CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Tell Olive what?” she asked again staring at everyone. She was soaked to the skin, her hair plastered against her head.
“Honey, take a seat,” said Ham.
“No. I think I’ll stand,” she said defiantly. “Tell me what?”
“Hi, Olive,” smiled Luca. She lifted her hand in a half-hearted wave, staring at him. “Olive. I’m your biological father.”
She stared at the men then at the others around the room. Looking back at Luca, she stepped up and stared at his face.
“We don’t look anything alike,” she whispered.
“He’s been in witness protection,” said Ham. “They’ve given him a new identity, new face, all of it.”
“You look just like me. The real me,” he said with a half-grin.
“Why? Why wouldn’t you tell me? All these years you were right here and you never once said a word to me?
Why?” she yelled, tears streaming down her face.
Iggy tried to reach for her but she pulled back.
Finley stared at the men, standing beside Olive in solidarity.
Winter, Keegan, and Sadie stood behind her as well.
“Telling you who I was would have put you in more danger,” he said softly. “I was ordered by the bureau to keep my identity hidden. Even here, with men who do this for a living, my background was fabricated so well, they didn’t know.”
“Which brings me to another point,” said Ham turning to look at AJ and Hiro. “How? How was it hidden?”
“Mama Irene,” they said in unison.
“She hired me and gave the boys all the information they needed, except it was provided by the bureau. I don’t know how she did it. I didn’t ask, nor did I care. I was able to see my daughter almost every day.”
Olive was still crying, shaking her head.
“I needed you!” she yelled. “I needed a father, someone who was actually my father! I needed to know that I was never abandoned.”
“Baby, you weren’t abandoned,” said Iggy. “He risked everything just be near you, just to be close enough to watch over you. That’s what a father does. He was protecting you right up until this very minute.”
“He’s right, honey,” said Winter. “I prayed for one person to care enough about me to do what he did. Someone to take me out of that clubhouse. Someone to care enough to risk their life for me.”
Olive sat down in the closest chair, nearly falling into it. Iggy kneeled beside her and she let her head fall against his shoulder.
“I’m not asking for forgiveness, Olive. I just did what I thought was right. I was a kid. A kid who’d left his home, his university, his friends and family, all of it because all I could think about was protecting you.”
The room was silent, only the sounds of rain and thunder breaking the haunting emptiness. The clock ticked on the wall. Three minutes. Five minutes. Six minutes.
Finally, she stood staring at Luca. She walked toward him slowly, standing just inches from him. She looked up into his eyes. Her eyes. It was the only thing left of who he’s once been.
“I’m sorry, Olive,” he said with tears filling his eyes.
“I know,” she nodded. “Me too.” She reached out and hugged him, Luca exhaling twenty-five years of held breath.
“It’s not over,” said Ham. “We need to figure out who the mole is on the inside. If we can’t figure that out, we’re going to have to do this the hard way.”
“We have another problem,” said Finley. “The barriers aren’t holding. The water is coming in too fast. I need help encouraging the barriers to rise.”
“Encouraging?” frowned Moose.
“Yes. I need muscle. Preferably SEAL muscle that’s used to working beneath the water.” Moose grinned staring at his fellow SEALs in the room.
“Let’s go. We got a storm to fight.”
The tropical storm arrived like it had a personal grudge against Belle Fleur. Rain hammered the roof of the main house, roared over the verandas, and turned the sugarcane fields beyond the live oaks into silver-gray ghosts.
By midnight, the bayous surrounding the property were no longer quiet ribbons of black water. They were rising, churning, muscling against the banks with a hungry, patient force.
Finley stood in the flood control room with one hand braced against the console and the other wrapped around a radio.
The screen in front of her should have shown the south spillway gate easing shut in clean green lines.
Instead, it blinked red, yellow, red again, then froze with a warning that made every engineer in the room go silent.
“Tell me that’s a display glitch,” Olive said from beneath the access panel, her voice echoing tinny and tense. She had a flashlight clamped between her teeth, two soaked braids pasted to her neck, and grease on one cheek like war paint.
Finley watched the bayou level climb another inch on the monitor.
“If it is, it’s the most committed display glitch I’ve ever met.”
The Belle Fleur flood protection system had been overbuilt on purpose.
Three mechanical gates guarded the main channel where storm surge could press up from the bayou.
