Chapter 3 - The Night Everything Ended

Elara's POV

My fingers shook so badly I had to unlock my phone three times. I stood at the end of the road with blood stiffening in my hair, and the only thing I had left that belonged to me was on that screen. On the stairs, before I understood why, my thumb had started the voice recorder, and it had run in my clutch through everything upstairs. Fourteen minutes of Ian saying he never wanted me, that I was never enough, that Camila was what he actually wanted. He had no idea.

I attached the file and typed underneath it.

Let's see how calm you stay when the world hears the truth, Ian.

A tear slid down to my jaw and stung the cut. I pressed send, and the message whooshed away. My life was in ruins, but this was the first thing I had done on my own all night, and it felt like striking a match in a dark room. Let him find out what it was to lose control of the story.

The phone buzzed before I could lower it. Greenfield Women's Clinic, a number I'd ignored for two days.

Mrs. Vance, your results are ready. You are 3 weeks pregnant. Please call to schedule your first appointment.

I read it twice before the words meant anything. I had blamed the dizziness on stress and the nausea on nerves, and I'd only let the nurse draw blood on Tuesday to make her stop asking. My free hand went to my stomach, over a dress I hadn't taken off since the party, and felt nothing but cold beads. I was carrying Ian's child. The man who had slapped me into a wall had left a piece of himself behind in me.

A laugh broke out of my throat, cracked and hollow. Was this irony, or punishment? I couldn't tell anymore.

I left the suitcase on the curb because I couldn't carry it and think at once, and I started walking. The wind pushed at my bare shoulders and streetlights came and went above me. I only knew I couldn't be Elara Vance for one more minute.

I was crossing a stretch of dark between two lamps when headlights swung around the corner and hit me full in the face. A van skidded to a stop beside me, tires screaming. The door slid open, a gloved hand clamped over my mouth, and an arm locked around my ribs. The smell came next, sharp and sweet and chemical. I kicked back and felt my heel connect, heard a grunt, and screamed into the glove until my lungs burned. The streetlight stretched into a long yellow smear, and then everything went black.

***

Cold woke me, the damp, bone-deep kind that rises through the floor. My head throbbed, my wrists were on fire, and the rope bit whenever I moved. Steel walls beaded with moisture, a bare bulb swinging overhead, and under me a slow sway that turned my stomach.

A ship.

Then I saw the man tied to the post beside me, and my breath caught.

"Finn?"

My brother's head was down, dried blood along his cheek and a split across his eyebrow. He lifted it at the sound of my voice.

"Elara?" He looked at the ropes, then the walls, and I watched him work it out the way I had. "Ellie, where are we?"

"I don't know. They took me off the street. How did they get you?"

"Outside my apartment." He swallowed. "I saw the news about the party. I was coming to find you."

A phone rang across the hold. A heavyset man with a scar through his beard answered it and put it on speaker without any hurry.

"Hello, boss."

"Is everything going as planned?" A woman's voice, low and smooth. I had heard it laugh in my kitchen and cry on my shoulder, and only hours ago murmur in my bed.

"Yes, boss."

"Good. Get rid of them. Make it look like an accident."

"Understood. Miss Camila's orders will be carried out."

Camila. The name went through me like a blade. Of course it was her. But beneath the rage something colder was forming. Camila had plenty of poison and no reach like this: men, a van, a ship, all arranged in the few hours since I'd walked out of that house. She couldn't have done it alone.

Unless Ian had helped her.

He had the money and the contacts, and he had given me the motive himself, over breakfast months ago, when I asked why he never came home before midnight. Sometimes I wish you'd just disappear, Elara. I had laughed it off. I always laughed things off.

"You monsters!" I threw myself against the ropes until the post groaned. "Who sent you? What did we ever do to you?"

The scarred man crouched in front of me. "Save your breath, sweetheart. It's easier when you stop fighting." He pressed a gun to the center of my forehead, slowly, enjoying it. "Don't worry. We won't even get our hands dirty. The sea does it for us."

