Page 41 of The Shield
“Wouldn’t dare,” Ethan answered, and I felt his mouth shape the words against my temple.
“This is my granddaddy,” I said quickly, slipping a hand against Ethan’s thigh like I could bridge the two worlds with one touch. “Butch Kennedy. He and I built half these storm maps together.”
Ethan’s hand tightened at my waist, steady. “Nice to meet you,” he said, tone polite but edged with the quiet weight he carried everywhere.
Butch’s eyes crinkled, not with humor but with that old, sharp scrutiny. “Likewise,” he agreed. “I make it a point to know the men near my girl.”
I swallowed, heat climbing my throat, but I didn’t flinch. “Now you do.”
We moved out to a cheer, Flapjack shouldering into the street like he’d been born for parades and storms in equal measure. Meeting to Market, Market to East Bay, east wind pushing rain sideways. Ethan’s arms bracketed me without crowding. Every time the horse shifted his weight, Ethan matched him, and I matched Ethan, a living proof that three bodies can learn each other fast when they mean to.
We were ridiculous and useful. Shops that would’ve ignored a woman with a stack of flyers turned out to a woman on a giant horse in a storm, and I took shameless advantage. “High ground!” I called, pointing with my whole arm. “Don’t park in the low garage—no, not even for ten minutes—I see you. You in the Prius, you’re about to make a very expensive decision—go left. Left. Thank you. You’re my favorite stranger.”
Ethan edged Flapjack to the gutter where a drain hiccuped ominously. “There?” he asked.
“There,” I confirmed, and he dismounted in one easy slide, handed me the reins, and crouched into the filthy water like a man who understood that heroics sometimes look like pulling oak fluff out of a grate. He cleared it with his hands. The drain gulped, caught, then spun to life, a small cyclone that earned a spontaneous round of applause from a pair of tourists in see-through ponchos.
He swung back up, warm and wet, and put his mouth next to my ear so he didn’t have to shout. “You’re having too much fun.”
“It’s working,” I said, high on the simple drug of effect. I turned my head without thinking, and his lips brushed my cheek. I shouldn’t have shivered. I did.
We looped Lockwood. We flagged a sedan before it became a boat. We called Huck to send cones to the corner where water disguised a hole. Everywhere, phones lifted. Everywhere, texts pinged. And everywhere, Flapjack made strangers smile in a hard hour.
After an hour, the rain hardened, a drum roll under a low sky. Ethan leaned back, listening with his body, the way men do who learned from weather early. “He’s starting to slog,” he said, palm rubbing Flapjack’s neck with a gratitude that tightened my throat. “I need to get him dry.”
“Go,” I said, already calculating how many blocks I could cover on foot before the tide shoved us off the board. “I’ll?—”
“Nope.” He curved an arm around my waist, fingers splayed at my jacket hem, maddening and anchoring. “I’m not dropping you in a puddle. Text your people. Then come with me and I’ll bring you back.”
With him. Like it had always been true.
“Bossy,” I said, and texted Owen, anyway.Circle soon. Taking horse to shelter. Play nice with Public Information Officer.
Owen:Dear God, marry him on camera.
“Later,” I muttered, pocketing the phone.
We cut east and then south, the city thinning to quieter streets where live oaks met overhead, dripping lace. Flapjack’s jog became a walk. His breath steamed. My hands found the warmth of his neck without thinking and stroked, whispering nonsense the way women whose blood remembers animals do. He flicked an ear, listening.
Dominion Hall rose out of the rain—stone and dark glass, long stables tucked close, lamps glowing honey at each bay.
Once we were through the front gate, Ethan steered us straight for the stables, the horse first, everything else second. Staff looked up as we came in, relief plain when they saw Flapjack, curiosity flickering sharper when their eyes landed on me. The stable’s air was warm with hay and sweet feed, leather and the clean, animal musk that softened something in my chest I didn’t know was hard.
I slid down from Flapjack’s back, boots hitting damp straw, and tilted my head at the mansion beyond the stables. “So, this is Dominion Hall.” My voice came out lighter than I felt. Everyone in Charleston knew of it—money, quiet power, the kind of place whispered about in a city that thrived on whispers. “What are we doing here?”
Ethan stripped the reins with steady hands, his shoulders rising and falling once, like he had to pull air into his chestbefore answering. “I just found out today the men inside are my brothers.” His gaze flicked to me, stormwater-dark and unflinching. “All of them. Every last one.”
The words hit harder than the rain on the roof. “Your brothers,” I repeated, my heartbeat stumbling. “You mean the Danes?”
He nodded once, slow. “Dane. That’s my name, too.”
I stared at him, the syllable vibrating through me with all the weight the city had taught me it carried. Dominion Hall. The Danes. A family that had shaped Charleston from its shadows, for better and worse. And Ethan—my Ethan, the man who had taken my body apart and put it back together with his bare hands—had just casually pulled back the curtain and set himself inside that legacy.
“You’re telling me you’re a Dane?” I asked, the words tasting strange in my mouth.
“I’m telling you I’ve been one my whole life,” he said, voice even, “but I didn’t know until now what it meant. Didn’t know I had brothers here. Didn’t know there was a second half of the story.” He looped the reins on a post, his fingers lingering on Flapjack’s damp neck. “Didn’t know I had to choose what to do with it.”
I swallowed, my mind spinning through the implications—the look on the cops’ faces when they’d seen his license, the sudden shift in temperature around him, the sense that the city already knew a piece of him he hadn’t shared. Now, it made sense. Or, at least, more sense than before.
