Chapter 10
Steel
The phone buzzes against the nightstand before I open my eyes.
Isla's hair covers my chest. Her hand rests against my pecs, fingers spread, and for two seconds I let myself have this. Her breathing slow and deep beside me, the weight of her arm, the purring low and continuous in my ribcage, a sound I haven't made for fifteen years and now can't seem to stop.
The phone buzzes again.
I reach for it without moving the rest of my body. The screen reads Diane, 6:14 AM. She doesn't usually call at six in the morning.
I answer. "Hello."
"Thomas. I drove past Isla's place this morning. The front fence is down. Three sections, maybe more." Her voice shakes. "The cages are torn apart. Equipment everywhere."
"Okay, hold on a sec."
I slide out from under her arm and pull the blanket over her shoulder. She doesn't wake. I grab my jeans off the floor and pull them on in the hallway, then take the phone to the kitchen and close the door behind me.
"How bad?"
"The intake pens along the east fence. And the raptor mews—the door's off its hinges.
Equipment scattered across the yard, smashed.
And there are snares around the old-growth stump.
The fox den. I couldn't see the family anywhere—there are tracks heading into the timber but the kits—" She stops.
Breathes. "It looks really bad, Thomas."
"Stay off the property. I'll handle it."
I hang up and a tremor runs through my fingers. It lasts about four seconds before I dial Knox. It stops as soon as I have a plan to make.
Knox answers on the second ring. His voice sounds like a man who slept three hours and hurts everywhere. He's still recovering from Bloodstone, ribs wrapped and shoulder stiff, but he sharpens the second I tell him what happened.
"Ridgecrest?"
"Looks like it. Systematic, not random. They tore the place apart. Destroyed equipment, ripped doors off, cut the fencing. This isn't Humans First. This is targeted."
"What do you need?"
"Colt on the surveillance footage. I want every camera on Isla's property reviewed from midnight on, if they haven't smashed them. Rex on the road—I want to know who drove out that way last night, if he can find anything. Garrett on a repair crew. The front fence is down in three sections."
"Done. I'll call Church for this afternoon."
I hang up and dial Colt. Then Rex. Then Garrett.
Four calls in six minutes, each one putting somebody on something.
I stand in the kitchen in my jeans with no shirt and the phone warm against my ear and I build a plan because building is the only thing that keeps me moving.
If I stop, the fear catches up, and I don't let it catch up.
Isla appears in the kitchen doorway. My shirt, bare feet, her hair tangled.
"What happened?" I hold up a finger and turn back to the phone.
Garrett's working through the repair crew—materials in the garage, what we'd need from the hardware store, how many hours the mews door will take to rehang. He says he can have a crew out by ten.
"Good." I hang up. Set the phone down. She's watching me from the doorway with her arms folded.
"Someone hit the rescue center overnight.
Diane drove past this morning—fences cut, equipment destroyed, the mews door ripped off.
They set snares around the fox den. The family scattered into the woods. "
Her arms drop. "The kits?"
"Tracks heading into the trees. Diane couldn't find them."
The colour leaves her face. Then the rest of it lands. "How bad is the rest of it?"
"Bad. But I've got it covered. Colt's pulling the surveillance footage, Rex is running plates on anyone who drove that road last night, Garrett's got a repair crew heading out by—"
"I need to go to my land."
I look at her. She hasn't moved.
"We don't know if they're still watching the property. Colt needs to review the perimeter footage before—"
"Thomas."
"If we wait for Rex to finish running plates, we'll know who we're dealing with before—"
"Thomas."
I stop.
She's not angry. The calm in her face hits harder than if she'd yelled.
"You just made four calls about my rescue center without once asking me what I wanted to do."
The sentence sits between us. The coffeemaker cold, the phone resting where I left it with the call log showing four outgoing calls in six minutes. I look at the log and then I look at her face and I see it.
The way she's watching me. Like she's watching a pattern she's seen before.
"I didn't walk out of a company that made every decision for me to stand in a kitchen and listen to someone else make every decision for me."
"I built the mews with my own lumber. The surgery table I welded. Every piece I've put into that land for six years, I did myself. That's my property. My center. And you called people before you even told me what happened."
She's right, and I shove the realization down because she's also in danger, and the people who did this aren't finished, and whoever tore that place apart did it to send a message, and the fox kits are somewhere in that woods alone, and if I stop holding this together for five seconds the fear will eat me alive.
"I'm trying to help."
"You're trying to take over." She pushes off the counter. "I don't need someone taking over. I've done this alone for six years."
"And look where that got you."
I say it before I can stop it.
The sentence drops between us. Her face changes, and what I see isn't anger. She's heard this before. From someone else, in a different room, and I just sounded like them.
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.
"Where it got me," she repeats.
"I didn't mean—"
"Where it got me is twelve acres and a federal permit and a rescue center I built with my own hands from a severance check and a welding torch.
Where it got me is six years of reporting to Fish and Wildlife while no one listened, and filing every report anyway, and feeding animals at two in the morning because no one else showed up.
" Her voice doesn't rise. It stays level and that's worse.
"Where it got me is the table of a man I've trusted for two years, who just told me that everything I built isn't good enough because I built it alone. "
"That's not what I said."
"It's what you meant."
I stand there with my arms loose at my sides. She's wrong about what I meant but she's right about how it sounded, and I can't fix both at the same time.
"I can't watch someone I love lose everything because I didn't move fast enough to prevent it."
The word sits in the air between us.
Love.
I didn't plan to say it. I said it because it's true, because the fear underneath the plan is the same fear that's lived in my chest for fifteen years.
The person I care about is in danger and doing nothing isn't something I survive.
So I move. I call. I build the plan. Because I know what happens when I can't do enough.
"And I can't be with someone who loves me by deciding what's best for me, without even talking to me about it."
The word hangs in the kitchen, and neither of us reaches for it.
"I'm going to my property," she says. "On my terms. Not yours."
"I'll ask Garrett to drive me."
She turns and walks out of the kitchen, bare feet on the floor, my shirt hanging past her thighs. The doorframe swallows her and she's gone.
I stand in the kitchen with my phone on the counter and the call log open. Four brothers deployed on a rescue operation for a woman who didn't ask me to call anyone.
I pick up the phone. I set it down. I pick it up again and then I put it in my pocket because there's no one left to call and calling is the only thing I know how to do.
The garage smells like motor oil and sawdust.
I sit on the workbench stool with my glasses off.
Elbows on my knees, face in my hands. Without the lenses the garage softens into nothing I need to see.
I know where everything is. I labeled every shelf in here.
Organized every hook on the pegboard. And when the phone rang this morning, I did what I always do—picked it up and called four people and built a plan she didn't ask for.
She said love.
I'll hear it for a long time. The way the word left her mouth, aimed at me, carrying the weight of everything she's afraid I'll take from her. Her authority over her own land. Her right to decide for herself what happens next.
I don't know how to love any other way. Every version I've tried looks like this—hold tighter, move faster, build the wall before the hit lands. Isla didn't lose someone. She lost herself to control. And the man she chose last night just showed her control wearing his face.
Somewhere on the compound, Garrett's truck starts. The engine fades down the south road toward the coast highway, and I know who's in the passenger seat without looking.
She's going to her land. On her terms.