Trent slid a plate in front of her. Scrambled eggs, toast, and a handful of strawberries. He sat across from her with his own plate, fresh coffee, and for a few minutes, they ate in the kind of silence that didn't need filling. Forks scraping. Mugs lifted and set down. The gators grumbling in the moat outside like a low, constant engine that never shut off.
Then Trent set his fork down. “We need to talk about something."
She looked up. He was staring at his coffee, his thumb tracing the rim of the mug, and there was something on his face she didn't see often—uncertainty. This man walked into gator-infested water without flinching, but whatever he was about to say had him fidgeting like a kid called to the principal's office.
"This morning," he said. “I didn’t use a condom. I didn’t even think about it. I should’ve, and I’m sorry.”
Her heart dropped to the bottom of her toes and then flew back to her throat. “I didn’t realize that until just now.” She lifted her gaze, catching his, and the conversation that needed to happen—the one about timing and responsibility and what it meant and what they were going to do about it—hovered between them like something fragile balanced on an edge.
Dove opened her mouth to say something—anything—but out of the corner of her eye, she noticed something outside.
Movement. Through the kitchen window, past the moat, near the equipment shed. A figure, low and fast, slipping out through the side door. Then a second figure behind the first. He closed the shed door and moved swiftly across the property toward the mangrove near the waterline.
She jumped to her feet. “We’ve got company, and not the good kind.”
He pushed his chair back, turning his head. “Motherfucker.” His bare feet hit the linoleum, and he crossed the kitchen in three strides. He grabbed his Glock from the top of the refrigerator and racked the slide.
Dove was right behind him, snagging her weapon, which she’d placed on the counter by the door when she’d come downstairs this morning. She had it in her hand and her feet in her boots in seconds.
"Out the back," he said. "They're moving toward the south dock." Trent didn’t bother with boots, which she thought was crazy, but she wasn’t about to argue. Not now.
They went through the screen door fast. Dove's gaze locked on the two figures now visible between the cypress trees. They'd cleared the large trees and were making for the waterline where a flat-bottom boat was tied to the old dock—the one Trent's father had built.
The boat looked new. Clean. Shiney. Like this was its maiden voyage.
The morning air was thick and hot—tasted like mud mixed with cypress bark. The gators in the moat sensed the commotion—heads turning, bodies repositioning, Dolly letting out a low bellow that vibrated in Dove's sternum. She ignored all of it. Her focus narrowed the way it always did when the switch flipped—peripheral noise gone, vision sharp, every detail registering and cataloging in real time.
The two figures reached the dock. One of them jumped into the boat while the other untied the line. Both were dressed in dark clothing with long sleeves, hats pulled low, and gloves. No faces visible from this distance.
“I’m not letting them get away this time.” Trent veered toward his airboat, tied on the south side of the dock where the water opened into the river. “Come on.”
She scurried down the wooden planks, through the tall weeds, and raced up to the other dock.
Trent hopped into his boat, hit the blower, and the big fan roared to life with a sound that scattered every bird within a hundred yards. Dove quickly untied the lines from the cleats and landed in the seat beside him, one hand on the rail, the other holding her weapon against her thigh.
The intruders pulled away from the old dock, its outboard churning white water as it swung south into the channel.
Trent dropped the throttle and the airboat surged forward, skimming across the shallow water with a force that pressed Dove back in her seat. Wind ripped at her hair, her shirt—his shirt—and she had to squint against the spray. The sawgrass blurred on both sides, a green wall rushing past, and ahead of them, the flat-bottom picked up speed.
She pulled her phone from the pocket of Trent's shorts—the only thing she'd managed to grab besides the gun—and shot Buddy a quick text about what had transpired.
Seconds later, he responded that he was en route.
The channel widened. The flat-bottom had maybe two hundred yards on them, but the airboat was faster in the shallows and Trent knew these waterways the way she knew a rifle—by instinct, by memory, by the kind of intimacy that came from a lifetime of paying attention. He cut through a gap in the sawgrass that shaved fifty yards off the distance, the hull skimming over water so shallow she could see the mud bottom flashing beneath them.
A hundred yards. She could make out details now—the boat was a center console skiff, clean lines, the outboard gleaming. Not the kind of vessel that belonged to poachers or local troublemakers who'd lifted it from a dock.
Eighty yards and closing.
The flat-bottom cut hard to the left.
“Shit,” Trent muttered as the skiff whipped around, engine howling, and the passenger rose from behind the console with something long and black braced against his shoulder.
"Down!" Trent wrenched the airboat right, the hull tilting as the fan screamed at full power.
The first shot cracked across the water like a whip. It punched through the fiberglass hull of the airboat two feet to Dove's left, leaving a hole the size of a quarter and sending splinters spraying across her bare legs.
A second shot split the air where Dove's head had been a half second earlier, and she felt the heat of it pass—or imagined she did, which was close enough.
