14. SQUALO
SQUALO
Exactly fifteen minutes ago, George and I found Gabriella unconscious on the kitchen floor.
While I sent him to find out what had happened, I carried her to my master suite and locked the door behind us.
We’d received a red storm warning, so we’d been making our way through the yacht, informing everyone.
What he didn’t know was that I knew they’d steered the curse toward Li Galli, and the storm was rolling in from there.
If we’d stuck to the original route, we would’ve been prepared for it and avoided it altogether.
The concern on his face told me he hadn’t had the final say in any of it—the captain had.
I’d finally figured out who was behind everything. Now I just had to put a face to it.
My pace quickened, taking two steps at a time until I reached the bridge on the upper deck.
George was already inside, warning the captain waiting in the bridge cabin.
Their voices came through the open doorway, too caught up in planning their next move to notice me closing in.
If they’d bothered to check the surveillance cameras, they would’ve seen me coming.
“Mr. Sinclair,” the man said.
His voice was familiar, just his face wasn’t.
He was an older man dressed in a white captain’s uniform, two badges pinned to the right side of his chest, a captain’s hat sitting neatly on his silver hair. His jaw tightened beneath a thin white beard as his hand slid to the back of his head before running through his graying hair.
“What brings you here?” he asked.
“I came to meet the crew.” I smiled, leaning against the wall as my gaze settled on both of them. “I gave George free rein when it came to hiring the maids and cooks. I didn’t know he’d hired a new captain too.”
“No, Mr. Sinclair.” He offered me a smile. “I can assure you I’m only here temporarily. Captain Smith fell ill, so I’m filling in for him. At the next port, we’ll switch places again.”
I was sick of pretending to be the drunken, clueless rich asshole. Sick of playing the fool while everyone underestimated me. Years of biting my tongue had built into something sharp, pressing against the back of my teeth, begging to be unleashed.
“Cut the shit.” I chuckled. “I know about your little plan to sail to Li Galli.”
“Mr. Sinclair, that’s the port where we’re supposed to switch with Captain Smith,” George added. “Captain B…” He stopped, cleared his throat, then corrected himself. “The captain is just following orders.”
“Whose?” I asked. “Because they sure as hell aren’t mine.”
“Captain Smith gave us the sailing route,” he said. “We’re just following…”
“George.” I stepped closer. “Do you honestly take me for a fucking idiot?”
“No, Mr. Sinclair,” he started.
The captain stepped forward, lifting a hand to stop him.
“That’s enough, George. Obviously Mr. Sinclair knows his yacht has been taken over by our crew.”
“That’s bold.” I let out a dry chuckle. “Now turn this boat around, or I’ll call the Coast Guard and have every one of you locked up.”
I slipped my hand into my pocket, only to find Gabriella’s letter from 1996 still folded inside. My phone wasn’t there.
Even if it had been, I had no idea whether I’d have any signal this far out. It was a bluff, but he didn’t know that.
As I looked up, I caught him reaching behind his back.
“Your father wouldn’t be pleased with that,” he said, pulling out a gun. “Hands up.”
A smirk tugged at my lips as I raised my hands.
“Then you know I’m his only son.”
“Not his only one.” He laughed. “But your family secrets aren’t mine to tell.”
I swallowed hard.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Oh, you didn’t know?” He turned the gun sideways, then looked at George. “He didn’t know?”
He laughed again.
“George. Tell him.”
George swallowed, his eyes drifting to me. I didn’t know who he feared more, the man standing beside him or me standing in front of him, but he spoke anyway.
“Gianni De Luca,” he said, clearing his throat. “Sofia De Luca got pregnant around the same time as your mother.”
“You’re lying.” I took a step back, forcing myself to stand straighter.
George shook his head.
“You see, Sinclair,” the captain said, “I had no trouble making Gianni disappear, and I can do the same to you.” He raised an eyebrow. “Your father has no say in any of this. Neither does my brother, Andrea.”
My stomach twisted.
For the first time, the truth hit me square in the face.
He’d just admitted Gianni was dead. My brother.
Gianni was my brother?
I swallowed, a cold sweat breaking across my forehead as I forced myself to stay composed, refusing to let him see even a flicker of fear. I held his gaze, scanning every movement, calculating every possible way out.
But there wasn’t one.
The Mediterranean surrounded us on all sides, the storm closing in by the minute. I had nowhere to run.
“Then shoot me.” I spread my arms, my right hand tapping the left side of my chest. “Right here.” My voice came through the bridge. “Kill me now.”
“Tsk, tsk, tsk.”
He clicked his tongue, the corners of his mouth curling into a grin.
“That would be too easy. Then I’d have no one to blame.”
He lifted the gun beside his temple, tapping one side of his head with the barrel while rubbing the other with a finger.
“And I still need your yacht to find something I lost thirteen years ago.”
He lowered his hand, stepped back, and leaned against the console lined with computers. Smacking his lips, he finally spoke.
“Your mother… she was an artist I hired to duplicate some beautiful paintings we’d stolen.” He sighed. “She painted each copy beside the original to make sure every brushstroke matched. Perfect enough to fool anyone.”
His eyes narrowed.
“Then I found out two paintings had disappeared.”
A beat of silence sat between us.
“Just a month later, she killed herself.”
He set the gun on the desk and folded his arms.
