Chapter 3
3
CATHERINE
I t’s Jacob.
I’m boiling water on a murder-plane because Jacob Chambers is my passionate hobby.
He’s obviously not just a hobby. He’s not a show I watch in my spare time or a book I read to fall asleep or a mummy exhibit in the British Museum.
But he is my passion. Being with him is the thing that makes me feel best, even when we’re falling off a horse into the snow or rushing away from London in a panic. He’s the only person I wanted to see waiting for me at the altar. He’s the only one I wanted to swear to love and honor.
I may have accidentally admitted to falling in love with him when I found him awake in the middle of the night in Mason’s guest apartment, but we haven’t talked about it again. In light of the plan to fake-widow me, I can see why we haven’t. And, like, having a man —even a man like Jacob Chambers, who’s handsome and smart and views me as a valuable person and not just a piece of property to the point that he’s almost driven himself out of his mind trying to save me—goes against everything I thought I wanted for my life.
My father was my mother’s passion, and he broke her. She was a shell of a person when my aunt whisked her away after my father’s funeral. She had been a shell of a person for a long time, I think, caught between my father and us.
But it wasn’t a choice for her. Not really. It might have been in the beginning, but it wasn’t by the end, and I chose to marry Jacob. I wanted to marry Jacob.
Oh, God. What have I become?
A wife who’s only a wife? A wife who’s a wife because the most important thing in the world to her is her husband?
The timing could not get worse. We might die in a matter of hours or a matter of minutes, and I don’t know how to tell him I’ve just now realized that he’s my favorite thing.
He’s the person whose face makes me light up inside, and it doesn’t matter what we’re doing. We’ve gone to see every touristy spot in London and flown across the ocean together. We’ve gone to the opera together, which was the worst except that Jacob was there. The best part of every day was when he would come home from the office. The worst part of any day was when he left on a business trip, and I’d have to pretend I was just as happy when he was gone.
Finding my passion in life while he was traveling was never going to work, because I want to find my passion in life with him. I don’t need Jacob to decide what it is for me, and I know he would never do that.
He would search with me, though. He has searched with me. He’s indulged every interest I had. Even the opera.
Whatever I do, I don’t want it to be separate from him. I want it to be alongside him.
“Damn,” I whisper.
“Is something wrong?”
I do my best to stop feeling like I’ve just had a bucket of not-unpleasant water dropped on me when I was least expecting it.
“We’re on a murder-plane, so that’s pretty wrong.” I turn off the sink and flip the top of the kettle closed. It locks itself with a satisfying click. “ But other than the part where we might die, I’m fine.”
Jacob hesitates, then seems to realize it would be a waste of time to talk about how I don’t want to die at the hands of a man named Raymond Harris or at the hands of any man, really. I want to live.
I put the kettle into its hook, which will hold it in place on the slim countertop. It’s one of the cordless ones, so the only thing left to do is flip the switch.
I do.
The indicator light turns red. A faint electric hum vibrates under my hand. Soon we’ll have one kettle full of boiling water, unless there’s, like, a bucket we could use to store the water.
No. I don’t think there’s a bucket. And Jacob would then have to lift a bucket of boiling water and throw it without scalding himself. If the water stayed hot enough for long enough.
One kettle it is.
Bubbles form in the water. I watch them expand through the kettle’s little window. There’s that saying about a watched pot, but I feel like I might boil over. My heart simmers in adrenaline and the wild crush I’ve had on Jacob since I first saw him and—and love, wrapped in frustration like a fancy sausage wrapped in a fancy piece of bacon and delivered to me by a uniformed waiter at the kind of part that Jacob would be the life of.
Or like our wedding reception.
Jacob opens drawers and compartments, brushing against me every few seconds, his body warm and solid and reassuring, even on the murder-plane with the murder-pilot. It doesn’t take long for him to look through everywhere he can reach. After a minute, he drops a handful of silverware on the countertop next to the kettle.
