Chapter 4 #3
The pedestal they’d hit first sulked now under a dusting of powder.
The second smoldered. The third—two slips beyond Isobel’s—was new fire, real hungry, chewing on the lip of a piling where old varnish met fresh.
He hammered it with the extinguisher’s last breath, the nozzle biting his palm.
He thought he felt his skin give with heat, but he ignored it.
He always had. Hands were for work, and work sometimes burned.
When the flame guttered into a blackened crescent, he turned to scan the dock, the way you do when you know you’re not alone.
There—down the far run, smoke veiling the walkway in a dirty curtain—Isobel.
Small against the glow, quick and sure, an extinguisher at her hip, another in a pair of hands beside her.
Lucky, he thought, catching the angle of shoulders.
Lucky from the Jefferson forty-eight in C-row—skittish as a crab and twice as unpredictable.
But Lucky didn’t help people. Lucky hid and prayed storms passed.
Rone lifted his chin, looking for the lazy line of Lucky’s gray ponytail, the neon flip-flops he wore like a joke.
No ponytail. No neon.
A second flame coughed high near Isobel’s knee, and she doused it with a precision that said she’d been coached once and listened. The man with her didn’t move like a recluse. He moved like a decision.
Rone started. Echo hovered at his heel, the dog’s breath steady, his weight coiled. The wind shifted. The new man’s scent rode it—cologne where there shouldn’t be any, the sour thread of someone who’d been running.
Not Lucky.
“Echo.” Rone’s hand flattened by instinct. The dog’s gaze locked on Isobel, then on the stranger, then back to Rone like a question with teeth.
“Protect.” The word came out of a part of Rone he didn’t let talk much. It didn’t ask. It commissioned.
Echo launched—clean, quiet, a streak of purpose. The shepherd’s nails clipped the boards twice and vanished into smoke.
Rone grabbed a fresh extinguisher off a piling and ran. A spark, caught by the draft, curled back like a comet and landed on the crest of his hand—sharp, mean. He didn’t break stride. He didn’t swear. He shoved the pain into the same room as the others and locked the door.
“Isobel,” he shouted.
Her head snapped, and for a second, he saw her eyes through the exhaust haze—steady, stubborn, ready. The man beside her half-turned, keeping his face away. That told Rone as much as a name.
“Echo,” Rone called, expecting the bark that said I’ve arrived, or the low growl that said not one step closer. Nothing. Smoke swallowed sound like wool. The space where the dog should’ve tugged at the edge of the world and then refused to fall off was empty.
Rone’s lungs didn’t like that. He hammered the nozzle at the base of the flame at Isobel’s feet until the hiss folded, then swung what powder he had left at a tongue of fire climbing the back of the pedestal two feet away.
It died hard. His hand screamed a bright little star, and he clamped the extinguisher in the other and finished what needed finishing.
Barking erupted but farther away. Echo claimed another threat, not the one standing in front of them. The man glanced to where Echo called out in the darkness with warning, telling Rone there was another predator who had been a bigger threat nearby.
“Where is he?” Isobel’s voice scraped at him. Not panicked. Determined.
“Finding.” Rone’s eyes cut every shadow, every heap of coiled line where a smart dog might go low and watch the problem’s ankles. “Back.” His voice dropped to that grip-steel tone that brooked no argument. “Behind me.”
Isobel didn’t argue. She stepped where he told her to step, close enough that he could feel the shake she was hiding when her arm brushed his.
The man who wasn’t Lucky drifted three paces back—too calm for a stranger, too present for a neighbor.
He had what Rone thought of as messenger energy—carry the threat, don’t get messy.
Rone took one forward step to test it. The man retreated exactly one. Not fight, then. Delivery.
“Say your piece,” Rone told him.
Echo barked like rapid fire. A man screamed from the area near the parking lot.
The man in front of them glanced toward the eruption as if to run over to save his friend, but his gaze snapped back to Rone, to Isobel. “Your father died for something he had,” he said, voice even, words meant to drop like stones. “It’s time to turn it over to them.”
A lazy little wind nosed the smoke aside and let Rone see the man’s eyes. Not drunk. Not unhinged. Paid.
“Who’s ‘them’?” Rone asked.
The man ignored him. “Give it back,” he told Isobel, “and this ends. You drag your feet—” He let the sentence stop like that was more effective than finishing it.
“Back up,” Rone said.
The man did, gloved hands loose at his sides, the kind of gloves that weren’t for warmth or work but for not leaving a story behind. He looked at Isobel like he knew she wasn’t going to run. He possibly liked that. Messengers often did.
“Echo!” Rone called again, and the night gave him only the slap of small waves and a far-off siren that belonged to some other emergency. A hollow opened under his ribs. He didn’t feed it. He couldn’t.
The man tipped his chin toward the water. “If you ever want to see your father again,” he said, “you’ll give it back.” Then he smiled without pleasure, turned, and walked into the smoke like a door had opened for him there.
Isobel shot faster than Echo by his side to chase the man. Rone bolted after her, wrapped his arms around her middle, and held her back to his chest. “No.”
She struggled to free herself, but he pressed her tighter against him. “We’ll lose him.”
He hated the we in that sentence because he liked it. “He’s got no say and probably knows less about your father, but doesn’t mean he won’t take you to who does.”
“Good.” She pushed away but he wouldn’t release her to her death.
Rone’s jaw worked. “Stop. I know you're smarter than this.”
She stopped fighting and breathed in several shallow breaths until she managed one deep one.
“I’m going to let you go, but you promise me you won’t run.”
“I won’t,” she breathed out, making him realize how close they were and how long it had been since a woman was in his arms, especially one as beautiful and feisty as Isobel.
