By the fourth night aboard my family's luxury yacht, I could barely stand.

The silence from the deck was worse than the voices had been.

When they were talking, I could track them.

I knew where Graham was standing.

I knew what he was planning.

The moment they went quiet, I lost all of that.

I counted my own heartbeats.

Footsteps crossed the deck above me.

One set.

Slow and deliberate.

Then they stopped directly overhead.

I didn't move.

The cabin door opened.

Graham stepped in and stood at the threshold.

I could feel him looking at me from across the room.

I kept my breathing slow.

Kept my hands loose at my sides.

Kept my face turned slightly toward the wall the way it had been when he left.

He crossed to the bed.

He crouched down beside me and put two fingers against the side of my neck.

Checking my pulse.

I forced every muscle in my body to stay still.

"Good," he said quietly.

To himself.

Not to me.

He stood.

Walked to the small dresser by the door and opened the top drawer.

I heard him moving things.

Then the drawer closed.

He left.

I waited until his footsteps faded up the stairs before I opened my eyes.

The drawer.

I slid out of bed and crossed to it in the dark.

Inside, pushed to the back behind a folded scarf, was my regular phone.

The screen had four missed calls.

All from the same number.

My father's private line — not the one he used for business, not the one anyone outside the family knew.

The one he had given me the morning of the wedding and told me never to ignore.

I stared at it.

If I called him back on this phone, Graham's family would know within seconds.

They'd been monitoring it.

That was the only explanation for why it was in this drawer instead of on the nightstand where I'd left it.

But the emergency device was gone.

Which meant I had one option left, and it was the worst one.

I put the phone back exactly where I'd found it.

Closed the drawer.

Went back to the bed and lay down.

Above me, I heard Graham's voice again — low, close to the door at the top of the stairs.

"Ten minutes," he said.

His father answered: "The deck's clear.

Wind's picking up."

A pause.

Then Graham said something I wasn't supposed to hear from this distance.

But the wind shifted at exactly the wrong moment and carried it straight down to me.

"After tonight, everything transfers.

The lawyers have the paperwork ready for Monday."

Monday.

Three days from now, my family's entire estate — the company my grandfather had built, the properties my parents had spent thirty years protecting — would transfer to Graham's name.

Not because of anything legal.

Because I would be gone, and the marriage contract my father had signed in good faith contained a clause that none of us had caught.

A clause, I now understood, that Graham's family had spent two years engineering before he ever asked me on a first date.

This was never a marriage.

It was a acquisition.

I pressed my palm flat against the mattress and breathed.

The emergency device was gone.

My phone was compromised.

The deck was being cleared.

And I had ten minutes.

I thought about what my father had said when he pressed the device into my hand the morning of the wedding.

I'd laughed.

I'd told him he was being paranoid.

He hadn't laughed back.

"If you ever need me," he'd said, "and you can't reach me any other way — there's a second device.

Same frequency.

I have the receiver."

A second device.

I hadn't thought about it until this moment because I hadn't known I needed it.

I'd assumed the first call had gone through.

I'd assumed help was already coming.

But my father had known something I hadn't.

He'd packed two.

I dropped to my knees beside the bed and reached into the lining of my travel bag — the inner pocket with the broken zipper that I'd been meaning to fix for months, the one so awkward to open that I'd stopped using it entirely.

My fingers found something hard and flat.

I pulled it out.

The second device was smaller than the first.

A single button.

A single red light.

I pressed it and held it down for three seconds the way my father had shown me.

The light blinked twice.