Chapter Four
Tess locked the front door with hands that still wouldn't stop shaking.
Friday.
Four days to change her mind or lose everything. Four days of watching her boats sink one by one while Gregor Petrovic's men sat in her parking lot and waited for her to break.
She should go upstairs. Lock herself in the apartment, drink the wine she'd been saving for a better day, and pretend the walls weren't closing in.
That's what a smart woman would do. A smart woman wouldn't stand at the window watching a Wolf lean against his bike in her parking lot like he had nowhere else to be.
Tess had never been particularly smart about the things that mattered.
She turned off the shop lights and walked outside.
The April evening had teeth—wind coming off the lake with enough bite to make her wish she'd grabbed a jacket. Lakeshore sat on his bike facing the water, silhouette carved against the last light of sunset, and he didn't turn when she approached. Just shifted over like he'd been expecting her.
"They're gone," she said.
"Saw them leave."
"You waited."
Now he turned. Those eyes—pale gray, cold as the lake in January—found hers and held.
"Yeah."
One word. No explanation, no excuse, no attempt to pretend this was normal. Just yeah, like watching over a woman he'd known for three days was the most obvious thing in the world.
Tess should tell him to go home. Should thank him for his business and send him back to whatever dangerous life Wolves lived when they weren't drinking terrible coffee in bait shops. She'd been handling this alone for six weeks. She could handle four more days.
Instead, she said: "You want to know what's going on."
"Told you. Curiosity."
"Bullshit."
Something flickered across his face. Not quite a smile, but close enough to make her stomach flip in ways that had nothing to do with fear.
"Maybe."
She walked past him to the dock, and he followed without being asked. The wood creaked under their weight, familiar sounds that had been the soundtrack of her childhood—her father teaching her to tie knots, to read the weather on the water, to respect the lake even when it seemed calm.
The lake wasn't calm tonight. Whitecaps out past the breakwall, the kind of chop that kept smart boaters on shore. Tess sat on the edge of the dock with her legs dangling over dark water and waited for Lakeshore to join her.
He did. Close enough that she could feel the heat of him through two layers of leather and flannel, but not touching. Giving her space she hadn't asked for.
"Gregor Petrovic," she started.
"Smuggler. Runs contraband across the lake from Michigan ports. Been operating about fifteen years, mostly stays under the radar."
Tess stared at him. "You know who he is."
"Know his name. Know his business." Lakeshore's jaw tightened. "Didn't know he was pressing on this stretch of waterfront."
"This stretch of waterfront being...?"
"Wolf territory."
The words hung in the air between them, heavy with implications she didn't fully understand. Tess had grown up on the South Side. She knew what MCs were, knew the rough outlines of how they operated. But knowing and understanding were different things.
"So I'm in the middle of a territory dispute."
"You're in the middle of a man who thinks he can take what he wants because nobody's stopped him yet." Lakeshore's voice went flat, cold. "That ends now."
Something about the certainty in his tone made her shiver, and not from the wind.
"I didn't ask for your help."
"Didn't say you did."
"I don't need—" She stopped, because the words were ridiculous and they both knew it. She absolutely needed help. She'd needed it for six weeks, and she'd been too stubborn or too scared or too proud to admit it.
"Six weeks," Lakeshore said quietly. "You've been fighting this alone for six weeks."
"Yes."
"Why?"
The question cut deeper than it should have. Tess looked out at the water, at the waves that had been her whole world since she was old enough to hold a fishing rod.
"Because it's my father's shop. Because he built it from nothing and ran it for thirty years, and now he's in a nursing home forgetting my name, and this—" Her voice cracked.
She hated that it cracked. "This is all I have left of him.
The shop. The boats. The water. If I lose this, I lose the last piece of him that still works. "
Silence stretched between them. The lake muttered against the pilings, patient and eternal, and Tess felt the tears she'd been holding back for weeks pressing against the backs of her eyes.
She didn't let them fall. Couldn't afford to fall apart, not now, not in front of this man she barely knew.
"He came to me six weeks ago," she continued, steadier now. "Gregor. Or his men, anyway—I've never actually met him. They wanted to rent my dock. After-hours access, storage space, somewhere to load and unload without the main harbors paying attention."
"And you said no."
"I said no." She laughed, but there was no humor in it. "I said a lot of things. Most of them would have made my father proud and my mother reach for the soap."
"Good."
She looked at him. Really looked, taking in the scars on his hands, the hard lines of his face, the way he watched the water like it owed him something.
"They started slow. A hole in a boat here, a cut fuel line there.
Insurance denied my second claim, and my charter bookings dropped because word got around that my fleet wasn't safe.
Every week it gets worse, and every week they come back with the same offer, and every week I tell them the same thing. "
"What do you tell them?"
"That my father didn't build this place for thirty years so some smuggler could use it as a loading dock.
That I walked away from a career to keep his legacy alive, and I'm not handing it over to anyone.
That they can sink every boat I own and I'll still be standing here telling them to go to hell. "
Lakeshore was quiet for a long moment.
Then: "You know they'll escalate. Friday isn't really a deadline—it's a threat. They'll hurt you, Tess. Men like Gregor, they don't stop at property damage when they want something badly enough."
The sound of her name in his mouth made something twist low in her belly. He said it like it meant something. Like she meant something.
"I know."
"And you're still not running."
"I don't run." She met his eyes, letting him see the steel underneath the exhaustion. "I've been on this lake my whole life. I've ridden out storms that would have sunk better sailors. I'm not afraid of a smuggler who thinks he can scare me off my own dock."
Something shifted in Lakeshore's expression. The coldness cracked, just for a second, and underneath it she saw heat. Want. The kind of fierce, possessive intensity that should have terrified her.
It didn't.
"You've seen the boats," she said. "Coming and going at night. Running patterns that don't make sense."
"Yeah."
"That's his operation. Small craft, moving cargo between here and Michigan ports. He uses private docks like mine because the main harbors have security, cameras, schedules. Out here, nobody's watching."
"Someone's watching now."
The words were quiet, but they landed like stones. Tess felt the weight of them settle into her chest, right next to the fear she'd been carrying for six weeks.
"Why?" she asked. "Why do you care what happens to my shop? You're a Wolf. You've got your own problems, your own wars. I'm nobody to you."
Lakeshore turned to face her fully. In the dying light, his eyes looked almost silver—pale and cold and endless as the lake itself.
"This is Wolf waterfront," he said. "Everything from 31st Street Beach to the Indiana border. The water, the docks, the businesses that depend on the lake. All of it's ours."
"So I'm just territory."
"You're a woman who told two enforcers to go to hell without blinking.
" His voice dropped, roughened. "You're standing alone against a man who's been running this lake for fifteen years, and you haven't taken a single step back.
You work on boats with your own hands and you make terrible coffee and you look at the water like it's the only thing that makes sense. "
Tess's heart was pounding. She couldn't look away from him, couldn't move, couldn't breathe.
"That's not nothing," he finished. "That's not nobody."
The wind picked up, cutting through her flannel and raising goosebumps along her arms. She should go inside. Should end this conversation before it went somewhere she couldn't come back from.
"Gregor Petrovic has been trespassing," Lakeshore said, and the cold certainty in his voice sounded like the lake itself. "On Wolf territory. On water we've held since before he started running his little smuggling operation. That ends now. You understand? It ends."