Page 29 of Christmas Harbor Secrets
Echo’s tail thumped once under the table: a single stamp of approval. Rone’s mouth twitched.
“Tell me about your father,” he said. The way he said it wasn’t prying; it was invitation.
She glanced at the helm. She stared until her breath evened. “He could fix anything,” she said, eyes on the memory. “Boat engines. Toys. Broken moods. He hated when I cried because he didn’t know where to set his hands to mend that. He would give me a task instead. ‘Hold the flashlight, Isobel. Turn it toward where we need to see.’ And when I did, he’d say, ‘Good. There it is. We can fix what we can see.’”
Rone’s throat moved. He didn’t say the obvious: what we can’t see is what kills us. He didn’t have to. It hovered around his eyes.
“He taught me knots,” she went on, finding a small, improbable smile. “Bowline, clove hitch.He said every knot has a purpose. If you try to make it do more than it’s designed for, it fails. People are like that. He wasn’t wrong.”
Rone rubbed the edge of the bandage with his thumb as if the texture could ground him. “Do you think he left because he failed?”
She shook her head. “I think someone pulled him.”
Something lurched in the water then—a mullet, probably—and slapped back with a sound like a hand hitting wet stone. Echo’s ears pricked, head up now, gaze cutting toward the hatch.
Rone’s head turned a fraction. Awareness slid over him like a second skin. He didn’t reach for anything. He just listened with his body, and she discovered she could tell the difference now between the way he listened for weather and the way he listened for threat.
The moment stretched and passed. Echo’s ears eased. Rone’s shoulders did not.
“You’re thinking about leaving,” she said softly. It wasn’t accusation. It was observation. The way his body leaned toward the door even while all of him sat in the cabin with her.
“I’m thinking about next steps,” he said. “I’m thinking if we open the drive, we need distance from everything with a plug and a connection. I’m thinking lines and locks and the things Sheriff Fletcher will or won’t do even with an election breathing down his neck.” He ran his teeth across his lower lip and left a white line there. “I’m thinking I wish you hadn’t told him who you are.”
She blinked. “Why?”
“The less they know about you, the better. The less they’ll push before you go.”
“And if I don’t go?”
“Then you die. It’s a fact. Don’t trust me to protect you.”
She wanted to push. She didn’t. Some fights you pick. Some you set aside because there’s a bigger one at the door.
Echo shifted again, weight landing forward. He made a sound in his chest, low and vibrating like a humming wire.
“What is it?” Isobel whispered.
Rone didn’t answer. He was already moving, the coffee mug silent in his hand as he set it down without looking. He stood and turned toward the door, every line in him narrowing to purpose.
“Rone?”
He should’ve looked back. He didn’t. Something in the air changed—some small invisible thread pulled taut. A gull’s call sliced past and left the quiet truer behind it.
“Stay,” he said to Echo without taking his eyes off the doorway. Echo ignored him, half-standing, tail stiffened into a straight line.
Isobel followed his gaze, reflex more than choice. She didn’t see anything through the open but a slice of sky the color of dime metal.
Then a red dot bloomed on the front of her shirt. Tiny. Perfect. A bead of light right over the sternum.
For a heartbeat, her mind made it something ordinary—a reflected marker from a kid, a trick of sun. The way a brain will translate a snake into a rope until you’re too close to do anything but bleed.
Rone saw it when she saw it. His face didn’t change. Everything else did.
“Down,” he said, and the word was more breath than sound.
Echo erupted—no bark at first, just the violent intake of air a dog makes when the world moves wrong. Then the sound: a crack of fury so sudden it stung her eardrums. He launched for the door with a howl that had nothing to do with show and everything to do with blood and protection.
Rone was already moving, a blur at the edge of the table. His shoulder hit her waist, and the air left her in a grunt as the two of them went to the floor. Her mug went end over end, coffee arcing in a thin brown parabola. Her elbow glanced the table edge; pain flared, sharp and bright, and went quiet again under the adrenaline that swallowed everything.