“Two butter knives. Two steak knives. The rest is in the main kitchen.” Jacob glances at me as if to say we don’t want to get close to the cockpit, in case he comes out while we’re up there.
I silently agree.
We look at our tiny collection of weapons. Another surge of frustration bubbles in my rib cage.
“Steak knives are better than nothing.” I try to sound optimistic.
“Far better than nothing,” he agrees.
It’s hard to imagine an encounter with Raymond Harris playing out well anywhere, but especially not where we’re standing. There’s hardly enough room for me and my husband to maneuver around each other. If Raymond decides to shoot us where we’re standing, there’s not much to stop him.
Except the two steak knives, two butter knives, and one kettle of almost-boiling water.
But what does a fight in an annoyingly enclosed space get Raymond Harris?
“Do you know how his wife died? You said—” I remember Jacob in the guest apartment at Mason Hill’s building so vividly. He was so tired, and I would have done anything to turn him back into the magnetic, bright-eyed man I’d been introduced to at his first big society fundraiser after he’d come back to New York. “You said she died because of the consortium.”
“A car accident.” Jacob looks into the middle distance. “They’d saved up to buy a small investment property in Florida. One of my father’s companies held the debt.”
“Okay…”
“A hurricane wiped out the house, but the insurance policy was…” Jacob’s brow furrows, but after a few beats, he shakes his head. “It wasn’t a legitimate policy, or—there was something wrong with it. They wouldn’t pay to rebuild. My father’s company kept collecting the debt.”
“Didn’t you go to his house? Didn’t they have, like, another house?” It’s these moments when I realize I’m missing things. I’m missing a lot. I went to high school and got good grades because I had to, but there wasn’t a class about what happens when your house gets destroyed by a hurricane and you get screwed by the bank.
“Yes.” Jacob meets my eyes. “But they’d put their life savings into the second home. It was meant to be Raymond Harris’s retirement one day, and it ended up costing them everything.”
“And the car accident…”
“From what I gather, his wife was driving to a meeting with a representative from my father’s company when someone ran her off the road.”
My stomach goes cold.
“The police report said she’d been driving under the influence, but it wasn’t true.”
Jacob hasn’t looked well for days. Maybe weeks. Maybe, now that I think of it, he hasn’t looked completely healthy for months. But even in the plane’s gentle mood lighting, I can see what little color he had draining out of his face.
“How do you know it wasn’t true?”
“Because Raymond Harris tried to sue the police department for falsifying the results of the investigation on behalf of my father’s company, which meant that subsidiary and its legal team got access to all the evidence that Harris brought his lawyer, and those documents included his wife’s medical records.”
Jacob tells me all this with an exhausted familiarity, like he actually went through every piece of paper and every computer file that had anything to do with Raymond Harris and his wife and his father’s company.
And if he did all that research for one case…
He’s still patient. Waiting for me.
“What did you find?”
“I found that she had a documented alcohol allergy. The amount she supposedly had to drink would’ve caused a reaction that suffocated her before she left the driveway.”
“That’s, like, pretty damning evidence.”
And…too obvious. If Raymond Harris couldn’t win against Jacob’s father’s company and the police department, it was because they were too powerful.
Jacob nods.
I know it’s the wrong moment to try to convince him, but I can’t help it. “But…you know that wasn’t your fault. You weren’t even here. I mean—in the country. Because you were in London.”
Jacob just watches me.
“Raymond Harris has to know that, too. If he knows enough about you to have gotten himself on this plane, then he has to know you weren’t even in the States when his wife died.”
“He knows I’m my father’s son,” Jacob answers. “He thinks I tried to buy his silence. That’s enough for him.”
There’s another not-quite-silence between us. I want to argue that it’s not Jacob’s responsibility to fix all the pain our parents caused in the world, but I’ve tried to tell him that before, and I don’t think I got through to him.
