Chapter 11 #2
He shifted his body, ignoring the squeeze on his leg, the pressure building toward pain. Angled the air gun upward. The snake's head swayed. He needed a shot at the top of the skull, behind the eyes. The sweet spot where a single pneumatic bolt would do its job and the animal wouldn't feel a thing.
The head dipped.
He fired.
The bolt connected. A sound like a muffled punch, and the snake's body went slack. Not dead—unconscious. The coils around his leg loosened like a rope coming undone, the massive body sagging against the ground in a boneless heap.
Trent was on his feet in an instant. He ripped the remaining coils from his leg, the scales rough against his skin, and grabbed the pithing tool from his belt—one quick, precise thrust into the brain stem.
The snake was gone.
No suffering. No drawn-out death. Just a switch flipped off, the way nature didn't do it, but humans owed it to the animals they'd displaced.
But the gator was still tangled.
Three and a half feet of panicked, oxygen-deprived alligator with jaws that could snap off a man's hand at the wrist. Its eyes were open now—wide, wild, pupils blown.
It hissed again, a wet, guttural sound, its tail slapping weakly against the dead snake's body.
Disoriented. Scared. And likely to bite whatever came close.
“It’s okay, Clarkson. You’re gonna be just fine,” he whispered.
“I’ll be right back.” He grabbed the bucket and brought it closer.
He lifted the chicken quarter with the hook, threading it onto the curved end so it dangled like bait on a line.
With his free hand, he carefully peeled the dead snake's coils away from the gator's body, working quickly, keeping his fingers well clear of those jaws.
The gator snapped at the air. Once. Twice. Testing. Looking for something to fight.
"Easy," Trent murmured. "Easy, Clarkson. Nobody's gonna hurt you."
He held the chicken quarter out on the hook, low to the ground, letting the smell do the work. The gator's nostrils flared. Its head tracked the meat, instinct overriding panic. Hunger was a hell of a motivator, even when a gator had nearly been crushed to death.
Slowly, carefully, Trent guided the hook toward the moat, step by step, the chicken quarter swinging gently.
The gator followed, its gait unsteady, weaving slightly like a drunk navigating a parking lot.
But it followed. Because it was a gator, and gators followed food the way rivers followed current. It was just what they did.
At the moat's edge, Trent swung the chicken quarter out over the water. The gator lunged, snapping the meat off the hook with a crack that echoed across the property, and slid into the dark water with a splash. The steep concrete on this side would keep it from climbing back up. Safe. Contained.
Trent exhaled. His mind and body finally registered the kind of danger he’d been in, like it always did after he’d encountered something that wasn’t considered a routine pithing or gator confrontation.
His pulse hitched. His breath caught in his throat.
His hands even trembled. He shook them and blew out a long breath.
He lifted his leg, which throbbed where the python had squeezed, a dull ache that would probably turn into a spectacular bruise by afternoon. He rolled his foot, giving it a good stretch before putting it back on solid ground. His shoulder hurt from the fall.
He looked up at the porch.
Dove stood behind the screen door, the Glock still in her hand, still at her side, her face pale but composed.
The morning light caught her blond hair, turning it almost white, and for a second she looked less like a woman and more like a ghost—something caught between this world and the next, not quite committed to either.
"You can come down now," he called.
"No, thank you. I’m good right here.”
He laughed. He couldn't help it. After everything—the phone call, the news about Slade, the tears on the bedroom floor, a fifteen-foot python trying to make a meal of his gator and squeezing his leg—the woman who could drop a target at a thousand yards was standing on his porch refusing to come down because there might be reptiles.
"It's not funny," Dove said. But there was something in her voice. Not humor, exactly. More like the echo of humor. The memory of what laughing felt like, preserved somewhere beneath all the grief and shock and exhaustion.
"It's a little funny."
"You almost died."
"I did not almost die."
"The snake was wrapped around your leg,” she said.
"I had it under control."
"You were on the ground."
"Temporarily. Part of the process."
She stared at him through the screen, her expression balanced and unreadable. “I don’t know if I want to strangle you or kiss you.”
“I’d prefer the kiss, and I’ll be up in a second to get it.
” He figured that was about right for the two of them on any given day.
He turned back to the dead python, pulling a breath of thick morning air into his lungs, tasting the musk and blood and the green of the Everglades waking up around him.
The bruise on his leg pulsed in time with his heartbeat.
Normal morning at Mallor's Landing. Just another… shit.
Slight movement near the tree line, low to the ground, where the tall grass met the fence.
His eyes narrowed, tracking the motion. A ripple through the grass. Then another. Different direction. Then a third, further down the fence, sliding along the base of a cypress trunk.
More snakes.
Not as big as the one he'd just killed. Eight, maybe ten feet. But unmistakable—that distinctive lateral undulation, the mottled pattern catching the early light as they moved through the undergrowth. He counted them, his jaw tightening with each one.
One near the fence post. Another along the drainage ditch. A third coiled at the base of the equipment shed. A fourth disappeared into the grass near the south bank.
Four. At least four.
His blood went cold.
He hadn't seen a python on his property in years. He was constantly looking for them. Looking for nests nearby. Clearing them out when he found them. But the last time he saw one slithering on his land was about six years ago.
