CHAPTER SEVEN
A small fire was all he needed.
Robert Brune fed it with driftwood he'd collected from the shore, pieces worn smooth and pale by the lake's patient hands, and watched the flames work through the grain the way water worked through stone—finding the weakest point and consuming from the inside.
The fire popped and hissed against the cold.
He sat on an overturned bucket outside the fishing shack and held his hands toward the warmth and listened.
He shifted on the bucket and his ribs reminded him of the woman.
The bruise ran from his left side to his sternum, deep and hot, the kind that hurt worse on the second and third day than on the first. She'd driven her elbow into him with a force that surprised him even now, days later.
He probed the area with careful fingers, testing.
Nothing broken. He'd broken ribs before—hauling crab pots in a November gale, thirty years ago—and he knew the difference between cracked and bruised.
This was bruised. His jaw ached where her elbow had connected, and his left eye was still swollen enough to narrow his vision on that side, the skin around it gone the color of an overripe plum.
She'd gouged at his eye socket with her thumb and nearly taken the eye itself, and even now the memory of that—the sudden blinding pressure, the animal panic of a man whose sight was being taken—made his hands tighten on his knees.
She was strong. Stronger than he'd expected.
He had watched her on the docks for three nights before he moved, tracking her patterns the way he'd once tracked the movement of fish through channels he knew by heart.
She walked the same routes. She checked the same gaps between containers.
She was predictable in the way that people who believed themselves hunters always were—focused forward, blind to the periphery, certain that the thing they sought would be found in front of them rather than behind.
He had been behind her. And he'd still nearly lost.
The fire cracked. A log shifted, sending a constellation of sparks upward into the dark where they died against the cold air.
Beyond the firelight, the lake stretched into nothing, black and vast and breathing.
He could hear it. He could always hear it.
The low, tidal murmur that wasn't waves and wasn't wind but something underneath both, something that had been speaking to him since he was eight years old and his mother had gone into the water and not come back.
The lake had kept her. The lake kept everything it took.
That was the covenant, the truth that lived beneath the truth that other people understood.
Superior did not give back. It held what it was given, deep and cold and forever, and in return it whispered to those who listened.
It had whispered to him his whole life—in the creak of hull planks, in the groan of ice, in the sound the water made against rock at night when the world was quiet enough to hear what mattered.
He closed his eyes and listened now.
The wind moved through the birch stand and across the water, carrying the smell of water.
The lake murmured. He sat with it, patient, the way he'd always been patient.
The fire warmed his face, and the dark pressed against his back, and the water spoke in the language it had always spoken, the one only he could hear.
And slowly, the way understanding always came—not sudden but inevitable, like ice forming on still water—he knew.
Killing her would not be enough.
He had killed before. Many times. The lake had accepted what he'd offered, body after body given to its depths, and each time the whispers had quieted for a while, sated.
But this one was different. He had felt it on the docks when the chain was around her throat and her pulse was hammering against the links.
The lake didn't want her dead. The lake wanted her alive.
Wanted the breath still in her lungs when the cold water closed over her face.
Wanted the fight, the struggle, the moment when the body's desperate will to survive met the greater will of the deep, and lost.
A living sacrifice. Not a body delivered to the water, but a soul taken by it.
Isla Rivers had to drown.
He opened his eyes. The fire had burned low, embers glowing orange against the dark gravel.
The lake stretched before him, patient as it had always been, patient as it would always be.
He would heal. He would wait. And when he was ready, he would go back to Duluth and give the water what it asked for.
He fed another piece of driftwood to the fire and listened to the lake breathe.