My Honeymoon Husband Was Going to Drown Me for My Inheritance — Then a Girl with My Face Screamed from Below Deck

Chapter 3

“No, you’re not.” His thumb stroked her cheek, and every instinct she owned screamed at her to flinch. “Did you take your medicine?”

“Yes.”

His eyes held hers a beat too long. Then he smiled. “Good girl.”

The two words slid down her spine like ice water. Good girl. As though she were a dog he was training.

He went to the balcony doors and watched the helicopter settle onto the upper landing platform, the yacht tilting gently under the rotor wash. “Probably one of your father’s people,” he said over his shoulder.

“Why?”

“Business.”

“On our honeymoon?”

He laughed — warm, dismissive, perfect. “You know your family.”

Three hours ago she would have believed him. Now every word sounded like a script he had memorized.

He kissed her forehead and left. The instant the door clicked shut, Amelia moved. Not fast — fast would have emptied her legs — but she slid off the bed and went back to the bathroom, working her fingers behind the mirror panel again.

Same panel. Same lock.

But this time she noticed something she had missed before: a thin seam in the metal behind the pipes, barely visible unless you knew where to look. She pressed it. A service hatch slid open, revealing a dark corridor that ran behind the crew quarters, hidden inside the ship’s spine.

Her father’s second route. He had hidden it so well she had almost missed it herself.

Amelia climbed through, eased the hatch shut, and crept down the narrow passage until she reached a ventilation grate that overlooked the main lounge.

She shouldn’t have looked.

Because down there, in the gold light of the lounge, stood a woman in a cream coat — her mother, Rosalind, elegant and composed, the woman who had cried at her wedding. And beside her, a broad-shouldered stranger with silver hair she had never seen before.

Her mother stepped up to the stranger and slapped him, hard, across the face.

“You absolute fool,” Rosalind said — and her voice was not the warm voice Amelia had loved her whole life. It was cold as a scalpel. “I told you Amelia stays alive until every transfer is verified.”

The stranger touched his jaw and laughed. “The paperwork is done.”

“Paperwork means nothing if Richard freezes the trust before morning.”

Amelia’s hand covered her mouth. The trust. Her mother — her mother — was talking about the trust.

Then Rosalind turned, and for one gut-wrenching second Amelia thought she looked straight through the grate, straight at her. “We make Richard believe his daughter is still alive long enough to authorize the transfer himself,” Rosalind said. “Amelia calls him. She tells him she’s happy. She tells him she wants immediate access to the family holding account.”

The stranger nodded slowly. “And once Richard authorizes it?”

Her mother lifted a champagne flute — her father’s champagne, on her father’s yacht. “Then my daughter can disappear.”

Amelia’s knees buckled. She caught herself against the wall, swallowed the scream, and the floorboard beneath her foot let out a long, dry creak.

Every head below snapped upward. “What was that?” Bennett’s voice, suddenly no longer sweet.

Amelia ran.

She ran down the service corridor, slammed her shoulder into a bulkhead, nearly went down, and dived behind a stack of folded linens in the crew passage just as footsteps thundered past. Bennett stopped not five feet from her hiding place.

“Amelia?” he called, softly, almost kindly. “You shouldn’t be walking around at night. Not in your condition.”

The ship creaked. Her heartbeat was so loud she was certain he could hear it through the sheets.

Then her mother’s voice, from behind him: “Bennett. We need you.”

A pause. The footsteps retreated.

Amelia waited until the passage fell silent, then slid down the wall and sat in the dark, shaking, until her legs stopped trembling. Her own mother had just toasted her disappearance.

She thought of the photograph — her mother and Bennett, comfortable, conspiratorial. And the message: She still believes Richard Hartley is her father.

She would find out what that meant.

But first she needed to reach someone. The communications room sat two decks below, behind the crew quarters, and her father had made her learn the ship’s blueprints the year she turned sixteen. She knew a way down that didn’t pass the lounge.

Amelia pulled herself up and reached for the maintenance ladder.

Behind her, above her, the helicopter engines finally cut out.

Someone had landed.

And whoever it was had ordered the crew not to kill her until they arrived.

That meant she had time.

She didn’t know how much.