Chapter3

The water was getting colder.

At first I could still manage to keep myself afloat.

But the minutes stretched on and my limbs began to go numb, my breathing short and ragged.

I looked up at the yacht.

Mark had turned his back to the sea entirely, as though it had stopped occurring to him whether I was still alive.

Lillian leaned at the railing without a trace of concern on her face.

They weren't worried about me drowning.

Maybe, from where they stood, it would actually be cleaner if I did.

My body was sinking.

I pushed to get my head up, but the darkness around me had become a wall of black water. There was nothing to fix my eyes on.

My strength was going.

And the past began rising to the surface of my mind without permission.

The first time I met Mark, he'd been a small-time entrepreneur barely holding a startup together. We'd shared a tiny office and he'd worked through most nights. He'd taken my hand and told me something.

He'd said: Ella, as long as you stay with me, I promise you'll never regret it.

I believed him.

I left a well-paying job to build something alongside him. I stayed through the worst of it. I was at the hospital nearly every day when his mother was dying.

It all felt like a joke now.

The water had reached my chin.

I was shaking beyond any control.

My body felt like it was made of lead.

I knew I didn't have much time left.

Then, just as the edges of my consciousness began to blur, a deep, low rumble reached me from somewhere in the dark.

I forced my head up one more time.

On the black surface of the ocean, the silhouette of a massive vessel was moving slowly toward me. Dark-hulled, enormous, its outline pressing against the night in a way that felt almost like a threat.

The large yacht drew alongside the smaller one.

Light from its deck spilled across a small patch of water.

A voice from somewhere high above me.

"Captain. There's someone in the water."

A few seconds passed.

Then a man walked to the bow.

He stood there and looked down at the sea.

The light found his face.

It was a face almost entirely without expression—cold in a way that seemed less like a mood and more like a permanent condition. His gaze moved over me the way it might move over something incidental.

"Do we pull her out?" someone nearby asked.

He didn't answer immediately.

His eyes dropped to me.

I was nearly spent. My head was barely above the surface. Water ran down through my hair.

And with it, the necklace shifted into view.

A deep blue stone resting quietly against my collarbone.

The man's eyes stopped.

He stared at the necklace for a long moment.

Then, quietly, he said:

"Bring her up."

I was already slipping away when hands pulled me from the water.

I was dragged onto the deck, and I lay there unable to move.

Footsteps approached.

A pair of black leather shoes came to a stop in front of me.

I forced my eyes open.

The man was looking down at me with that same measuring, cold attention—as if he was verifying something.

Then he bent down and reached for the chain at my throat.

The blue stone caught the light.

For the first time, something shifted in his expression.

"So this is where it's been," he said, almost to himself.

Someone beside him hesitated.

"Sir—do you know that necklace?"

The man straightened slowly.

When he spoke again, the coolness had returned completely.

"I've been looking for this stone for a very long time."