motivated gator could do things that would surprise most people.
"Some of them could get over if they wanted it bad enough," he said. "They smell a fight. Go. Now."
Dove moved. No argument. No hesitation. She disappeared through the side door, the screen slapping shut behind her.
Trent found his boots on the porch and ran toward the equipment shed. Twenty years on this land had mapped every root, every dip, every patch of ground into his muscle memory.
Inside the shed, he grabbed what he needed. Bolt stunner first—a captive bolt device, humane, designed to render the animal unconscious instantly if placed correctly. Pithing tool next, a metal rod with a sharp point, for the follow-up. An air gun. A snake hook, four feet of aluminum with a curved end. He shoved the smaller tools into a belt and wrapped it around his waist. He slung the air gun over his shoulder.
Then he grabbed a chicken quarter from the bait cooler and dropped it into a bucket.
His hands were steady. That was something confidence and years of being a cocky asshole had brought him. It didn’t matter what was going on inside. The fear. The adrenaline. His outsides needed to be calm. It’s what had saved his sorry ass many times.
He jogged back toward the fence line, bucket in one hand, hook in the other, the rest of his tools jangling against his hip. The python hadn't moved much. It didn't need to. It was doing exactly what millions of years of evolution had designed it to do—squeeze, wait, squeeze again. Each time the gator exhaled, the coils tightened. Patient. Methodical. Like a machine that ran on hunger and time.
The gator was maybe three and a half feet. Young. Showed up a few months ago. Hurt, bleeding, and would’ve died if she hadn’t found her way to Mallor’s Landing.
He’d named her Clarkson, after Kelly Clarkson and the song Stronger. And Trent knew it was her based on the pale scar on her left flank.
She was still fighting. Barely. But still.
He set the bucket down about fifteen feet from the tangle, far enough that the smell of raw chicken wouldn't complicate things more than they already were. Then he approached the porch. Dove was standing behind the screen door, his Glock in her right hand, barrel pointed at the ground. Finger off the trigger. Proper form. Because a sniper wouldn’t know any other way.
"Here's how this goes," he said, keeping his voice low and steady. "If the snake or the gator comes at me and I can't handle it, I’ll tell you to shoot it. If I'm on the ground and something's coming for me, you put it down—but you wait for the signal.”
“That won’t be a problem.”
"I don't want to die today, and I can't wrangle both at the same time." He held her gaze. "But if I tell you not to shoot, you don't. Can you do that?"
“Now, that’s asking a lot.” She rolled her shoulders, craning her neck side to side. “If teeth come close to breaking skin, I’m gonna shoot.” There was no tremor in her voice. No uncertainty. The woman standing on his porch was the trained sniper, not the woman who'd been crying in his arms an hour ago. He was grateful for both versions of her, but right now, he needed the soldier.
“I can live with that.”
“That’s the plan, Mallor.”
He smiled, then turned back to the problem.
The python was massive. Fifteen feet, easy. Maybe pushing sixteen. A Burmese—the invasive bastards that had been decimating the Everglades ecosystem for decades, eating everything from rabbits to deer to the occasional alligator, breeding in numbers that made wildlife officials lose sleep. Trent had caught and killed hundreds of them over the years. Maybe more, if he counted all the Python Challenges and the freelance removals not to mention the times he'd stumbled across one on his property and dealt with it because that's what you did when you lived on the edge of the Glades.
But he'd never dealt with one mid-kill. Not alone.
The snake's head was buried somewhere in the coils, pressed against the gator's midsection, its body a thick rope of muscle that rippled with each constriction. The tail end was loose, draped across the ground like a fat, heavy hose. When the gator thrashed, the tail twitched in response—a warning. A reminder that there was more snake than what you could see.
He gripped the hook and started forward.
