Chapter 12 #2
Lucky’s smile sharpened. “Two bodies went into that water the night your boy decided to grow a conscience. One came back up because we needed someone to send a message.” He lifted his phone like a toast, the cracked screen catching the light. “Messages travel farther than men.”
Isobel blinked hard. Rone watched a tremor run under the skin along her throat, saw her pull air in, slow, like she’d learned how to breathe all over again. When her gaze lifted, there was a new temperature in it. No collapse. Fire finding oxygen.
They pulled them toward the side doors—cells cut out of the old storage rooms—when Lucky glanced over his shoulder at Blake and let the grin go soft. “Too easy,” he said conversationally. “Took longer than I wanted, but what’s two years between friends?”
Blake’s head snapped up. “Friends?”
“Trust is a funny currency,” Lucky went on, strolling closer. “You pay a little up front. Bring the right tip at the right time. Make the right problem go away. Folks like you start to relax their shoulders.”
“Two years,” Blake repeated. Color drained under his stubble. “You’ve been feeding me lines that long?”
Lucky laughed. “Don’t flatter yourself, Fed. I was feeding the whole field. You were just the one who mattered.” He tipped his chin toward the guards. They shoved Blake down onto a battered chair and cinched his zip ties to the armrests.
“You’re a traitor,” Blake spat.
“Wrong hymn,” Lucky said lightly. “FBI wouldn’t lift a finger when my sister went missing. ‘Resources thin.’ ‘Wrong jurisdiction.’ You remember the words? I do. Laurel took care of it. Wasn’t pretty.” His eyes went flat. “But it was honest.”
Rone filed the sister in the box in his mind where leverage went. A dead sister made zealots. A living one made leashes. He couldn’t tell which version had written Lucky.
“Honest?” Blake’s voice cracked the way men’s did when faith curdled. “You think selling out witnesses is honest?”
Lucky’s grin returned, plastic again. “I think debts get paid. And you’ve got one due.”
They dragged Rone and Isobel past Blake and shoved them against the opposite wall.
A ring bolt had been driven low into a cross brace; they clipped Rone’s restraints to it, then Isobel’s.
He tested the give. It bit back. The plastic tightened, grinding into bone.
He looked down at his hands briefly—the wrapper of gauze on the burn gone gray with swamp and blood—and flexed his fingers to keep feeling.
He kept his face bland, bored even. The urge clawed at him to save Isobel because the thought of the plastic digging into Isobel’s skin made him squirm, the thought of her being hurt making his blood simmer.
Men like Lucky liked reactions. He gave them none.
“Now.” Lucky clapped once, sharp. “Since our little family’s assembled, here’s the play.
Sweetheart.” He cocked his head at Isobel without looking at her, like he already owned whatever answer she might give.
“Dad left you keys. Hidden compartments. Clever little riddles on that rust bucket you got sentimental over. You help us open what he shut, and we all get to go home alive.”
Did they not know about the drive? Did Blake keep that part to himself? If so, that meant the man he knew as his brother really did have his back, which gave him false hope of a better outcome to this situation. “And if she doesn’t?” Rone asked, just to hear the lie.
Lucky’s eyes slid to him with lazy interest. “You won’t like the variation.”
He stepped closer to Isobel. Rone shifted his weight, ready to throw a shoulder into Lucky’s ribs even if all it earned him was a broken jaw. A guard came in on instinct, muzzle finding Rone’s sternum like a magnet.
Lucky lifted a hand. “Easy.” His gaze touched Rone’s bandage. “You keep putting your hands where the fire is, don’t you?”
Rone didn’t respond. He watched the corners of the room, the catwalk, the door with the padlock that didn’t match the rest of the hardware—too new. He listened for the sound underneath the building’s breathing. Wind. Water. Insects. And… there. Soft. Low. A whine he knew in his bones.
Echo.
The sound came again, softer this time, from outside the broken window near the ceiling where hurricane boards had rotted to pulp.
Rone lifted his eyes like he was measuring the room and let them snag on the gap.
A shadow ghosted past the torn screen—ear, muzzle, the patience of a hunter who’d learned the price of mistakes.
Rone exhaled slow, control harnessed tight. He didn’t move his head. He shifted his shoulders an inch as if easing the bite of the restraints, then another. Body language dogs knew—a slow, weight-forward nod. Yes. With me.
