Page 23 of The Steel Beast’s Heart

"It's what you meant."

I stand there with my arms loose at my sides. She's wrong about what I meant but she's right about how it sounded, and I can't fix both at the same time.

"I can't watch someone I love lose everything because I didn't move fast enough to prevent it."

The word sits in the air between us.

Love.

I didn't plan to say it. I said it because it's true, because the fear underneath the plan is the same fear that's lived in my chest for fifteen years. The person I care about is in danger and doing nothing isn't something I survive. So I move. I call. I build the plan. Because I know what happens when I can't do enough.

"And I can't be with someone who loves me by deciding what's best for me, without even talking to me about it."

The word hangs in the kitchen, and neither of us reaches for it.

"I'm going to my property," she says. "On my terms. Not yours."

"I'll ask Garrett to drive me."

She turns and walks out of the kitchen, bare feet on the floor, my shirt hanging past her thighs. The doorframe swallows her and she's gone.

I stand in the kitchen with my phone on the counter and the call log open. Four brothers deployed on a rescue operation for a woman who didn't ask me to call anyone.

I pick up the phone. I set it down. I pick it up again and then I put it in my pocket because there's no one left to call and calling is the only thing I know how to do.

The garage smells like motor oil and sawdust.

I sit on the workbench stool with my glasses off. Elbows on my knees, face in my hands. Without the lenses the garage softens into nothing I need to see. I know where everything is. I labeled every shelf in here. Organized every hook on the pegboard. And when the phone rang this morning, I did what I always do—picked it up and called four people and built a plan she didn't ask for.

She said love.

I'll hear it for a long time. The way the word left her mouth, aimed at me, carrying the weight of everything she's afraid I'll take from her. Her authority over her own land. Her right to decide for herself what happens next.

I don't know how to love any other way. Every version I've tried looks like this—hold tighter, move faster, build the wall before the hit lands. Isla didn't lose someone. She lost herself to control. And the man she chose last night just showed her control wearing his face.

Somewhere on the compound, Garrett's truck starts. The engine fades down the south road toward the coast highway, and I know who's in the passenger seat without looking.

She's going to her land. On her terms.

Chapter 11

Isla

The fox enclosure door hangs open on one hinge.

I kneel in the dirt where I built it six springs ago. The wire mesh peeled off the frame in long strips, the posts bent at angles that took a crowbar and time. The latch I fabricated from an old gate hinge sits in the grass three feet away, tossed like a bottlecap. Empty. I moved the rehab animals last week—the fawns and the flight-cage raptors to a friend near Garrett's, the owl and the hawk and the sick kit to the compound. But the fox family under the stump stayed. They weren't mine to move. And seeing what someone did to the place I built for them lands in a different part of my chest than knowing the rehab animals are safe.

Garrett stands thirty feet back near the truck. He hasn't said anything since we pulled in. He offered to carry equipment, I told him no, and he leaned against the tailgate—gave me the space I asked for and the security I didn't.

I stand. Wipe my hands on my jeans.

The twelve acres take an hour to walk. I photograph what Diane couldn't see from the road. The raptor mews, gutted. Perches knocked loose, the flight-conditioning line snapped at both anchors. Old feathers on the floor from the last bird I housed here. I framed these walls myself, shingled this roof in two days of August heat. Inside, my surgery table lies tipped on its side, the drainage pan dented flat. My hand-lettered intake log, the one I've kept since the first season, soaked through with motor oil someone poured across the desk. Six years of entries. Species, dates, outcomes, release coordinates.

The fawn pen's windbreak ripped down. Feed bins stomped in. My tool rack, the one I mounted with lag bolts I drove myself, pulled off the wall and scattered across the ground.

At the north fence, the fox den sits torn open. Not the enclosure—this one the vixens dug themselves, three seasons of mothers choosing my twelve acres because nothing hunted here. Snare wire loops through the grass around the entrance. The kits are gone.

Everything I put into a life that someone else decided didn't need to exist.