The Shield (Dominion Hall #10)

Chapter 1

NATALIE

The vibrator buzzed in my hand, steady and efficient, like the world’s most boring personal assistant.

It got the job done—usually—but this Saturday morning, even that felt half-hearted. I pressed harder, changed the angle, letting my hips roll into the rhythm my body knew by muscle memory. Heat built, sharp at first, then soft and sluggish, like a wave that never quite crested.

When the orgasm finally came, it was small. A whisper where I wanted a roar.

Fuck.

I stared up at the ceiling fan, catching my breath, and laughed under it.

Low. Bitter.

No man had ever made me come. Not once.

Not in college, not in the handful of relationships since, not even in the one-night stands where I’d done all the work and left them smiling. Men liked to be taken care of. I was good at that. What I wasn’t good at was demanding anything for myself.

Maybe that was fine.

I had my toys, my own hands, and my schedule. I had work that swallowed me whole. I had Maybelle, my spoiled tabby who thought every sunbeam in the house was laid out just for her. It wasn’t like I needed more.

Except sometimes, after mornings like this, I caught myself thinking: God, there has to be more.

I set the vibrator on the nightstand, still warm from my skin, and rolled over to grab my phone.

Half my search history was floodplain data and drainage reports. The other half was a parade of brightly colored silicone. I scrolled through a site with sleek little icons promising “mind-blowing,” “earth-shattering,” “the one toy you’ll never need to replace.”

Sure. I’d heard that before.

My phone buzzed again—this time with a text from Owen: King tide + onshore wind. Isle of Palms just called. Can you be there in an hour?

Arousal gone. Reality rushing in.

Work first. Always.

On my way, I typed, then swung my legs out of bed.

Jeans. Field boots. Golden brown ponytail high and mean.

I slung my laptop into my bag, tucked the drone case under my arm, and grabbed the fluorescent survey flags and roll of orange tape that served as my portable baseline. A stack of printed maps—FEMA floodplains in jaundiced pastels, my own overlays in bruised blues and reds—waited by the door.

On the street, a tour cart rattled past on its way to the Battery, people pointing up at verandas that had outlasted wars and hurricanes, as if longevity were a moral virtue. If Charleston had a religion, it wasn’t Methodism, or even money—it was memory.

We worshiped what we could keep. We ignored what was coming.

The Ravenel Bridge lifted me into cloudy sky, the river below hammered pewter. By the time I crossed the Ben Sawyer Bridge, whitecaps were already nipping at the marsh grass, wolf-teeth flashing in the shallows. A pelican skimmed low, wings steady, unbothered.

At Isle of Palms, Owen stood in the far lot near the public access, long legs braced against the wind, his clipboard tucked to his chest. He lifted a hand when he saw me, the way men who live by data do—precise, like a vector.

“The Soundline’s volleyball court is a lake,” he said by way of hello. “We’ll get better coverage if we start east and sweep toward the inlet.”

The place was pure Isle of Palms. Salt-stained pilings.

A long, splinter-smooth deck that spilled straight onto the sand.

A low stage where covers and near-famous bands blew out summer nights.

Rafters hung with old surfboards and sun-faded gig posters.

Bar rails sticky with beer and sunscreen.

A couple of battered pool tables listing like boats after a storm.

On clear days, the beachside courts thumped with pickup games and laughter.

Today, the nets sagged over brown water and the whole court had turned tidal pool, gulls standing in the end zone like referees who had given up.

“Understood.”

We climbed the dune walkover. The beach on the other side looked shaved—dune scarp bitten clean, the tide throwing itself at the line like it had a personal grudge.

House after house stood on stilts, balconies draped in bunting, underbellies stacked with kayaks and bikes and the kind of things you bought when you were sure the ocean would always stop where you wanted it to.

“Two feet of scarp in places,” Owen said, scanning. “Three where the fence failed.”

