"Then I'm making muffins." She pushed through the door into the kitchen, and he heard her opening cabinets, the familiar sounds of someone looking for mixing bowls in a kitchen they didn't know well enough to navigate without searching.
Trent stood on the porch and watched the morning settle over his property. The gators in the moat had calmed, their bellows fading to the occasional grumble. Somewhere in the grass, a python he couldn't see was making its way toward a place it had no business being. His leg ached. His shoulder throbbed. Inside, a woman he was falling for was making muffins because it was the only thing standing between her and a grief so big it could swallow her whole.
He pulled out his phone and called Fallon.
It rang twice before she answered, her voice thick with sleep. "Trent? It's not even six. Someone better be dead or dying."
His chest tightened. "I need you and Keaton and maybe one or two other FWC officers out at Mallor's Landing. As soon as possible."
"What's going on?"
"I've got a python problem—at least five, including a fifteen-footer I already put down. The rest are spread across the property, making their way toward the moat. I've never seen this many on my land. Not even close." He watched the grass near the fence line, tracking a subtle movement that could have been wind but wasn't. "Something's not right."
“Getting out of bed now,” Fallon said. “I’ll call it in and make it official.”
"Thank you."
He hung up and leaned against the porch railing, listening to the clink of a mixing bowl being set on the counter and the soft thud of the fridge being closed. It was the sounds of someone building something small and good in the middle of something terrible.
His leg throbbed.
The snakes were still out there.
And somewhere in Okeechobee, Dove's uncle was lying on a cold steel table waiting for someone who loved him to come and say his name.
Chapter Twelve
The medical examiner had used the word "peaceful." Odd word choice to describe a man who’d been murdered.
“You doing okay?” Trent asked.
“Hanging tough.” Dove watched the highway unspooling through the windshield of Trent's truck, the flat stretch of Florida sliding past in a blur of sawgrass and sky. She couldn't stop hearing that word. Peaceful. Like her uncle had drifted off to sleep. Like two bullets hadn't ripped through him in a parking lot while he sat alone in his car.
The ME had cleaned up her uncle and closed the wounds. Folded his hands across his chest. Made him look like a man resting instead of a man snuffed out by God only knew who. And Dove had stood there under the fluorescent lights that buzzed like the ones in every military facility she'd ever set foot in, staring at a face she'd known her whole life—the thick jaw, the crooked nose he'd broken twice, the deep lines around his mouth from decades of either laughing or clenching his teeth through things no one should have to see—and confirmed that yes, this was Aaron Slade.
She'd kept it together. She'd nodded when the ME spoke, signed where they told her to, answered the questions in a voice so flat and controlled it could’ve been a recording. Trent had stood behind her the whole time, close enough that she could feel his presence like a hand on her back, even though he wasn't touching her. Just there. Solid and warm in a room full of cold steel and antiseptic.
She hadn't cried. Not in the room. Not in the hallway. Not in the parking lot where Trent had opened the truck door for her and waited while she climbed in and buckled her seatbelt with hands that didn't shake because she wouldn't let them.
But now, forty minutes into the drive south toward Fort Lauderdale, the numbness was wearing off. And what was underneath it wasn't grief. Grief was a luxury she couldn't afford yet. What was underneath the numbness was something hotter. Something with teeth.
Rage.
It smoldered in her chest like a coal, white-hot and glowing, radiating heat through her ribs and into her throat until she could taste it—metallic, bitter, the flavor of blood after she'd bitten the inside of her cheek too hard.
This wasn't random violence. This wasn't a mugging gone wrong. This was an execution. And executions meant planning. Surveillance. Intent. Someone had decided Aaron Slade needed to die, and they'd made it happen with the kind of precision that said they'd done this before.
Dove was going to find them. And when she did?—
She stopped that thought. Packed it into a box. Shoved it into a corner. Not because she was afraid of it, but because she needed to think clearly, and fantasies about retribution didn't help with that.
She turned her head and looked at Trent.
He drove the way he did everything—steady, unhurried, one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the center console. His jaw set, eyes fixed on the road, she could tell by the way his thumb tapped against the steering wheel that his mind churned.
"You don't have to do this," she said.
He glanced at her. Just a flick of his eyes before they returned to the road. “What?”
