Chapter Fifteen
The call came at noon.
Tess was in the compound kitchen, helping Jessica box up pastries for a church fundraiser, when her phone buzzed with a number she didn't recognize.
"Miss Mahoney?" The voice was shaky, old. "This is Hendricks, from the marine supply. You need to come down here. Something's happened to your shop."
The drive took fifteen minutes. It felt like hours.
Lakeshore rode beside her—she'd borrowed one of the compound trucks, couldn't handle being pressed against him on the bike, needed the space to breathe—and his silence said everything his words didn't. He knew. They both knew.
Gregor had finally stopped playing.
She saw the smoke first.
Thin gray wisps rising from the waterfront, not the billowing black of a serious fire but the lazy drift of something smoldering. As they got closer, she saw the source—her storage shed, half-collapsed, the contents charred and scattered across the gravel lot.
But that wasn't the worst of it.
"No." The word came out small, broken. "No, no, no—"
Her boats were gone.
Not damaged. Not sabotaged. Gone. The last two rentals sat at the bottom of their slips, only the bow rails visible above the waterline. The kayaks had been slashed to ribbons, plastic shreds floating on the surface like confetti from a funeral.
Tess was out of the truck before it fully stopped, running for the dock on legs that didn't feel like hers. The water was still settling, rings spreading outward from where her fleet had gone under. Fresh destruction. Recent.
They'd missed Darko by minutes.
"Tess." Lakeshore's voice came from behind her, steady and calm. "Don't go inside yet."
"That's my shop."
"I know. But let me—"
She didn't wait.
The front door hung crooked on its hinges, kicked in with enough force to splinter the frame. Tess pushed through it and stopped dead.
Her father's shop looked like a bomb had gone off.
Rod racks torn from the walls, the poles snapped and scattered like bones. Display cases shattered, glass crunching under her boots with every step. Reels smashed, lures crushed, thirty years of carefully curated inventory reduced to wreckage.
And on the wall where her father's trophy fish had hung—the forty-pound muskie he'd caught in 1987, the one he'd talked about until his voice gave out and his memory followed—there was nothing but a bare nail and a water stain.
They threw it in the lake.
Something inside her cracked.
"Tess." Lakeshore was beside her now, his hand on her arm, his body a wall between her and the worst of the damage. "Look at me."
She couldn't. Couldn't look at anything but the destruction, the systematic dismantling of everything her father had built.
Her eyes moved across the wreckage, cataloging each wound: the cash register smashed on the floor, the coffee maker shattered against the wall, the photos behind the counter ripped from their frames and scattered like trash.
Then she saw the counter.
A knife was buried in it, blade-down, driven deep into the wood with enough force to stand upright on its own. A gutting knife, the kind fishermen used to clean their catch. And pinned beneath it, a note written on what looked like a piece of her own receipt paper.
The lake takes everything eventually.
The crack widened.
She walked to the counter like she was moving through water, each step deliberate and slow. Her hand reached out—Lakeshore said something, tried to stop her—but she was already pulling the knife free, feeling the blade slide out of the wood with a sound that made her teeth ache.
Good steel. Sharp edge. A professional tool, used by someone who knew how to cause pain.
"Darko Mali?."
Tess turned to find Lakeshore reading something on his phone, his face carved from stone.
"Who?"
"Gregor's attack dog. Young, violent, runs the fastest crossings." His eyes met hers. "He's the one they send when intimidation needs to escalate."
"He did this."
"He did this."
Tess looked down at the knife in her hand.
Her grip was steady. Her breathing was even.
Somewhere inside her, a woman was screaming—screaming for her father's fish, for the shop she'd sacrificed everything to save, for the memory of a man who'd loved this place enough to pour his whole life into it.
But that woman was very far away.
The woman standing in the wreckage felt nothing but cold.
"Where is he?"
"We'll find him."
"Where. Is. He."
Lakeshore studied her for a long moment. She didn't know what he saw in her face, but whatever it was made something shift in his expression. Recognition, maybe. Understanding.
"Scout's tracking his movements. He operates out of a marina south of here—one of Gregor's secondary locations." He stepped closer, close enough to touch but not touching. "This was a message. He wanted you to see it. Wanted you broken."
"Do I look broken?"
"No." A ghost of something—pride, maybe—crossed his face. "You look like a woman who's about to make someone regret being born."
"Good. Because that's exactly what I am."
She set the knife on the ruined counter, handle facing out, and turned to survey the damage one more time.
The shop was destroyed—truly, completely destroyed, not the slow bleed of sabotage but a single massive wound designed to kill.
Insurance wouldn't cover this. Her savings wouldn't cover this.
Even if Gregor dropped dead tomorrow, she'd never be able to rebuild what he'd taken.
But that wasn't the point.
The point was her father's fish, sinking to the bottom of a lake that had already taken so much from both of them. The point was thirty years of love and labor, smashed and scattered by a man with a gutting knife and a note about inevitability.
The lake takes everything eventually.
Not this time.
"I want him," she said quietly. "Darko Mali?. I want him to understand what he did. I want him to know that the lake doesn't just take—it gives back. And what it's going to give him is exactly what he deserves."
Lakeshore moved to stand beside her, shoulder to shoulder in the wreckage of her father's dream.
"The brothers are mobilizing. Scout's got eyes on the secondary marina. By tonight, we'll know where Darko's staging his next crossing."
"And then?"
"And then we end this. Him, Gregor, all of it."
Tess looked at the empty space on the wall where the trophy had hung.
Her father had caught that fish the year she was born.
Had told her the story so many times she could recite it from memory—the fight, the near-miss, the moment he finally got it in the boat and realized he'd landed something worth keeping forever.
Now it was gone. Like his memories. Like his voice. Like everything except the stubborn love she carried for a man who couldn't carry it himself anymore.
"I want to be there," she said. "When you find Darko. I want to look him in the eye and tell him what he destroyed."
"Tess—"
"I'm not asking for permission." She turned to face him, letting him see the steel underneath the grief. "That was my shop. My boats. My father's legacy. You said it was yours too, remember? That you protect what's yours?"
"I remember."
"Then protect me by standing beside me, not in front of me. Let me be part of ending this."
The silence stretched between them, heavy with everything they'd been through and everything still to come. Tess held his gaze, refusing to look away, refusing to be the woman who waited at home while the men handled the violence.
She was done waiting.
"Okay," Lakeshore said finally. "You want to be there when we find Darko, you'll be there. But you follow my lead. You stay behind the line until I say otherwise. And if things go sideways—"
"If things go sideways, I run toward brothers, not away. I remember."
He reached out and cupped her face, his thumb brushing across her cheekbone with a gentleness that shouldn't have existed in the middle of so much destruction.
"You're sure about this? Once you cross certain lines, you can't uncross them."
"I've been crossing lines since the moment I told Gregor's men no." She leaned into his touch. "I'm not stopping now."
"Then we do this together."
"Together."
She took one last look around the shop. Her shop. Her father's shop. The place that had been worth more than a marketing career, worth more than safety, worth fighting for even when the fight seemed unwinnable.
It was gone now. But the woman who'd refused to give it up—she was still standing.
And she had a message to deliver.
"Darko Mali?," she said, her voice flat and cold as lake water in January. "He thinks the lake takes everything? He's about to learn that the lake gives back what you throw in."
Lakeshore's hand found hers, fingers interlocking, a silent promise sealed in the wreckage.
"Let's go tell the brothers."
They walked out together, leaving the gutting knife on the counter and the destruction behind them.
There would be time to grieve later.
Right now, there was only revenge.