The others laughed like it was a joke at a barbecue. Finn's shoulder jerked against mine, and I thought, absurdly, of the three-week-old secret nobody in this room knew about.

Then the whole ship lurched. It wasn't a wave. It was a grinding crash that threw everyone sideways, metal screaming like an animal, and someone shouted that we'd hit the rocks. A seam split above my head and black seawater poured in.

"The hull's breaking!"

The water reached my ankles, freezing and rising fast. The scarred man shoved toward the ladder with the rest of them, and in the chaos nobody was looking at us.

"Finn, we have to get out!"

"Working on it." His teeth chattered and his elbows jerked behind the post. There was a wet tearing sound, and his hands came free, scraped raw. He grabbed my ropes and pulled until they gave. "Come on, Ellie. Come on."

We climbed into screaming wind and rain. The deck tilted under us, and the men were fighting over the lifeboats on the far side. Off the bow, a speedboat bobbed on its line.

"There! Finn, there!"

We ran, slipping across the drenched planks. He reached the rail first and had a hand on the cable when a man lunged out of the dark, caught his ankle and dragged him backward.

"Go!" Finn shouted. "Elara, go now!"

"I'm not leaving you!"

"I said go!"

Gunshots cracked, one after another. I felt them in my chest more than I heard them. Finn's face changed without a sound, then he was gone under a heap of bodies and rain, and the world went horribly quiet.

"Finn!"

A hand seized my shoulder. I wrenched free and threw myself over the rail.

The cold hit like a fist and emptied my lungs. When I surfaced the ship's lights were already receding and waves were breaking over my head. I swam back toward the hull, calling his name until my voice shredded, diving again and again, and my hands touched nothing but black water and floating wood. Then I saw it drifting past on the swell, a dark ribbon spreading wider and wider. Blood.

I screamed until something tore in my throat. The cold sapped my arms, and still some animal part of me kept kicking. Live. If not for you, then for him. And smaller, from somewhere deeper: for this.

I don't know how long I swam. The ship went down behind me with a long groan. Finally my hands struck rock, jagged and wet, and I dragged myself onto a reef with my nails splitting and lay there shaking so hard my teeth knocked together. I didn't close my eyes. Not until I had said what I needed to say to the dark.

They would pay. Ian and Camila, both of them.

***

"No! No!"

I shot upright, gasping, with the sheets twisted around my legs and sweat running cold down my spine. For a moment the room made no sense. Then morning light touched the dresser and the crack in the ceiling I knew by heart, and my heart stopped trying to climb out of my chest.

"Mummy!"

The door banged open and Claire, Emily and Noah piled onto the bed in their pajamas, hair sticking up in every direction.

"Mummy, you're sweating," Claire said, and pressed her palm to my cheek like a doctor.

"I was doing yoga, darling." My smile wobbled. "Early morning yoga. Very strenuous."

Noah frowned, four years old and deeply suspicious. "Yoga doesn't make people cry."

"You always say lying is bad, Mummy," Emily added, arms folded like a tiny judge.

I let out my breath and felt the lie fall apart. My face was wet anyway. They got through every wall I had built simply by not knowing it was there.

Claire's voice dropped, gentle in a way no four-year-old's should be. "You dreamed about Uncle Finn again, didn't you?"

I looked at the three of them, Ian's dark eyes looking back at me out of every small face, the reason I had crawled onto that reef and the reason I got up every morning since. I brushed their hair, one head after another.

"I'm fine," I whispered. "I just miss him. That's all."

Noah wriggled into my lap and took my hands in his warm small ones. "Then we'll miss him together."

My throat closed. I pulled all three against me, breathing in sleep and baby shampoo, until my heart slowed to match theirs.

They didn't know the whole story yet. But someday they would, and when that day came, Ian Vance and Camila would regret ever crossing my path.

They thought they had buried Elara Rhodes that night. All they had done was wake the woman who would destroy them both.