Which put it somewhere between the exhumation and the town meeting tonight, wedged into a day that was already running out of road. Trent nodded because there was nothing else to do.
Dawson gestured toward the yard. "I need everyone to step out and let us work."
They filed out into the bright, punishing morning. Buddy and Sterling said their goodbyes with the clipped efficiency of people who had things to do and would do them without being asked twice. Keaton and Dawson disappeared into the shed with their phones out.
Trent walked toward the house, and Dove fell into step beside him.
The screen door creaked the way it had since he was a kid. Inside, the kitchen smelled like eggs and coffee and the ordinary morning they'd had about forty-five minutes ago, before the world had another go at him. He stood in the middle of the kitchen floor, his hands at his sides. "I don't know how much more of this I've got," he said. “They used a gator a I knew.” He stared at the floor. "He's been coming here since I was a teenager. He's never bothered anyone." His voice didn't crack. He wouldn't let it. "He came here because I made it safe." He felt the failure of that in places words couldn't reach.
“Don’t do that to yourself. This isn't your fault.”
"Maybe not. But I seem to be the center of it, and it's not just gators that are being killed. It's people." He held up his hand before she could say a word. “I'm sorry about your uncle." He lifted his gaze. “I know he didn’t tell us everything. But whatever it was that he was trying to do, he didn’t deserve to be murdered.. He didn’t deserve to be gunned down in a parking lot, and over what?”
“I don’t know, but whatever it was, my uncle was willing to risk his life for it.” She leaned against the counter and crossed her arms, her eyes steady on his. “He came here to warn you, or help you, or maybe to stop something.” She paused. "Which means there's a thread here somewhere. And when we find it and pull it, the whole thing comes undone."
He looked at her—this woman who hated gators and showed up anyway, who'd watched her team die and got back up, who was standing in his kitchen less than a day after identifying her uncle's body and talking about threads instead of falling apart.
He loved her. God, he loved her. He knew that the way he knew the moat—every depth, every current, every cold-blooded creature that called it home. He knew it without needing to say it out loud and without being ready to, which was the quiet cruelty of being a man who'd spent most of his adult life keeping his mouth shut about the things that mattered most.
He pulled out a chair and sat down. He was a coward and she deserved better.
Pushing off the counter, she poured him a fresh cup of coffee and set it in front of him, then sat across the table in his father’s chair.
Outside, the gators moved in the moat. A tail slapped the water, sharp and authoritative—a way of announcing that one of them was watching.
He wrapped his hands around the mug.
Find the loose stone.
Okay. He could do that. He'd pulled twelve-foot snakes off struggling animals with his bare hands. He'd held this property together through his father's death and his mother's slow disappearance and every bad decision he'd made in between.
He could find a loose stone. And he’d find the threat and neutralize it.
And once it was all over, he had to find a way to tell Dove how much he loved her. How he couldn't see his future anymore without her in it.
Chapter Sixteen
Trent pulled into the Aegis Network office parking lot and cut the engine. Stepping out of the truck, his heart was still in his throat. He’d just watched the backhoe dig up his father’s grave. He watched them lift the casket out of the earth and move it into a large tent. He’d stood there with Dove, staring at that tent for what seemed like hours, but was actually maybe forty minutes before the ME exited, with his father’s remains in a new container.
Gently and respectfully, they put that container into a hearse and drove away.
Trent was told it would take one to three days for confirmation that the remains were indeed his father’s. But the rest of the information the feds wanted could take weeks to obtain.
He did his best to shake the image of his dad’s empty grave from his head and focus on… well, everything that had turned to shit.
Dove came around from the passenger side, and they fell into step together, crossing the lot toward the low-slung building that sat just outside of town. Decker Brown owned it—his construction company office down the hall from the Aegis space—and there was nothing on the exterior that would tell you what happened inside. No signage. No indication. That was the point.
“Are you okay?” Dove asked.
He had no idea how to answer that question. Worse, she was going through it too with the death of her uncle, and yet, here she was, holding his hand. He should be the one being strong for her, instead of this shell of a man who could barely complete a whole thought.
“Are you upset because I asked Cullen to follow Karl?”
Trent paused in the middle of the parking lot. “I wish you had told me, but I’m not mad. You’re trying to help, and I appreciate it.”
She stopped beside him, hands in her back pockets, chin up—ready for whatever came next. “Are you worried about this meeting?”
“Very,” he admitted. “I took the heat for Karl eight years ago because I believed in loyalty, even though I knew he was an asshole and I was distancing myself. As time went on, he started to threaten me with exposure for what he’d done on my land. It worried me, and I'll admit, sometimes I helped him with stupid stuff. Nothing that would get me more than a ticket or a fine. Karl's been more bark than bite, and I realized he’d have to own his criminal activity, and he’d never do that. Then a few years ago, he asked me if he could use Mallor's Landing after he learned I helped out another buddy. One who was actually a friend. Someone who just did a stupid thing for the right reasons.” Trent ran his fingers through his hair and stared at the building. It was just something for his eyes to focus on. Nothing really registered. Just something to occupy his body with while he let his emotions curl around his chest like a python.
