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

Chapter 6

“Fourteen billion,” Richard repeated, staring at Malcolm. “And you spent twenty-six years destroying my family for it.”

“Careful, Richard. You don’t even know how to describe the family you’re defending.”

Richard didn’t take the bait. “Take him. Secure the Ashworths. Seal every deck.”

Security moved. Malcolm went without a fight, which made Amelia’s skin prickle. Men who didn’t fight were men who knew the fight hadn’t started yet.

In a secure cabin below the waterline, Elara told them the rest.

“Winston built the trust so it could only be unlocked by two identities,” she said. “Two living signatures. Two halves of the key. He gave Rosalind both halves when we were born — one for each of us. She was supposed to keep us together.”

“Instead she let Malcolm take one of you,” Richard said. It wasn’t a question.

“She was afraid.” Elara’s voice was flat. “Malcolm had the leverage. He had me. So she gave up the fight and married you and told everyone she had one daughter, and she prayed that if I was safe enough in his hands, I would never matter.”

Amelia felt the locket against her collarbone — the familiar weight of it. Rosalind had fastened it around her neck on her eighteenth birthday, telling her it had belonged to her grandmother, telling her never to take it off. She had worn it through college and law school and her wedding, never once asking why the clasp was a tiny compass rose, never once noticing that the back plate could turn.

She turned it now.

The plate rotated a quarter of an inch and clicked.

Elara went very still. “Where did you get that?”

“From my mother. She said it was our grandmother’s.”

“Show me.”

Amelia lifted it. Elara reached beneath her shirt and pulled out an identical chain with an identical pendant — one half of a compass rose, its needle pointing nowhere.

“No,” Amelia breathed.

“Winston made two,” Elara said. “Matching halves of one key. I’ve had mine since I was nine. Malcolm gave it to me the night he told me the truth about who I was. He said it was all my family had left me. I thought it was a taunt.”

“He gave it to you?”

“He thought I’d never find the other half.”

Amelia held out her pendant. Elara held out hers. Together, they pressed them face to face.

Click.

The two halves locked into one — a complete silver compass, the needle spinning once, then settling. On the inner face, where the halves met, fine engraved lines had aligned into a message:

FIND HER.

And beneath it, a row of numbers.

“A trust identifier,” Richard said quietly.

“The address,” Amelia corrected, because the numbers resolved, in her memory of maritime charts, into a string of coordinates. “No. This is a location.”

She looked at Elara. “Where is this?”

Elara was already pale. “A vineyard in northern Italy. Near Lucca.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because Malcolm used to take me there.” Elara swallowed. “He kept an old man in a house on that hill. He said he was the caretaker. He made me call him Zio — uncle — and told me he was senile and I was to be kind to him and never repeat a word he said.”

The room went cold.

“He was our grandfather,” Richard said slowly. “Winston Beaumont. Alive. Hidden in plain sight.”

At that moment, Marcus — alive, bloodied, wrapped in a crew member’s jacket — appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Hartley. The vessel Malcolm’s partners sent just changed course. They’re not following anymore.”

“Then what are they doing?”

“Cutting us off.” Marcus looked at Amelia, then at Elara. “They’re trying to intercept us before we reach territorial waters.”

Richard swore. “How far out?”

“Three hours.” Marcus’s voice was tight. “And they’ve just lit up every search radar on that boat.”

Amelia felt the ship’s engines surge beneath her feet. Somewhere above, her father’s men were shouting, and the storm was building on the horizon, and she was running out of time in the truest sense she had ever known.

She looked at her sister. “The thing Malcolm told you. About the trust.”

Elara’s face was guarded. “Which thing?”

“About — if one of us dies — ” Amelia couldn’t say it without her stomach turning. “Is it real?”

Elara was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, “I don’t know.”

“It was built so two sisters have to sign together,” Amelia pressed. “So why would Winston put a clause in that rewards killing one of us?”

“Maybe because Winston was paranoid and cruel and wanted to make sure the fortune always had an owner. Or maybe — ” Elara met her eyes — “maybe because Malcolm invented it to make us look at each other the way we’re looking at each other right now.”

Rain hammered the windows. The yacht heeled sharply.

Amelia turned the compass in her hands, watching the needle swing, and made a decision.

“Then we go to Italy,” she said. “And we ask the man who built it.”

Elara almost smiled. “You believe he’s alive.”

“I believe the only person who can end this is the person who started it.”

Through the glass, across the churning water, the pursuing vessel’s lights appeared on the horizon.

They were coming.