Chapter Two
The canoes were the first thing she saw.
Tamsin killed the engine and sat frozen behind the wheel, staring at the wreckage scattered across her front yard.
Three Kevlar canoes—twelve thousand dollars of equipment she'd spent two years saving for—dragged from her storage shed and stabbed through with what looked like a pike.
The hulls gaped like gutted fish, torn open with deliberate violence.
Behind her, the Savage's motorcycle rumbled to a stop.
She didn't move. Couldn't, for a moment. The truck damage had been expensive. The trailer had been infuriating. But this—
This was her livelihood bleeding out on the grass.
The bike's engine cut, and boots crunched on gravel. Lockjaw appeared at her window, his expression unreadable as he took in the scene.
"Stay in the truck."
"Like hell."
She was out before he could argue, crossing the yard with her fists clenched and her vision narrowing to the destruction in front of her.
The Northwind solo—her favorite, the one she'd portaged across half the Boundary Waters—had three holes punched through its hull.
The tandem was worse, nearly split in two.
The third canoe, a rental she kept for clients, had been flipped and crushed like someone had jumped on it.
"Don't touch anything."
Lockjaw's voice came from behind her, closer than she expected. She spun to find him scanning the tree line with eyes that moved like they were cataloguing threats.
"This is my property—"
"And someone was just here." He pointed at the ground near the shed. Fresh boot prints in the mud, two sets, leading toward the forest road that connected to the highway. "Recent. They heard us coming and left."
Tamsin's stomach dropped.
She looked at her cabin—small, isolated, exactly the way she'd wanted it when she'd bought the place three years ago. The door was closed. The windows intact. But suddenly every shadow between the pines felt like it was watching.
"Check the cabin," Lockjaw said. "I'll clear the perimeter."
"I can clear my own—"
"Tamsin." His voice cut through her protest, not loud but heavy with something that made her stop. "Someone just destroyed twelve thousand dollars of your equipment and ran when they heard a motorcycle. Let me make sure they're not still here before you walk into a building with one exit."
She wanted to argue. Every instinct she'd built over four years of surviving alone screamed that accepting help meant admitting weakness.
But the boot prints were fresh.
And her rifle was inside the cabin.
"Fine." The word tasted like surrender. "But I'm not hiding in my truck like a scared client."
"Didn't ask you to." He was already moving toward the tree line, shoulders loose but eyes sharp. "Check the cabin. Yell if anything's wrong."
She watched him disappear into the pines, moving with a quiet efficiency that didn't match his size. Then she turned toward her cabin and forced her legs to carry her forward.
The cabin was untouched.
Tamsin cleared each room with her rifle in hand—bedroom, bathroom, the tiny kitchen that doubled as her office. Nothing disturbed. Nothing missing. They'd focused entirely on the canoes, which meant this wasn't robbery.
This was a message.
She was standing in her kitchen, staring at the client schedule pinned to her corkboard, when Lockjaw's boots hit her porch.
"Clear," he said through the screen door. "Two sets of prints, truck parked about a quarter mile up the forest road. They're gone."
"For now."
"For now." He stepped inside without asking permission, which should have irritated her but somehow didn't. His presence filled the small space without crowding it. "You want to tell me about the floatplanes?"
Tamsin set down her rifle.
"What do you know about Gordon Pruitt?"
"Runs a fishing lodge on Vermillion. High-end clientele, expensive packages, discrete service." Lockjaw leaned against her counter, arms crossed, watching her with an intensity that should have been uncomfortable. "The Savages know about his basement card games. Didn't think it was our business."
"It wasn't. Until I started guiding routes that cross his access points."
She grabbed two beers from the fridge—habit, hospitality, something to do with her hands—and set one on the counter near him. He took it without breaking eye contact.
"Three years ago, I mapped a new route through the eastern Boundary Waters. Connects four lakes that nobody else guides because the portages are brutal." She popped the cap off her bottle, took a long drink. "Best fishing in the region. Clients book six months in advance."
"And?"
"And one of those portages runs right past a boat launch that Pruitt's people use.
Not for fishing—for moving clients." She met his eyes.
"The floatplanes bring them in. The boats shuttle them to the lodge through routes that don't show up on any maps.
I've seen them three, four times a season.
Expensive suits, no gear, definitely not here for walleye. "
Lockjaw's jaw tightened. That thing he did, the clench that made the muscle jump beneath his skin.