Something was wrong for this many to be gathering.
He collected the bolt stunner, the pithing tool, and the air gun, leaving the dead python where it lay.
He’d feed it to the gators later once things settled down.
He walked back toward the porch with a calm he didn't entirely feel, his gaze scanning the perimeter, counting threats, calculating distances between the snakes and the moat.
"We've got a problem," he said, setting the tools on the porch step.
Dove's eyes sharpened. “Worse than the one you just handled?”
"More pythons. At least four that I can see.
Maybe more I can't." He ran a hand through his hair.
"I need to call Fish and Wildlife. Actually, I'll call Fallon directly, and she’ll call her boss, Keaton Cole.
I can't deal with this many on my own, and if even one of them gets into the moat.
.." He shook his head. "A python that size could easily take one of my smaller gators.
And if they get into the breeding area, it'll be a massacre. But the bigger gators could easily deal with the pythons, but it would be an all-out battlefield and a messy one.”
Dove straightened. "Okay. You deal with this. I'll go to Okeechobee and—"
"No."
“I can’t sit around here. I have to go identify my uncle's body."
"And you will. With me. Not alone." He closed the gap between them. "I just need to wait for Fish and Wildlife to get here and get set up. Once they're on the property doing their thing, I'll go with you."
"That could take hours."
"Then it takes hours."
"I'm not going to fall apart driving to Okeechobee by myself."
"I know you won't." He kept his voice low. Gentle but immovable. "But I also know what it's like to walk into a room and look at someone you love on a table and have nobody standing next to you. My mother took her last breath with me sitting next to her. Alone. Then I sat there, alone, waiting for them to take her. Then I sat here for hours because I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. All alone.”
Her eyes glossed over.
"You're not doing that by yourself,” he said. "I won't let you. So we wait."
She opened her mouth. Closed it. He could see the war playing out across her face—the part of her that needed to move, to act, to do something before the grief caught up with her, fighting against the part that knew he was right.
That recognized the truth in what he'd said because she'd seen her own version of that utter sense of aloneness.
He took the Glock from her hands, gently, and set it on the end table by the old sofa. “I care about you.” He cupped her face, his thumbs tracing the dark circles under her eyes, the tear tracks that had dried on her cheeks.
She looked up at him. Those blue eyes, rimmed in red now, bloodshot from holding back the tears and filled with something that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite grief but lived in the space between them.
The morning light was soft on her face, washing out the edges, making her look young and exhausted and so far from the woman who'd walked into his life like she was built for war that it broke his heart.
“I’m not okay,” she whispered.
"I know."
"I don't know how to do this."
"Nobody does." He pressed his forehead against hers. "But you don't have to figure it out by yourself. That's the whole point of this. Of us. Whatever we are."
She let out a shaky breath. Her hands came up to grip his wrists, holding on like he was the only solid thing in a world that had gone liquid and uncertain.
"Okay," she said quietly. "I'll wait."
“Good decision because if you had said no, I would’ve had to tie you down, and that’s not how I wanted that to go, if you know what I mean.”
“Now you’re being a pig.”
“I’m a man.”
She chuckled as she pulled back and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Then she straightened her shoulders—a deliberate thing, like someone putting on armor one piece at a time. “I’m going to make muffins."
Trent narrowed his stare. "Muffins?”
"I need to do something with my hands, and if I can't shoot something or punch something, baking is the next best option." She moved toward the door, then stopped and looked back at him. "You have flour, right?"
"I have flour."
"Eggs? Butter? Sugar?"
"I think so."
"Blueberries?"
"Fresh ones that you bought the other day."
"Then I'm making muffins." She pushed through the door into the kitchen, and he heard her opening cabinets, the familiar sounds of someone looking for mixing bowls in a kitchen they didn't know well enough to navigate without searching.
Trent stood on the porch and watched the morning settle over his property.
The gators in the moat had calmed, their bellows fading to the occasional grumble.
Somewhere in the grass, a python he couldn't see was making its way toward a place it had no business being.
His leg ached. His shoulder throbbed. Inside, a woman he was falling for was making muffins because it was the only thing standing between her and a grief so big it could swallow her whole.
He pulled out his phone and called Fallon.
It rang twice before she answered, her voice thick with sleep. "Trent? It's not even six. Someone better be dead or dying."
His chest tightened. "I need you and Keaton and maybe one or two other FWC officers out at Mallor's Landing. As soon as possible."
"What's going on?"
"I've got a python problem—at least five, including a fifteen-footer I already put down.
The rest are spread across the property, making their way toward the moat.
I've never seen this many on my land. Not even close.
" He watched the grass near the fence line, tracking a subtle movement that could have been wind but wasn't. "Something's not right. "
“Getting out of bed now,” Fallon said. “I’ll call it in and make it official.”
"Thank you."
He hung up and leaned against the porch railing, listening to the clink of a mixing bowl being set on the counter and the soft thud of the fridge being closed. It was the sounds of someone building something small and good in the middle of something terrible.
His leg throbbed.
The snakes were still out there.
And somewhere in Okeechobee, Dove's uncle was lying on a cold steel table waiting for someone who loved him to come and say his name.