Chapter 31 Blood On The
Dock
Bishop
One shot.
That's all it is.
I know it before I'm fully upright the report, the angle, the specific sound of a warning round rather than a targeted one. Someone on the dock path or the water's edge, shooting through the kitchen window at an angle designed to miss.
Designed to be heard.
I get Delilah down and keep her down and move to the wall in four steps. Gun from the bedroom nightstand I moved it there two weeks ago, close enough for exactly this, and I'm back in the kitchen in six seconds.
I fire twice into the dark shoreline.
Not at anyone. Into the dark. The return fire that says I'm armed and I'm not alone and whatever you're calculating needs to include that.
Then silence.
The kind that follows the decision to leave.
I wait. Thirty seconds. Sixty. The lake doing its quiet thing beyond the broken window. The dock lights on the water. The cold air coming through.
Nobody comes.
I go back to Delilah first.
She's behind the couch where I left her, on her knees, one hand on the floor and one resting on her stomach not clutching, just resting, the instinctive gesture of someone whose body has already decided what matters most.
She's not hurt.
I check anyway. Hands moving over her arms, her shoulders. Her face in my hands the way she held mine a week ago in the marina office. Looking for what I don't want to find.
"I'm okay," she says.
"I know."
"Then stop looking at me like that."
"Give me a minute."
She lets me have the minute.
I sit back on my heels and look at her in the broken-glass dark and feel the specific terror of a man who has been preparing for something and still wasn't prepared for it. The shot was a warning. Placed to be survived.
That doesn't make the image of her hand on her stomach something I'm going to stop seeing.
I clear the exterior in ten minutes.
The dock path is empty. The shoreline clear. Tire marks on the grass verge at the access road someone parked, waited, fired, left. The whole operation under three minutes. Efficient. Practiced. No evidence that would hold up to anything official, which is the point.
I stand at the water's edge and look out at the lake and recognize it.
The tactic. The precision. The warning shot designed to land without landing. I used to sit in rooms where men planned things exactly like this the right amount of force to communicate, not enough to cross the line that would bring the wrong kind of attention. I know this playbook because I helped write it.
Standing on the wrong side of it feels exactly like I thought it would.
Worse, actually.
Because now there's a woman in my kitchen.
When I come back inside Delilah is at the far end of the counter.
Not cowering. Not on the phone. Standing with her arms crossed and her eyes moving over the broken glass on the floor with the same focused expression she uses on billing discrepancies and vendor rate errors. Assessing. Filing. Deciding what needs addressing first.
She looks up when I come in.
"Clear?" she asks.
"Clear. Access road, in and out in under three minutes. Warning shot from the dock path angle." I look at the window. "They're gone."
"Club Eidolon."
"Yes."
She nods. Uncrosses her arms.
Her hands are steady.
I don't say anything about that. But I see it and I'm going to be thinking about it for a long time the specific image of her hands steady in a kitchen with a bullet hole in the window and broken glass on the floor, because she decided to be steady and steadiness is a choice she keeps making, over and over, in every version of hard this has been.
"Sit down," she says.
"I'm fine."
"Bishop." She pulls out the kitchen chair. "Sit down."
I sit.
She gets the first aid kit from under the sink without being told where it is. I showed her the first day she moved in alarm code, gun safe, exits, first aid kit. She opens it on the table and looks at my hands and I look at my hands.
The right one is bleeding. A cut across the palm from the broken glass when I cleared the counter coming through the kitchen. I didn't feel it.
She cleans it without commenting on the fact that I didn't know it was there.
I watch her work.
Careful hands. Certain. The focused quality of her attention that's been present since the dock in July the same attention she turns on inventory counts and vendor rates and everything else, she decides is worth caring about. She's decided I'm worth caring about. She keeps deciding that, methodically, in small specific ways, and I keep sitting with the evidence of it and not knowing what to do with a person who shows up like this.
She cleans the cut and closes it with two small butterfly strips and doesn't look up through any of it.
I watch her the whole time.
At the almost of tonight. At the specific calculation of the trajectory the angle of the shot, where it hit the far wall, the distance between that line and the place where she was sitting. Three feet. Maybe less.
Her hand on her stomach before she knew she was doing it.
"Delilah."
"I know," she says.
"I need"
"I know what you need." She looks up. The direct look. "You need me to leave. To go somewhere safer. To let you handle this without me in the radius." She holds my gaze. "The answer is no."
"Delilah"
"We're past that." Steady. Certain. "You know we are."
She finishes with the cut and puts the kit away and sits across from me. The kitchen is cold and glass-strewn and the broken window is a hole where the lake air comes in and none of it changes the specific gravity of her sitting across from me like the most important thing in the room is this table.
She reaches across and takes both my hands.
Her grip is stronger than the situation deserves. Not desperate deliberate. The grip of someone who has decided where they're standing and intends to stand there.
I feel it in my chest the way I always feel her. Too much and not enough.
The fear is still there, the image of her on the floor, the hand on her stomach, the broken glass. That's not going away. But underneath it something is shifting, the way things shift when you've been carrying something alone for a long time and someone reaches across a table and takes it with you.
Not from you.
With you.
"We end this," she says.
Quiet. No performance. The voice she uses when she's arrived somewhere and there's no more deciding to do.
"Together." She holds my gaze. "Not you managing it from the outside and me staying in the perimeter. Not you going back to them to protect me." A pause. "Together. Say it."
I look at her.
At the woman who showed up in a wedding dress and chose me and came back and stayed through every version of hard this has been. Who put her hand on her stomach before she knew she was doing it. Who is sitting in broken glass in my kitchen at ten at night and the word she keeps using is together.
"Together," I say.
Something in her face settles.
She's still holding my hands when the phone rings.
Unknown number.
I know before I answer.
I answer anyway.
The voice on the other end is not Reyes. Calmer than Reyes. More certain. The voice of someone who has never needed to raise it because calm is what it sounds like when you own the room.
"Come back to the club, Morgan," he says.
A pause. Measured. Deliberate.
"Or she bleeds."