CHAPTER FOUR
Paramedics arrived eleven minutes after the patrol officers.
Isla counted everyone from the bumper of the squad car, a blanket around her shoulders she hadn't asked for, a water bottle in her hand she wasn't drinking. One of the officers—young, earnest, still following first-responder protocols by the book—had insisted on the blanket, the water, and Isla remaining seated until medical could evaluate her, ma’am.
Isla remained seated because standing required energy she was temporarily short on. Not because she’d agreed to anything.
"I don’t need the ambulance," she told the paramedic who approached with a penlight and an expression of professional concern. "I need you to get your people out of my crime scene."
The paramedic—a woman in her thirties who dealt with blood often enough to be unimpressed by it—cleaned the cut above Isla’s eye with quick, practiced hands, applied butterfly strips, and checked her pupils before turning her attention to the bruising already darkening across Isla’s throat in a pattern that would, by morning, show individual chain links like a grotesque necklace.
She recommended imaging. Mentioned possible tracheal damage.
Asked if Isla could swallow without pain.
Isla swallowed. It felt like dragging gravel down a drainpipe. "Yes," she lied.
"It’s worse than you think it is," the paramedic said, and cleared her against recommendation. They both knew how this conversation ended.
Isla pulled her phone from her jacket. The screen was cracked from the fight, but functional. 9:47 PM. She pulled up Kate Channing’s number and pressed call.
Kate answered on the second ring. "Rivers. It’s late."
"I need to report an incident." Isla’s voice was a ruin, every word scraping past bruised tissue. "I was attacked. On the docks, near the old Clarkson warehouse. Robert Brune. He came at me with a chain." She steadied herself. "I’m okay. Patrol responded. He fled into the container yard."
Silence on the other end. Not the processing kind. The kind where anger was building so precisely it required architectural containment.
"What were you doing on the docks, Isla?"
She’d spent the eleven minutes on the squad car bumper rehearsing answers. I was just walking. I happened to be in the area. I had a hunch. None of them would survive five seconds of Kate Channing’s scrutiny, and none of them deserved to.
So she told the truth.
"I’ve been walking the docks every night since you put me on leave.
Every night, Kate. No badge, no weapon. Watching the waterfront, trying to find him.
" She paused to breathe, which was harder than it should have been. "I know what it sounds like. I know what it is. But he’s still out there, and nobody’s found him, and I couldn’t—" She stopped herself. She wasn’t going to say that she couldn’t just sit there.
That sounded exactly what a psychologist would expect.
Kate let the silence hang for three full seconds. When she spoke, each word was chosen the way a surgeon chose instruments.
"You have been conducting unauthorized, unarmed, solo surveillance at night while on mandatory psychological leave. For a week."
"Yes."
"And you told no one."
"No."
"Isla." Kate’s voice cracked, just slightly, and underneath the anger was something that surprised Isla: fear. Not for the case. Not for the Bureau’s liability.
For her. "He could have killed you. Do you understand that? He nearly killed Sullivan, he’s killed God knows how many people, and you went out there alone with nothing.
" She stopped. Took a breath. When she spoke again, the containment was back but thinner.
"We’re going to have a very long conversation about this. But not tonight."
"Kate—"
"Tonight, you're going to the hospital. Not for your injuries, though, from the sound of your voice, you need that too." A beat. "Sullivan woke up two hours ago."
The docks went silent. Officers, ambulance, radio static—all of it receded to white noise. The only thing Isla could hear was her own heartbeat.
"What?"
"Patel called my office at eight fifteen. He regained consciousness earlier this evening. They’ve removed the ventilator.
He’s weak, but he’s awake, and he’s been asking for you.
" Kate’s voice softened, barely. "Go see your partner, Isla. That’s an order, and unlike my other recent orders, I expect you to follow it. "
Isla was in her car before Kate finished the sentence.
***
Isla drove too fast through empty streets, made every green on Superior Street, and parked in the first space she found without checking if it was legal. The hospital materialized out of the dark like a ship coming into port, lit windows stacked up the facade in rows.
The fourth-floor corridor was quieter than she’d ever heard it.
Helen, the nurse who’d never commented on the hand-holding, looked up from the station and did a double-take at Isla’s face—the butterfly strips, the bruised throat, blood she’d missed on her collar. But Helen had seen worse on this floor.
"He’s been in and out. Keep it short."
Isla pushed open the door to James’s room, and everything was different.
The ventilator was gone. That hit her first—the absence of the machine that had been breathing for him for nearly two weeks, its hiss and click replaced by silence and the soft, unassisted sound of a man breathing on his own.