I crouched, dug my fingers into the sand, and pulled out a broken slat. “We should log every breach. People are going to ask why their fence didn’t save them. I’d rather give them data than sympathy.”

“Sympathy comes easier,” Owen said.

I laughed because he was right, and because it sounded like a line you could apply to men.

I set the first fluorescent flag at the toe of the scarp and tied orange tape around a post for the baseline. The tape flapped like a tongue trying to say something I wasn’t ready to hear.

The tide slapped my boots.

At one point, a man in mirrored sunglasses told me the Corps of Engineers was going to save this place with a seawall “like Miami,” as if walls were spells and we’d been saying the wrong incantation.

I told him walls helped some, harmed others, and always came with consequences.

He told me we’d lose tourism if we weren’t careful. I told him we’d lose houses first.

Downshore, a little girl shrieked as a wave erased the turret of her sandcastle.

Her father lifted her, spinning, both of them laughing like loss was a game you could play and still win.

I wanted to bottle the sound and hand it out at public meetings.

You won’t always get to rebuild in place.

I could say it a hundred ways with charts and model runs, and none of them felt as honest as a turret dissolving under a single, ordinary wave.

We worked the line. Owen flew the drone, its hum a small insect against the rush of surf and wind.

I walked and marked, measured and photographed, the labor soothing in its repetition.

A woman in a high-cut bathing suit paused to ask if her house would be “okay,” as if okay were a category you could enter with a credit card and a prayer.

I gave her my card and the script I kept for moments like this.

“We’re mapping active erosion zones today,” I explained.

“What we’re seeing here is king tide plus wind forcing.

It doesn’t mean your house is going to collapse tomorrow, but it tells us about near-term risk—and how the next storm might behave.

The city’s working on a suite of measures, structural and nonstructural. ”

She blinked. “Nonstructural?”

“Policy,” I said. “Buyouts. Elevations. Restrictions.”

Her mouth pinched at the last word. People always got hungry on the first three and went cold at the fourth.

“So, you’re the one who wants to tell us where we can live,” she said.

“I’m the one who wants to make sure you’re alive to argue with me,” I replied.

She stared another beat. “I remember your granddaddy,” she said finally. “Mayor Butch Kennedy, right? He came to my third-grade class and told us Charleston’s soul was in its houses.”

“Yes. Sounds like something he’d say,” I answered, a little warmth in my voice I didn’t mean to show. “He loves this city.”

“People listen to men like him,” she said.

People listen to men.

She didn’t mean it like that. Maybe she did. Maybe we all did.

“Careful, Nat,” Owen called from downshore. “Sneaky set.”

I lifted my head just as the ocean leapt, a line of whitewater racing with a speed it hadn’t shown all morning.

I back-pedaled, the edge chasing me like it wanted me, specifically.

It caught my shins, anyway, a cool slap that flooded my boots, soaked my jeans to mid-calf, and left me swearing as the water fled like it hadn’t done anything at all.

Owen trotted over, grin tucked in place. “Baptized by barometric pressure.”

“Something like that,” I said, squeezing my calves to force water out the cuff. “Make yourself useful and fly the inlet cut. If we get overwash on the back side, we’ll need to flag it.”

He nodded and headed toward Breach Inlet, the drone skimming ahead like a patient bird.

I stayed where I was and breathed, the wind yanking the hair at my neck, the taste of salt in my mouth.

My mind, traitor that it was, slid back to the morning. To the toy on my nightstand. To the truth I hated admitting. No man had ever made me come. They always looked grateful afterward, as if they’d gotten away with something.

Maybe, they had.

By noon, the sky wore the color of breath held too long. The wind changed in that small way you learn to feel if you spend enough time with it—not sharper so much as more certain.

Owen came jogging back, drone case in hand. “Overwash in two places,” he said, breath a little short. “Backside slough looks active. I flagged coordinates.”

