Trent didn't move for a long moment. Dove pushed back her chair, crossed the kitchen, and put her hand flat against his back. She felt the tension in him—coiled, barely-held in check—and didn't say a word. He straightened. Turned. His eyes met her gaze. “Grab your Glock.”
She didn’t need to be told that twice. Snagging her weapon, she followed Trent out the side door and over the bridge, nearly stumbling when a sudden realization crystalized in her mind. The prehistoric creatures thrashing about below were her friends. Her comrades. Her backup.
Chapter Twenty
The walkway groaned under his boots the way it always did—the low, familiar complaint from boards that had been expanding and contracting in the Florida heat for thirty years. Trent knew every pitch. Every soft spot. Every plank his father had laid by hand on a Saturday in October because the weather had finally broken enough to work outside without sweating through his shirt in the first ten minutes.
He'd walked this dock a thousand times. Tonight, it felt like the longest hundred yards of his life.
Dove moved beside him, her footsteps near-silent against his, her shoulder close enough that he could feel the warmth of her in the dark. Neither of them spoke. The night pressed in around the edges of the dock lights, thick and alive with the sound of the Glades settling into itself—frogs, crickets, and the distant splash of large fish moving through the bay.
Then came a thrash from the far edge of the moat. It was heavy, deliberate, the particular sound of a large animal rolling around in the water and mud like a small child stomping in puddles during a spring rain storm. And underneath it—a low, guttural noise that wasn’t quite a bellow that he felt more in his chest than heard with his ears. It wasn’t a gator giving a warning. It was more of a welcoming grunt.
Trent stopped dead in his tracks.
"What—" Dove started.
He raised his hand while his heart shot up to his throat. He stood still and let his eyes find the dark beyond what little glow was left from the porch lights. He didn't really need to adjust. He knew this property the way he knew his own heartbeat—every shadow, every shape, every place where the grass met the water and the moat curved out toward the far dock. He'd been reading this land since he was old enough to walk it alone.
But he stood there anyway, because part of him already knew what moved at the far edge of the moat, where the concrete lip gave way to a wide stretch of grass. Only, it was impossible.
The shadow was tall and broad through the shoulders. He stood at the water's edge with the easy stillness of a person who wasn't afraid of what lived in that water. Not many could come to Mallor’s Landing and do that.
But what really shocked Trent was Dolly.
The twelve-foot alligator, roughly nine-hundred pounds of prehistoric territorial animal, was rolling around like she was a puppy that had been given a new chew toy.
This wasn’t the slow drift she did when she was patrolling. Nor was it the aggressive display she put on for strangers who got too close. She rolled, her massive body turning in the shallows, tail sweeping in a wide arc through the water, the way she did when Trent came back from a trip and she heard his boots on the dock before she saw him. The way she'd done every single time his mother had walked this property in the last twenty years, right up until the month she got too sick to come outside.
The way she'd done, a long time ago, for someone else.
His throat closed. He rubbed his eyes.
Dolly didn't do that for people. She did it for family.
"Trent." Dove's voice was low and close to his ear. "You okay?"
He couldn't answer that.
He squeezed his eyes closed and counted to three before blinking them open again. The figure was still there. Still standing at the edge of the water, completely unbothered by the twelve-foot alligator performing what Trent could only describe as a greeting at his feet. The stranger had one hand hung loose at his side. The other rested, easy and familiar, on the top of Dolly's exposed flank as she rolled.
"Trent." Dove's hand found his arm. Then she went rigid at his side. “What the hell?” She drew her weapon, smooth and clean. "Show your face and keep your hands where I can see them."
The figure raised both hands slowly. Turned. And walked toward them.
He moved into the reach of the distant lights—unhurried, and seemingly unworried that he was on the wrong side of the moat. The light caught his face, and Trent’s heart froze in his chest. His pulse soared. And his mind spun with a million questions.
All Trent could do was stand there with his mouth open and stare.
Stare at this man with the same wide nose. Same high cheek-bones. Same high forehead. Same shaggy hair that was always a little too long and a five-o’clock shadow.
He'd been looking at a version of it in the mirror his entire life.
The man stopped ten feet away, hands still in the air.
"Hello, son."
The air in Trent’s lungs became trapped. He couldn’t release it, nor could he suck in more.