The room was dim, lit by monitor glow and a bedside lamp, and in that warm, low light, James Sullivan was looking at her.
His eyes were open. After everything—the fight, the chain, the phone call, the drive—his eyes were open and they were the same deep-set blue they’d always been, crinkled slightly now, not with humor but with the effort of consciousness, tracking her as she came through the door.
"Hey," he said. Barely a whisper, wrecked by the ventilator tube that had been down his throat for days. But it was his voice.
Isla crossed the room in four steps and sat in the chair she'd occupied every day for two weeks.
She opened her mouth to say something composed—how are you feeling, you scared us, welcome back—and nothing came out.
She looked at him, and her eyes burned, and she pressed her lips together hard because she was not going to cry in a hospital room.
James’s gaze moved slowly over her face with the careful attention she’d always admired in his work. The cut above her eye. The bruising on her throat. The blood on her collar. Concern surfaced through the exhaustion like something rising from deep water.
"What happened?" Harder now. Edged with something that, in a man with more energy, would have been alarm.
"Run-in with our friend. On the docks." She swallowed, winced, saw his eyes track to her throat and darken. "He’s still out there. But I’m fine."
"You don’t look fine." Each word cost him. She could see it in his shallow, careful breaths. "You look like you went ten rounds."
"Two, maybe. I’m tough." She tried a smile. It didn’t fit. "James—I should have been there. At the scrapyard. You shouldn’t have gone alone."
Something moved across his face—guilt, maybe, or the memory of whatever had happened that put him here. His hand shifted on the blanket, that same left hand she’d watched for days hoping for exactly this, and his fingers found hers. The grip was weak. She could feel the effort it cost him.
"I’m sorry," he said. "Thought I had him. Near the north end. Should have called it in. Should have waited."
"Yeah. You should have." Her voice broke on the last word and she stopped trying to hold it together. Not sobbing—Isla didn’t sob—but tears sliding down her face in steady silent tracks she didn’t wipe away because both her hands were holding his.
"And I’ve been walking the docks every night looking for him.
By myself. No weapon. Kate just found out. "
James stared at her. Even barely conscious, he put enough weight into that stare to make her feel it. "That’s insane."
"I know." She tightened her grip, gentle around the IV. "I couldn’t sit there, James. He put you here. He’s still free while I’m on leave filling out psych eval paperwork."
"I know you couldn’t." His thumb moved against her fingers—the smallest gesture, barely perceptible—and it stopped her more effectively than any argument. "That’s what scares me."
They sat with that. Monitors tracing their quiet green testimony.
Outside, Duluth glowed against the dark, and beyond it the lake stretched into blackness, and somewhere in the city’s margins a man who called himself the Lake Superior Killer was hiding with a length of chain and the conviction that the water demanded more.
"We’re going to finish this," James said. His eyes were heavy, but his voice held. "Together. When I’m out of here."
"Together," Isla agreed.
"But until then." Even at a whisper, even from a hospital bed, three years of partnership carried weight. "You stop going to the docks alone. You let the task force do their job. And you fill out Kate’s paperwork."
She looked at him—dark blonde hair flat against the pillow, jaw still strong even in a hospital gown, blue eyes fighting to stay open. She thought about deflecting. Humor. Competence. Changing the subject.
"I’ll try," she said instead.
His eyes held hers a moment longer, reading her the way he read everything—carefully, completely. Then his eyelids drooped, his grip loosened, and she watched him slide back toward sleep.
"I'll be back tomorrow," she told him. Same promise she'd made every day for two weeks. This time, he could hear it.
His lips moved. She leaned closer.
"Bring coffee," he whispered. And then he was asleep.
Isla held his hand and let herself cry, quietly, in the dark room where nobody was watching.
Not grief. Not fear. Something closer to relief.
And that hurt more than either because it meant acknowledging how close she’d come to a world where he didn’t wake up, and how close she’d come tonight to one where she didn’t either.
After a while, she wiped her face, stood, and straightened her jacket. The cut throbbed. Her throat ached. Her shoulder was already stiffening where the chain had hit it. By morning she'd be a map of bruises.
She paused at the door. James Sullivan, breathing on his own, sleeping the real sleep of a body beginning to heal. Emma’s drawing still taped to the wall—the house with the lopsided chimney, the yellow sun.
She walked out of the hospital into the cold March night. The anger was still there behind her ribs. But something else was alongside it now. Something that felt like a beginning.