Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Dove jerked awake, her heart slamming against her ribs before her brain even caught up. Old instincts. The kind that never fully went away, no matter how many years separated her from the battlefield.
Her phone buzzed against the nightstand like an angry wasp, vibrating so hard it threatened to skitter right off the edge.
She reached for the phone, her fingers fumbling against the nightstand.
The room was black. Not the soft gray of approaching dawn, but the thick, velvety darkness that meant the sun was still hours from even thinking about rising. The only light came from the phone screen, a harsh blue-white rectangle that stabbed at her sleep-blurred eyes.
4:10 AM.
Unknown number.
Beside her, Trent stirred. His arm tightened around her waist, pulling her back against the warm wall of his chest. His breath was hot against her shoulder, slow and steady, not quite awake but no longer fully asleep.
"Why's your alarm going off at four in the morning?" His voice was a low rumble, rough with sleep and muffled against her skin.
"It's not."
She stared at the screen, watching the phone vibrate in her palm like something alive.
Nothing good ever came from unknown numbers at this hour.
That was a universal truth, right up there with death and taxes and the fact that the Everglades would eventually reclaim everything humans tried to build.
She declined the call.
The screen went dark, and she set the phone back on the nightstand, screen down, like that would somehow prevent it from ringing again. Like ignoring a problem ever made it go away.
"Wrong number?" Trent asked.
"Probably."
She turned in his arms, fitting herself against him, her leg sliding between his.
His skin was warm, almost hot, the way it always was when he slept.
Like he ran a few degrees higher than normal humans.
She'd teased him about it once, called him a furnace, and he'd just shrugged and said it came from spending too much time with cold-blooded creatures.
"Well," she said, her fingers tracing up his chest, "since we're awake, we might as well have some fun."
His hand slid down her spine, fingers drawing lazy patterns on her lower back that made her skin tingle. "I'm not opposed to—"
The phone buzzed again—the same angry wasp sound.
She rolled to her side, snagging the cell. Dove's stomach tightened into a cold knot.
Once could be a wrong number. Once could be a drunk dial or a telemarketer with no sense of time zones, or a scammer trying their luck at an hour when people were too groggy to think straight.
Twice was something else.
Twice was intentional.
She tapped the green button and hit speaker. "Hello?"
"Is this Dovelynn Quinn?" The voice filled the dark room—male, professional, carrying a weight that came from years of delivering news nobody wanted to hear. Dove knew that voice. Not the specific person, but the type.
Trent sat up beside her, instantly alert. She felt him go still, felt his attention sharpen in the darkness.
"Speaking."
"Miss Quinn, this is Deputy Director Ethan Corrick with the U.S. Marshals Service. I'm your uncle's supervisor."
The cold knot in her stomach turned to ice.
Trent's hand found her back, warm and solid.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
Silence. One second. Two. Three.
Each one stretched out like taffy, pulled thin and wrong, the kind of silence that said everything and nothing at the same time. The kind of silence that gave you just enough time to imagine every worst-case scenario before the words came to confirm one of them.
"I'm so sorry to have to tell you this." Corrick's voice softened, and the sound of it—that careful gentleness—made Dove's chest seize. "Your uncle was found a little after midnight. In his vehicle. In a parking lot in Okeechobee."
Trent's hand pressed harder against her back. She could feel the tension coiling through his body, could feel him holding his breath.
"He was murdered. Two gunshot wounds. One to the head. One to the chest."
The words landed like physical blows.
She felt them hit. Felt the impact somewhere deep in her chest, a dull thud that radiated outward like ripples in still water.
Her uncle. Aaron Slade. The man who'd taught her to shoot when she was twelve years old, setting up cans on a fence post and patiently correcting her stance until she could hit the center every time.
The man who'd shown up at her apartment a month after her team died, when she was drowning in a bottle and didn't care if she ever came up for air, and told her about the Aegis Network.
Told her there was still a place in the world for people like them.
People who were too broken to go back to normal life but too stubborn to give up entirely.
He was dead.
Murdered.
In a parking lot in Okeechobee, of all goddamn places.