Echo stilled. Muzzle lifted. One ear flicked toward Rone, the other toward the yard. Good boy.
“Look at me.” Lucky’s voice went amused again. He’d leaned close enough that Isobel could have counted his pores. “You going to be smart about this?”
She looked him in the eye. Rone felt the temperature of it from five feet away. “My father didn’t hide anything for you. And he didn’t raise me to hand over a knife and say thank you.”
Lucky’s expression didn’t change, but something small hardened behind it.
He straightened. “You can do grief later. Right now, you’ll save this man by your side.
I mean, he’s done everything but sacrifice himself to save you.
Too many heroes in this room; I’m counting on a woman to be the wiser member of this group. ”
“I don’t—”
Lucky grabbed her. Rone lunged, but his restraints didn’t let him move far enough to stop him. His hands were on her, searching her. Rone’s blood boiled over with rage. “Get. Your. Hands. Off. Her.”
“Ahh, there it is.” Lucky held up the drive between his fingers. “Gotta love those hidden pockets. Not really much of a hiding place, though.”
He glanced toward the far door and snapped his fingers.
A guard opened it and wheeled in a metal cart with a laptop bolted to a plate and a tangled nest of cables.
The Laurel Tide crest sat in the corner of the login screen like a watermark made by greed.
Lucky tapped the touchpad and the screen brightened.
“You’ve got an hour to remember whatever bedtime stories Daddy left you. ”
Blake found Rone’s eyes over the cart. He shook his head once—barely there. The look in it was apology and warning and the kind of ruined loyalty that left blisters. “This is wrong,” he said to Lucky, tone low. “You said—”
“I said exactly what you needed. And you did exactly what I needed. I was your only rat left standing in that marina, but I wasn’t yours. Circle closed.” Lucky turned his smile back on Isobel. “Clock’s ticking.”
Rone shifted his weight again, scuffing the heel of his boot along the cracked concrete to cut through what he wanted to do and what he could. Close enough to Isobel now that his shoulder brushed her arm. He didn’t look at her. He let his forearm press, a fraction of pressure. With you.
She leaned into it. Not much. Enough. The grief in her had cooled to something else, a heat. Fire under ice. Ready to bend or burn, whichever got through.
He set his jaw. If he got her out of here, he’d never put her near anything with Laurel’s stink on it again.
He’d find a lake somewhere that took winters seriously, find a cabin with a stove that sang, and keep the world far enough away that bullets turned into old stories.
It was a lie Shade once embraced, and one he let himself touch for a heartbeat because touching it made it sharper to lose, and he needed that sharp to stay awake.
Outside, the wind shifted. The screen at the high window fluttered, tore a little more. Echo’s whine filtered in again, thread-fine. Rone tipped his chin. Wait.
Lucky circled the cart with the exaggerated gait of a game-show host and tapped a key. The password field blinked open. “We’ll start easy. Daddy liked dates. Anniversaries. Birthdays. Try not to disappoint him.”
“Your boss going to want to be here for this?” Blake said, stalling, eyes flicking toward the door and the newer padlock bolted across it.
Lucky’s grin widened. “He’s already here.”
Isobel cleared her throat and lifted her chin.
The defiant, beautiful set of her face made him tighten.
“I can’t enter anything with my hands bound.
” She held up her wrists, palms open, and glowered at Lucky.
Rone felt the line of muscle at her jaw, the same stubbornness that warned she wouldn’t take things without a fight.
She shot Blake a nearly invisible nod, the sort of signal only someone who’d spent time with her would see.
Lucky nodded to the man at Isobel’s side.
The man produced clippers; plastic shrieked and fell away as the restraints parted.
Isobel tripped, knocking the clippers from the man’s hands.
She grabbed the rifle and shouldered it in one fluid motion.
Blake kicked out, catching a man who lunged; both went down in a tangle of limbs.
Rone clipped himself free.
A shot cracked.
Rone surged toward the scuffle, pushing through bodies.
“Enough!” Lucky barked.
One of the captors slammed Isobel into the wall, hands closing at her throat. Two men trained pistols at Rone’s head, but he kept coming, ignoring the leaden weight building under his ribs.
“Snap her neck if anyone else moves.” Lucky spat the words like acid.
