Chapter 15
Alice Prescott didn't want to leave her house.
Dana stood in the kitchen where she'd sat four days ago talking Alice through a kidnapping, and now she was trying to talk her into a truck.
"I've lived in this house for forty-one years," Alice said.
She was standing at the counter with her hands wrapped around a coffee mug and her back straight, and the set of her jaw was a preview of what Dana was going to look like in thirty years if she kept fighting everything that came at her.
"Ray and I raised two boys in this house.
I'm not leaving because some man sent a picture. "
"Alice. He photographed you through your window."
"Let him photograph. I'll give him my good side."
Dana loved this woman. Had loved her since she was fourteen and Alice had caught her crying in the shop bathroom after her father's funeral and sat down on the floor beside her without saying a word for thirty minutes.
Alice Prescott was four-foot-eleven and made of the same granite as the harbor breakwater, and convincing her to do anything she hadn't decided to do herself was like pushing a boat uphill.
"Ray's already at the compound," Dana said.
"He's safe. He's eating Nora's cooking and complaining about the coffee.
But he's worried about you, and I'm worried about you, and the men who took him off your porch have already lost two people this week, which makes them desperate, which makes you a target. "
Alice looked at her over the coffee mug. "Are you safe?"
"Yes."
"Because of the biker."
Dana blinked. "His name is Squall."
"I know what his name is. I've been on this waterfront since before his mother was born.
I know every man in that club by road name and real name and what they were before they earned either one.
" Alice set the mug down. "Brian Kane used to fish off the same dock as Ray's nephew.
Good deckhand. Better captain. Lost his boat and found something else.
The question isn't whether he's keeping you safe.
The question is whether you're letting him. "
"I'm letting him enough."
"Enough isn't a thing you do halfway, sweetheart."
Dana drove Alice to the compound in a silence that felt like being examined from the inside. Alice sat in the passenger seat with her purse on her lap and her eyes on the road and the specific quietness of a woman who'd said what she meant and was waiting for it to land.
At the compound, Nora met them at the door and took Alice inside with the practiced efficiency of a woman who'd turned the mill's great room into a second living room.
Ray was in the back booth — his booth now, apparently — and when Alice walked through the door, the old man stood up with a speed that contradicted every complaint he'd made about his knees in the last five years.
Dana watched them hold each other and felt the ache in her chest that came from seeing something she wanted and wasn't sure she'd earned.
She found Squall in the garage.
He was at the workbench with Diesel and Breech, a map of the coast spread between them. They looked up when she walked in, and the conversation didn't stop this time — either they'd accepted her presence or Squall had told them to, and she wasn't sure which one mattered more.
"Alice is inside," she said.
Squall nodded. "Good."
"She didn't want to come. She told me she knew your real name before I did."
Diesel coughed into his fist. Breech studied the map with sudden fascination.
"She knows everyone's name," Squall said. "She's been on this waterfront longer than the harbor master."
"She also told me I should let you keep me safe."
"Smart woman."
"I told her I was letting you enough."
"Enough." He said the word like it tasted wrong. "You're letting me enough."
"Don't start."
"I'm not starting anything. I'm pointing out that you've been in two firefights, swung a breaker bar at a man's arm, driven to a kidnapping solo, and argued your way into every operation we've run, and you're telling a seventy-year-old woman that you're letting me protect you enough.
" He leaned on the bench. "Define enough. "
"Enough that I'm still standing here instead of locked in your room, which is what you actually want."
Diesel stood up. "I'm going to go — anywhere else." He left. Breech followed without a word, taking the map with him, which Dana noted meant the conversation about Meer's location was coming with her whether Squall wanted it to or not.
"I don't want to lock you in my room," Squall said when they were alone.
"No?"
"No. I want you to stay in my room voluntarily because you understand that a man who photographs women through windows is capable of worse and I can't function if I'm thinking about where you are instead of what I'm doing."