Something inside her shifted. Like a door slamming shut. Like a switch being flipped. One second she was Dove—niece, friend, woman who'd had dinner with him three days ago and laughed at his terrible jokes and promised to call more often. The next second she was someone else. Something else.
Sergeant Quinn. The sniper who could lie perfectly still for eighteen hours waiting for a shot.
The soldier who'd watched her team die through a scope and kept breathing anyway.
The machine wrapped in skin, running on autopilot because the alternative was falling apart, and falling apart wasn't an option.
It was never an option.
Trent had pulled her against him, his arms wrapping around her from behind, his chin resting on her shoulder. She let him. But she didn't lean into it. Couldn't afford to.
"Do you have any leads?" Her voice came out flat. Controlled. Like it belonged to someone else entirely. "Witnesses?"
"Nothing yet," Corrick said. "The parking lot had minimal security coverage—just one camera at the entrance that caught his vehicle arriving at approximately eleven forty-five PM, but nothing that shows the incident itself.
We're canvassing the area, talking to businesses, checking traffic cams on the surrounding streets.
But so far..." He trailed off. The silence said what he couldn't.
"Your uncle was two months from retirement," Corrick continued. "He had no major cases on his desk. Nothing active that would've put a target on his back. Truthfully, we're at a loss. This doesn't fit any pattern we can identify."
Dove's mind was already turning over possibilities, examining them from every angle the way she'd been trained to examine a target zone before taking a shot.
Random robbery gone wrong? Possible, but two shots—head and chest—spoke of execution, not panic.
Someone from an old case with a grudge? Maybe, but Slade had been careful, always careful, and he'd survived thirty years in the marshals service by knowing which threats were real and which were just noise.
"What about the dead man's cache?" she asked. "The Parrish documents? Jack Mallor's case?"
Behind her, Trent went rigid. His breath caught, and she felt his fingers dig slightly into her arms.
A pause. Longer than it should have been.
“Your uncle shouldn’t have mentioned that,” Corrick said slowly.
“There was nothing active that your uncle was involved in.
He was winding down, not ramping up. Transitioning cases to other agents.
Clearing his desk." Another pause, a little longer than she thought necessary.
“The Mallor case affected Slade. He took that loss personally, and in some ways, he never recovered. Always paranoid about who in our office might have betrayed our witness. Betrayed him. Did your uncle mention something about the case to you?”
“Just that your office requested to exhume Jack Mallor’s body.” She held her breath for a moment, waiting for Trent to react.
He didn’t.
Corrick cleared his throat. “I’m expecting to hear from the judge today, and I also expect that they will allow it.”
Trent made a sound—low, wounded, barely audible. His arms tightened around her.
“I don’t know if my uncle told you that I’m living and working in Calusa Cove.”
“He did,” Corrick said.
“My uncle wasn’t overly thrilled with the idea of exhuming Jack’s body, and he mentioned that to Jack’s son. We understand there’s new information that needs to be confirmed, but I got the feeling there’s more, and I’d just like to be able to give Trent some peace of mind.”
Trent brushed his lips across her shoulder, soft and tender.
“You didn’t hear this from me, but there are some questions about the validity of the original autopsy and the ME who performed it.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Dove said. “Uncle Aaron said he was in town for a surprise visit, but I don’t believe that. He came to Calusa Cove because of whatever is going on with a case that crumbled twenty years ago and now he’s dead—murdered—because of it.”
“Slade had a few enemies. Anyone of them could’ve killed him,” Corrick said. “Right now, I need you to come to Okeechobee. To make an identification. The local medical examiner is expecting you—you can come anytime, there's no rush. He's..." A heavy breath. "He's not going anywhere."
The words hung there. Obscene in their practicality.
Of course, he wasn't going anywhere. He was dead.
Dead people didn't go anywhere. They just waited, cold and still, for someone who loved them to come and confirm that yes, this body used to be a person.
This shell used to laugh, tell bad jokes, drink bourbon on Sundays, and show up when you needed them most.
"I'll be there as soon as I can," Dove said.
"Take whatever time you need. And Miss Quinn—Aaron was a good man. One of the best I ever worked with. If there's anything I can do—anything at all—please don't hesitate. Day or night."
"Thank you."
"I'm so sorry for your loss."
The line went dead.