They stopped Rone in mid-step.
“Enough of these games.” Lucky walked up behind Rone, and he was shoved to his knees, gun to the back of his head. “Enter the password in thirty seconds or this one dies.”
The fingers slid from Isobel’s throat, and she coughed and wheezed and fell to her knees. “Don’t. Know. It.” She managed between gasps.
“Better figure it out quick. Or he’s dead.”
Isobel moved, slow and methodical. Tripping every few steps as if she were a clumsy kind of girl, but she wasn’t. She was stalling, but for what?
That’s when Rone saw it: a pinprick of red, hovering in the dust motes, then steady, landing on the slope of Lucky’s cheek as he leaned toward the laptop. If you weren’t trained, you’d call it a trick of the light. Rone’s ribs iced over.
Sniper.
From the woods.
“I don’t think I’ll be doing that today since you just gave me a way out of this,” Isobel said with a tone that housed years of resentment and anger.
Lucky laughed, but his man shook his head.
The guard’s eyes flicked up and went wide. “Boss—”
The shot came like the crack of dry wood breaking over a knee. The bulb above them burst, raining filament and glass. Lucky jerked sideways with a snarl, hand flashing to his cheek. Blood. Not a kill shot. A mark. A message.
Chaos ripped the room open.
“Down!” Rone snarled, lunging for Isobel. He caught her shoulder and yanked, dragging her off the line of that window as the second shot chewed a splinter out of the doorjamb where her head had been.
Men yelled. Rifles swung to the window. Someone outside opened up with a short, vicious burst that stitched the wall. Echo’s bark detonated against the roar—close now, no longer patient, all forward drive and teeth.
A Laurel Tide soldier rushed the window, turning to cover the breach just as a dark shape exploded through the torn screen—fur and muscle and momentum.
Echo hit the man mid-chest and drove him backward into a table, jaws flashing for the wrist that held the rifle.
The gun went off wild, the shot taking a chunk of ceiling and raining rot.
“Echo!” Rone’s voice broke in a way he didn’t recognize. The shepherd didn’t look, not for the command, not for confirmation. He was a streak of purpose, pivoting to the next threat even as hands grabbed for him.
Two more men swung their muzzles toward the dog.
Isobel moved.
She didn’t scream, didn’t freeze. She went for the cart, hip-checked it, drove her hands up under the edge, and heaved. The laptop pitched. Cables snapped. The cart surged and crashed into one of the gunmen’s knees. He went down with a curse. His finger clenched. The rifle barked.
Rone saw the line of the muzzle and knew the geometry before the sound hit his ears. He lunged toward her like he could outrun physics.
The bullet caught Isobel high, just above the collarbone.
The sound it made was not like television.
Flesh and bone don’t ring. They thud. They tear.
Her body jerked once, all the breath driven out of her in a single, shocked exhale, and then she was folding, eyes wide with a kind of surprise that made something in his vision go white.
“No!” Rone’s voice tore itself. He stood in the line of the firefight and raced for her. He didn’t care about himself. There was only her.
And he couldn’t fail someone else. He’d die before he let that happen.
Echo wheeled midair on a snarl, launched at the man who’d fired.
Teeth closed on his gun hand. The rifle clattered away.
Another man grabbed for Echo’s hindquarters and got the heel of Rone’s boot in his knee as Rone kicked wild, anything to make space, to make a break in the tide of bodies between him and Isobel.
Somewhere to his left, Blake bellowed and took a headbutt that bought him nothing but blood and an extra zip tie around his throat. Lucky had flattened against a post, one hand pressed to his bleeding cheek, eyes sharp now, no humor left.
“Hold your fire!” Lucky roared, and for a heartbeat, everything froze.
Rone rushed the last steps and collapsed to his knees, pressing his palm to her wound. Isobel sucked in a breath that sounded like it had razors in it. Blood slicked hot and dark down the front of her shirt, bright against skin gone suddenly too pale. Her eyes found his.
They were clear. Furious. Alive.
He dragged in air like a drowning man who’d found a shallow, and every plan he’d ever thought about made a hard, immediate pivot.
The file could burn, the island could sink, Blake could rot in whatever hell he’d made, Lucky could walk out with half his face and zero penance—none of it mattered if she didn’t breathe through the next sixty seconds.