Chapter 10 #2
He gives me a look that says you burn water, and I hold up a hand. “I’ve been watching Food Network! And anyone can make toast and eggs. I’ve got this.”
He shakes his head. “If it’s nasty, I’m DoorDashing. Should we make it smell girly for her? Light a candle or something?”
“Cinnamon and spice,” I say. “Or vanilla.”
Storm’s mouth tips in a way that both is and isn’t a smile. “The boy can be useful.”
I grin.
My phone pings—security with bags from the Tybee boutique. I take the clothes into the guest room and lay them out without folding them store-neat. I want Phoenix to touch them and know they’re hers and not something grabbed off a display.
Atticus calls from upstairs, summoning the rest of us.
We gather around a screen that shows an arc of ocean. My eyes scan over and interpret each item rapidly: a blinking triangle, a dotted line, the ghost of a Coast Guard cutter nowhere near where we need them to be.
Atticus explains, thankfully minus the tech-bro jargon.
“The call from Blackvine came in. This is where the AMARANTH STAR will be in five hours if it holds speed. Blackvine’s boats are going to intersect here.
” He points. “They’ll be boarding under the guise of running private maritime security for ‘piracy mitigation.’”
“Pirates,” I say. “Cute.”
“Legal fiction,” he says. “Big guns that don’t have to belong to a flag to pack a punch.”
Storm leans on the back of a chair. “Are we going to be on the boats or are we meeting them at the shipyard?”
“We’re on that fucking boat,” Atticus says.
Storm doesn’t ask if we trust Blackvine. He trusts me to have done that math. I did. They could’ve hung us out to dry with the pharma stuff and they didn’t.
That said… I trust them like I trust a shark that’s not hungry. They’ll eat another day. Today, we swim together.
My phone buzzes, and I glance at the screen.
“Blackvine’s team is in place.”
The room takes a collective breath. It feels like things are—finally—starting to move. Like we’re finally taking the necessary steps to get our girl back. We’ve been doing that all along, of course, but this feels…I don’t know. Active. More.
I go back to the kitchen and eat a sandwich while I pace a circle around the island. It’s going to be hours before we get anywhere close to where Phoenix is located, and the waiting is brutal. I need to fucking do something.
Conrad comes in, clutching Zeus’s blanket, and walks past me without saying a word. Shoving the last bite of sandwich in my mouth, I follow.
He walks straight to the room we chose for Phoenix, pulls the blanket out, and lays it on the bed while I watch from the doorway. He inhales once—sharp, like a stab—and turns to leave.
I stop him with a hand on his chest. “We’re going to get her here,” I tell him, in case he thinks this is all theatre we’re doing to make ourselves feel better. “She’s going to sleep in that bed. She’s going to wake up to us and not…them. Whoever the fuck it is.”
“Yeah. I know,” he says. His face tightens. “Mav.”
“Yeah?”
“You and Storm…you did a good job with this.” He gestures at the house and trails off. “Thank you.”
I grin at him because if I do anything else we’ll both fall apart, and we’re allowed to do that after, not now. “You can pay us in favors for the next decade.”
“Fuck that,” he says, and goes downstairs.
I check the time on my phone. We have forty minutes before we need to be on a boat. I grab a duffel and toss in everything I can think of… It’s probably overkill but I want to be prepared for anything.
And it makes me feel better, I guess, to think about managing the wounds and hurts and discomforts that can be managed—clothing to keep her warm, protein gels if she can’t chew, a blanket that isn’t Zeus’s but smells like him now because Conrad pressed it to the dog’s side before he handed it to me.
Storm adds a trauma kit, a space blanket, restraints we won’t need if the men we meet aren’t idiots.
Atticus brings a case that speaks multiple legal languages and will confuse a man with a badge into thinking that the paper in it is his own.
It’s the thought of how we’re going to care for the other kinds of wounds that sends ice down my spine.
I can more easily kill the men who hurt her, I think, than make it better, and nothing has ever made me feel smaller than that awareness.
But maybe she’s not hurt.
Maybe.
On the way to the garage, Storm peels off toward the side deck. I follow because when Storm moves like that, it’s either a problem or a gift.
He stops in the shadow of the live oak, looks out at the suggestion of the water beyond the houses, and says—more like he’s talking to the tree because he doesn’t know how to talk to a person about this, “I called my father.”
I lean against the tree. Let the wind move my shirt. Make it easy for him not to look at me while he says it. “How’d that go?”
