Page 62 of Christmas Harbor Secrets
The phone clicked off.
The night swallowed the silence that followed.
Her knees gave out. She couldn’t breathe. The air burned in her chest.
Her father wasn’t— No. No, she refused to believe it.
“He’s lying,” she whispered. “He’s lying.”
But Blake’s expression told her otherwise. That tiny shake of his head—grim, final—shattered the fragile thread she’d been clinging to.
Her vision blurred. The world tilted, the edges of the swamp swimming in red light. Acid boiled up her throat.
Lucky laughed, low and cruel. “You think we’d go through all this trouble if Daddy Daniels was still breathing? Nah. Thought he’d sent you the info, tried to track you down, but Daddy wouldn’t squeal. Tried lying to him and saying we already had you, still didn’t tell us. Don’t know how, but that man kept your location a secret all these years.”
“Then how’d you find him?” she managed between pants.
“We didn’t. That’s the beauty of all this. We never did trackhim or you down. Didn’t even know about you at the time. A new hire to the company told a story about his prison days. A real winner of a story that caught some attention. You know what he told us?”
She could only shake her head. Hot tears spilled down her cheeks, and nausea rolled up her throat.
“Told us about a man that everyone had said was murdered, but our guy was on mop duty and saw him walk out of the infirmary. It took one leak to the FBI that we’d found out, and he came running to protect his family. Kept him alive long enough to record his voice to generate phrases from. Techie stuff above my pay grade, but amazing what AI can do now. He was useful for a while. Until he wasn’t.”
Laurel Tide minionsmarched them through the ruin of the ranger station like trophies, wrists cinched with plastic. Rone counted boots, guns, angles without thinking. Twelve in the outer ring. Four in close. Two on the catwalk above pretending they were posts. The odor of wet plywood and old fuel clung to the air breathing out through the hurricane-torn walls. A small room in the back sparkled with Christmas lights as if mocking happier times.
He couldn’t gauge Blake’s part in this. Misstep—it had to be based on the shocked look on his face. Not that anyone else could see it except an old military brother who’d beat him at poker on more than one occasion. But if so, where were the Feds? Backup? They were supposed to be staged on the island.
Lucky walked backward ahead of them, an easy smile riding his face like something he’d practiced in a mirror. The smile didn’t reach his eyes. Nothing did.
He stopped in the middle of the open room, under adangling bulb that swayed in the wind. “Let’s not drag out the grief parade,” he said, head tilting toward Isobel. “Your daddy’s dead.”
Rone felt her flinch by his side. Her breath hitched once, then went thin and fast. She didn’t make a sound. She just stood there like someone had pulled a wire straight through her sternum and tied it to the floor. He wanted to reach for her, take her in his arms and promise her everything would be okay. He didn’t. He couldn’t. Any move toward her would be a trigger here.
Blake’s jaw worked. “You’re lying.”
Lucky’s smile sharpened. “Two bodies went into that water the night your boy decided to grow a conscience. One came back up because we needed someone to send a message.” He lifted his phone like a toast, the cracked screen catching the light. “Messages travel farther than men.”
Isobel blinked hard. Rone watched a tremor run under the skin along her throat, saw her pull air in, slow, like she’d learned how to breathe all over again. When her gaze lifted, there was a new temperature in it. No collapse. Fire finding oxygen.
They pulled them toward the side doors—cells cut out of the old storage rooms—when Lucky glanced over his shoulder at Blake and let the grin go soft. “Too easy,” he said conversationally. “Took longer than I wanted, but what’s two years between friends?”
Blake’s head snapped up. “Friends?”
“Trust is a funny currency,” Lucky went on, strolling closer. “You pay a little up front. Bring the right tip at the right time. Make the right problem go away. Folks like you start to relax their shoulders.”
“Two years,” Blake repeated. Color drained under his stubble. “You’ve been feeding me lines that long?”
Lucky laughed. “Don’t flatter yourself, Fed. I was feedingthe whole field. You were just the one who mattered.” He tipped his chin toward the guards. They shoved Blake down onto a battered chair and cinched his zip ties to the armrests.
“You’re a traitor,” Blake spat.
“Wrong hymn,” Lucky said lightly. “FBI wouldn’t lift a finger when my sister went missing. ‘Resources thin.’ ‘Wrong jurisdiction.’ You remember the words? I do. Laurel took care of it. Wasn’t pretty.” His eyes went flat. “But it was honest.”
Rone filed the sister in the box in his mind where leverage went. A dead sister made zealots. A living one made leashes. He couldn’t tell which version had written Lucky.
“Honest?” Blake’s voice cracked the way men’s did when faith curdled. “You think selling out witnesses is honest?”
Lucky’s grin returned, plastic again. “I think debts get paid. And you’ve got one due.”
