Chapter 1 — The Tightening Noose

The Caribbean air on the third day of my honeymoon should have tasted like the beginning of a life.

It tasted like nothing, because by then I could barely taste anything at all.

The yacht had been my father’s wedding gift — a beautiful, absurd, multi-million-dollar thing, all teak and brass and glass, the kind of vessel that turns heads in every harbor it noses into.

For the first two days I had loved it the way you love a dream you can’t quite believe is yours.

By the third day it had become something else.

A beautiful box, very far from land, with no one aboard I could trust.

I didn’t know that yet.

Not in words.

What I knew was that I was tired in a way that frightened me — a thick, sourceless exhaustion that pulled at me from the inside, so that lifting my own arm felt like lifting someone else’s.

Flynn, my husband of six days, my picture-perfect husband with the easy smile the whole wedding had sighed over, would sit on the edge of the bed and stroke my hair and murmur that it was only seasickness, that some people just needed a few days to find their sea legs.

And every night, with a glass of water and that same tender smile, he gave me two small white pills.

I took them.

Of course I took them.

He was my husband, and his hand was gentle, and I had no reason on earth to believe that the man I’d married was measuring out my death a little at a time.

Until the third afternoon, when something older and wiser than my drugged, trusting mind forced my eyes open and would not let me sleep.

I should tell you how I got here, because from the outside it must look like I was a fool, and maybe I was, but it was a well-engineered kind of fooling.

Flynn had appeared in my life eight months earlier looking like the answer to a question I’d stopped asking.