“He had some good advice,” he says. Then, after a beat, “He told me some things we could do, afterward.”
I nod. “That is useful.”
“He said he loves me,” Storm says after a moment, like a man reporting a strange weather event.
“What’d you say back?”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. We’re the kind of men who know silence is a whole story in itself.
“My dad would tell me to move on,” I say. “Pick a new girl, go to a new bar, pretend I didn’t turn my insides into this one person’s shape.”
Storm cuts his eyes at me. “Could you do that?”
I bark a laugh that has no humor in it. “That’s not a possibility for me. Not anymore.”
He holds my look a second longer than he’d have allowed last year. “You love her.”
“Of course I love her,” I say, and there’s zero lightness in the response. It lands like a hammer.
He exhales. “I guess welcome to the same bullshit, then.”
“You there, too?”
He doesn’t look away. “I’ve fucking been there for years. It’s perfection and hell all in one place”
We stand in that for a breath. The wind moves the oak; somewhere in the marsh a bird makes a sound that doesn’t belong to our conversation. I clap his shoulder once, hard enough that his body jerks with the jolt.
“Good,” I say. “She’s going to need all of us when she gets here. Steady. Heart-whole. With her.”
“We will be,” he says.
I believe him.
Blackvine’s guy texts with coordinates, call signs, and a reminder that, “If anyone asks who we are, we’re none of their business, and if they push, we’re the fucking Coast Guard.”
We link up at a private dock that doesn’t look like it belongs to the syndicate until you see the way the guards don’t look. The boats are low and fast, matte paint, engines that purr like they’re bored until they open their throats.
The guy Blackvine has leading the retrieval shakes our hands but doesn’t offer his name. He jerks his head toward the boats.
“Two of ours on the other boat will handle the ladder. You two take eyes and hands. If she’s ambulatory, you don’t touch her until she says you can.
If she’s not, you move like she’s glass with a thousand cracks.
Anything that isn’t wearing a face we recognize gets pointed at the water and told to swim home, or you can put a bullet in their head for all I care. ”
“Understood,” Storm says, taking the deck behind the pilot. Con settles on the other boat, meeting my gaze across the water.
I sling the duffel at my feet and hold on to a rail as we cut across the open water and start building a line toward a moving target that isn’t going to like us when we arrive.
The city behind us dwindles to a smear of yellow as the dark ahead grows bigger. The cargo ship is a suggestion on the horizon until it reveals its location by its lack of movement.
Atticus rides with us, headset on, voice low, coordinating the other half of the plan. “Blackvine’s dock team is in my ear. We keep everything quiet until we don’t need to anymore.”
“Copy,” Storm says.
We ride silence for a minute. The ocean does its repetitive miracle: wave, lift, slap, breathe. If I let myself, I could be eighteen again, on a smaller boat, carefree and out on the water for booze and fun and thrills.
But I’m not eighteen. I’ll never be eighteen again, not after tonight. None of us will. Tonight I’m counting all the ways it’s possible for a man to take and box a woman into the shape he wants…and then I count the ways we’re going to break that man apart.
“Why her,” the pilot asks, not like he wants gossip, but like he genuinely wants to understand the urgency behind the task he’s been given. And I understand, because it’s a task that could end with his people hurt or dead.
“Because she’s ours,” I say.
He nods. It’s enough.
The radio crackles. “I’ve got a visual,” the other boat says. “Two miles out. Running lights, but she’s not calling herself on AIS. Ladder’s dropped on port.”
We adjust course. Our engines change tone. We’re all teeth now.
I pull out my phone and send the text I’ve wanted to send for twenty-four hours.
We’re coming. Hold on.
If there’s a god who delivers messages written to air and ether, he’ll deliver this one because that’s the only way Phoenix would know. Her phone isn’t on. But when she does get it back, she’ll know that I cared enough to tell her we were on our way.
We hit the ship’s shadow and become a different kind of fast—quiet, focused. The men on the other boat clip lines and hand up grips. The ladder clanks against steel, and at the top, a Blackvine man already in play stops us with a palm.
“Deck left is hot,” he whispers. “We go right, snake the lanes. We keep our mouths shut until we see the face we came for. Then you do whatever you came to do.”
We move, my hand trailing lightly along a rail as I follow Storm around a stack of red containers.
We turn the corner into the lane that will make all of this either beautiful or hell, and I whisper the words again to the girl who learned how to survive in rooms built for men, “Come on, firebird. Help us find you.”