Chapter 6 #2
“A drive,” he said. “I haven’t plugged it in.”
“Because…?”
“Because it could be a key or a fuse,” he said. “Either way, something lights.”
She set her mug down with care and laced her fingers together so she didn’t reach for him. “Thank you for telling me.”
He gave the smallest nod, and the gratitude she felt at that ridiculous fraction made something deep in her chest go tender and sore.
She should have been angry with him for keeping it.
She wasn’t. Or not exactly. There was anger in there, but it had softened into a sad kind of understanding: he had been trying to build a wall around her without noticing she’d been born on the other side of it.
He shifted, the couch creaking under his weight, and leaned forward, forearms on the table, the line of his back tense even at rest. “We’ll look,” he said, an adjustment so slight it might have been the sound of a lock agreeing to open.
“But not here. Not on anything connected to anything. Off-site. Offline. We control the light switch and who sees it.”
She exhaled. It trembled coming out, then steadied. “Okay.”
Echo’s tail thumped once under the table: a single stamp of approval. Rone’s mouth twitched.
“Tell me about your father,” he said. The way he said it wasn’t prying; it was invitation.
She glanced at the helm. She stared until her breath evened.
“He could fix anything,” she said, eyes on the memory.
“Boat engines. Toys. Broken moods. He hated when I cried because he didn’t know where to set his hands to mend that.
He would give me a task instead. ‘Hold the flashlight, Isobel. Turn it toward where we need to see.’ And when I did, he’d say, ‘Good. There it is. We can fix what we can see.’”
Rone’s throat moved. He didn’t say the obvious: what we can’t see is what kills us. He didn’t have to. It hovered around his eyes.
“He taught me knots,” she went on, finding a small, improbable smile. “Bowline, clove hitch. He said every knot has a purpose. If you try to make it do more than it’s designed for, it fails. People are like that. He wasn’t wrong.”
Rone rubbed the edge of the bandage with his thumb as if the texture could ground him. “Do you think he left because he failed?”
She shook her head. “I think someone pulled him.”
Something lurched in the water then—a mullet, probably—and slapped back with a sound like a hand hitting wet stone. Echo’s ears pricked, head up now, gaze cutting toward the hatch.
Rone’s head turned a fraction. Awareness slid over him like a second skin. He didn’t reach for anything. He just listened with his body, and she discovered she could tell the difference now between the way he listened for weather and the way he listened for threat.
The moment stretched and passed. Echo’s ears eased. Rone’s shoulders did not.
“You’re thinking about leaving,” she said softly. It wasn’t accusation. It was observation. The way his body leaned toward the door even while all of him sat in the cabin with her.
“I’m thinking about next steps,” he said.
“I’m thinking if we open the drive, we need distance from everything with a plug and a connection.
I’m thinking lines and locks and the things Sheriff Fletcher will or won’t do even with an election breathing down his neck.
” He ran his teeth across his lower lip and left a white line there.
“I’m thinking I wish you hadn’t told him who you are. ”
She blinked. “Why?”
“The less they know about you, the better. The less they’ll push before you go.”
“And if I don’t go?”
“Then you die. It’s a fact. Don’t trust me to protect you.”
She wanted to push. She didn’t. Some fights you pick. Some you set aside because there’s a bigger one at the door.
Echo shifted again, weight landing forward. He made a sound in his chest, low and vibrating like a humming wire.
“What is it?” Isobel whispered.
Rone didn’t answer. He was already moving, the coffee mug silent in his hand as he set it down without looking. He stood and turned toward the door, every line in him narrowing to purpose.
“Rone?”
He should’ve looked back. He didn’t. Something in the air changed—some small invisible thread pulled taut. A gull’s call sliced past and left the quiet truer behind it.
“Stay,” he said to Echo without taking his eyes off the doorway. Echo ignored him, half-standing, tail stiffened into a straight line.
Isobel followed his gaze, reflex more than choice. She didn’t see anything through the open but a slice of sky the color of dime metal.
Then a red dot bloomed on the front of her shirt. Tiny. Perfect. A bead of light right over the sternum.
For a heartbeat, her mind made it something ordinary—a reflected marker from a kid, a trick of sun. The way a brain will translate a snake into a rope until you’re too close to do anything but bleed.
Rone saw it when she saw it. His face didn’t change. Everything else did.