“Let’s wrap the scarp and then walk it,” I said, tapping my watch. “I want community meetings on the calendar before we send the report. If people are going to hear hard truth, I want them hearing it from a person and not a PDF.”

“Good plan,” he said fondly. “I’ll email Huck the prelim summary.”

“Make it clean enough to leak without hurting us.”

“Always.”

We moved like we always did when the ocean had decided to remind us who it was—quick, competent, a little reverent.

Owen and I weren’t just colleagues. We were business partners.

Kennedy & Neilson had started three years earlier, born out of a contract the city never expected us to win.

Most people assumed we were a boutique outfit, too small to handle serious coastal work.

But Owen had the kind of technical mind that made even federal engineers shut up and listen, and I had the maps and the mouth.

His wife, Kimmy, kept us alive—part bookkeeper, part receptionist, all backbone—running invoices, scheduling site visits, and guarding the phone so we could stay in the field.

Together, we’d built a reputation for telling hard truths with enough polish that even politicians couldn’t look away.

We weren’t rich. We weren’t flashy. But we had influence. And in Charleston, influence mattered.

“Community meetings,” Owen muttered, shaking his head. “You’d stand in front of a firing squad if you thought it would get someone to listen.”

“Sometimes, it feels like the same thing,” I said, brushing sand from my palms.

We packed the drone back in its case and made our way toward the busier stretch of beach where the day-trippers clustered.

The Soundline’s music carried faintly over the wind, laughter and bass spilling out like the tide itself had a sense of humor.

Umbrellas dotted the sand in uneven constellations, children dragging boogie boards, teenagers holding phones high to capture a backdrop of waves that wanted nothing more than to eat their stage.

If you wanted the pulse of Charleston, you didn’t find it in council chambers or old men’s parlors. You found it here—in families arguing over sunscreen, in couples sipping canned cocktails from plastic cups, in neighbors whispering about whether their houses would still be here in twenty years.

“Let’s keep talking to people,” I said to Owen. “See what they’re worried about.”

He gave me a look. “You mean, let’s hand out cards until someone yells at us.”

“That, too.”

We stopped near a family hauling coolers and beach chairs closer to the dune line.

The mother’s eyes flicked nervously to the water lapping higher than she’d expected, and I recognized that look—half denial, half dread.

I explained what the king tide meant, how the wind forced water farther inland, how it wasn’t panic time, but it was proof of what we’d been saying.

She listened with her mouth tight, then nodded and thanked me, her husband hovering behind her with the wary expression of a man who didn’t like bad news.

A group of college kids nearby interrupted our path, one of them sloshing beer onto his own chest as he asked if this was “the big flood everyone kept whining about.” I gave him a quick primer, firm but polite, and when he realized I wasn’t backing down, he muttered something about tree-huggers and flopped back onto his towel.

Owen smirked. “I love public engagement days.”

“Shut up,” I said, but I was smiling, too.

Every conversation mattered, even the ones that went nowhere.

Every word seeded the ground for what was coming.

And whether or not I admitted it out loud, part of me knew that what we were doing today wasn’t just work.

It was laying the foundation for something bigger—for me, for this city, for the Kennedy name I’d spent my life trying to both honor and escape.

The sun was slipping into that harsh, silver angle it always found at midday, reflecting off the water. My boots were gritty with salt, my hair stiff from the spray, but I kept moving down the line of umbrellas and coolers, talking, listening, explaining.

Somewhere up ahead, past the flags and the volleyball court still drowning in tidewater, the crowd thickened.

And that was where I was headed.

Because the people who came here every weekend—the mothers with restless toddlers, the retirees with their folding chairs, the tourists with their sunburns—they were the ones I needed to reach.

The ones who would decide whether my maps became policy, whether my warnings became headlines, whether my future stayed behind a drafting table.

I adjusted the strap of my field bag, squinting into the wind as Owen caught up beside me. The day wasn’t done, not by a long shot.