“She opened the art gallery we used to smuggle the paintings. Valuable pieces came in, she’d copy them, the copies were either returned or left hanging in the gallery, and we sold the originals on the black market.”
A quiet chuckle escaped him as his fingers pinched the bridge of his nose.
“We already had buyers lined up for two of them. Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence and Rembrandt’s Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee. Instead of the originals, I received flawless copies.”
His gaze locked onto mine.
“The originals she hid are somewhere on Li Galli.”
His words came one after another, and the whole world I had built so carefully began to crumble.
Everything I thought I knew slipped through my fingers.
The last memories of my mother gave way to the truth of who she really was, and this new version of her was someone I couldn’t bring myself to love.
I lost her when I was very young. Almost every image of her disappeared from my mind, and the ones that were gone I tried to replace with an image I created myself.
A loving mother who smiled as she painted in the garden, who breathed in the scent of the blue hydrangeas I brought her with her morning coffee.
But now that image splintered apart, each piece sinking to the bottom of my mind.
The memories I had buried were the ones I truly remembered all along.
The paintings she did in the garden belonged to the Bianchi family.
The morning coffee I carried to her was accepted with tears already filling her eyes.
She would sit by the window, staring out at the sea while silent tears slipped down her face.
One by one, she placed each blue hydrangea into the vase beside her bed without ever lifting them to her face to smell them.
She had lost herself long before I lost her.
She had lived with depression for a long time. I had seen the marks on her hands. It wasn’t the first time she had tried to end her life. It was only the first time she had succeeded.
For years, I thought she had been selfish, that she had done it for herself. But now I know she couldn’t see another way to leave my father and me except through death.
The truth was heartbreaking.
Sometimes people live with danger for so long, even the danger inside themselves, that they stop moving altogether.
They keep swallowing the pain, holding it in, day after day, until there’s no room left for anything else.
My mother stood in that place for years, carrying everything alone until one day she simply couldn’t carry it anymore.
It took me a long time to understand that.
It was always easier to blame everyone else than to blame her.
Because I knew that if I truly allowed myself to blame my mother, everything I had built inside myself would come crashing down.
Every wall would collapse, and I would lose her all over again, just as I had when I was a ten-year-old boy, wrapped around my mother’s lifeless body, waiting for her to wake up.
I just stared at him blankly while he kept rambling.
“Your father was nothing compared to her. She was the mastermind, and we did everything the way she planned. It was never the same after she was gone.” He laughed.
“But luckily for us, George’s daughter, Viola, found a map that leads me to more gold and those exact paintings, and your idiot father handed it over in exchange for a partnership. ”
Of course.
I took a slow breath.
My father had never intended to leave the business to me. He only wanted me as far away from him as possible so I would never get tangled in his dirty secrets and lies. What he hadn’t known was that the brother of his secret partner in crime had boarded my yacht.
And he had been right. I wanted to be as far away from all of this as possible. Now I was even questioning the last name I carried. I wanted to tear it away from myself.
The anger boiling inside me surged into my clenched fists.
Veins rose beneath the skin of my forearms until they burned.
Every muscle in my body screamed at me to beat them both into the floor.
But the only two people on this ship I could truly trust wouldn’t be safe if I did, so I forced myself to stay still.
With every word that left his mouth, the storm grew louder.
Thunder rolled across the sky, shaking the ship beneath our feet, while rain hammered harder and harder against the windows.
And those two fucking old fools who thought they had balls of steel, paid no attention to what was building behind their backs.
The feeling settled deep in my gut.
I knew exactly what was about to happen.
Then I saw it.
A twelve-metre rogue wave rose out of the horizon, towering above the sea as it gathered itself and charged straight toward us.
I made a quick wave at them and ran outside. The key was still in the door of the cabin. As I pulled it shut behind me, I locked it from the outside and sprinted downstairs.
None of it mattered anymore. Not the secrets. Not the lies. None of it was worth dying for.
My feet pounded against the stairs as I took them two at a time. Within seconds, I reached the upper deck where my master suite was. As I raced down the corridor, Isabella appeared at the far end.
“Go to the deck!” I shouted. “Get into one of the rafts. Save yourself.”
“What?” she asked, frozen in place, until her eyes moved through the glass doors leading outside.
“Run! Now!” I yelled, my footsteps thundering across the carpet.
Her eyes widened as the tall wave drew closer, swallowing more of the horizon with every second. Without another word, she turned and ran through the doors.
She listened.
I didn’t know if my plan would work. I didn’t even know if we’d survive. But I knew one thing. This time, I wasn’t leaving behind the one person I’d already abandoned too many times.
My hands trembled as I grabbed the handle of the master suite. The key slipped against the lock, my fingers refusing to cooperate. I tried again. Then again until it caught.
The lock clicked.
I threw the door open. It slammed into the wall hard enough to shake the room just as the yacht lurched beneath another crashing wave.
Blue…
“Gabby,” I whispered.
She stood in the middle of the suite, still wearing her uniform. Her hair spilled over her shoulders, framing tear-stained cheeks. She turned toward me, her lips moving, saying something I couldn’t hear over the roar outside.
I ran to her.
The floor shifted violently beneath my feet as the wave closed in. I was only one step away when the deafening scream of twisting metal tore through the yacht.
The person I hated so much I wanted to drown is now drowning beside me.