"You've been paddling past a gambling operation's access points."
"Public water." Her chin lifted. "I've got every right to be there."
"Rights don't stop bullets."
The words landed like stones. Tamsin felt the weight of them settle into her chest, cold and heavy.
"A year ago, two of Pruitt's guys approached me at the Kawishiwi Lake launch." She kept her voice steady, but the memory still made her hands want to shake. "Polite at first. Said their employer was concerned about 'traffic' on certain routes. Offered to pay me to guide different lakes."
"You said no."
"I said I don't take bribes from criminals." She smiled, sharp and humorless. "That's when they stopped being polite."
"What happened?"
"I put a paddle through one guy's knee and outran the other to my truck." She shrugged like it didn't matter, like the memory of that sprint through the woods with her heart hammering didn't still wake her up some nights. "Figured that would be the end of it. Figured wrong."
Lockjaw was quiet for a long moment.
"Pruitt runs high-stakes games for people who fly in from Minneapolis and Duluth.
" His voice had dropped, taking on an edge she hadn't heard before.
"We're talking six-figure pots, wealthy clients who can't afford to be seen at regular casinos.
The lodge is a front. The fishing packages are cover.
And those access points you keep paddling past? "
"Let me guess. That's how he moves money."
"That's how he moves everything. Cash, clients, problems that need to disappear." His eyes held hers. "You're not an inconvenience to him, Tamsin. You're a witness. And witnesses—"
"Don't age well in his world."
The words came out flat. Mechanical. Her brain processing what her gut had already known since the first "polite" approach at Kawishiwi Lake.
Gordon Pruitt wasn't trying to scare her off.
He was building a case for making her disappear.
"The canoes." She looked toward the window, toward the wreckage in her yard. "That's not vandalism. That's him cutting off my options. I can't guide without equipment. I can't work without income. And if I can't work—"
"You have to leave."
"Or I stop being a problem another way."
Silence settled between them, heavy with implications neither of them wanted to voice.
Tamsin had built this life from nothing. A truck, a canoe, and a rifle—that's what she'd left her marriage with. Four years of sixteen-hour days, of sleeping in her vehicle between trips, of earning a reputation one client at a time until she had something that was hers.
And now some lodge owner with a gambling habit was going to take it from her because she'd paddled past the wrong boat launch.
"I'm not running." The words came out harder than she intended. "I didn't rebuild my entire life to let some resort asshole chase me off public water."
"I know."
She looked at him—really looked, past the cut and the road name and the intensity that seemed to radiate off him like heat. He was watching her the way he'd watched the tree line. Like she was something worth protecting.
"The Savages," she said slowly. "This is your territory."
"It is."
"And Pruitt's been operating here without... what, permission? Tribute?"
"Without acknowledgment." Lockjaw set down his beer, still mostly full.
"We knew about the card games. Didn't think it was worth the attention.
But his people threatening a woman on club-friendly water, damaging property openly, acting like this land belongs to them?
" His jaw clenched again. "That's different. "
"So what happens now?"
He pushed off the counter and moved toward the door, pausing with his hand on the frame.
"Now I bring this to church. Let Permafrost decide how the club responds." He looked back at her, and something in his expression made her breath catch. "But I'm not leaving you here alone tonight. Not with fresh boot prints in your yard and canoes that look like a crime scene."
"I have a rifle."
"You have one rifle and one exit." He held her gaze. "I have a bike, a phone, and brothers who'll be here in twenty minutes if I call. Your choice."
Tamsin wanted to argue. Wanted to tell him she'd survived worse than some gambling operation's muscle. Wanted to prove she didn't need anyone, the same way she'd been proving it since she'd signed the divorce papers and driven north without looking back.
But her canoes were destroyed.
Her business was bleeding.
And the boot prints in her yard said Pruitt's people knew exactly where she lived.
"Fine." She grabbed her rifle and her dog's leash from the hook by the door. "But you're sleeping on the porch. And if you snore, I'm feeding you to the bears."
Something flickered across his face—not quite a smile, but close.
"Fair enough."
She followed him out into the evening light, her dog pressing against her leg, and tried not to think about how quickly her world had narrowed to this: a destroyed business, a dangerous enemy, and a biker with intense eyes who looked at her like she was worth fighting for.
Witnesses didn't age well in Gordon Pruitt's world.
But Tamsin Rowe had never been good at dying quietly.