Page 22 of The Steel Beast’s Heart

Isla appears in the kitchen doorway. My shirt, bare feet, her hair tangled. "What happened?" I hold up a finger and turn back to the phone. Garrett's working through the repair crew—materials in the garage, what we'd need from the hardware store, how many hours the mews door will take to rehang. He says he can have a crew out by ten.

"Good." I hang up. Set the phone down. She's watching me from the doorway with her arms folded. "Someone hit the rescue center overnight. Diane drove past this morning—fences cut, equipment destroyed, the mews door ripped off. They set snares around the fox den. The family scattered into the woods."

Her arms drop. "The kits?"

"Tracks heading into the trees. Diane couldn't find them."

The colour leaves her face. Then the rest of it lands. "How bad is the rest of it?"

"Bad. But I've got it covered. Colt's pulling the surveillance footage, Rex is running plates on anyone who drove that road last night, Garrett's got a repair crew heading out by—"

"I need to go to my land."

I look at her. She hasn't moved.

"We don't know if they're still watching the property. Colt needs to review the perimeter footage before—"

"Thomas."

"If we wait for Rex to finish running plates, we'll know who we're dealing with before—"

"Thomas."

I stop.

She's not angry. The calm in her face hits harder than if she'd yelled.

"You just made four calls about my rescue center without once asking me what I wanted to do."

The sentence sits between us. The coffeemaker cold, the phone resting where I left it with the call log showing four outgoing calls in six minutes. I look at the log and then I look at her face and I see it.

The way she's watching me. Like she's watching a pattern she's seen before.

"I didn't walk out of a company that made every decision for me to stand in a kitchen and listen to someone else make every decision for me."

"I built the mews with my own lumber. The surgery table I welded. Every piece I've put into that land for six years, I did myself. That's my property. My center. And you called people before you even told me what happened."

She's right, and I shove the realization down because she's also in danger, and the people who did this aren't finished, and whoever tore that place apart did it to send a message, and the fox kits are somewhere in that woods alone, and if I stop holding this together for five seconds the fear will eat me alive.

"I'm trying to help."

"You're trying to take over." She pushes off the counter. "I don't need someone taking over. I've done this alone for six years."

"And look where that got you."

I say it before I can stop it.

The sentence drops between us. Her face changes, and what I see isn't anger. She's heard this before. From someone else, in a different room, and I just sounded like them.

I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.

"Where it got me," she repeats.

"I didn't mean—"

"Where it got me is twelve acres and a federal permit and a rescue center I built with my own hands from a severance check and a welding torch. Where it got me is six years of reporting to Fish and Wildlife while no one listened, and filing every report anyway, and feeding animals at two in the morning because no one else showed up." Her voice doesn't rise. It stays level and that's worse. "Where it got me is the table of a man I've trusted for two years, who just told me that everything I built isn't good enough because I built it alone."

"That's not what I said."