Page 32 of Christmas Harbor Secrets
The line appeared between her brows. “In what?”
“This.” He gestured at the dock, boat, bullet holes, the shape of threat that had settled around her and refused to be shooed. “Deep enough that there isn’t an easy out. You already knew it. I’m saying it out loud so we stop wasting time pretending there’s an escape hatch that isn’t there.”
She stared at him for a long breath. Then she nodded, once, steady. “Okay.”
“We do this my way,” he said. “We pick ground, not panic. We don’t bargain with criminals. We move quiet, and we don’t show everything we have. Not even to the sheriff.”
“Okay,” she said again. The word wasn’t surrender. It was an agreement between equals. Her bravery had earned his respect. He’d never met a civilian with such strength and determination with zero training.
He went down to his boat and came back with the old laptop wrapped in oilcloth. A thick, ugly computer with keys that still clicked like a proper machine and a hinge that had outlived newer, prettier cousins. No network card. No drive that talked to the world unless you told it what to say. He set it on the table, and the sound it made when he opened it felt like a vow.
He didn’t look at her when he reached into his pocket. The Altoids tin was warm from his thigh. He set it down, popped the lid. Mint dust swirled. He took the drive between thumb and forefinger, then slid it into the USB port with a click that sounded too loud.
The screen stuttered from black to a hungry gray to a patient blue. The machine considered its life choices and then welcomed the stranger: removable device detected. He didn’t let his breath out until the directory appeared with plain file names in a plain font, the way trouble always liked to dress.
He kept his hands light. He didn’t open anything yet. He stared the way you stare at a dog you don’t know: no sudden moves, no retreat.
Isobel moved from the couch and stood at his shoulder, steady as a lamp behind him. He could feel the heat of her through the thin cotton of his shirt, and he could feel Echo’s weight settle at his feet.
“Ready?” he asked without taking his eyes off the screen.
“No,” she saidhonestly. “Do it anyway.”
He double-clicked the only folder not pretending to be boring. It had a name that did nothing and everything at once in his blood: TideLedger.
A small box blinked up, requesting a password. Beneath it, a tagline he hadn’t seen in years traced across the corner of the window—an old logo like a watermark: a stylized wave curling around a laurel. His mouth went dry.
He knew that crest. Everyone who’d been on the job longer than five minutes in the wrong cities knew it. A shell company that had outlived three administrations and four rebrandings—clean as a church on paper, rotten as a bait bucket under the pier in truth. They used to call it the Laurel Tide Group and laugh about how the river cleans everything if you give it time.
“Rone?” Isobel’s voice was soft and far away, like she’d stepped to the other end of a long hallway.
He didn’t answer. He stared at the tiny digital laurel like it was a fingerprint blooming in powder. He clicked the little “info” arrow almost against his will. Metadata unfolded: last modified, a date that sat a week before Shade went into the water. Author: initialed. S.D.
His stomach went cold in a slow, sinking way. He’d expected numbers. Names. Maybe a ledger of payoffs. He hadn’t expected the brand stamped into the corner like a priest’s seal, casual and permanent.
“This isn’t bad, this is disastrous. This isn’t petty crime or a local group. This is a huge global organization of drug running, mafia, and all things that go bump in the night. It’s Laurel Tide,” he said, and the name felt dirty in his mouth. “That’s a front. Old. Still used. It’s not… This isn’t something Shade was gathering for somebody else.”
“What do you mean?”
He swallowed. The cursor blazed, ready, impatient. His finger hovered and didn’tdescend.
“He wasn’t informing on them,” Rone said. The words were heavy and quiet and cruel. “He was working for them.”
Silence ate the air around them. The generator hummed, indifferent. A boat two slips down coughed as somebody tried to turn an engine that hadn’t been loved. Echo lifted his head and whined, just once.
Isobel said nothing. Her hand came to the back of his chair and didn’t grip, it simply rested there, steady. He was grateful for the pressure and hated that he was grateful. He made himself click. The password prompt blinked, patient. In the lower corner, the little laurel glowed like a smirk.
Rone stared at the screen until the edges went filmy and his pulse found a hard, slow rhythm in his ears. “Shade told me once that truth is a weapon to be used wisely.”
The story cracked.
He felt it in the bones of the boat.
He didn’t look at Isobel. He didn’t look away from the thing he’d brought into the room.
“Whatever this is,” he said, and his voice came out like it had been pulled over gravel, “it just got bigger. And uglier.”
On the dock outside, footsteps passed, light and careless. A gull screamed. The cursor blinked. The laurel waited. Echo’s tail thumped once, twice, like a countdown.