"And I can't function if I'm sitting still while people I love get threatened.
" She stepped closer to the bench. Closer to him.
Close enough that the argument had a physical dimension — the pull between them that made every disagreement feel like foreplay.
"Meer lost his warehouse, his enforcer, his grab crew leader.
He's operating out of somewhere new, and he picked a place fast, which means it's somewhere he already knew about. Somewhere on the water."
Squall watched her. She could see him fighting it — the part of him that wanted to shut her out for her own protection wrestling with the part that knew she was about to say something useful.
"I know this waterfront," she said. "Better than Breech's laptop.
Better than Diesel's road map. Every dock, every shed, every derelict building between the fuel pier and the point.
If Meer set up a new operation in the last forty-eight hours, he did it in a place that was already empty and already had water access, and there are exactly four spots that fit. "
"Dana—"
"The old Ryland boathouse past the fuel dock — burned out, no roof, no good.
The ferry terminal storage building on the south side — too much foot traffic, even off-season.
The bait-and-tackle warehouse on Pier Six — possible, but the harbormaster walks that dock twice a day.
" She ticked them off on her fingers. "That leaves the fish-processing plant at the end of Harbor Road.
Closed eighteen months ago. Still has power because the owner's fighting the demolition order.
Loading dock on the water, vehicle access from the back road, and a cold-storage room the size of a basketball court. "
Squall was quiet. His jaw was working, and his eyes were on hers with that intensity she'd learned to read — not anger, not frustration, but the specific conflict of a man whose need to control the situation was losing to his respect for the woman dismantling his objections.
"You're sure," he said.
"I've been driving past that plant every day for a year.
Three weeks ago the parking lot was empty.
Last week there were tire tracks in the gravel.
This week there's a padlock on the gate that isn't the owner's — wrong brand, new hardware.
I noticed it because I notice everything on this waterfront. It's what I do."
He stared at her for a long time.
"You noticed a padlock."
"I notice everything."
"Yeah." He pushed off the bench and stood close to her — not touching, but inhabiting her space the way he always did, his presence a physical claim that her body responded to whether she gave it permission or not. "You do."
"So let me help. Not from the truck. Not from the compound. Let me be part of how this ends."
"If something happens to you—"
"If something happens to me, it happens to a woman who chose to be there. Not a woman who was left behind."
The garage was quiet. The compound sounds filtered in — voices, a bike starting up, the clink of bottles from the great room. Squall looked at her the way he'd looked at the harbor the first night she'd met him — reading the conditions, measuring the risk, deciding whether to commit.
"You stay with me," he said. "Not behind me. Not in front. With."
"With works."
He reached out and caught her hand. Pulled her forward until she was against his chest, his arms closing around her with the possessive certainty that was just who he was — not a choice, not a performance, but the fundamental operating system of a man who'd decided she was his and was going to keep acting on that decision until she told him to stop.
She wasn't going to tell him to stop.
"The fish plant," he said into her hair. "You're sure."
"I'm sure."
"Then we hit it tomorrow." He pulled back enough to look at her face. "And you ride with me."
She nodded. His hand tightened on hers, and she tightened back, and for a moment the garage felt like the only room in the world — just the two of them and the workbench and the map that Breech had taken and wouldn't need, because the woman standing in front of the VP had already drawn it from memory.
Squall pulled his phone and called Torch. "Church in an hour. Dana found Meer's new location. We're moving tomorrow."
He hung up. Looked at her.
"You're going to be the death of me," he said.
"Not if I can help it."
He kissed her — hard, fast, a stamp of ownership pressed against her mouth in the middle of the garage where anyone walking by could see — and walked out to gather his brothers.
Dana stood at the workbench alone, her lips buzzing, her heart hammering, and the image of the fish-processing plant at the end of Harbor Road sitting in her mind like a target she'd painted herself.
Tomorrow, they'd walk into it together.
She was done being left behind.