Chapter 3 #3
He scrubbed at a smear of tar and let the muscle memory run while the mind wandered where it never did unless forced.
Shade interrupting Rone on a rainy night while he sat alone with a bottle and a gun.
. Shade asking him, “That what you think she’d want?
Rone didn’t want to listen to the man. Torres had bled out in his arms on a cold, wet dock.
Now he sent envelopes every month and drove his truck farther when he needed parts just to fix another man’s boat so he could send more.
Shade and his lies, Shade and his saves.
He’d told Rone once about a niece who’d died, and something in his face had cracked open for half a second—father-love, not uncle-grief.
Rone understood then that “niece” was the safer word for a man who didn’t want to invite questions.
Looking at Isobel now—the jaw, the refusal, the way the engine-room tin had put sunlight in her eyes for a heartbeat—he didn’t have to guess hard.
He wondered how many nights Shade had sat in some quiet place and talked about a girl he would never admit was his.
He could only guess the shady dealings on the docks were the reason.
Echo huffed like he’d heard the thought.
“We don’t know the tin Shade gave me was meant for Isobel.”
Echo rolled to his feet and stared at the outer door ladder leading down to the cockpit, body going from lazy to a wire strung tight.
“What?” Rone asked, even though he was already seeing it—the tiniest glint where the ladder met the platform, a thread catching light for a blink and then vanishing. Fishing line. Wrong place. Wrong height.
He set the brush down without a sound and cut the hose at the valve. The marina noise shrank to gulls and the slap of water. He moved careful, silent to the pilot house door and opened it. “Isobel? You got a second?”
She appeared outside the pilothouse with tape stuck to her wrist and a smudge of dust on her cheek, hair pulled up in a knot that hadn’t beaten the humidity but refused to surrender. “What’s up?”
“Stay where you are.” In one breath, he didn’t want to frighten her; in the next, he reminded himself she needed to be scared into leaving. “Please.”
Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t test him.
Good. He stepped to the platform’s edge and crouched.
There it was: monofilament stretched from the top rung, around the outside of the boat through the hole to the inner cleat on the far side, set just above ankle.
Not enough to break skin. Enough to take a person down the steps with a good injury if they weren’t paying attention and came down the ladder cocky.
On the line, three inches off the step, someone had crimped a lure with the barbs flattened.
Not meant to injure. Meant to send a message.
His jaw locked. He followed the line with his eyes. The tag end disappeared under the dock finger, tied off where a foot wouldn’t find it by accident. Fresh, too—the clear plastic still glossy, no salt fuzz.
Echo’s lip lifted over just a hint of tooth.
Rone pinched the line between thumb and forefinger, easing it slack with the kind of patience he only used for bad ideas other people built.
He didn’t hand her a lecture on what it was.
He didn’t name the knot. He didn’t give whoever was listening a how-to.
He just gathered it until he had the lure in his hand and snapped it off with a quick twist.
He stood and showed Isobel his palm. The lure dangled, a nasty little Christmas ornament of its own.
Her mouth thinned. “That was for me.”
“For anyone coming down fast and not looking.” He met her eyes. “But yeah.”
“Who?”
“If I told you, it would be a list and not a name.” He scanned the slips.
A dinghy idled three boats over, no lights, low man in a dark cap facing away.
By the time Rone looked, the motor puttered quieter and the bow turned out toward the channel like it had never been interested in this dock at all.
Echo tracked it with the hard stillness he saved for prey he wasn’t allowed to chase.
Rone wanted to chase. He wanted to put fingers in the fabric of whoever kept testing boundaries and rip until seams popped. Instead, he breathed and tucked the lure into his pocket, a piece of proof he could put on a table later.
Isobel came down one step and stopped herself on the next, catching his look.
Smart. He set a hand out to balance her as she stepped the last one to the platform.
She didn’t need it. She took it anyway. Despite her calm expression, her damp, clammy palm told a different story.
Quiet strength again, sliding around his ribs and settling there like it meant to stay.
“Was this Shade’s world?” she asked, voice low. “Warnings and lines and games?”
“Shade’s world had rules.” He felt the old weariness file down his words. “Men who left warnings usually kept them. Men who didn’t… weren’t men for long.”
“And where do we fall? People who ignore them?”
He almost smiled. “Stupid. Brave. Both.”
She looked at his hand still in hers, and he let go. The loss was immediate in a way he didn’t like, because when he touched her, he knew she was safely by his side. She disembarked and studied the outside of the boat as if to find more danger.
Echo stepped up and gave him that side-eye again, hard enough to count as an opinion.
“I’m not her savior,” Rone told the dog under his breath. “We’re helping. That’s it.”
Echo didn’t blink.
Rone scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “Fine,” he said softly. “We don’t walk away. Happy?”
The dog’s tail thumped once. Isobel pretended not to see it, but the corner of her mouth tipped—flicker quick, there and gone.
“Isobel,” Rone said, because the quieter part of him didn’t want to keep ducking the thing sitting in his chest. “About Shade. There’s stuff I could tell you. Maybe should.”
She lifted her chin. “Like how he died?”
“Like who he made enemies of on the way.” He hesitated. He saw Shade’s hands, rough and careful, setting a mint tin on a table; heard him say niece while his eyes said daughter. “Like who he lost before that.”
Her breath hitched. Then she shook her head once, neat. “Not here. Not when someone’s stringing tripwires on my ladder.”
“Fair,” he said. Relief flickered with regret. He could live with both for now. “We’ll pick it up somewhere that isn’t a target.”
She nodded.
“Dinner tonight. Casual. Take the dinghy to a spot a bit from here.” If he got her away from the boat, away from the questions she thought she’d find the answers to in Shade’s boat, maybe he could convince her to leave and let him finish the work.
Echo stood and wandered back toward their boat as if he’d finished his job. The dog sashayed like he was a stage dancer. Rone followed him to their slip and growled down at him. “Don’t be so smug. Not a date.”
Echo pranced into the boat and went to the stateroom only to return with Rone’s button-up shirt he only wore when he had to dress for an occasion.
Rone snatched it, balled it up and threw it on the settee. “I. Don’t. Date.”