And…
I want him to know that I’m…I’m impressed he would try to make amends, even knowing it’s an impossible task. That makes him a better man than his father by far. I wish it hadn’t led us to this murder-plane, but I’ve met a lot of people who cared a lot less about a lot of things.
“If he comes back here—” Jacob starts.
“He won’t.” I think of all the conversations people must have had about Raymond Harris’s wife. And about the companies in the consortium. People must have talked about my father and how afraid they were of what he might do. People must have hidden their fear and their anger so they’d have a better chance to survive. Now Raymond Harris doesn’t have to hide any of it. The men who controlled the consortium are either dead or in prison. They can’t hurt him anymore. His wife is gone, so if she was the kind of woman who’d be horrified if he took a violent revenge, he doesn’t have to worry about disappointing her. “I don’t think that’s what he wants out of this.”
Jacob puts his hand on my arm and squeezes like he can see the flood of memories sweeping through my brain. My father never wanted things done quickly. He wanted the pain he caused to last as long as possible. He wanted it to be unforgettable.
That was one of the first things I learned as a child. I learned that my father was dangerous, and not because he would lash out in a rage. He calculated everything he did down to the last swing of the cane he kept in his office.
My father was like that at home, and he was like that in his businesses, too. Ruthless and calculating and scary.
“He’s been…” More memories stream through my head. I do the best I can to hustle them out. Thinking about my dead, terrible father won’t help me get out of this alive. “Suffering, you know? Since his wife died. It probably seems like forever to him. He wouldn’t get any satisfaction out of just, like, shooting us quickly. He’ll probably land somewhere and torture us so we die slow, painful deaths.”
Once, when I was little, I fell off a dock in the Hamptons and plunged into cold salt water. My pink-and-yellow life jacket pulled me back to the surface, but I went all the way under first. The most shocking part wasn’t the fact that the water was cold or that it surrounded me in a split second. It was that so much water went into my nose and burned down my throat and hurt . I instinctively reached for the surface, my life jacket already tugging in that direction, and I remember thinking there’s water in my nose, it hurts, it hurts! and not a single thing about how, if I wasn’t wearing the jacket, or if the jacket had come off, I could’ve drowned.
Realizing that Raymond Harris is probably going to torture us for hours or days before he finally kills us is like all that water going up my nose.
We might not be able to stop him with the boiling water and our four knives. If we screw up any one thing, it’s horrible prolonged suffering for us. Even if we somehow manage to do several things right, it still might be prolonged suffering for us.
This flight is all we have.
That’s it.
We’re already at the mercy of Raymond Harris, and we have no hope of escape while we’re in mid-flight.
Anger hits me like cold salt water. Frustration boils through it. Panic splashes in, and the kind of fear I can’t give in to, because being that scared means bursting into tears and screaming until I don’t have a voice.
“Kitten.” Jacob rubs my arm, and I look up into his eyes, the blue like the ocean under the sun, sparkling underneath me for a heartbeat until I was choking on it. “Talk to me.”
“We’re newlyweds.” My voice trembles, but the rest of my body is shaking for a different reason. It’s not fear—it’s urgency. It’s that I can practically hear the clock ticking. There might actually be a clock like that on the plane, come to think of it. A sign of luxury, and a sign of all the time we don’t have left. “I thought we would be in bed by now. I thought we would be having sex with each other. We’re supposed to be giving each other orgasms as husband and wife, not boiling water and trying to figure out how to kill a guy with a butter knife.”
“The knife is pretty straightforward,” Jacob says, and makes a stabbing motion with his free hand. “As for the rest, there’s a bed behind that door, and there’s nothing stopping us from using it right now.”
I look him in the eyes, and they’re blazing, just like I must be. Jacob isn’t kidding. He understands me, and that makes me even hotter than I was a few seconds ago.
He bends at the same time I go up on tiptoe, reaching for him. I put my arms around his neck, and his arms go around my waist, and he kisses me like it’s our wedding night as he walks us into the bedroom at the back of the plane, as far as we can get from Raymond Harris, and shuts the door behind us.