She almost smiled. Didn't quite get there, but something moved in the right direction. A muscle in her cheek. The smallest acknowledgment that even in the middle of this, something was holding her up that hadn't been there before.
A cruiser door slammed. Radios crackled. Corrick's voice carried across the lawn, calm and authoritative, directing officers toward the house.
Dove straightened. Wiped her face. Put the armor back on, piece by piece, the way she always did.
But she didn't pull away from Trent's arm. Not yet. She gave herself ten more seconds of leaning into him, of letting someone else hold the weight, of breathing in the smell of cypress and swamp and the stubborn, complicated man who'd driven two hours without being asked and hadn't once suggested she didn't need him there.
Chapter Thirteen
The gators were restless this morning.
Trent could tell by the way they surfaced—not the lazy, drifting emergence of animals at ease, but the sharp, angled rise of heads breaking water with purpose. Eyes scanning. Nostrils flaring. Something had shifted in the moat overnight, and every cold-blooded creature in it knew it.
He tossed the last chicken quarter to Dolly, who snapped it out of the air with a crack that sent a heron flapping off the dock in protest. She'd been extra possessive of the south bank since the python incident, patrolling the waterline like a twelve-foot security guard, her tail sweeping slow arcs through the shallows.
Clarkson was sunning herself on the flat rock near the east bank, moving more slowly than she should. Favoring her left side, where the coils had done the most damage, and her breathing had a slight wheeze that Trent didn't love. But she was eating. She'd taken two chicken pieces this morning without hesitation, snapping them down with the single-minded determination of an animal that had stared death in the face and decided it was hungry anyway.
New gators floated in, and some of the regulars had made their way back out into the wild. It’s how the habitat worked. But a few made this their home, and Trent made them his family.
He crouched at the moat's edge for a long moment, watching Clarkson breathe. If the wheeze got worse, he’d monitor more closely and hope he wouldn’t have to put the creature down. If it got better, he'd call it a miracle and move on. That was the deal when you lived alongside animals that had been around since the dinosaurs. You did what you could. You accepted what you couldn't.
He rinsed his hands in the bucket by the feeding station, dried them on his jeans, and then headed toward the house.
The sky was shifting from black to gray, the sun still crouched below the tree line but throwing its first hints of color—pale pink and amber threading through the clouds like veins of ore in dark rock. The air was heavy with dew and the distinct green scent the Everglades exhaled every morning, as if something alive were drawing its first breath.
Inside, the house was quiet. Not the terrible quiet of those first weeks after his mother died—the absence that had weight and teeth and lived in every corner—but a different kind. The quiet of something that had been through the worst and was still standing.
He started the coffee, leaning against the counter while the machine gurgled and hissed. The kitchen still smelled faintly of blueberry muffins. Two batches yesterday. The first had come out golden and perfect and she'd stared at them like she couldn't remember making them. The second she'd burned because she'd been crying at the table and forgot the timer. He'd scraped the blackened bottoms without a word and they'd eaten them anyway.
The machine beeped. He poured two mugs, added a splash of cream to hers, and carried them upstairs.
The bedroom was dim, curtains filtering the early light into a soft gray wash. Dove was on her side, facing the window, the quilt pulled to her chin, her blond hair fanned across the pillow in a tangle that said she'd slept hard or at least tried. Twice in the night, she'd jerked awake, gasping, her body going rigid beside him, before she remembered where she was and allowed herself settle back down.
He set her mug on the nightstand and sat on the edge of the bed.
She rolled toward him, eyes opening slowly, bloodshot, heavy with the kind of exhaustion that sleep hadn't come close to fixing.
"Hey," she murmured.
"Hey, yourself." He nodded toward the mug. "Coffee."
She pushed herself up to a sitting position, reached for it, and wrapped both hands around the ceramic like it was the only warm thing in the world. She took a sip and her eyes closed. A small sound escaped her—gratitude and pain tangled up together.
"How are the gators?" she asked.
"Good. Dolly’s standing guard, like she’s waiting for something else to happen and Clarkson’s acting like she didn’t almost die yesterday. Tough little cookie, that one.”
“She gets that from her dad."
Trent chuckled. Even wrecked, even running on no sleep and grief that could swallow a person whole, she could still make him laugh—he loved her a little for that.
"How are you?" she asked, peering over the rim.
“I should be asking you that question.”
“I got there first.”
“I know, but you asked because you don’t want to talk about yourself, and you need to.” He took a sip of his coffee. "How are you feeling? And don't say fine."
