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

Chapter 5

The scream came from below deck, and every muscle in Amelia’s body locked.

The voice was hers. Not similar — identical. The same pitch, the same strange upward break when angry, the same way it cracked on her own name. She had heard that voice in recordings and inside her own skull her whole life.

“AMELIA! DON’T BELIEVE THEM!”

Malcolm’s face changed. The arrogance flickered, and for the first time since he had spoken, he looked like a man who had lost control of a room.

“What the hell is that?” Bennett demanded.

“Lower storage,” Malcolm said. “You said it was locked.”

“It was.”

Amelia moved toward the stairs.

“Miss Hartley — ” someone started.

She ignored them. Whatever was down there knew her name. Whatever was down there sounded like her.

The lower-deck door burst open before she reached it.

A young woman staggered into the corridor, barefoot, her dark hair wet and tangled, her wrists raw with red marks where restraints had chafed. She lifted her head, and the room went silent.

She had Amelia’s face.

Sharper cheekbones, darker hair, a thin scar through one eyebrow — but the face, the gray-green eyes, the mouth, even the small dimple at the corner of the left lip. It was Amelia, wearing a harder life.

The two of them stared at each other.

Then the woman whispered, “You really exist.”

Something broke inside Amelia. She moved forward. The woman moved too, and they stopped an inch apart, and the stranger reached up with shaking fingers and touched Amelia’s cheek, as if checking that she was made of flesh.

“You’re Amelia.”

“Yes.”

A tear slid down the stranger’s face. “I thought he invented you.”

“Who are you?”

“Elara.”

Amelia’s whole life had rested on one fact long enough that she had stopped questioning it: she was an only child, the center of her father’s world.

“I don’t have a sister.”

“You do.” Elara’s eyes were dry and hard and full of twenty-six years of something Amelia could not yet name. “We were born seven minutes apart. He took me from the clinic before she could tell anyone.”

She didn’t say who he was. She didn’t have to. Malcolm stood at the top of the stairs, staring down at them both, and the satisfaction was gone from his face, replaced by something older — something almost like fear.

“You have no right to be here,” Malcolm said.

“I have every right,” Elara said. “I’ve been waiting my whole life.”

Above them, boots thundered across the deck. Guns. Voices. And at the center of it, a man in a rain-soaked jacket, silver-haired, wild-eyed, who came to a dead stop at the sight of two daughters he had never known he had.

“Amelia,” Richard Hartley said.

“Dad.” Amelia’s voice broke. “Dad, they said — they said you weren’t my — ”

He crossed the room and wrapped his arms around her so tightly she couldn’t breathe, and for the first time since the nightmare began, she felt something like safety. Not because he had come with guns and men. Because he was her father.

“I know,” he said into her hair. “I know, sweetheart. I know.”

“Dad, they said Malcolm is my — ”

“He’s not.” Richard pulled back and cupped her face in his hands. “Look at me. You are my daughter. There was never a single day you were not my daughter.”

“I don’t understand.”

Richard looked past her at Elara, and his face did something complicated — shock, and grief, and a kind of furious tenderness. “I found out two weeks before your wedding that the paternity records were falsified,” he said. “I was trying to confirm it before I told you. I never imagined — ” He looked at Elara again. “I never imagined there were two of you.”

“Malcolm’s men are still aboard,” someone said.

“Then take them.” Richard’s voice went flat and hard. “Every last one.”

Security closed in on Malcolm, on the Ashworths. But Malcolm didn’t struggle. He stood perfectly still, watching Richard with a smile that had no warmth in it.

“You think this ends because you have more guns?”

“I think it ends when you have nothing left to hold over me.”

“You don’t even know what you’re protecting, Richard.” Malcolm laughed. “The money on this yacht is pocket change.”

Amelia felt Elara’s hand find hers. Her sister’s fingers were cold.

“What’s he talking about?” Amelia whispered.

Elara looked at her. “There’s a trust,” she said. “Our grandfather — Rosalind’s father — a man named Winston Beaumont. He disappeared the year we were born. Everyone thinks he’s dead.”

“I know that name,” Richard said slowly. “Rosalind’s father. The financier who vanished.”

“He didn’t vanish.” Elara’s grip tightened. “He hid. From Malcolm. And before he hid, he built a fortune so large that three hundred million is the rounding error.”

The room went very quiet.

“How large?” Amelia breathed.

Elara said, “Fourteen billion.”

And across the room, Malcolm Beaumont began to clap.

“Very good, Elara,” he said softly. “But you’ve left out the best part. There’s a condition on the trust, you see. Winston was a paranoid old man. He built his fortune so that no single person could ever claim it.”

He looked at the two sisters, standing together, holding hands.

“He built it for twins.”