“Down,” he said, and the word was more breath than sound.
Echo erupted—no bark at first, just the violent intake of air a dog makes when the world moves wrong. Then the sound: a crack of fury so sudden it stung her eardrums. He launched for the door with a howl that had nothing to do with show and everything to do with blood and protection.
Rone was already moving, a blur at the edge of the table.
His shoulder hit her waist, and the air left her in a grunt as the two of them went to the floor.
Her mug went end over end, coffee arcing in a thin brown parabola.
Her elbow glanced the table edge; pain flared, sharp and bright, and went quiet again under the adrenaline that swallowed everything.
Her cheek hit the rug—scratch of fiber, taste of old salt that lived in everything here.
Rone’s body covered hers, not crushing, a shelter built of heat and muscle and the precise weight of someone who knew how much pressure a ribcage could take.
His uninjured hand pressed her head gently to the floor to keep it from smacking when the boat jolted.
“Don’t move,” he said into her hair, close enough that she felt the words rather than heard them.
Echo’s front claws scrambled, then found purchase. The dog’s snarl shifted to something more surgical—the cutting, rhythmic bark of a trained animal marking target, warning, daring.
Isobel couldn’t see the dot anymore, but she could feel it on her skin like a phantom sunburn. She could feel Rone breathing above her: steady, controlled, the kind of breath that pulled discipline out of chaos by force.
Outside, somewhere beyond the door, something metallic pinged off the piling—small, crisp, terrifyingly casual.
Rone’s weight shifted.
Echo’s bark became a roar.
The world erupted.
Glass shattered overhead in a violent spray. Shards rained like tiny fragments of death.
The sheriff arrived an hour later, not with the cavalry—no sirens, no crime-scene tape, no white-suited techs climbing aboard with tweezers and evidence bags.
Just Fletcher, hat in his hand, and a single deputy whose camera clicked in slow, mechanical bursts while the dock baked under a bright, indifferent sun.
Rone stood on the upper deck near the dinghy outside the pilot house and watched Fletcher eye the damage. The pilot house windows wore their new holes like badges—starburst fractures crazed with tiny prisms, sunlight snagging in every edge.
“Feel that cool December breeze up here,” Fletcher said at last, as if a stiff wind had blown through and rearranged curtains. His tone was butter-soft, the kind used on old ladies, drunks, and anyone you didn’t plan to help. “Ms. Isobel good?”
“Define good,” Rone said, and made himself keep the anger out of it.
He didn’t need to tell him that Isobel wore a brave face but he knew she was in the head, shaking as she pulled glass from her hair.
A fear he kept stomped down threatened to resurface.
What had he done? Any bullet could’ve claimed Isobel, and he could’ve done nothing to save her.
He needed to get her out of this marina. One way or another.
Echo pressed against his leg—solid, vibrating low, eyes fixed on the dock. If the dog ever learned English, Rone figured the first sentence would be there’s a problem you’re not addressing.
The deputy leaned around the doorway, snapped three more photos, and scuffed a shoe through a glitter of glass.
The sound rang high and mean in Rone’s teeth.
He cataloged it, the way he catalogued Fletcher’s hands—spotless—and Fletcher’s eyes—unmoved.
The deputy scurried past and down to the cockpit.
“Who called it in?” Fletcher asked.
Rone didn’t answer the worthless question and headed down the exterior ladder to the cockpit to check on the deputy’s progress.
He bent near the exit to the swim platform and let his fingertips travel the deck where he thought he saw something under the carnage.
There—caught against a screw head, a hint of brass.
He plucked the casing from the grit like a coin out of a fountain.
.223, he thought; could be a dozen rifles.
Heat had taken the shine off, but the rim was clean enough to give a partial bite of the firing pin.
The deputy lifted his camera, hesitated.
Rone’s palm closed. He slipped the casing into his pocket and straightened, bland.
Fletcher appeared at the salon doorway as if taking the exterior steps would be too much of a bother despite stomping through evidence.
Rone shoved his temper into place and forced himself to remain civil for Isobel’s sake. “You’ll want to canvass. Somebody saw a shooter. The shore, not dock.”
Fletcher’s mouth made a sympathetic shape his eyes didn’t join. “We’ll look into it.” He turned to his deputy. “Get a few angles for me of the outside of the boat. then you’re done. Folks got work to do. No need to make a production.”