You have to lie perfectly still under the hand of the man who is killing you and let your face stay slack and your breathing stay slow, and you have to make your terror look like sedation.

I had never acted in my life.

That night I gave the performance of a lifetime to an audience of one, and the only review that mattered was whether I was still breathing in the morning.

I found, lying there, that I was better at it than I’d have guessed.

Maybe everyone is, when the alternative is the ocean.

Chapter 9 — The Call

There was a second device in the false bottom, smaller and heavier than the phone — a secure satellite unit tied into my father’s private security network, the thing he’d built when the company got big enough that being his daughter became a liability as well as a gift.