And when he remembered she was in a thin nightgown, he forced himself to release her and take a giant step away.
It was his turn to catch his breath. He counted the things he could control—power cut, flames out, dock wet, neighbors accounted for.
One thing he could not count: the dog who should’ve been at his heel.
“Echo!” He put more gravel in it, more command than hope.
Silence answered.
They moved together, scanning the black seams—the gap between boat and finger pier, the dark holes where a smart animal might drop to trail a problem underwater along the pilings. Rone’s hand burned brighter with every heartbeat, a metronome for the worry he refused to let start conducting.
“He knows to circle back,” Isobel said, and there was faith in it like water finding a low place.
“He does,” Rone answered, because if he didn’t say it out loud, the room where he’d locked fear would kick the door and demand attention.
They swept the dock end to end. Neighbors peered out and asked questions he didn’t answer. Powder dust stuck to his tongue. A smear of melted plastic tracked down his wrist where the ember had branded him and was now letting itself be noticed.
Isobel saw it before he could tuck it behind his back. “Rone.” She didn’t scold, she spoke more like concern with soft edges. “You’re burned.”
“I’ve had worse.” Truth, but not helpful.
“Worse doesn’t mean this one doesn’t need tending.” She took his wrist—careful, firm—and turned his hand into the only dock light left in the form of a city lamp post. Angry, red crescent, beginning to puff. “Come,” she said, and the word didn’t give him a choice, only shelter. “Inside.”
He wanted to keep moving until Echo appeared out of the dark like he always did.
He wanted to kick every shadow until it admitted what it was hiding.
He wanted to shake the dockmaster awake and say lock this place down until I say, and he couldn’t have any of those.
What he could have was her steady hand and the small mercy of water and salve.
He let her lead.
Inside, the boat held the smell of night—metal, salt, the faint mineral oil from whatever cleaner she’d found that didn’t make old varnish protest. She sat him at the settee like she’d been born giving orders kindly.
She disappeared to the back, returned in shorts and a t-shirt, then took out a bowl and the kit she already had placed where a seasoned sailor would put it.
He turned his hand palm-down on his knee because stubborn dies hard, and she didn’t call him on it.
She just dipped a cloth and set cool against fire.
The first touch took a tight inch out of his spine. He didn’t mean to make the sound. She didn’t pretend not to hear it.
“Better,” he said after a long breath.
She nodded, eyes on his skin, not his face, because dignity matters. “He said my father’s alive.”
He shifted when she moved the cloth, heat talking louder now that it had an audience. “Can’t trust him.”
She wrung the cloth, her fingers sure. “He said my father would die if I didn’t turn something over to them.” Her gaze flicked up, quick and searching. “I don’t know who ‘they’ are. He didn’t say.”
The Altoids tin rose in Rone’s mind as if it had been sitting at the center of his thought the whole time, waiting its turn.
Red paint rubbed smooth by a man who carried it everywhere.
A rabbit charm carved for small hands. A washer etched in small, careful letters meant for one person only. FOR FIRST MATE—ALWAYS HOME. —DAD.
And its twin, tucked inside the panel in a wall of his boat.
Not yet, he told himself, and shoved the thought back where he kept the parts of truth that could get a person killed if said at the wrong time. The sting in his hand helped. Pain could be useful when you needed a reason to be cautious.
“Thanks for keeping me from doing something dumb.” She swallowed as if to control her anger or tears.
“I wanted to get him to talk. But he wasn’t here for answers.
Just threats.” She folded the cloth and laid it cool again, and when she spoke next, she sounded like the version of herself that had tossed water at flame without flinching.
“I want answers, but even if he was telling the truth, I can’t take him—or what he stands for—down alone. That’s a fast way to die.”
Rone’s throat did that hard swallow it hadn’t done since the night a bullet took Torres and taught him what alone looked like with sirens.
He had been watching Isobel for the ways she was like his partner—jaw set, eyes bright, the refusal to step back when stepping back would be smart.
This wasn’t that. This was a woman who could measure her fight and pick ground that didn’t end in a body bag.
Maybe she wasn’t like Torres, which allowed relief to slip through a crack before he could shut it.
It didn’t mean he should care. Caring was how men like him made stupid promises and got people hurt.
She lifted the cloth. The worst of the red had calmed.
He could move his fingers without wanting to put his teeth through a stick.
She squeezed burn gel into her palm, warmed it with a breath, and smoothed a thin shine over the crescent.
Her touch was careful and impersonal and somehow not impersonal at all.
“Thank you,” he said, and meant for more than the salve.
She taped gauze to his skin. “You’re welcome.” She hesitated, then asked, “Who do you think ‘they’ are?”
He stared at the white bandage edge against his skin and saw an Altoids tin tucked where only a daughter would think to look. “I think they’re patient until they’re not,” he said. “And I think they just told us they’re done waiting.”
A sound cut across the night—sharp, distant, wrong enough to snap both their heads to the dark rectangle of the window. Not a gull. Not an engine cough. A single bark, clipped short, swallowed fast.
Echo.
Rone stood too fast. Pain lit his hand like a match, but it wasn’t the brightest thing in him anymore.
“Stay here,” he said.
Isobel was already moving. “Not a chance.”
They hit the cockpit together, breath fogging in cooling air, eyes searching the lanes of black water and the ribs of dock shadows where a dog could be and a man could hide. The marina held its breath, listening with them.
Another sound, closer now. Not a bark. A splash.
Rone didn’t think. He vaulted onto the dock, burn on his hand a brand that said keep moving.
Behind him, Isobel’s voice carried—a prayer, or his name, or both.
And from beneath the dock, something knocked once, like a warning coming up through wood.