I was not, it turned out, nearly as powerless as Brandon had counted on — and the reason was my father.

My father had died two years earlier, but he had been a cautious man, a man who understood that wealth attracts danger, and he had left me more than money.

He had left me Douglas, his trusted security director of twenty years, who had stayed on to look after me and who answered his phone on the first ring when the hospital finally reached him.

And my father had left me something else, something Brandon had forgotten about entirely, or perhaps never fully understood.

Years earlier, my father had installed discreet security systems in all of the family’s vehicles — including the SUV that was now Brandon’s, the SUV that Brandon and Gretchen had driven back down the mountain after they left me to die.

It was a simple system, meant to protect against carjackings and theft: a dash camera, and an internal microphone, recording continuously, saving to a secure server my father had set up and that Douglas still administered.