Two had lowered into place before sunset.
The third—the old south gate, the one everyone said would be replaced next season—had stalled at forty percent.
Forty percent was not nothing. Forty percent might slow the water, might buy the house an hour, maybe two. But with the storm pushing six inches of rain across the parish and the wind driving the bayou backward over itself, forty percent was not enough.
Olive slid out from beneath the panel with a coil of wiring in one hand and a look of professional betrayal on her face.
“The actuator isn’t receiving full command voltage. Either the junction box is flooded, or something chewed through the conduit.”
Finley’s eyes lifted to the window. Outside, lightning flashed over the black water. Cypress knees poked up like knuckles from a fist, and somewhere beyond them the emergency lights along the south channel flickered under sheets of rain.
“The junction box is underwater.”
Olive sat up.
“Of course it is. Why would the thing we need be dry during a flood? That would be rude to the storm.” Finley keyed the radio.
“Command, this is Engineering. South gate is stalled. Manual override point is submerged in the channel. We need divers.” While Finley and Olive were checking the systems again, Ham and the others were in the small control room near G.R.I.P.
For one long second, only static answered. Then a deep voice came back calm enough to be annoying.
“Engineering, this is Ham. Define submerged.” Olive snatched the radio.
“As in, underwater. As in, the bayou is currently where dry land had the nerve to be this morning.” Another voice cut in, bright with mischief.
“Copy that. Bayou has entered the chat.”
“Zulu,” Ham warned.
“What? I’m documenting environmental shifts.”
Within five minutes, the Belle Fleur security wing had transformed into a staging area.
Ham moved with quiet authority, issuing assignments while studying the flood schematics Finley had thrown across the table.
Zulu checked comms and grinned like he had been waiting all week for something to go spectacularly wrong.
Pax sorted dive lights and backup batteries with monk-like focus.
Saint inspected medical gear because Saint inspected medical gear the way other people breathed.
Brix stood over the oxygen tanks, expression flat.
“For the record,” Brix said, “I hate night dives, flood currents, electrical systems, and reptiles with more teeth than a chainsaw.”
“That’s a lot of hate for one man,” Pax said.
“I’m efficient.”
Finley pointed to the map.
“The manual override wheel sits inside the south gate housing, behind this grate. The problem is visibility. Under normal conditions, the channel is murky. Tonight, it’s mud, debris, and storm runoff. You’ll be swimming by touch.” Ham folded his arms.
“We’re not SEALs tonight. We’re the people dumb enough to be good in bad water.”
“Speak for yourself,” Zulu said, pulling a hood over his head. “I am brave, highly trained, and deeply motivated by the fact that Belle Fleur’s kitchen still has bread pudding.” Saint lifted one finger.
“If anyone gets hurt, I am documenting that dessert was listed as an operational objective.”
Then, from the darkness beyond the boathouse, came the slow slap of something heavy entering the flooded path. Brix turned his light toward it and froze. Two yellow eyes hovered just above the waterline.
“Absolutely not,” Brix said. Olive leaned around Ham’s shoulder and exhaled in relief.
“That’s Alvin.”
“Right, our pet alligator that we named because it made it less deadly,” Pax said sarcastically.
“He named himself by showing up every Tuesday for scraps from the fish-cleaning table,” Finley said. “He knows the deeper channels better than anyone.” Zulu stared at Alvin, then at Finley.
“Just to clarify, our guide is a prehistoric purse with attitude.”
The team moved out under a sky that seemed to split open every few seconds.
Rain came sideways across the boathouse lights, turning every beam into a trembling white cone.
Finley and Olive followed as far as the raised walkway allowed, both wearing rain jackets that had surrendered ten minutes earlier.
Ham stopped at the edge where the walkway disappeared beneath the flood. He looked back once, not at the storm or the rising water, but at Finley’s face.
“We’ll get your gate back.”
Finley wanted to say something clever. She wanted to match Zulu’s ridiculous bravery or Olive’s sarcastic defiance. Instead she nodded, because if she opened her mouth, every terrible calculation in her head might come pouring out with the rain.
Alvin drifted ahead of them, low and silent, a shadow with eyes. He did not hurry. He did not panic. In the middle of the storm, the old alligator seemed almost offended by everyone else’s urgency.
“I respect his confidence,” Pax said over the radio.
“I respect his dentist,” Brix replied.