PART 1
“Don’t bother trying to open the door, Valerie. It’s too late for you.”
Those were the last words I heard my husband say before I watched him climb out through the front driver’s window and leave us behind in the middle of the river.
It all happened in seconds.
Julian was driving our SUV down the coastal highway toward the bay. My brother, Mason, was in the back seat, in the wheelchair he’d been confined to ever since the car crash that killed our parents fifteen years earlier.
Suddenly Julian lost control. Or that’s what I believed.
The vehicle smashed through the guardrail and plunged straight into deep water.
The impact left me dazed. By the time my head cleared, freezing water was already swirling around my ankles.
“Julian! The door won’t open!” I panicked, yanking at the handle.
He didn’t answer. I watched him unbuckle his seatbelt with a horrifying, methodical calm, roll down his window, and swim out into the current.
“Mason’s still in the back!” I screamed, my voice cracking with terror.
He didn’t even turn around.
I reached down to unlatch my own seatbelt, but the buckle was jammed solid. I dug my fingers under the leather and felt something thin and metallic.
A heavy-gauge wire. Someone had deliberately bound my seatbelt mechanism to the steel frame of the seat.
This wasn’t an accident.
The dark water reached my chest. Through the glass I saw Julian pulling himself onto the muddy riverbank. He wasn’t alone.
A woman was waiting for him under a large umbrella.
Chloe. My half-sister. Visibly pregnant.
I watched through the sinking window as Julian wrapped his arms around her waist. She stroked his cheek tenderly, and then the two of them stood side by side, watching our SUV slowly disappear beneath the surface.
Julian even smiled.
Three years of marriage. Three years of him whispering that I was the love of his life. Every single night he’d insisted on making me a warm glass of milk, because — according to him — I worked too hard running my family’s legacy shipyard in Virginia.
And now he was watching me drown with a smile on his face.
“Val…”
Mason’s voice rasped from the back seat. I turned, sobbing hysterically, as the water reached his chin.
“I’m so sorry, Mason,” I cried. “I brought this monster into our lives.”
I closed my eyes, bracing for the end.
Then I felt a sudden, violent thud behind my seat. Then another.
My eyes snapped open. Mason was no longer sitting in his wheelchair. He was standing up inside the flooded cabin.
Standing. On both legs, firm and steady.
He pulled a small, heavy-duty wire cutter from a waterproof pouch hidden under his jacket and snipped the bound wire on my seatbelt in two quick cuts.
I sat there frozen, in absolute shock. “Your legs…?”
“I’ll explain later,” he muttered through gritted teeth.
Mason kicked the rear passenger door with his full weight just as the internal water pressure equalized. The door burst open, and he grabbed my arm, hauling me out into the dark, freezing current.
I tried to kick for the surface, for air, but Mason grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back down.
“No,” he mouthed underwater.
“We’re going to drown!” I choked out once we broke the surface beneath the rotting timber of an old, abandoned pier.
Mason pressed a small emergency oxygen mouthpiece into my hand, pulled from his waterproof pouch. “Julian’s watching from the bank,” he whispered, voice trembling with icy rage. “If he knows you survived, he’ll come back to finish it.”
We waded beneath the pier to a hidden maintenance alcove between massive concrete pillars, completely out of sight from the highway above.
The moment I caught my breath, I slammed my hands against Mason’s chest. “Fifteen years! Fifteen years I believed you couldn’t walk!”
Mason didn’t push me away. He just looked at me with deep, agonizing sorrow. “Because our parents’ crash wasn’t an accident either, Val.”
The ground seemed to fall out from under me. “What are you talking about?”
“Julian’s family has been trying to seize the shipyard for fifteen years,” Mason said quietly. “He didn’t marry you for love. He married you to finish what his father started with Mom and Dad.”
Standing in that dark, freezing alcove, I realized my entire marriage had been an elaborate execution plot.
But I didn’t yet know the most horrifying part: what my husband had been putting into my body every single night for three years.
