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

Chapter 7

They crossed the territorial line two minutes ahead of the pursuit, and the pursuit turned around the moment they did. Authority vessels came out to meet them. The Ashworths were taken into custody, and Malcolm went with them, still smiling, still saying nothing.

Amelia stood on the deck and watched him go, and the whole time he kept his eyes on her, and she kept her hand on the compass at her throat.

“I don’t like that he isn’t afraid,” she said.

Richard came to stand beside her. “Neither do I.”

She wanted to fly to Italy that night. Richard made her wait until the interviews were done, until the statements were signed, until the lawyers had stopped talking. Three days. Every one of them felt like years.

On the fourth morning they flew to Pisa and drove north, up into the hills, to a vineyard above Lucca with no name on the gate.

A thin old man sat beneath an olive tree, pruning shears resting in his lap, watching them come.

He was eighty-three, white-haired, frail — and when he saw them, he stood up so quickly the shears fell to the grass.

“Elara,” he said. His voice cracked on the name.

Elara stood frozen a few steps back. “Zio.”

“Don’t call me that.” The old man came forward, and his eyes were wet. “That was Malcolm’s word. My name is Winston. I am your grandfather. And I have been waiting twenty-six years to say it to your face.”

Elara didn’t move. “You knew me. On this hill. And you let Malcolm tell me you were a caretaker. You let him call you senile.”

“Yes.” Winston’s hands trembled. “And I have regretted it every single day. But Malcolm made me a promise, Elara — that if I stayed hidden, if I played the addled old man, he would not hurt you. And I believed him, because I had already lost one daughter to him, and I could not lose you too.”

“You hid,” Elara said flatly. “And you let him raise me like a prisoner, and you let him take my sister — ”

“I know.” Winston was crying now, openly, helplessly. “I know.”

Amelia stepped forward. “The trust,” she said. “The one in the compass. Did you build it for twins?”

Winston looked at her — at his granddaughter, whom he had never seen — and his face crumbled with love and grief. “Yes,” he said. “It was the only thing I could build that Malcolm could not break.”

He took them into the house, and in a room with a long oak table, he opened a box and showed them the truth.

The fortune was real. Fourteen billion, held in a lattice of charitable and investment vehicles. But it was not an inheritance.

“It’s restitution,” Winston said. “I made that money being ruthless in ways I have regretted for half a century. When I learned what Malcolm had become — what he was planning for Rosalind, for her children — I decided the money would not go to him, and would not go to anyone who would use it the way he would. I structured it to fund families displaced by financial exploitation, children without stable homes, victims of coercion.”

Amelia stared at him. “But the trust needs twins. Two people.”

“It needs two people who will always choose each other over the fortune.” Winston’s voice softened. “That was the only clause I ever wrote.”

“What about the one where if one twin dies, the survivor gets everything?”

Winston looked at her for a long moment. Then, very quietly, he said: “That is not mine.”

The words hung in the room.

“Malcolm wrote that,” Elara said.

“I believe so.” Winston nodded. “He knew the two of you would one day find each other. He built a lie to make you fear each other, because fear was always his favorite weapon.”

Amelia thought of Malcolm’s smile on the deck of the yacht — the man who had spent twenty-six years arranging her death, and part of that time arranging for her sister to believe she was a threat.

She turned to Elara. “Want to destroy his whole plan?”

Elara looked at her. A smile crept across her face — the first real one Amelia had seen. “Very much.”

They signed the documents together, side by side, in Winston’s oak-lined study. When it was done, Elara looked at the compasses on their two chains.

“You know what this says now, right?” she said.

“‘Find her,'” Amelia said. “It says find her.”

Elara shook her head. “It found us. That’s the part Malcolm never understood.”

For four days they stayed on the hill. Richard’s lawyers flew in and out. Winston told them everything — Malcolm’s schemes, Rosalind’s fear, the fabricated documents, the twenty-six years of watching from a distance. On the fifth night, Marcus’s satellite phone buzzed.

He read the message twice. Then he looked up, and his face had gone gray.

“Mr. Ashworth,” he said. “Bennett. He escaped custody during a medical transfer this morning.”

Richard stood. “What?”

“Flight manifests show a private jet chartered from New York to Pisa.” Marcus swallowed. “Departing tonight.”

Amelia’s blood ran cold.

Bennett was coming to Italy.

And Bennett knew exactly where they were.